BY DR. TONY M MONDA
Visual art has been part of the human experience for many millennia. Indeed, some archaeologists contend that the ability and desire to make art are essential human characteristics. Art helps to define what it means to be human.
However, the practice and dissemination of all forms of art comes with a serious responsibility; one in which the producer, overseer, director, curator and government functionaries, should ensure that the art produced or on display is in conformity with the culture, customs, laws, and people of the land in which they are living.
An insight into the changing trends and the new face of Zimbabwean art reveals that Zimbabwe’s visual arts scene has come full circle in four plus decades of post-colonial independence, although prejudices and vestiges of colonial race and gender discrimination are still evident in some nerve centres of art galleries and in the minds of Zimbabweans.
Unfortunately, many African curators, arts administrators and arts lecturers have not fully reconciled their colonised education and colonised cultural outlook with indigenous notions of aesthetics and education.
Several art curators and critics from the Occident and African Diaspora have chosen to ignore educated and enlightened African artists who are critical of the Western hegemonies and art establishments and instead have opted to choose “self-taught” African artists in the hope of perpetuating their romantic colonial perceptions of the ‘self-taught savage geniuse’. Such terms should be rendered obsolete, by any forward-thinking, progressive curator, especially those of the Motherland.
Arguably since independence Zimbabwean sculpture, and the visual arts in general, assumed a new national countenance, one that was celebratory, euphoric, patriotic, critical and expressive of a newly-liberated indigenous African people who were recovering their cultural identity and visual memory following 90 years of European colonial AND cultural subjugation from THE TIME OF occupation in 1890 to liberation in 1980.
From the early European contacts with African societies south of the Sahara in the 19th and early 20th centuries, African art has been characterized as representing deeply primordial cultural beliefs and ways of viewing the natural order of the world.
Since the nation achieved independence there has been considerable interests in understanding and interpreting the cultural aspects of Zimbabwe’s society, particularly since the overlay of western values and mores perpetuated through the past education system distorted the traditional manifestations of the creative fields such as art, theatre, dance and music.
Works of African art, almost by definition, were considered anonymous. This perception is consistent with the boarder popular opinion among colonialists that African societies had no history in that they did not create individual Works of African art, almost by definition, were considered anonymous.
This perception is consistent with the boarder popular opinion among colonialists that African societies had no history in that they did not change and where not impacted by the creative actions or intentional designs of its citizens.
African societies were thought to be static, lacking in innovation (social as well as in technology).
Fortunately, this perspective, while still present, has been thoroughly challenged and discredited in the past decades by African and Africanist anthropologists and art historians. However, this tendency has influenced the discussions on Zimbabwean stone sculpture where its authenticity, as African art, has been questioned by some, based on the prominence given to the celebration of the creativity of individual Zimbabwean sculptors.
Moreover, some art commentators who applaud the aesthetic power of some Zimbabwean stone sculpture, challenge its ‘Africanist pedigree’, arguing that as “. . . a new form of art developed in the 1950s with the encouragement of a few European art promoters, this art form cannot be considered to be traditional African art”.
On the other hand, much of the colonial euro-centric artworks produced were for the most part, country and farm landscapes of the Eastern Highlands, Nyanga, Vumba, Melsetter, Matobo and Kariba, which at that point in history, were mostly holiday areas exclusive for white Rhodesian settlers. The domestic still life’s of Rhodesian interiors and portraits of prominent Rhodesian personalities were gradually phased out of public art galleries and gave way to more powerful contemporary African-centred sculpture.
Following Zimbabwe’s Independence and even earlier, indigenous people began to appear in paintings painted by local and settler artists like George Nene, Rose West, Pip Curling, Jackie Carstairs and Heather Cameron, giving expression to the rural and peri-urban lives of local people.
Such expressions shed a new light on the creative visual documentation of the indigenous people of Zimbabwe. For the first time, African people became the subject of local interest and inquiry.
Following independence in 1980, colonial art promoters suddenly had to face a new African generation of outspoken artists. For example, Tapfuma Gutsa’s print work Rhodesia Upside Down and his wooden sculpture Bird of Doom, which he ignited and burnt as a performance art event, were some of the more out spoken works with socio-political connotations and revolutionary interests.
Modernism, a term applied to the innovative development of European arts in the 20th Century, saw a break with realism, naturalism and other such traditional art forms. Modernism and its attendant styles like Cubism, Post-Impressionism and the ill-defined Primitivism were highly influenced by classical African art.
In Zimbabwe African modernism was firmly established in the new post -independence era, having been introduced in the late 1950’s and early 1960s with artists such as Ackence Makore, Nicholas Mukomberanwa and Moses Masaya, introducing sophisticated cubist-inspired artworks. These were developed and re-defined by artists such as Brighton Sango, Victor Mtongwiso and others.
Post-independence, many African artists have come of age, for example: pre-eminent modernist painter, Gerard Sekoto, was one of South Africa’s most critically acclaimed artists is also recognized as the pioneer of black South African Art. ‘Self-Portrait’, possibly his most famous work, sold at an auction at Bonhams in London in May 2006 for £117,600 (about $178,676). Sekoto must be recognised as the best-performing black South African artist at international auction sales
One of the world’s foremost contemporary artists is the Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui. His work draws on African cultures and is particularly concerned with the erosion of inherited traditions by external forces. In 2012, Bonhams achieved a world record for the Ghanaian artist, with his huge woven tapestry of flattened bottle caps, titled New World Map which sold for £541,250 ($850,544) in London.
THE Contemporary African Art Fair, founded by Moroccan-born Touria El Glaoui, in 2013, confirms that the market is beginning to ‘warm up to African art’. In December 2014, Sotheby’s France achieved a new record for its African and Oceanic Art department when final sales raked in €12 million ($14.26 million), bringing the 2014 total to nearly €26 million ($30.9 million) – a record in this category.
As the post-colonial period in Africa coincided with the post-modernist deconstruction of the euro-centric hegemony in the visual arts, the question has been raised: Are the two phenomena related?
They are, insofar as the multi-culturalism promoted by the post-Modern Movement has opened new doors for contemporary African art, enabling it to show the world that the creativity formerly associated with its past has been rejuvenated. Yet, much of the so-called post-colonial African art is not as independent as implied in the rhetoric of decolonisation.
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