Unmixing the Chaos

Notes

• This essay draws on a series of discussions held by the Art, Culture, and Knowledge (ACK) group of the African and African-American Studies Research Project (AAASRP) of the University of California San Diego in 2006 and 2007. The challenges and possibilities of visual analysis in light of new media technologies have been a recurrent theme in ACK group discussions. The authors presented an earlier version of this paper at the 50th Annual Meetings of the African Studies Association in New York on 19 October 2007.
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• Susan Vogel, ed., Africa Explores: Twentieth Century African Art (New York: Center for African Art, 1991), 14–31.
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• André Magnin, Alison de Lima Greene, Alvia J. Warlaw, and Thomas McEvilley, eds., African Art Now: Masterpieces from the Jean Pigozzi Collection (New York: Merrell, 2005), 54–57.
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• Simon Njami, “Chaos and Metamorphosis,” in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, ed. Simon Njami (London: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005), 22.
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• Ibid; 21.
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• Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “Ordering the Universe: Documenta 11 and the Apotheosis of the Occidental Gaze,” Art Journal 64, 1 (Spring 2005): 80–89.
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• See Vera L. Zolberg, “Art Museums and Living Artists: Contentious Communities,” in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, eds. Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 105–136; Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Chéri Samba: The Hybridity of Art, Contemporary African Artists Series, No. 1 (Québec: Galérie Amrad African Art Publications, 1995); Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Mami Wata: La Peinture urbaine au Congo (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2003).
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• It might be argued that unmixing is simply an instance of “playing around” with the paintings. Instead, we view unmixing as a strategy for delving more deeply into the meaning and construction of individual artworks and their placement within exhibitions. This research arose from a viewing of Africa Remix and a search for a preliminary method to specify and refine some of the categories of classification used in this exhibition. Along these lines, we are inspired by Simon Njami's dictum in “Chaos and Metamorphosis,” 23: “It is through the works, and the works alone, that the answers will transpire, or at least the routes toward renewed reflection.” Ideally, unmixing should involve the collaborative work of artists, curators, and their audiences. Deeper appreciation and interpretation emerge from judicious evaluation of context and dialectics of the artwork in social space.
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• Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovett (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 12–13.
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• Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Messages of Tourist art: An African Semiotic System in Comparative Perspective (New York: Plenum Press, 1984): 146–150.
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• Arnold Hauser links this workshop style of apprenticeship to the persistence of craft guilds during the rise of Renaissance art, and J.R. Osborn notes that a similar guild structure operated in the production of Ottoman art and manuscripts. See Arnold Hauser, The Sociology of Art, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 144–146; and J.R. Osborn, “The Type of Calligraphy: Writing, Print, and Technologies of the Arabic Alphabet” (Ph.D. diss., University of California San Diego, 2008), 155–157. Aspects of this type of apprenticeship also remain evident in African art ateliers and craft cooperatives. See Jules-Rosette, Messages of Tourist Art, 81–82.
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• Jules-Rosette, Messages of Tourist Art, 142–151.
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• Trinh Minh-Ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 22, states: “Writing necessarily refers to writing. The image is that of a mirror capturing only the reflection of other mirrors.” Similarly, we believe that unmixing the elements of a painting necessarily refers to the act of painting. As a method of critical analysis, unmixing communicates via the same media as the original image rather than dialogically in the form of a correlative or critical discursive text.
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• Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. WR. Boyce Gibson (London: Collier Books, 1962), 286–287. Husserl uses Dürer's engraving The Knight, Death, and the Devil as an example of the depicted object as a reality, a fantasy, and an image. Neutrality modification is the mechanism for moving from one frame of interpretation to another.
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• A.J. Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 220. Greimas refers to Dogon hymns and Romanian ballads as aesthetic productions that modify style and signifiers in relationship to natural language. This modification results in the creation of complex semiotic objects. Following a similar line of analysis, J. R. Osborn has noted how aesthetic pieces of contemporary Sudanese calligraphic art may be read as a genre of critical writing. See J.R. Osborn, “Writing the Self in the Painting of Letters: The School of Khartoum and Contemporary Calligraphic Art” (paper presented at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San José, Calif., 16 November 2006).
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• See Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 161–163; and Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Engelwood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1967), 54–56.
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• Jonathan Jones, “Africa Calling,” The Guardian, 9 February 2005.
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• Megan Vaughan, “Africa and the Birth of the Modern World,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16(2005): 144.
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• The posters advertising Africa Remix differed in their appeal to local audiences and cultural expectations. Shirabe Ogata, “Africa Remix at the Mori Art Museum,” Eastern Art Report 53(January (2007): 22, notes that the incorporation of posters into gallery spaces added yet another layer of remix. One wonders how the poster might have looked had the exhibition opened at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. See Sally Price, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac's Museum on the Quai Branly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 26–37.
