The Art Bulletin Kongo Ins-(ex)piration in Contemporary Art

The Art Bulletin ISSN: 0004-3079 (Print) 1559-6478 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcab20 Kongo Ins-(ex)piration in Contemporary Art Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz To cite this article: Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz (2016) Kongo Ins-(ex)piration in Contemporary Art, The Art Bulletin, 98:3, 291-296 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2016.1157410 Published online: 06 Sep 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcab20 Download by: [105.3.117.162] Date: 08 September 2016, At: 10:20 WHITHER ART HISTORY? Kongo Ins-(ex)piration in Contemporary Art B
a rbaro Mart
ınez-Ruiz Initial contact between Africans and Europeans established a pervasive paradigm for the Western understanding of African religious, cultural, and artistic practices and judgments about their inferior location in the intellectual universe in comparison with European traditions. Remnants of these attitudes continue to influence contemporary dialogue on African art. Studies of colonialism and imperialism, along with recognition of the biased political and cultural narratives and absence of local agency such systems engendered, have resulted in newly constructed narratives within academic disciplines, including art history, but have failed to fully replace assumptions regarding the primitive nature of “traditional art.” Dichotomies in contemporary art theory between modernity versus modernization, culture versus nature, and high culture versus low culture continue to position art in opposition to traditional culture. Generally speaking, fine art is understood as distinct from and hierarchically superior to traditionally produced craft or the anthropological “artifact,” with the former produced for its visual and aesthetic value while the latter remains rooted, even mired, in traditional culture and in the way in which a society relates to and makes sense of the world. The still-evolving approach to the study of Kongo art has not prevented contemporary artists in Africa and the diaspora from creating powerful responses to and extensions of Kongo visual and cultural practices (Fig. 1). Indeed, the work of many contemporary artists can inform modern discourse about Kongo art. Their work, and the increasingly global art scene in which it is produced and consumed, enables the exploration of the manner in which Kongo principles are taken up, extended, and reinterpreted by artists in a new cultural paradigm. By intertwining Western and Kongo visual practices and melding concepts of “modernity” with historical elements, these artists attempt to bridge the perceived gap between art and culture. In some cases offering new interpretations of archetypal images, contemporary Kongo-influenced work also reveals the pervasiveness of certain Western conceptual memes and highlights the difficulty in exploring Kongo art on its own terms. The large number of contemporary artists in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and North and South America inspired by Kongo visual history cannot be covered here, nor can this essay catalog the body of work featured in recent exhibitions highlighting Kongo influence around the diaspora. Instead, I have chosen to highlight the manner in which selected artists have drawn on Kongo history, art, iconography, religion, and philosophy in creating contemporary works of art and explore their approaches to such source material. These approaches range from artists, such as Jos
e Bedia, with firsthand experience of Kongo religious practice who represent and reinterpret deliberately selected Kongo images and forms to those who utilize but decontextualize iconic Kongo objects and to others who have not intentionally looked to Kongo art history, much less Kongo practices, but whose work nonetheless reflects aesthetics similar to those of some Kongo forms. Together, their art presents an opportunity to reflect on how the resulting work can be used to move forward contemporary discussions of the overlapping spheres of historical and contemporary African art. Cuban-born Jos
