Follow the Money: Economics and African Art

Money is very important in the history of art.

—Michael Baxandall (1972)

To what degree have those interested in African visual and performed expression explored the issue of economics? In other words, everyone is well aware that financial concerns envelope all aspects of society, but where is the focus on money in African art historical analysis? And to what extent has the economic aspect occupied the forefront of artistic analysis as a contextual frame to elucidate African visual and performed cultures? Such questions are at the core of this issue of Critical Interventions, giving credence to the fact that in the study of African art, money does matter (Guyer, 1995).

In refashioning anthropologist Jane Guyer's seminal phrase in her examination of currency and economic transformation in colonial and postcolonial West Africa, Guyer and her contributors demonstrated the changing nature and unpredictability of African economies.¹ Her argument of fluidity and change surrounding African economies was recently corroborated when The Economist dubbed Africa “The Hopeless Continent” in May 2000, only to reassess that earlier claim and run the cover story “Africa Rising” 11 years later. The point is that in Africa, rapid change has always occurred and continues yearly, if not daily, and those changes are closely linked and driven by local, regional, and global economic complexities.²

Despite economics as a major impetus fueling cultural change, scholars have yet to focus on the role of money as it plays out on the ground in African art. Foregrounding money as the contextual frame of analysis provides fresh interpretation to paradigms of change, aesthetic choices, artistic rationale, motivation, patronage, workshops, cultural associations, and formal and informal institutions. The essays that follow turns attention toward the economic, stressing how money influences and shapes the myriad and nuanced layers of creative consciousness across Africa.

Anthropologist Fiona Siegenthaler begins our inquiry into the economics of African art with a literal consideration of artists and the actual use of money and currency as artistic media. Her study builds from the well-documented phenomenon of long-standing uses of metal, trade-breads, cowrie shells, and other prestigious materials in indigenous African cultures, extending the discussion to the work of contemporary African international artists. Her study provides a detailed comparative analysis of three artists from different parts of Africa (Republic of Benin, Zimbabwe, and South Africa). Siegenthaler interprets their individual uses of currency around the notions of objet trouvé, symbolic value, and ideas of the “alien,” exploring how art sparks local and international commentaries, allowing the artists to engage in global conversations about identity with a medium that transcends all time and space: money.

Anthropologist Till Förster presents an examination into the workshop dynamics of commercial and fine artists working in the minimally active art scene of Bamenda, a city located in the northwest region of Cameroon. In this tough and highly competitive environment, the pursuit of economic security is fleeting and part of the daily grind of being an artist. The issue of artistic agency in relation to economic success is at the heart of Förster's discussion. Analyzing three specific artists and their workshops, he argues that to financially succeed, Bamenda artists must slip in and out of the trends of creativity, originality, and continuity, developing artistic agencies based not on inspiration but on economic rationale.

Art historian Jordan A. Fenton shifts inquiry to the traditional-based realm with his investigation into the ways money saturates contemporary masquerade and performance in Calabar, urban capital of Cross River State, Nigeria. Fenton demonstrates that as a historic port-city, Calabar and its historic masquerade society known as Ekpe has long been part of economic transactions since the slave trade, a pattern that continues to shape masquerade culture into the present. In investigating the money in masquerade spectacle and the business of cultural clubs and renting masquerade costumes and ritual paraphernalia, Fenton argues that economic incentive is one of the major motivations as to why masquerade culture thrives in contemporary Calabar.

Art historian Amy Schwartzott's essay turns attention to contemporary African art as she considers the economic dimensions of refuse as artistic media in the capital city of Maputo, Mozambique. In her examination of three Maputo-based artists—Zeferino Chicuamba (Zeferino), Domingos W. Comiche Mabongo (Domingos), and Moisés Ernesto Matsinhe Mafuiane (Butcheca)—Schwarzott shows how their manipulations of recycled materials engage ideas of materiality, the transformative power of art, art as an educational tool, and salability and the art market. The underlying element running through all three diverse approaches and explanations of these artists' interest in “garbage,” as Schwartzott demonstrates, is one of economics.

Curator Lara Koseff evaluates the viability of new media trends emerging in South Africa as well as in other areas across the continent. Turning attention to film, video, and digital art, Koseff discusses how contemporary South African artists are shifting from object-based approaches of renowned contemporary African art to more transient modes of expression. Important to this transient movement is its inherent connection to how indigenous arts such as masks and sculptures are decontextualized in museums and galleries displays, when in reality they were once parts of broader ephemeral rituals, ceremonies, and performances. The implications of favoring the physicality of African art (whether traditional-based or contemporary) is crucial to her analysis as she grounds her discussion within the concerns of the global art market, raising the question of just how financially rewarding and sustainable is “African art” that rejects the object?

