From Glutinous Okra to Bitter Leaves to Groundnuts. The Contemporary African Art Gallery in New York

International Wed 04-01-2012

From Glutinous Okra to Bitter Leaves to Groundnuts. The Contemporary African Art Gallery in New York
Aarti wa Njoroge | AfricanColours.com

Bill Karg is a collector and gallerist of contemporary fine artists who were born in, and whose art is inspired in some way by, Africa and, as such, is almost a kindred spirit of AfricanColours. (We put ‘and/or’ instead of ‘and’ for the artists we feature.)

Karg started discovering such art while working on various development projects on the continent. He now represents over thirty artists. Just as AfricanColours chose the Internet as an alternative space for contemporary African art, Karg has housed his gallery, which can be visited by appointment, in his home in New York City, USA . While the Upper West Side building may be unmarked and even unassuming, inside is quite a revelation.

If Karg has an advantage over us, it is that he has been collecting for twenty-five years. Yet his aim is to make himself redundant, and for the art to remain in situ – not unlike AfricanColours’ headquarters moving from Europe to Africa a few years ago. “There needs to be a middle class and private and public collectors collecting contemporary art in Africa, otherwise there is no local reception and interpretation of the art being produced and the work becomes detached from the culture from which it originates. This is changing slowly and it is important that it continue.” Think about Patrick Lumumba’s speech at AfricanColours’ first exhibition in Nairobi in 2005 urging Africans to collect their own art.

_{Oliranos by Ouattara Watts}

Karg told Viyé Diba (b. 1954, Senegal) when they first met around twenty years ago that he preferred abstract work as it was less likely to be labelled as curio or airport art. Viyé then featured people. A personal disclosure: a while ago, I wrote about how I favour the figurative. At a push, I can, like art critic Jerry Saltz, “love abstraction, but I even look at that kind of work for narrative content”.

At the Dak’art Biennale in 1996 Karg was instantly drawn to a series of abstract paintings. To his surprise, he discovered that they were by Viyé, who had taken on board Karg’s words as advice.

Currently on exhibit are a number of textured canvases with layers of colour which Viyé applies until he decides the work is finished. (When do artists consider a work complete? According to Turner Prize-winner Tomma Abts, “I know it’s finished when the work feels independent of me.” )

Viyé pays homage to the sixty per cent of Dakar’s population that works in the informal sector. His collages frequently have fragments of cloth resembling trousers, remnants of the time he was painting people. Karg points out that Viyé was recycling materials in the late 1980s, before the appropriation of discarded things into art became fashionable. Often his work had a piece of wood, earlier on the bottom, but in Karg’s collection to one side.

Escape I, one of two metaphors of freedom, with patches of light blue to represent the sky, has bundles in human form on the right hand side acting as a constriction, but there is an escape towards the top. Karg has sold the other work, in “deep purple”. It is now on display at the Brooklyn Museum as Red Escape II. In contrast, Kangaroo in Suspension – Viyé’s sense of humour, according to Karg – has protective marsupia.

_{Detail from Escape I by Viye Diba}

A compatriot contemporaneous to Viyé, Fode Camara (b. 1958, Senegal), also uses textures, but with bolder colours. A recurring theme of his works, Gorée Island, is the antithesis of Viyé’s Escape I. Sweeping strokes create strong Atlantic waves, as if representing the ominous start of a physically and mentally turbulent journey. Islamic-style hands face each other in the aptly-titled Solidarity; only the x-ray image in the left hand corner is pale. More hands are present in Action III and Witnesses Passing in Turn; in Notice is a direct hand print.

Oranges and reds recur in a mysterious half-portrait, Ya Bon IV – with a hat reminiscent of Joán Miró’s 1920s Catalan peasant series. Fode, like Tomma Abts, “rarely paints on an easel, [in his case] preferring instead to move his canvas to the floor”.