e Bedia uses his art to explore his double cultural heritage, seeking to reconcile the Kongo visual inheritance of his Palo Monte religion with conflicting attitudes toward the visual arising from his Western background and academic training. By creating systematic representations, groupings, and arrangements not previously seen in the Kongo Cuban visual tradition, Bedia explores the divergence and convergence of the various strands of his identity. In giving them equal prominence and validation, Bedia’s methodology is consistent with the Kongo artistic principle nfuanani, which means equality or egalitarianism1 and has been described in the context of visual presentation as work with “shifting layers, having no clearly subordinate ‘background’ and no clearly secondary themes.”2 Such an approach was groundbreaking in contemporary Kongo art, a validation of Kongo cultural principles and a recognition that an “artist” in Kongo terms can be an artisan, a maker of religious objects, or an expert in Kongo religious matters. Bedia’s work with Kongo artistic principles also exemplifies American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s view that aesthetics and art ought to be considered separately and that art could be analogous to an analytic proposition, a tautology.3 Whereas Kosuth’s 1965 work One and Three Chairs displayed the same idea (concept) using three different strategies (a photograph, a wooden chair, and a text) as a series of self-reinforcing statements that cannot be disproved, Bedia, exploring the role of tautology within a Cuban identity heavily influenced by Kongo culture, accomplishes multiple levels of conceptual representation while working in a single bidimensional framework. For example, in his 1993 painting Sarabanda son los Hierros (Sarabanda Is Iron), Bedia represents the same concept in three ways: employing Western writing in the title, depicting Sarabanda, the Palo Monte god of war and technology, using the Kongo graphic writing system known as firmas (signatures), and creating a unique anthropomorphic rendering of Sarabanda in lieu of the more typical use of iron tools to visually represent the god (Fig. 2). Like Bedia’s work with Palo Monte concepts and imagery, Edouard Duval-Carri
e’s art is informed by Vodou, a religion practiced predominantly in Haiti and among Haitians in the United States that is based on religious traditions of the Ewe, Fon, and Yoruba cultures of West Africa as well as key principles traceable to “traditional” Kongo 292 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2016 VOLUME XCVIII NUMBER 3 1 Nganga mawuku (religious specialist) Pedro Nzakimvena’s religious house (nzo a nkisi), Mbanza Kongo, Angola, 2006 (photograph by the author) religion and Kongo Christianity. Despite its rich and complex underpinnings and the way in which it exemplifies the manner in which Caribbean religions emerged from interrelated systems of cultural exchange and synthesis, Vodou is frequently misunderstood and ridiculed as a form of “primitive” superstition, characterized in the media as crude and lacking in formal teaching. Throughout his extensive body of work, including his 1997 paintings The Landing and Magic Calabash, Duval-Carri
e references Vodou oral literature that describes the ways and means of the lwas (gods and goddesses) and incorporates v
e v
e , a graphic writing system used in Vodou as firmas are in Palo Monte. Working primarily in oil painting and sculpture, Duval-Carri
e creates pictorial narratives utilizing anthropomorphic figures meant to capture and express the essence of Vodou divinities through tangible visual shapes, a technique similar to Bedia’s depiction of Sarabanda, but removed from the manner in which such deities are generally understood and depicted within the practice of Vodou. In addition to incorporating specific visual elements drawn from Kongo traditions, Paulo Kapela and Ren
ee Stout utilize the Kongo notion kubika a bundu, which means the “art of organizing” or “bringing together,”4 in the production of their work. Kapela, whose life and work in Angola has enabled him to experience the aesthetic eclecticism of hybrid religious forms such as Mpeve ya Nlongo, Bundu dia Kongo, and the Sim~ao Kimbangu Church, incorporates elements from such practices into his work. In contrast to Stout’s circumscribed approach to the display of objects, which parallels the conventional use of pedestals to display museum reliquaries, Kapela reproduces religious spaces, conceptualizing them as new fabrics capable of hosting vital powers, spirits, personal needs, and hopes. What began with spaces used for historical religious practices in Angola becomes an artistic installation constructed for Western audiences and predominantly aestheticized by the inclusion of expressive objects rather than by the relation between objects and the space. Stout presents images that allude to the historical treatment of Kongo “artifacts,” power figures known as minkisi nkondi that were both regarded as fetish objects and promoted as iconic central African art by museums and private 2 Jose Bedia, Sarabanda son los Hierros (Sarabanda Is Iron), 1993, acrylic on canvas, 617/ 8 £ 95 in. (artwork Ó Jose Bedia; photograph provided by the artist and the Faber Collection) WHITHER ART HISTORY? 