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Abstract
Bamenda in English-speaking Cameroon has some 34 art workshops. Most of the workshops sell their works to a commercial audience and offer signboard painting as well as a couple of other genres of applied art. The competition is very high. Though most of the artists insist that they have an individual style, there are striking similarities between different workshops and the art that they produce as most artists were apprentices of others in the city. After having established an independent workshop, they are likely to reproduce the style with which they had become familiar. However, they also need to demonstrate that they are able to develop an individual style. Creativity in such an urban setting is a precarious balance between adaptation and resistance. This article examines the economic constraints and the agency of the artists who have situated themselves in this difficult environment.
Notes
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/rcin.
1 Estimations vary around 310,000 to 390,000 inhabitants. Higher estimations would make Bamenda Cameroon's third largest city; lower estimations would make it rank five.
2 No exact figures exist for Bamenda, but legend are the many complaints by those who seek employment in the city. See, in general, the estimations by the ILO: http://www.ilo.org/dyn/infoecon/docs/441/F596332090/women%20and%20men%20stat%20picture.pdf. The concept of the informal sector is problematic. It is usually defined as the sector of the economy that is not controlled by the state, where the usual regulations do not apply and where most actors do not pay taxes. State actors saw it as a challenge, as chaotic, as something that had to be suppressed. However, the implicit presumptions have proven wrong: There are rules and regulations in the informal economy, and they are sometimes stricter than those of the administration. And the dichotomy of informal versus formal largely ignores that the two often interact and depend on each other.
3 For instance, through youth associations that provide public services that the state is uwilling or unable to deliver (see Fuh, Citation2009 for a study of such associations in Old Town Bamenda).
4 Fieldwork for this article was conducted between 2001 and 2013. I participated in many spontaneous conversations as they emerged in studios and in other places where artists met. Narrative interviews were conducted on selected issues—for instance, on former exhibitions and the apprenticeships of established artists. The organization of daily work in workshops and payment of artists was documented by direct observations.
5 Carvers who situate themselves in a “traditional” context rarely register in SOCADAP, the Société Civile du Droit d'Auteur et Droits Voisins des arts Plastiques et Graphiques (see http://www.journalducameroun.com/article.php?aid=1116).
6 Corruption is often used as a generic term for every act that violates societal norms, in particular the rules of impartial administrative practice.
7 A 42-year-old painter who wanted to stay anonymous on his own show of paintings in a nightclub.
8 See Förster (Citation2008) wherein I examine the visual presence and competition in Bamenda's urban visual culture, while this article looks at artistic production.
9 See Förster and Kasfir (Citation2013) for a general discussion of duties, organization, and hierarchy in African workshops.
10 The situation among tailors is different. Dependent labour is widespread in tailor shops but almost nonexistent among artists.
11 Following Tilly (Citation2006, p. 19), I understand regime as a relatively stable practice that is embedded in and part of the figuration of major social actors and institutions.
12 See http://www.speeart.com/biography.htm. By festivals, Spee mainly meant big cultural fairs that were more or less regularly organized at a regional and national level. Such festivals usually promote the arts and are for many artists an opportunity to sell to a wider audience.
13 E.g., Girl Before a Mirror, 1932; Rubin and Fluegel (Citation1980, pp. 278–280).
14 Workshops in European early modern painting were often business ventures based on similar divisions of labor, e.g., Lucas Cranach (Grimm et al., Citation1994) and Peter Paul Rubens (Sutton, Citation1993).
15 They continued to finish his paintings if Spee asked them to do so.
16 Brother Joachim, personal communication, January 17, 2013.
17 The dichotomy of modern versus traditional is used widely in Bamenda, by the artists as well as the audience.
18 Many painters and most ordinary people in Bamenda distinguish fine art as something without an immediate purpose from other genres as signboard painting and portraits, which are thought of as media of memory and representation.
19 Though tigers do not live in Africa, most people in the Cameroon grassfields are familiar with them as the fon, the customary king of Bali, is thought to transform into a tiger to demonstrate his divine power.
20 As in many other African countries, there are, to my knowledge, no reliable statistics on the arts and the work of artists in Cameroon.
21 This meant until the Cameroonian police would be considered less corrupt by German authorities—an expectation that came close to an illusion.
22 Pars pro toto generalizations are very frequent in Bamenda, as elsewhere. Many people believe that their culture is representative for large parts of the continent.
23 I use the term art world in Becker's (Citation1982) sense as a network of all social actors who have a say in how art should be produced and how it should look, like the visitors of Calakuta's off license.
24 Actually, Calakuta's workshop produced significantly more “real” art than an average workshop in town. This, however, came to an end when Calakuta sought political asylum in Germany.
25 I thereby adopt Mitchell's concept of mental image and material picture (Mitchell, Citation1994).
26 Neckar-Odenwald county, municipality of Hardheim.
27 E.g., http://www.neckar-odenwald-kreis.de/Aktuelle+Themen/Neuigkeiten/Afrikanische+Kunst+im+Landratsamt_+Ausstellung+geht+bis+2_+September.print or http://www.fnweb.de/region/main-tauber/lauda-konigshofen/mystische-szenen-geben-ratsel-auf-1.1217807.
28 “Afrikanische Lebensfreude,” http://www.swp.de/bad_mergentheim/lokales/tauberbischofsheim/Schauplatz-afrikanischer-Lebensfreude;art5656,2232568.
29 Note the parallels to early modern workshops in middle Europe (Förster & Kasfir, Citation2013, pp. 6–12).
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Notes on contributors
Till Förster
Till Förster ([email protected]) is an anthropologist and art historian. He holds the chair of social anthropology and is founding director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He has specialized in art, visual culture, and political transformations in West and Central Africa and has conducted field research for many years, mainly in Côte d'Ivoire and Cameroon. His recent publications focus on questions of visual culture, social creativity, and urban politics and governance in Côte d'Ivoire and Cameroon. Together with Sidney Kasfir he has edited African Art and Agency in the Workshop (2013).