Tomma “doesn’t relish speaking about her work, but she has developed a professional patter. ‘Why, as an artist, would you want to explain yourself? […] Painting is so visual that it is very difficult to say things that don’t compromise it.’” Ouattara Watts (b. 1957, Cote d’Ivoire) stopped speaking about his work after Jean-Michel Basquiat, who, to quote Karg, “discovered” Ouattara in Paris, committed suicide – he thought that Basquiat talking about his own work caused him to kill himself. In Takashi Murakami’s case, he has “no power to communicate in words. That is why I twist to the painting.”

Ouattara’s Ubu Roi-esque paintings on display, one of which is even called Spirit King, refer to his shamanic beliefs. He need only add hands à la Viyé, just as hands leaving their imprints on rock surfaces in ancient art may “acknowledge and enter the spirit world; known as the ‘sealing’ ritual”. Stylistically the paintings would be complemented well by Miró’s Barcelona series (1944).

_{Witness passing in turn by Fode Camara}

Like Ouattara, Sokari Douglas Camp (b. 1958, Nigeria) often incorporates her west African roots and western influences in her art, but her seated Chief Aramchree, a bronze sculpture resembling King Kariboye-Abbi Princewill Amachree IV, is the most traditional – and figurative – piece in West African Stew. According to the Galerie Herrmann website, Aramchree should be Amachree, “the Royal Family of the Kalabari Nation” , the eastern Ijaw region where Sokari was born. Or is this a play with the word armchair, on which the chief is sitting? Again there is a hat, this time a bowler, presumably left over from the colonial times.

Despite Karg’s reservations, he has space for exquisite figurative work after all… I, for all of mine, can, with the help of a guide, derive stories and pleasure from the abstract.

What is indeed so special about visiting the Contemporary African Art Gallery is Karg’s own anecdotes, which breathe life into the works and their creators. Among the other artists on display in different rooms outside West African Stew is the Senegalese Mor Faye, who was “institutionalised for most of his life,” according to Karg. He “never exhibited in his lifetime. [US film director] Spike Lee and a Senegalese attorney bought his works posthumously”.

Karg hints that he realises he could not have prevented Skunder Boghossian’s death from alcoholism. Anguish begets art. The reds and browns in Boghossian’s oils and mixed media works – spanning three decades – hark back to his native Ethiopia, where he “only spent three years of his adult life”. He painted Homage to Abebe Bekila, in honour of the first African Olympic champion (“he took his shoes off two miles in” the 1960 Rome marathon, which he went on to win) in 1984, as “by this time many African countries were falling apart”.

Two years earlier, South African John W Muafangejo linocut-printed a homage-in-waiting, They Are Meeting Again at Home. Well ahead of the end of apartheid, Muafangejo, who died in 1987, showed a black man and a white man embracing each other. It did not stop him from printing Dry Gardens in 1985 – a comment on how “blacks were given the worst land”.

Karg is adamant that “if the art is correctly interpreted, respected, and celebrated within the artist’s own culture and country, then the art will reflect that more strongly” , and not risk the danger of becoming commercial, but which South African home or institution will be brave enough to carry such a political statement? Or, if one does, will it encourage more artists to re-trace a difficult history? A debate for another time.

_{1.Interview with Max Weintraub, http://mantlethought.org/node/902}

_{2.www.contempafricanart.com}

_{3.Interview with Max Weintraub, http://mantlethought.org/node/902}

_{4.Interview with Sarah Thornton for ‘Seven Days in the Art World’ (Granta), page 175}

_{5.Ibid, page 122}

_{6.http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0438/is_4_34/ai_85031233/}

_{7.Interview with Sarah Thornton for ‘Seven Days in the Art World’ (Granta), page 122}

_{8.Ibid, page 196}

_{9.http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/hand_paintings_rock_art.php}

_{10.http://www.amachree.com/}

_{11.Interview with Max Weintraub, http://mantlethought.org/node/902}

Posted By: Andrew Njoroge

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