The special issue concludes with a return to the importance of monetary values and currencies modified into artistic materials. Art historian Johanna Wild considers Ndidi Dike's Waka-into-Bondage, an exhibition featured at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2008. Wild notes that Dike's conceptual installations engaged with and expanded on an established archive of Eurocentric imagery of the slave trade depicting the slave body as victimized and culturally void, thereby voiding the impact of slavery on Africa. Her exhibition critiques the fact that scholars are too willing to discuss the cultural and traumatic implications of the slave trade while avoiding the obvious fact of its resilience as an economic activity in which African bodies were literally traded for myriad types of European and African currency. Dike's exhibition deploys the materiality of slave currencies to forge collective memories of the slave trade and its after-effects. Her artworks, suffused with many types of currency, indict both European and African involvement in the economic fabric of slavery.

This issue of Critical Interventions thus focuses on how economic complexities of artworks, cities, and memories shape, inform, support, and inspire individual and collective artistic sensibilities. The importance of money and economics have long been indirectly suggested in earlier studies of African art, especially in relation to issues of trade markets (Sieber & Rubin, 1968; Bravmann, 1973; Merriam, 1968), media, display, and power (Fraser & Cole, 1972; Cole & Ross, 1977). Despite these examples, serious consideration of African art and economics grew from anthropological inquiry (Firth, 1951; Gerbrands, 1957; Herskovits, 1957; Messenger, 1973; Richter, 1980; Silver, 1981). The basis of a groundwork for an economic approach to African art did not occur until investigations targeted African artists and the topic of change,³ which helped shape a wave of scholarship interested in socioeconomic change in the late 1970s and 1980s (Ben-Amos, 1989, pp. 35–36).⁴ Despite the emerging interest in social art history, economic concerns remained sidelined.⁵

Perhaps this explains why in two state of the field addresses for African visual expression published in 1989, both anthropologist/art historian Monni Adams and anthropologist Paula Ben-Amos suggested that more emphasis was needed on the economic dynamics of African art. Adams stressed how new market opportunities drastically modified what is often referred to as “classical” African art (1989, p. 85). In a similar, yet different, vein, Ben-Amos stressed the need for less broad comparative studies, urging inquires to target more localized studies on artistic production and patronage (1989, p. 39). All these studies suggest that as far as anthropologists were concerned—and, to a lesser extent, for art historians—the economics of cultural production has long been a crucial component of studies of African art.

More importantly, since the 1990s a number of studies on African creative expression have continued to highlight change, this time through the lens of commodification of African art for Western markets.⁶ In anthropologist Christopher Steiner's influential book, African Art in Transit, his mapping of the commercial networks of exchange of African sculpture from rural to urban West Africa to the largest cities in the West tells the story of the global business and trade of African art (1994). Steiner concluded that the study of African art trade challenges us to view the penetration of capitalism in Africa as a series of personal linkages, forged one at a time by different individuals each with their own motives, ambitions, and set of goals. Steiner's valuable insight informs the basis for this issue of Critical Interventions in which scholars used elements of economics to engage issues of individual agency, specifically in how money and interests in global capital within Africa motivates, inspires, informs, and problematizes artistic expression. Following Steiner's text, the late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed increased interest in exploring the muddied notion of “authenticity” and Western commercialization (Phillips & Steiner, 1999; Rovine, 2008; Kasfir, 2007).⁷ While this work is important, this special issue turns attention away from Western commodification, exploring the impact of money and economics on the minds of those consuming, making, and selling art on the ground in Africa.

The attention to innovation, individual agency, and networks of support in the research presented here reveal a steady and unwavering set of artistic changes in response to market stimulants, whether the outcome is political, social, religious, or purely economic. As the following contributions demonstrate, financial implications surround all contexts for creativity, and African artists have long competed for and created based on the desire for financial or monetary sustainability. Is this any different from how Picasso and Matisse competed for the patronage of Leo and Gertrude Stein in their pursuit to lead a Western avant-garde that relied on artistic vocabularies appropriated from African art at the turn of the 19th century?

Similar cultural and economic implications of patronage frame art historian Judith Perani and anthropologist Norma Wolff's exploration of the dynamics surrounding the art patronage of cloth, textiles, and dress in Africa (1999). Expanding discussions on patronage, consumption, and production, art historian Sidney Kasfir and anthropologist Till Förster framed African workshops as both economic businesses and social spaces, highlighting the crucial role of money in how these workshops interface with society (2013). In a broader look at the business of culture and identity, anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff discussed how postcolonial cultures brand and market their cultural identities as a form of sustainability (2009).

