THE SHORT CENTURY
April 2002

In this extended interview, Okwui Enwezor, curator of The Short Century, talks with arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown about "the Africa of the imagination", and the interactions between Africa and Europe during the latter half of the 20th Century. Part II : Enwezor discusses the correlation between art and politics, and the use of art as a political tool. Part III: Enwezor discusses the changing art world, and the exhibit as a history lesson.

 

Online Special: The Short Century Browse the NewsHour's coverage of Arts and Entertainment   P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center	OKWUI ENWEZOR: Well "The Short Century", as you know, is an exhibition that has taken over, over the last one year to travel to different parts of the world and has arrived in New York, and I think that the very basic story of the exhibition is really to explore the post-independence context of culture, and other kinds of political transformations that took place in Africa from 1945 and up until the end of apartheid in 1994. JEFFREY BROWN: Is the art a way of telling that biography or is the art what was produced by that? OKWUI ENWEZOR: Well, I think that art is certainly one way of confronting the legacy of that biography, and, and also in expanding, you know, the view of what we know as African and, and also of making it possible to penetrate some of the areas that has so far remained completely screened from the media interest in Africa. And I think that artists and intellectuals have contributed significantly in enlarging the very nature of what the humanistic side of Africa has been in the last 50 years. JEFFREY BROWN: You mean this is a side of Africa that is rarely portrayed. OKWUI ENWEZOR: Very, very rarely portrayed, and I think that the difference we are seeing today is that increasingly, new positions are being taken across the divide of the continent in positing the fact that in order to begin to sort of understand the critical framework that has shaped the identity of Africans who have come out of the experience of Colonialism that the wide array of cultural patterns, the wide array of intellectual discourses and the ways in which they intersect with ideologies of modernization, of nation-building, of nationalism and so on, have to be really looked at very carefully. JEFFREY BROWN: Is it possible, though, given such a diverse continent, so many different countries and peoples, is it possible to speak of an identity? OKWUI ENWEZOR: Well I think it's difficult to speak of one single identity; I think that we can speak of multiple identities and the ways in which they continue to sort of, to come into contact with new developments and new says of, of positing the meaning of what Africa is today. JEFFREY BROWN: One of the things you also say in the essay — I'm quoting — the question is what is African and what is Africa to us? And then you go on; suffice it to say that "The Short Century" represents an Africa of the imagination as much as it addresses Africa in her lived realities.An Africa of the imagination. What do you mean by that? OKWUI ENWEZOR: Well, Africa of the imagination is that Africa that strives to dream, that Africa that tries to sort of transcend the limitations that has been imposed on the ways in which we figured the varied image of the continent worldwide. I think the African of the imagination is a creative space, is a space of very, very deep, committed, intellectual perspective. It's a place where new forms of being, new forms of articulating the modern personality are constantly being fashioned and being developed. JEFFREY BROWN: Is it a question of who tells the story of Africa? I was reading in Chinua Achebe's recent essays, a book of essays, and he has a quote here, let me read it to you. "There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where and as they like." And he talks about the power of narrative, the power of telling the story. OKWUI ENWEZOR: Mm-hm. Well I think it's, it's, I think he's absolutely correct, that it, it all depends on who is telling the story and from which perspective the story is being told. And this is not to say that the story necessarily has to come from an African, but I think it has to come from somebody who is really committed in really looking at the multi-faceted, you know, aspects of the continent and really trying to draw out, you know, the richness of the experience of what Africa is, and I think that you know if you do not have such a commitment that it becomes almost impossible to be able to do justice to the richness of this experience. And so that, you know, given what the Colonial scheme has been, which is completely about the reduction of the native narrative as nothing but so much nonsense. I think it makes... JEFFREY BROWN: Nothing but that that vis-a-vis the Colonial... OKWUI ENWEZOR: Yeah. Well mired in the stage of inarticulateness. I think that to to tell the story from the perspective of the deep empathy and the deep knowledge of what the stories mean is really, really very powerful and very important. And Achebe, more than anyone else, has given us the imperative to be able to explore this wider social and cultural dimension of Africa, and in a sense, then, not only just simply transcending the very limitations of the Colonial narratives that we've inherited in the past, but also giving cause for new appraisals of what Africa of the imagination — if I will go back to that term again — is and will be tomorrow. JEFFREY BROWN: So, so what is the story? What is the simple story of this exhibition. You're the curator, what story are you telling? OKWUI ENWEZOR: Well the story is very simple, and this is again to fashion an exhibition that explores through the work of artists, intellectuals, filmmakers to look at the, you know, three generations of artists who have really over the past 50 years created a new dimension of how we can understand Africa through its cultures, through its music, through its writing and, and through other kinds of material production.
	Interactions between Africa and Europe
	JEFFREY BROWN: Now, one of the key things that you're stressing is the interaction between Africa and particularly Europe in the middle of the last century, and I think you refer to it somewhere as a world of encounters. Tell me about the encounter. OKWUI ENWEZOR: Well I think that encounter, if we begin again on the onset of modernism, that it was very clearly a space of reciprocal gestures, reciprocal gazes and so on. And I think that it wasn't just a case of African artists being disciplined by the Colonial ideas of modern forms, or Europeans just simply borrowing. I think it was a meeting of two cultures that has been productive to the extreme, and I think that this meeting continues to animate the ways in which we dialogue with different positions that you see, whether it's in Europe or in Africa today. And that African identity remains deeply entangled with Europe's by dint of the fact that Colonialism was not just simply an experience that completely shattered the world of Africans and then completely transformed them. There was always strategy of resistance and strategies of appropriation that you find in this space of negotiation between two worlds. JEFFREY BROWN: Well, but tell me more about that, because many people familiar with the history of Western art will know about the influence of Africa on people like Picasso at the turn of the last century, how did it work the other way? What was the influence on Africa? OKWUI ENWEZOR: Well, I think that in the context of the exhibition perhaps we will see it in certain parts of the exhibition, that it was very, very clear that the discourse of modern art in Africa was more or less a Colonial enterprise, and it was done through formal academic training and I think that what really becomes more important is the ways in which artists who went through that formal training came out of it with new ideas of how they could express their relationship between what they have learned and their relationship to the audience that they speak to at home in Africa and so on, and the forms that came out of that. So I think that it's two-way traffic of going back and forth between what is seen to be academic and obviously European, and what is seen to be African and needed to be transformed through these, in a space of encounter is still a very, very important and ongoing question for artists. JEFFREY BROWN: So is it fair to say that when we talk about African art today that it is in some ways a mix of, of classical African forms and European forms? OKWUI ENWEZOR: Well, I wouldn't really put it in that kind of hybridized form. I think it's a work that is, that continues to undergo different kinds of renovation and innovations inside it, and I think that this is really what makes all forms of modern and contemporary art very interesting, in the sense that the artists do not really respect boundaries that are attached to the ideas of their biological or special identities. So an African artist no more, no less than an artist working in Europe or Asia, I think they continue to respond to the deepest ideas of their inspiration, they continue to respond to new contacts with new languages and new forms, and I think that all interest in art, and not just from the space of openness to new ideas, and I think this is what many of the artists are really involved in.

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