Intangible Heritage and Contemporary African Art

by Jean-Loup Amselle
Jean-Loup Amselle is a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Centre for African Studies) in Paris where he is also the director of the doctoral programme in anthropology. His eldwork focuses on African countries such as Mali, Cote dIvoire and Guinea. He has published numerous books in the eld of African ethnology including: Logiques metisses, en Afrique et ailleurs [Multi-cultural logics, Anthropology of Identity in Anthropologie de lidentite Africa and Elsewhere], Paris, Payot, 1990, Vers un multiculturalisme francais, Lempire de la coutume [Towards French Multi-culturalism, The Empire of Custom], Paris, Aubier, 1996, and Branchements, Anthropologie de luniversalite des cultures [Junctions, Anthropology of the Universality of Cultures], Flammarion, 2001. He is also the editor of Cahiers detudes africaines, Paris, Editions EHESS.

An original and paradoxical way of approaching what is conveniently designated as intangible heritage would be to consider this theme through the perspective of contemporary African art. In fact, according to UNESCOs conception, intangible heritage is understood to refer to all that is not embodied in tangible works such as monuments, archaeological sites or city ruins. Complementing previous preservation policies, emphasis is placed on what is considered part of intangible culture tales, folklore, music, oral tradition, physical techniques, etc. which is in danger of disappearing because of the lack of a record, whether written, audio or visual, of this heritage. In short, the focus is the preservation of cultural diversity faced with the homogenization resulting from globalization.1 This policy of preserving intangible heritage tends to imply a xed vision of different human cultures; it discards the idea that cultures may experience change, through adaptation or

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Intangible Heritage and Contemporary African Art

Jean-Loup Amselle

transformation into something other than themselves. CD or DVD recordings are collected of oral traditions, music, physical techniques, dance, and educational methods for children, etc. in order to preserve them from gradual or sudden extinction. This policy is embodied within the framework of what has been termed the ethnocide or murder of cultures; murder that is but another, certainly more harmless, aspect of genocide, the planned physical murder of entire groups which has occurred in recent years in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Indeed, the existence of what we have become accustomed to calling contemporary African art calls into question the concept and even the policies that are conducted in the name of preserving intangible heritage. It is clear that either contemporary African art has nothing to do with historical African art, and therefore, the question of heritage is irrelevant, or else there exists a relationship between these two forms, or these two periods of African art, and then it should be acknowledged that certain traditional elements survived during colonization and were passed on to contemporary African art. To develop our argument, we shall focus on the performing arts, visual art, literature and acoustic art to show that the actors of these different sectors have at times anticipated the recently initiated policies for the preservation of intangible heritage. Performing arts As regards the performing arts, we shall use the example of dance and choreography because they

are the eld that has most clearly emerged in recent years, as revealed by the growing success of the Festival of African Choreography, which was rst held in Luanda, Angola, and since 2001, in Antananarivo, Madagascar. When one speaks of African dance and choreography, one implicitly refers to traditional African dance and choreography, accepting as a given that these concepts can be applied without difculty to a series of physical practices and techniques that do not necessarily t into this framework. In fact, while it is easy to show that generic African dance does not exist, it is equally easy to demonstrate that within the same ethnic group, numerous physical techniques exist, some of which can certainly be qualied as dance while others do not belong to this category. In reality, critical analysis and the deconstruction of Western aesthetics applied to Africa require the boundaries and classications of the various art forms to be redened. What is represented, for example, under the label mask in museums and collections of African art is in reality part of a ballet: a mask is nothing without the choreography that animates it. If we perceive categories of dance and sculpture as belonging to two separate elds the performing arts and visual art these categories may prove ineffective when they are retrospectively attributed to ancient African artefacts and physical techniques. It was this labelling of African artistic practices that the rst African choreographers had to confront. Following Western or multicultural choreographers and dancers, like Maurice Bejart, who were fascinated by Oriental and African dance that they believed would

