Contemporary African Art Dynamism

Zimbabwe Mon 03-05-2010

Contemporary African Art Dynamism
By S. Garan'anga

Perishing of the strong by Stephen Garanan'ga All works of art are products of a specific time in history. Paintings and engravings on rock surfaces are Africa's earliest known art, and their present-day counterparts are emerging as some of the most important contemporary forms-often of a secular, urban, international character.

But the earlier treatment of African art as if it were the static product of an idyllic past has made it difficult for contemporary African art to receive its fare share of significance.

Some works of art were considered to be authentic and called "traditional," contrasting them with more contemporary art, which has deemed to be tainted by contact with other cultures. The phrase "traditional African art" helps perpetuate this unfortunate stereotyping.

Although most African traditions show marked continuity with the past, it is also clear that they have not stayed the same. They have evolved, often in response to stimuli from the outside. Influences leading to change have always flowed back and forth among African peoples.

Technologies, products, and ideas from beyond Africa have also been assimilated over the centuries. in fact, very little African art has not beenso affected.

It is sometimes suggested that the modern African artist has not carried on the traditions of his great predecessors because he has been the victim of colonialism or conversion to Christianity, or that latterly art buyers have encouraged the production of cheap imitations of the old carvings, known as "airport art".

This is partly true but the demand that the modern African artist should live up to his past imposes a considerable burden upon him. Very often he is conscious that he must make a break with the past, if studying the past means too great a concern for outmoded forms of expression.

The modern artists who have succeeded are not bemused by the external appearance of the old African sculpture, but recognizes that the forces straining to break out of the traditional mask into dance or poetry can also be found within themselves, and can be made to assist then in producing completely new forms of expression in modern painting and sculpture as well as other mediums.

Progress for an artist is moving on, breaking through imposed boundaries or market expectations. The career visual artists must choose materials which allow them to say what they want to say, by the stones, scrap metal, odd bits of glass, the rays of the sun, the light of the moon, the desert sands, found objects, paints, canvas, boards.

The career artists must manoeuvre and negotiate for the desired space to allow work to be created not simply made. The career artist's social responsibility is to themselves.

Today some artists renege the tradition giving African sculpture claim to fame. With the acquisition of stone a lost cause, an impossible dream, they turn to what they find around them.

Shards of pots, ancient relics, today known as cultural artifacts, assume in sculpture- their rightful place as Africa's cultural heritage. Bits of kitchenware what is left behind of features of homes tied to tops of buses carrying families to the remotest parts of their rural areas to become part of sculptures.

Piles of rubble, once a loved and tended garden is used in sculpture. Dumps (plentiful now in cities) - tokens of new movements of people are hunting grounds for artists.

Today artists use ancient and' modern detritus to make telling futuristic, apocalyptic works, voicing what lies inside rather than what is spoken. Thus, mixed media emerges as protest art, as much as street theatre, spoken poetry, or a pocket size volume of short stories.

In the international art world, mixed media has become something of a gallery conceit, an aspect of artwork contrived to shock, sometimes to displease. In some African countries artwork made through dire necessity has much to say and creates a direct link between art and contemporary African society. They are artists who pack up their tools, their wives and kids, rope the roof of their car to start a new existence, one where art is simply "what you do" rather than what you do for a living.

Beggars Opera by John James They bring to these remote places what is happening in art in one country to another, and conversely they learn about new form of art when artist are close to and dependant on nature and close to their traditions.

The contemporary artists’ movement away from traditional materials, stone, bronze, wood, clay to the engagement of the natural or man-made object is in keeping, however, with the tradition of the African mask maker who would take the wood from the tree, the feathers from the back of the chicken, the bones of the dead cattle and the pigments used by the late stone age artists and fashion them into a mask worn to appease deities and spirits.

Such an approach was also Picasso’s, who created from an astounding array of life’s leftovers a goat, or some kind of object which, because it was made by an artist, was during his time called a sculpture.

These approaches presaged an alternative way of looking at art by artists today. All artists respond in some way to what they see around them, and what they feel about what they see.

Who would think that a piece of corrugated iron placed against a background of wire netting and placed on a wall would work as an artwork? We look at a hanging construction made of such things and suddenly we see colors of the corrugated iron, gleaming silver, sudden shafts of rust which have been turned old gold by the sun, blobs of blue carelessly thrown from a paint can.

We look at the wire netting and it becomes delicate tracery rather than a bit of fence to keep in the chickens. We look at bamboo, a background of cardboard pieces and we have a composition, a carefully planned out work of art.

Contemporary artists are taking us on journeys through time, space, culture and the natural environment, as old as time, as new as we care to make it.

Some take canvas, scribble it under cipherable signs, paste it with old newspapers and hang it from its bundles of bones wrapped up in canvas.

Others are using traditional means to fashion from clay vessels and sculpted heads placed together, including obscure and altogether strange biblical messages, prophecies which have or may come true.

Some place stones on canvas, old stones, stones which might have been used to make flints during Stone Age, stones which look like fragments of granite caves used as backgrounds for paintings in pigment by the late Stone Age rock artists.

Fraught with symbolism, both these artists’ works have a relationship with the history of creative expression in Africa since man first came to the plateau.

^{Meditation head by Munyaradzi Mugorosa}

Artists are taking stones from underground and making them into sculptures which are immortal, transcendent of culture, time and place but they also scrounge the tips and car yards, tear down back fences and wrap the insides of the fridge.

In art nothing is sacred any more. Everything and anything from the wing of a butterfly to the scale of a fish can be made into art. And no space or place has even been sacred. Houses and cave walls have been backgrounds for paintings, and slabs of granite have been hurled over the continent to make massive pieces of sculptures.

Sculpture shaped by the elements stand in the bush, the scrub, in the most inhospitable of landscapes. It’s not where it is, it’s what it is, and that is the way of art.

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