“The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994,” the traveling exhibition hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art, is both an overwhelming experience and a noble effort.
No Chicago museum ever has organized — or hosted — anything like it. In years past, only the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris or Palazzo Grassi in Venice had the ambition and resources to attempt so broad an exploration.
And there’s the rub, for where European museums have presented vast, interdisciplinary shows in which documentation played as large a part as art objects, the approach long has been resisted by art historians in the United States, even with countries and time periods familiar to a Western audience.
With “The Short Century,” little of the political or cultural history is familiar. So the show, even apart from its accompanying 496-page catalog, attempts to give it all — through books, photographs, video tapes and text panels that may, or may not, illuminate the art.
The title of the exhibition, after all, does not mention art, presumably for the reason that the political and cultural history of Africa is of interest in itself. That, without doubt, is true. Here, then, is an exhibition emphasizing conditions that are behind not only contemporary African painting and sculpture but also architecture, literature, music, theater and film.
For such material, it is the African exhibition; there will not soon be another that takes on as much. Besides, who knows the terrain as well as curator Okwui Enwezor? Nobody presented themselves as a guide before him. Those who follow will long be in his debt.
Still, it must be emphasized that viewers will be overwhelmed with documentary material for more than half the exhibition, and remarkable is anyone who can assimilate even a part. It was a most unrealistic expectation that viewers would be able to carry this information through virtually the entire museum, so that it would shed light on the artworks at the top.
Moreover, straining toward retention leaves you exhausted at the very moment keen perception is needed, for nearly every artist shown — and heard; there is a section on music — will be unfamiliar to Chicagoans. Perhaps because much of the work draws on Western art, giving an African inflection here, transforming it there, the organizer thought it would be less difficult to sort out. But it’s the opposite. More attention rather than less is necessary to separate the African artists from their Western sources, making clear their personal achievements.
As it stands, the structure of the show — art preceded by a massive amount of political documentation — suggests the one should be valuable to us because of the struggles outlined by the other. Yet the idea that struggle automatically confers artistic distinction always has been too easy. It shows little awareness of aesthetic fine points that, no matter what we say, still end up being meaningful.
“The Short Century” is too complex an enterprise to promote facile interpretations. Yet the MCA installation only timidly and inconsistently raises issues of, say, style as opposed to content in its supplementary wall labels. Why some works have them and (most) others do not is as much a mystery as why aesthetic and political issues seldom are treated equally.
While plentiful, works created in the last decade do not make up the majority of pieces on view. So the largest group, which contains art from as many as 56 years ago, already has taken its place in the history of African art, which like work from any other place or historical period should be open to formal analysis. But the exhibition does not have much analysis, presenting even older works as if they were created yesterday and are, therefore, strange and new. So the documentation asserts itself once again, refocusing us on the political and social conditions under which the works were created.
Some will say that the current tendency toward presenting art in relation to politics and history rather than aesthetics is the only way to go. “The Short Century” is a show for them. Still, issues involved in the making of art — form, color, line — help us focus on works and remember them. They surely matter in the abstract paintings of Ernest Mancoba and Ahmed Cherkaoui or sculpture by Amir Nour or assemblages by Willem Boshoff or fabric works of Rachid Koraichi, which are among the more memorable pieces on view.
Why shouldn’t more names immediately come to mind? It’s certainly not that they’re absent from a show this size. Yet it’s unlikely that anyone who sees the exhibition will come away with many more. Maybe that’s true with most group shows, though “The Short Century” is not just any exhibition. It introduces us to artists of power and accomplishment. That it also submerges the experience in so much else that it becomes hard to hold onto is something we hadn’t expected.
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“The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994” continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., through Dec. 30. Thereafter, it will be shared by P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Feb. 10-May 5, 2002).