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renew Western dance and ballet which were considered decadent, African choreographers like Germaine Acogny2 and Alphonse Thierou3 worked in the manner of linguists to achieve a genuine articial synthesis of ethnic dance forms in order to assert genuine African dance on the international choreographic scene. Even if this standard form of African dance is a construction or an invention of these choreographers, it none the less conveys a series of characteristics, cultural practices or physical techniques which emerge from the ethnic groups where they originate. Accordingly, the method of Germaine Acogny and Alphonse Thierou can be viewed as a tentative solution for the preservation of intangible heritage within the context of modernity. What holds true for stage art can also be applied to the eld of visual arts. Visual arts If, in the eld of visual arts, certain artefacts or techniques were obviously introduced into Africa by the West (easel painting or, in certain countries such as Zimbabwe, stone sculpture), we may well ask whether the contents, the meaning or even the message of works of art using these supports also result from imposed themes provided by Europeans. In fact, it should be noted primarily that many paintings produced by local artists in Africa or Australia consist only of the transfer of motifs that already exist on human bodies, or walls of huts, or rocks. In this way, the German researcher, Karl Heinz Krieg, transformed the Guinean craftswoman, Kolouma Sovogui, into an artist in the Western sense of the term, by providing her

with canvas, brushes and paints, which enabled her to transpose local designs on to a Western support. In a certain manner, the Western inventor of the African artist also becomes the curator of intangible, or at least fragile heritage that existed in the Toma society of Guinea.4 The question is less about determining what is tangible or not, as regards heritage, but rather to reect on how this same heritage is to be preserved and handed on. Thanks to co-operation between the European patron and the African artist, it is the values, and especially the aesthetic values, of this African society that are perpetuated. Contemporary African art, in particular, once it takes on a permanent form, e.g. the cement funerary monuments in Ghana is therefore the repository of intangible artistic heritage even if this tradition is in some cases masked by the modern appearance of the works. As Bogumil Jewsiewicki points out with regard to Congolese urban painting, The memory of the pre-colonial past is expressed rst and foremost through the lter of its permanence in the present.5 Literature and acoustic arts It is legitimate, therefore, to ask whether the desire to preserve intangible heritage, unlike tangible heritage, does not in fact lead to implementing a real process of production of tradition, that is to say, the selection of a certain number of cultural features physical techniques, music, oral tradition dened a priori as traditional, and therefore separated from the actual practices of contemporary actors, whether artists or, more generally, actors in the life of society.

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Intangible Heritage and Contemporary African Art

Jean-Loup Amselle

Indeed, examining the question of heritage involves an appraisal of tradition and of the supposed competition from African modernity. Confronted with the supposed disappearance of traditional African cultures at both tangible and intangible levels, many actors prophets, writers, artists have taken a stance aspiring to be the messengers of their own culture within the context of contemporary globalization. For example, when Amadou Kourouma ` wrote Monne, outrages et des,6 he sought to express Malinke culture, not as much in the French language, even though what he writes is obviously French, but in his own language, which is a sort of idiolect, a twisting of French signiers into Malinke and vice-versa. When the Malian singer Rokia Traore expresses Bambara culture in world music, instead of blending the former into the latter, she upholds it, maintaining that globalization paradoxically becomes the vehicle for the homogenization and preservation of cultural specicity. Lastly, when the contemporary Hungarian musician, Ligeti, samples Banda Linda Pigmy music from the Central African Republic, music that was recorded in the 1960s and 1970s by the ethno-musicologist Simha Arom, he also perpetuates this intangible African culture, even if it is in an unrecognizable form, or at least difcult to identify as such, except by informed music lovers.7 In this way the notion of intangible heritage is remarkably ambiguous in the sense that it overlooks the various forms of exchange, transfer and movement that exist between cultures. In fact,

the notion of heritage supposes the notion of culture, while in fact, only cultures exist, or rather, transfers between cultures. The notion of heritage, therefore, only captures for a moment x, in a xed form, cultural snapshots, cliches of cultural practices in both senses of the term. Cultural interactivity It is only by postulating a circulation of terms between the different African cultures on the one hand, and between these cultures and the exterior on the other hand, that we can accurately understand the economics underlying interAfrican cultural exchanges at a universal level. Accordingly, it is senseless to contrast a vague precolonial age, within which each African ethnic culture would have evolved independently, with colonial or post-colonial modernity bearing profound changes or even mortal risks for these same cultures. We must bear in mind that the way in which we perceive different traditional African societies largely depends on a museographic perception, a perception that forces us to consider these cultures according to the various compartments or divisions used in museums to classify African artefacts. The ethnic labelling of these artefacts Dogon, Tschowkwe, Luba, for example makes use of the existence of links of society and pre-colonial cultures, all of the intercultural and intersocial fabric that gave a meaning to these objects. Within this pre-colonial trans-societal space, these objects took on a predominantly political dimension; in fact, when a fetish no longer satised a village or a chefferie, dozens or hundreds of kilometres were travelled to nd a substitute.

