Africa tends to arrive in the Western imagination as one of several stereotypes: a wasteland ravaged by the failures of colonialism, modernization and globalization, or an exotic world of colorful clothes, music, dance and ceremony. In a recent article in The New York Times, philosopher and Princeton professor Kwame Anthony Appiah describes a different reality: an Africa where traditional practices and the contemporary present commingle to produce a distinctive version of modernity. Appiah, who is half Asante, a major Ghanaian group, details his recent visit to the court of the Asante king. The ceremony is rooted in tradition, but interpenetrated with the modern world; when Appiah is presented to the king (who was educated at Oxford), they discuss the monarch’s next trip to New York, when he will meet with the head of the World Bank. One of Appiah’s points is that people from places like Africa are not passive recipients or victims of modernization, but engage the world, take certain things from it, adapt them to their culture and innovate. Rather than succumb to homogenization, they make “new forms of difference.” “African Art, African Voices,” the new exhibit at the Frist Center, very much takes this view. In addition to offering an impressive array of objects, it also provides a context for the people who made the work. We see the world as they experience it—a daunting task, considering that the show covers a wide swath of a continent filled with distinct rituals, languages, histories and cosmologies. Too much information means an exhausting amount to take in, too little information leaves you with a superficial view. This show, organized by the Seattle Art Museum and drawn primarily from its collection, does a marvelous job of getting the balance right. The show’s core consists of separate sections dedicated to seven cultures: the Asante, Kom, Yoruba, Dan, Mende, Maasai and Kongo, major groups in sub-Saharan countries from Guinea in the west to Kenya in the east. Each section focuses on art forms the group is most known for: Kente cloth and gold jewelry from the Asante, Maasai beadwork, Dan carved masks, etc. The audio guide provides commentary from a member of that society, who speaks in more personal and less academic terms than a typical curator’s tour. Several sections also include invaluable video that allows us to see the art in visceral physical context. Every object in the show is captivating in some way. The Asante jewelry references objects in the world, like a porcupine ring made from a burst of gold almost the size of a hickory nut. A Yoruba gelede mask portrays a bird holding a snake, and the two animals’ bodies form a geometric matrix around the carved human head that forms the mask’s base. Another gallery includes two hunters’ vests from the Bamana in Mali, fabric stained and coated in mud, then covered with tusks, horns and pouches to hold herbs and amulets; the shirts provide the wearer with magical power and camouflage in the forest. The continuous interplay of tradition with new ideas and experiences shows up throughout the exhibit. One gelede mask depicts a man with his face painted white, wearing glasses, a keg poised on his head, a comb stuck to one side of his head and a cigarette stuck above his ear. The audio guide points out several ways to interpret the mask, but the most obvious one is as a warning against African people trying to act European. The keg and cigarette indicate imported vices, and the comb is of Western design and won’t go through African hair. One of the more surprising items is a wooden coffin from Ghana in the shape of a Mercedes-Benz. Lined with light-blue satin fabric, the white car has curtains painted in its windows like a hearse, and it stretches in a distorted way, an effect very similar to the vehicles in a Red Grooms construction. A video shows other coffins in the shape of a screwdriver, a can of coconut milk and a mermaid, and the singing, dancing and processions that go with their interment. The movements and sounds seem fully African in spite of these updated vessels for the dead. The Frist Center curators underscore the dynamic character of African art by adding a selection of work by contemporary Africans. Most of the pieces in the previous sections are anonymous and imprecisely dated, but here we enter the world of individual artists working in media typical of the Western gallery system: photographs, collages, sculpture, drawing and painting. Two photographic portraits by the Malian photographer Seydou Keita, taken in the early 1950s, show Africans integrating old and modern ways in their own terms. Three women in traditional clothes and jewelry stand in front of a black car. A man in a light-colored tunic sports a wristwatch. These are not anachronisms, but records of people presenting themselves as they wished to be seen and remembered. Some of the most recent artists tackle the intersection of the West and Africa with dark humor. Yinka Shonibare’s installation “Nuclear Family” consists of four headless and handless mannequins dressed in bright trade cloth tailored in a Victorian mode. He makes fun of Victorian fashion, but also asks where the Africans were in the Victorian era. Fatimah Tuggar uses computer montage techniques to place a photo of a Nigerian family into a Western living room decorated with a portrait of the Cleavers from Leave It to Beaver. When Appiah argues that people in Africa and other non-Western places have forged their own versions of modernity, one implication is that cultural influence can be mutual. As Africans adapt Western material, their own innovations bleed into how we experience modernity, an obvious example being the cross-pollination that has taken place in popular music. Countless Western musicians, from Paul Simon to Talking Heads to Pharoah Sanders, have incorporated African sounds and polyrhythms. The potential, even inevitability, of African voices assuming positions of global cultural leadership comes across in the work of Wangechi Mutu. A Kenyan living in the United States, she produces complicated images from a combination of collage and drawing. Her work at the Frist, “Lilliputian Haunt,” shows a female form balanced precariously on her knees on a wooden African stool, with a small devil figure floating above her. It seems to hit her on the head with the wheel and shock absorber of a motorcycle, tormenting and dancing with her. The two figures are connected by threads that burst apart in a flush of color. The female has eyes and other features made from collage elements of a Western woman, although the totality still seems more African, and details from motorcycles incongruously accent the shape of her body. The image, ridiculous in parts and incomprehensible in others, is clearly tied to an African identity and achieves a freshness that eludes many of Mutu’s contemporaries who come out of a purely Western framework. The combination of these influences and personal visual fluency position her to become a major international voice. Some say that globalization makes the world smaller, but a show like this suggests that it only cuts down the distances. Instead, we encounter dizzying depth and breadth. As African artists move out of the anonymity of traditional practice and into the familiar terms of Western artistic media and easily recognizable intellectual ambition, we cannot deny the cultural impact they will have on the rest of the world.