293 3 Nkisi a mpungu at nganga mawuku Pedro Lopes’s religious house (nzo a nkisi), Mbanza Kongo, Angola, 2012 (photograph by the author) 4 Mpungu a nkodia at nganga mawuku Pedro Lopes’s religious house (nzo a nkisi), Mbanza Kongo, Angola, 2012 (photograph by the author) collectors. For example, in her 1992 installation Crossroads: Post No. 1, Stout references a genre of early nineteenth-century art known as “memory jars,” made by unknown artists, and states that the installation “locates itself within Kongo cosmology.”5 Each “memory jar” demonstrates an aspect of Kongo artistic tradition known as ma kisi nsi, visible in a type of mpungu ntutu a nlongo, an nkisi in the form of a bottle or other container. An mpungu, often referred to as an nkisi, is commonly conceptualized as a holder of vital powers in which medicine (bilongo) works as a manifestation of phenomenological physical and spiritual properties. The accumulation of things on the surface of the jar suggests that its maker had some degree of knowledge of kubika a bundu, in which an accumulation of dispersed life forces and problems is central to the object’s production, facilitating the physical emergence of the mpungu’s nature through 294 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2016 VOLUME XCVIII NUMBER 3 5 Mpungu a nkama at nganga mawuku Pedro Lopes’s religious house (nzo a nkisi), Mbanza Kongo, Angola, 2006. Hooton Collection (photograph by the author) the wrapping and tying of hundreds of palm leaves into a knot until they become a large bundle, known as a kanga (to tie) (Figs. 3, 4).6 However, despite the similarity between the memory jar and Kongo objects that are thought to have influenced it, no unbroken continuity exists between them, and the minkisi tradition cannot be understood as having been carried on completely in the former. The tradition is distanced even further as it is again reinterpreted in Stout’s installation. Rather than objects that work in seclusion, minkisi operate within a complex system of exchange with other objects, space, and humans. Their use is dynamic and shifting, and the religious and cultural systems underlying their use, as they migrate, necessarily undergo a transformation, marked in part by dislocation (Figs. 5–7). Congolese painter and installation artist Steven Bandoma, like Stout, utilizes well-known elements of historical Kongo visual culture in his work in an effort to bring historical artistic production into the more contemporary, conceptual practice for which Bandoma believes there is little room in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.7 For example, his 2011 pieces Acculturation and Lost Tribe depict minkisi at their core, continuing a tradition of contemporary African artists whose employment of these iconographic figures serve as shorthand references to a broader cultural or even pan-African identity, including Trigo Paula (Materna, 1984) and Kendell Geers (Twilight of the Idols, 2002). While such shorthand references are indeed effective and highly recognizable, they risk furthering the existing conflation of a wide range of distinct, complex practices and legitimizing the oversimplification and generalization characteristic of the existing Western approach to the study of African art. Similarly struggling with the contradictions inherent in making Kongo-based art accessible to a Western audience is contemporary Angolan artist Antonio Ole. Exploring ideas of national integration, nationalism, and cultural identity in a culturally diverse country recovering from decades of civil war, Ole looks to the historical prominence of the Kongo and alludes to the idea of belonging to a place in history (Fig. 8). He incorporates images emblematic of the Kongo Kingdom at the height of its power in the sixteenth century, such as early maps published by Antonio Cavazzi, and pairs these with images of copied versions of iconic nkisi figures available for sale to tourists in Luanda’s craft market. In addition to alluding to the Western consumption of Kongo visual culture, the juxtaposition of such politically and culturally charged images raises questions about the nature of art and how it can (and, indeed, whether it should) be used to forge a new, unified national identity at the expense of culturally specific definitions of and responses to art and beauty. Reflecting their varying degrees of personal experience with Kongo and Kongo-based religious and artistic traditions, the contemporary artists featured here navigate the nuanced and complex Kongo traditions in unique ways and with different levels of literal reference. Kongo imagery is adopted—in some cases, unaccompanied by a real understanding of the meaning behind such images or their manner of use—extended, and reinterpreted to form narratives that appear to present historical concepts, yet are constructed