Anthropos 92.1997: 3-20
Promoting African Art
The Catalogue to the Exhibit of African Art at the Royal Academy of Arts,
London
T. O. Beidelman
Abstract. - The large exhibition of African art shown re
cently in London, Berlin, and New York provides rich data
for reassessing current values and aims in presenting African
artefacts to the public. Issues of regional and ethnic bias,
questions of authenticity, hostility to modernism, definition of
what is art, contestation over ownership of cultural properties,
and commercial opportunism all figure in many such public
exhibitions. This essay examines some of these problems using
this prominent exhibit to illustrate these points. [African art,
regional bias, authenticity, aesthetics.]
T. O. Beidelman, D. Phil. (University of Oxford), Prof, of
anthropology at New York University. - Research in east
African ethnography (Kaguru, Ngulu, Baraguyu, Nuer); study
of colonialism in Africa, religion, social organization, history
of social anthropology. His publications include: The Kaguru
(New York 1971), W. Robertson Smith and the Sociologi
cal Study of Religion (Chicago 1974), Colonial Evangelism
(Bloomington 1982), Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of
Thought (Bloomington 1986), The Cool Knife (in press), and
over one hundred scholarly articles.
As part of the Africa 95 Festival, the Royal Acade
my in London exhibited an immense accumulation
of art from Africa, over eight hundred pieces.
This was shown from 4 October 1995 until 21
January 1996. It then moved to Berlin where it was
shown from 1 March until 1 May 1996 through the
Zeitgeist-Gesellschaft at the Martin Gropius Bau.
As I began this essay it was scheduled for the
Guggenheim Museum in New York City from June
7 until September 29, 1996. I have since seen the
exhibit (three times) which I found impressive in
terms of its range and the quality of many pieces
but ill-displayed, poorly labelled, and uneven in
quality and actual coverage.
The exhibit’s composition varies at each site,
but the catalogue 1 (sold at all three exhibition
galleries) remains constant, reflecting what the
exhibit would have been like had political and
other factors not intervened. This volume, lavishly
illustrated with over eight hundred excellent colour
photographs, maps, and copious annotations, is so
vast and varied that I can here only indicate its
form and scope and comment briefly. I do this
in the opening of this essay. In the remainder I
consider the ideology behind this catalogue. The
show prompting the catalogue is at a world famous
exhibition site. The vast range of artefacts illus
trated and the scholars providing the commentary
in the catalogue make this a likely milestone in
assessing the place which the visual arts of Africa
hold for the international community of art. Fur
thermore, exhibition catalogues have increasingly
grown in size and scholarly apparatus so today
catalogues such as this have a permanent impact
and circulation which make them in many ways as
important as the exhibitions they illustrate (Sieber
1996: 68).
The key word in the title of my essay is “pro
moting.” I selected this term because of its multi
ple and somewhat ambivalent meanings. “Promot
ing” can mean the act of popularizing or selling a
product or idea to a wider public. It can also mean
the advancing of some idea, product, or person
to a higher level of appreciation or value. The
word combines an ambiguous, ambivalent sense
involving both moral and material rewards. As
with all major exhibits of art, the aesthetic, moral,
intellectual, and scholarly are often combined with
the political, propagandistic, and commercial. It is
with some of these broader factors that much of
my essay is concerned.
I begin with a description of the way the cat
alogue has been organized. It is repeatedly stated
in the catalogue’s text that in large part, the cata
logue’s arrangement reflects how the London ex
hibit itself was arranged for viewing. While this es
say is a review of the catalogue, very brief mention
of its relation to the actual exhibits consequently
seems necessary. Museum size and structure relate
to any exhibit. The conventional structure and
large size of the Royal Academy present space
radically different from the Guggenheim Museum
1 Phillips, Tom (ed.): Africa. The Art of a Continent. Munich:
Prestel, 1995. 613 pp. ISBN 3-7913-1603-6. Price: $ 85.00.
A German translation, “Afrika, die Kunst eines Kontinents”
(1996), is published by the same press.