These books, on an art teachers’ school in apartheid-era rural South Africa and on the art scene in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Dakar, are timely explorations of what Howard Becker called the art world. According to Becker, to understand the art world one must look at the social network of institutions that produce, consume and evaluate art, such as galleries, art schools, museums and journals of art criticism, as well as the material conditions of art production such as paint and canvas. For him, this ‘world’ was restricted to largely urban spaces where artists met one another, rubbed shoulders with collectors in the galleries, read the same texts by the same critics, and bought the same supplies – in specific places such as New York or Paris, in what we now call the global North. The rest of the world, so to speak, was not seen as part of the ‘art world’, but, by and large, provided a sort of cultural raw material that Becker did not discuss.
Today, art museums in the global North are scrambling to escape the quagmire of a colonialist aesthetic associated with this idea of the art world. One increasingly popular route is to display modern or contemporary art done by African artists alongside more traditional forms associated with ‘tribal art’, that venerable raw material for the avant-garde. Another route is to debate whether modern and contemporary art done by African artists should simply belong with their peers in the rooms devoted to art in general. The concept of an art world, not to mention the category of those who belong in it, is clearly expanding. So, what better time to expand Becker's exploration to specific locations in African countries?
One cannot imagine a place farther from New York City or even Johannesburg and Cape Town than an erstwhile mission school in the Natal hills. Yet its site became an art teachers’ training college, run by the Department of Bantu Education from the 1950s to the early 1980s. In his book The Art of Life, Magaziner explores how its pedagogical plans and practices were very much part of the global art world. Those in South Africa who were thinking about how Bantu peoples would become South African listened to the likes of Paul Robeson, Bronisław Malinowski and John Dewey; they visited the United States to see how African Americans were being taught; and, like their peers in the US and Europe, veered between the nostalgic and progressive aspirations inherent in modernity when deciding what and how to teach. Were Bantu people losing their traditions and becoming unmoored? Would teaching art as a kind of tribal craft help them feel rooted? Or did they need to learn to create and be original to become comfortable in an industrializing society that erased individuality? Educational experts sometimes talked both ways. In the Bantu education system, and especially at the art teachers’ college in Ndaleni, the progressives prevailed.
Students were selected for their creativity and skill with modernist art forms. In learning to teach by making art themselves, they were also taught to imagine art as a human rather than specifically ethnic or even African practice. At the same time, they were constantly reminded via examples that Africans did make celebrated art. Yet, in teaching art, the graduates had to struggle against the material recalcitrance of the society around them. Bantu schools lacked funds for supplies, so ilala grass, wood and clay became the materials of choice even when the environment around Bantu schools had no such grass or wood. And against the entreaties of their art teachers, some students (often encouraged by other teachers or parents) wanted to make tribal curios to sell to tourists rather than original artworks that expressed individual freedom and modernist soul-making.
A handful of now renowned artists were educated in the Bantu system or directly at the art teachers’ school, but Magaziner is not telling a story of ‘towering’ figures. Instead, he wants to give us a sense of how learning to do art in a Bantu school affected people's lives. So we learn much about school life – about rules, dress codes, schedules and field trips – but also more importantly about particular lives after school. Some reflected the tragedy of apartheid. Silverman Jara, one of the more talented teachers who made large concrete ‘monsters’ that became Ndaleni's totems, was stoned to death by students when he tried to prevent them from vandalizing their school in a protest against Bantustan rule. Another talented artist, Samson Mahlobo, tried to live off his art and escape South Africa. Incessantly thwarted, he committed suicide. Yet Magaziner stresses that far more people who graduated from the school derived a certain sense of self-confidence from the experience of making art. Ezekiel Mabusela took the editors of the Bantu newspaper The World to task for excoriating the work of (the not yet famous) Dumile Feni, who had just won a prize from the South Africa Brewing Company for his modernist Mother and Child. To The World’s editors, the ugly image of misery conflicted with their impression of what ‘our African art should be’. To Mabusela, every brushstroke told a subversive but aesthetically powerful story. Magaziner writes with perfect understatement that Mabusela ‘knew a bit about art. He was a window dresser … in the Johannesburg business district where he had worked since finishing his Ndaleni certificate in 1963’ (p. 243).