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It is this political use of pre-colonial fetish objects, namely their intangible aspect that has been concealed by colonial museication. Paradoxically, the isolation of these objects in museum cases has resulted in a loss of meaning, that of the political and social conditions in which they were used. Consequently, rediscovering the precolonial ideological, cultural and religious environment of these objects appears to be rather illusory once the practical conditions of use have disappeared. Similarly, recording the sound or

image of cultural or musical features, or physical techniques that are supposed to refer to an age-old tradition would mean forgetting that these same cultural features have if not submitted but at least reacted to every political situation that they have had to face since the European conquest. Dance forms, tales and oral traditions are, therefore, as contemporary as the works of the contemporary artists they inspire. All current African art whether labelled traditional or rural or, on the contrary, urban and modern, is thus part of the same contemporary state.

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15. The Oruro Carnival, Bolivia, proclaimed by UNESCO as a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity. Transmission of social practices through children participating in ritual.

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Miguel Gandert

Intangible Heritage and Contemporary African Art

Jean-Loup Amselle

Contemporary African art and global art If we accept the idea that contemporary African art conveys elements of the past or of tradition, it remains to be seen how it is linked to contemporary art when viewed in a global context. In fact, the category of contemporary African art, like the category of contemporary Chinese art, for example, assumes in a way that there is a specicity to this art in relation to global art that refers precisely to the existence of a specic tradition or rather a specic representation of Africa that we will now briey address. In fact the labelling of contemporary African art is not completely fortuitous; it refers to a vision of Africa as a continent of freshness and spontaneity. Confronted with the West, and Western art, perceived as lacking innovation and headed into a sort of cul-de-sac, Africa afrms itself as an element capable of rejuvenating the West and time-worn Western art. Even if all contemporary African art does not participate in this trend, much of it, due to pressure exerted by Western inuences, continues to follow the model of what could be termed primitive African art. It is for this reason that selftaught art is preferred by Western curators to the detriment of works by artists who have been to ne arts schools and who are accused of producing pale imitations of Western art. It is therefore towards a heritage of ideas and traditional, that is popular, African pictorial designs, that contemporary African artists have returned to nolens volens, as shown by the success of the works of Frederic Bruly Bouabre, Cheri

Samba, Bodys Isek Kingelez, etc. These artists are thus supposed to represent authentic Africa while their colleagues who are directly in tune with global art, give the impression of having lost their soul. In our opinion, the only artist who fully performs the interplay between modernity and post-modernity, both at African and global levels, is Ousmane Sow. By integrating the contribution of a Rodin or a Leni Riefensthal into his work, Ousmane Sow clicks on to all the European cliches relating to Africa, while at the same time placing his work within an ethnic framework, such as Peul for example. Through a phenomenon of abreaction, Ousmane Sow is able to accomplish a kind of cultural anamnesis, achieving the return of European inhibitions to the heart of Africanness, fully asserting himself as a contemporary African artist. The assumption that intangible heritage lies at the heart of contemporary African art reveals the layers of cliches attributed to Africa, whether from the European impact or earlier factors such as the Arab-Islamic culture, for example, which have irreversibly shaped the totality of traditional African cultures. Protecting intangible African heritage is thus as much encouragement of the creation of contemporary works as preservation of what is labelled as traditional, because tradition is dened as the product as well as the permanence of a heritage.

NOTES
1 For a debate on the notion of intangible heritage, see the articles in Le

patrimoine culturel immateriel, les enjeux, les problematiques, les pratiques [Intangible Cultural Heritage, Stakes, Questions and Practices],

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Internationale de limaginaire No. 17, Paris, Babel, Maison des Cultures du

Monde, 2004. 2 Germaine Acogny, Danse africaine [African Dance], Weingart en Kunstverlag, 1994.

3 Alphonse Tierou, Doople, loi eternelle de la danse africaine [Doople: The Eternal Law of African Dance], Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 1989.
4 Catalogue de Partage dexotismes, 5e Biennale dart contemporain de

Lyon [Sharing Exoticisms, The 5th Biennial of Contemporary Art in Lyon],

pp. 423. Lyon, Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 2000. 5 Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Mami Wata, La peinture urbaine au Congo [Mami

Wata, Urban Painting in the Congo], Paris, Gallimard, 2003.

6 Paris, Le Seuil, 1990. 7 Maxime Joos, Gyorgy Ligeti: une musique au singulier [Gyorgy Ligeti, A Singular Music], in Musica Falsa, No. 19, autumn 2003, pp. 425.

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