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• Compare Simon Njami, Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (London: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005), with Simon Njami, Africa Remix: L'art contemporain d'un continent (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2005).
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• Jones, “Africa Calling.”
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• Ogata, “Africa Remix at the Mori Art Museum,” 21.
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• Njami, “Chaos and Metamorphosis,” 17.
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• André Magnin, Alison de Lima Greene, Jean Pigozzi, and Alvia J. Warlaw, “Two Conversations: Jean Pigozzi and André Magnin,” in African Art Now: Masterpieces from the Jean Pigozzi Collection, eds. André Magnin, Alison de Lima Greene, Alvia J. Warlaw, and Thomas McEvilley (New York: Merrell, 2005), 11.
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• Thomas McEvilley, “How Contemporary African Art Comes to the West” in African Art Now, 35–40: Masterpieces from the Jean Pigozzi Collection, eds. André Magnin, Alison de Lima Greene, Alvia J. Warlaw, and Thomas McEvilley (New York: Merrell, 2005), 35–40.
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• McEvilley, “How Contemporary African Art Comes to the West,” 38.
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• See Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Chéri Samba: The Hybridity of Art, 70–71 and Bogumil Jewsiewicki, “Corps interdits la christique de Lumumba comme rédempteur du peuple zäirois,” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 36, 1–2 (1996): 113–142.
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• Jules-Rosette, Messages of Tourist Art, 356–358. In a 1990 interview with Bennetta Jules-Rosette and a follow-up interview in 1993, Koffi Kouakou expressed surprise at the international reception of his art. With catalogs containing his work in hand, he wondered why royalties and sales had not increased.
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• Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, ed., Josephine Baker: Image and Icon (St. Louis: Reedy Press, 2006). Following a brief “Foreword” by Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, the three essays in the catalog were: Bennetta Jules Rosette, “Josephine Baker: Inventing the Image and Preserving the Icon”; Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, “Josephine Baker: Modern Woman”; and Tyler Stovall, “Freedom, Community, and the Paris Jazz Age: Josephine Baker and the World of Black Montmartre”.
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• Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and The Image (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 5–6.
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• HEC-TV, “More Than Just a Banana Skirt: St. Louis Honors One of Its First International Icons,” HEC-TV Magazine (May 2006): 2, 14.
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• David Hoekstra, “Gallery Celebrates Chanteuse Josephine Baker,” The Chicago Sun Times, 30 July 2006.
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• Susan Davidson, “National Portrait Gallery,” Museums (December 2006): 29.
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• Janice Kaplan, “Josephine Baker Jazzes Up The Portrait Gallery” The Torch 6, 12 (2006): 1.
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• Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life, 50–52.
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• The movement from index to icon is an important element of decoding artistic texts. See Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 140–142. We incorporate this process of decoding into the methodology of unmixing.
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• Njami, “Chaos and Metamorphosis,” 21.
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• Josephine Baker's primitivistic and exotic images figured prominently not only in her early performances but also in later touristic simulations of her persona and her work. See Bennetta Jules-Rosette, “Josephine Baker and Utopian Visions of Black Paris,” Journal of Romance Studies 5, 3 (2005): 37–41; and Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life, 13–46.
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• Barbara Rose Lange discusses the application of hypermedia to popular music, in which correlative texts and supplementary materials may be included as part of a CD-ROM package. See Barbara Rose-Lange, “Hypermedia and Ethnomusicology,” Ethnomusicology 45, 1 (2001): 132–149. We propose that parallel processes could be applied to popular paintings, performances, videos, and other artworks. As an analytic method, unmixing could suggest which elements would benefit from supplementary extrapolation.
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• Ivan Karp, “Introduction: Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture,” in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, eds. Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 12.
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• The theory and method of unmixing could productively be applied not only to the exhibitions that we discuss but also to others such as the 2001 exhibition of contemporary Congolese art curated by Bogumil Jewsiewicki and Barbara Plankensteiner and the 2004 exhibition on Kinshasa by Filip De Boeck and Marie-Françoise Plissart. See Bogumil Jewsiewicki and Barbara Plankensteiner, An/Sichten: Malerai aus dem Kongo (New York: Springer Verlag, 2001); and Filip De Boeck and Marie-Françoise Plissart, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City (Amsterdam: Ludion, 2004). Jewsiewicki and Plankensteiner begin to unmix the gallery space through their presentation of domestic arenas in which art is depicted and displayed. Similarly, virtual spaces for unmixing could be developed for use in future exhibitions.
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