A historian is only as good as his or her archive, and Magaziner is fortunate to have the very thorough record-keeping of Ndaleni's longest-serving director, Lorna Peirson, to supplement his dozens of interviews completed with alumni and staff. The book is full of sketches of similarly compelling individuals. We also glimpse several individual artists in Joanna Grabski's Art World City who emerge from the hundreds of interviews she completed on several long visits to Dakar, beginning with her thesis research in the late 1990s. These individual artists are successful, and the most successful are always, as they put it, ‘entre deux avions’, or between planes – a residency here, a biennale there (Dakar has its own, as well as a counter-biennale). But returning to their studios in Dakar, they make art that is more ethnographic than personal. Thus Fodé Camara is internationally known for his painting Barca ou Barsakh (Barcelona or Death), depicting in abstract form the desperate migration of so many Senegalese youth via boats to Europe. Such paintings have put him and his peers on the world art map.
Ethnography is crucial as Dakar is a very specific art world, and one of the book's strengths is its emphasis on this specificity by looking at the relationship between artists and the city from which they draw inspiration. Unlike the art worlds Becker explored, there are no galleries to speak of and no philosophers or critics shaping art through pronouncements. Instead, artists are far more independent and entrepreneurial. Their studios double as intellectual salons and exhibition spaces. Artists put on shows and invite guests, including the photographers and journalists who supply the news and commentary that sustain their reputations. The market is only notionally local, consisting in large part of foreigners residing in the city: diplomats or those who work for NGOs. In earlier eras, many of these collectors wanted imagery or objects representing Senegal and ‘Africa’. Increasingly, the city has become the subject. And this applies to the international market too, where the ‘between planes’ travellers have their city-themed work displayed in museums such as the National Museum of African Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the US.
Since the 1980s, the most successful artists have been graduates of Dakar's art school, which offers a very sophisticated education that requires students to produce a portfolio of work and a thesis (or mémoire) that links the work to theoretically informed but personal engagement with the city. Artists, as they tell Grabski, ‘witness’ what goes on around them. They record the ethnographic present via art. This focus on the city has led, as Grabski emphasizes, to very effective artistic innovation. She offers an extensive description of artists working in two quintessentially urban media: assemblages of found objects, the detritus that a city such as Dakar sloughs off as its grows yet falls apart, and which the artists call ‘recuperation’ or ‘salvage’ (most famously associated with Moustapha Dimé); and forms of painting that engage in multiple self-conscious ways with the city's visuality. Cities, after all, are already collages. Walls are covered with graffiti and advertisements. Patina and texture are everywhere, and this visuality can be transformed into images. A broken car windshield is painted and repainted, then broken again by Hassane Sar. Waterlogged wood collected at the beach is left in the sun to dry by Jean-Marie Bruce and then buried, dug up and sanded. A wall covered in marks is photographed and the photograph transposed on to a painted canvas. The city as subject, at once a particular city with its particular neighbourhoods but also as a sort of metonym for ‘Africa’ now – urban, gritty, falling apart, yet creative – is what the art world forces or encourages Dakar's artists to make, because the art market craves it. Grabski reveals this market, both as a global phenomenon and as a local one. You feel, as you read, the thrill of this kind of artistic production. And you also get to see it.
Indeed, a strength of Art World City is its copious illustrations. You see quite vividly what the artists in the Dakar art scene make. It is easy to picture the gritty city through the photographs of their creations. Magaziner's book also shows us a generous number of powerful images made by (often unknown) artists. Especially moving are the colour photographs of the traces of art that remain at the school today. Now in ruins, overgrown by grass and weeds, some art remains. Wall murals depicting students doing art are especially moving. The large concrete monsters Silverman Jara made are still there and children now play on them. It is a pleasure to get to see what both authors describe so eloquently. I will use these books in my classroom not only to revise my students’ understandings of African countries’ art worlds but also to show them how to do studies of how art worlds are made, no matter where they decide to go.