within and shaped by Western approaches to art. The results, unfamiliar anthropomorphic representations of deities and isolated reproductions of minkisi, illustrate the artists’ Western orientation insofar as they focus on the manipulation of static images or objects rather than the processes through which artistic production can express underlying religious and cultural beliefs and the manner in which representational objects are animated and engaged. WHITHER ART HISTORY? Although the efforts to negotiate and reconcile Kongo artistic practices with the Western artistic tradition within which these artists have trained can inform the evolving study of Kongo art and the broader field of African art history of which it forms part, the danger exists that the Western approach continues to dominate while appearing on the surface to sufficiently consider and incorporate non-Western components. By using certain images recognized and accepted as “representative of” Kongo art such as minkisi, nails, and packages, these artists risk unwittingly glossing over the true complexities and contextual meanings of the Kongo visual traditions, and the art world can point to their critical and commercial success as evidence that such issues have been addressed and are not in need of further exploration. Also notable is the fact that, although these artists draw on various elements of Kongo philosophy and visual culture, their work is produced largely for consumption by an elite, Western(ized) class; little of the discussion it engenders—or the cultural and financial rewards it earns—makes its way back to the communities most actively engaged in the practice of Kongo-based traditions. Until voices from these communities are included in the conversation, it is difficult to see how a comprehensive framework for the study of Kongo art—or African art, more generally—can be fully developed. More broadly, although the current contemporary work being produced by artists in Africa and the diaspora is exciting, its reception in increasingly mainstream circles should not be taken as proof that the challenges facing African art have been fully overcome. In fact, there is a danger that the success of contemporary African art will lend support to the pernicious assumption that African art is following a trajectory similar to Western artistic traditions, evolving from “primitivism” to modernism and moving away from 7 Mpungu a nvuanzi at nganga mawuku Lino Gracia’s religious house (nzo a nkisi), Mbanza Kongo, Angola, 2012. Hooton Collection (photograph by the author) 6 Mpungu a nkama mbenza, Noki, Angola, 2007. Hooton Collection (photograph by the author) 295 296 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2016 VOLUME XCVIII NUMBER 3 8 Antonio Ole, N/S, 1994–97, mixed media on paper, 121/ 8 £ 93/ 8 in. (30.8 £ 23.8 cm). Collection of the artist (artwork Ó Antonio Ole; photograph by the author) production driven by and inextricably linked to belief systems whose complexity has been dismissed in the West. A view that African art is (finally) evolving and should be encouraged in such a process overlooks and dismisses other forms of artistic production that continue—and themselves evolve—throughout the region and reinforces the erroneous and detrimental implication that such forms lack artistic merit. B
a rbaro Mart
ı nez-Ruiz is an art historian with expertise in African and Caribbean artistic, visual, and religious practices. Previously a professor at Havana’ s High Institute of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Stanford University, he joined the University of Cape Town in 2014 as chair of its Art History Department [Department of Art History, University of Cape Town, 31–37 Orange Street Gardens, Cape Town, South Africa 8001, [email protected]]. Notes 1. Antonio da Silva Maia, Dicionario Complementar Portugues-Kimbundu-Kikongo (Cacuj~aes: Cooperaç~ao Portuguesa, 1994), 343. 2. Robert Farris Thompson, personal conversation with author, Yale University, 2000. 3. Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 840, 841. 4. B
arbaro Mart
ınez-Ruiz, “Funerary Pots of the Kongo in Central Africa,” in African Terra Cottas: A Millenary Heritage, ed. Floriane Morin and Boris Wastiaus (Geneva: Mus
ee Barbier-Mueller Press, 2010), 296. 5. Michael D. Harris, “Resonance, Transformation and Rhyme: The Art of Ren
ee Stout,” in Astonishment and Power, by Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael D. Harris et al. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 113. 6. B
arbaro Mart
ınez-Ruiz, “Ma Kisi Nsi: L’art des habitants de la r
egion de Mbanza Kongo,” in Angola: Figures de pouvoir, by Christiane Falgayrettesee Dapper Press, 2011), 183–90. Leveau et al. (Paris: Mus
7. See http://stevebandoma.blogspot.com.