No More Mumbo Jumbo, book review, Art Monthly

African art, what it all about? In the old days, it was all so simple. African art was stuff made, up to the beginning of the last century, in the sub-Saharan part of the continent by black-skinned makers whose personal identities were not a primary factor in the making of the objects. The objects in turn were produced for a variety of rituals and practise that the West has traditionally regarded as not much more than superstitious mumbo-jumbo…

…Over the course of the past twenty or thirty years, various writers and researchers have, with varying degrees of success, made attempts to chart the development of a modern and contemporary African art. In this regard, a pioneering study was Ulli Beier’s Contemporary Art in Africa published in 1968. We can think of Kojo Fosu’s 20^th Century Art of Africa, published in Nigeria in 1986. We can also think of more recent efforts such as André Magnin and Jacques Soulillou’s Contemporary Art of Africa, 1996, as well as the exhibition catalogues Africa Now and Africa explores, both 1991.

This new Thames and Hudson book, written by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, effortlessly runs rings around earlier studies. It does so by weaving a range of narratives that work both to identify and unravel the complexities of the contemporary African artist and his/her p0ractice. Indeed, Littlefield Kasfir clearly embarked on a wide-ranging and critical appraisal of preceding texts such as the ones I’ve just mentioned, in the writing of her book, as well as ‘drawing liberally upon them as sources’…

…But in attempting to construct and describe a ‘broader artistic geography’, Littlefield Kasfir, perhaps unwittingly, irreversibly unravels the entire edifice of ‘contemporary African art’. What becomes apparent in reading this book is that ‘contemporary African art’ has none of the clear-cut terms of reference that throughout much of the last century were used to describe ye olde worlde African art. Few of the artists descried in this book are constrained by geographical borders. Contemporary African art has become an assortment of international commodities, no less than many of the artists discussed in this book – who live and work in countries/continents other than the ones in which they were born.

The above extracts are from "No More Mumbo Jumbo", a book review by Eddie Chambers of Contemporary African Art, by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000, Art Monthly, London, Number 237, June 2000: 46-47