The rise of neoliberal capitalism and global commerce compels scholarship to focus on the economics of African art while emphasizing the value of locality and individual creativity. All those who have conducted fieldwork in Africa know that financial transactions involving direct exchanges of money are integral to one's ability to conduct research. Interviewees often demand to be compensated for their time, and while this may be initially viewed as frustrating, it ultimately affirms the notion that their time and knowledge is viewed as currency in Africa, an issue worthy of scholarly exploration. A more sensitive issue is that most African artists and cultural custodians simply do not wish to speak about their economic situations to friends, let alone foreign researchers, and rightfully so. This makes it difficult to collect specific kinds of economic data.⁸ Another challenge facing researchers is the daunting issue of unraveling the informal economies that permeate all modalities of African art.

Despite these roadblocks, examining and exploring money and economics as the contextual frame for cultural production sheds new light on the internal and external factors shaping creative consciousness in Africa. The essays that follow encourage scholars of African art to “follow the money,” in order to discover and explore the ways in which money affects artistic expression on the ground in Africa.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jordan A. Fenton

Jordan A. Fenton ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Miami University, Ohio. His research interests include economics, secret societies, masquerades, and local knowledge systems in Calabar and Cross River State, Nigeria. Recent publications include: “Knowledge in Motion: Reading and Performing Ukara Nsibidi” in Ukara: Ritual Colth of the Ekpe Secret Society (2015) and “Nyoro Masquerade as a Hunt for Modernity: A View from a West African City” in Behind the Masks of Modernism (2016). Fenton also serves on ACASA's Executive Board as the association's treasurer.

I would like to thank Christine Mullen Kreamer and Janet Stanley for encouraging me to pursue the topic of African art and economics during a predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art in 2011. I also thank Amy Schwartzott for her comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1 See the edited volume, Wari Matters: Ethnographic Explorations of Money in the Mande World, for an approach influenced by Guyer in which money served as the foundational thread, linking together a diverse set of explorations into Mande culture (Wooten, 2005).

2 For broader and more comprehensive economic histories of Africa, see A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (1973) and Ralph A. Austen, African Economic history: Internal Development and External Dependency (1987).

3 Since the early formation of the discipline of African art history, scholars first framed broader understandings of the continent's art through the myriad, nuanced, and continual processes of change and permutation. The works of Roy Sieber and Arnold Rubin (1968), Rene Bravmann (1973), Sidney Kasfir (1984), and others were instrumental in laying and furthering the groundwork for change by mapping out geographical stylistic zones, interaction, and historical analysis in the field of African art history.

4 For example, a special issue published in African Arts was one of the first attempts to grapple with artist/patronage relationships (Aronson, 1980; Kasfir, 1980; Peek, 1980; Perani, 1980).

5 In terms of social perspectives to art, Arnold Hauser, a leading Marxist art historian of his time, argued for the inherent relationship between artistic and social change, weaving economic issues into his analysis of art. For more, see his book The Social History of Art (1951). In the field of art history, Michael Baxandall's investigation into the commercial aspects of 15th-century Italian painting remains a seminal and important study merging art history with social history through detailed analyses of the economic factors influencing patronage, taste, and links between art and daily life (1972). For an example from West Africa, see anthropologist Paula Ben-Amos's social historical construction of 18th-century Benin court art (1999).

6 Since the influential writing of Karl Marx, the commodity (and its “fetishism”) as well as the general process of commodification has become a staple discussion and theoretical framework in art historical critiques and analyses. Although Marx himself spent little time exploring art and literature, his work, along with that of Walter Benjamin and others, laid the groundwork for the preoccupation of the “commodity” within the discourse of modern art. Paul Wood (2003) provided a lucid account of the many discussions on this topic in Western art history.

7 For more on the issues and problems with the construction of “authenticity” and “authentic” African art, see Sidney Kasfir (1992) and Sylvester Ogbechie (2011); for a broader discussion on how authenticity has come to denote value in non-Western art collection and museum display, see James Clifford's seminal book, The Predicament of Culture (1988).

8 Economist Carl Liedholm provided an example of such difficulties in his study of small-scale textile production, focusing on issues of supply, demand, and profitability (1982). Also with the growing interest in statistical analysis and data collection of the contemporary Nigerian African art markets (Fagbule & Castellote, 2014, 2015), such newly emerging date proves ripe for scholarly scrutiny.