Let Down By Africans In Dallas

On the way to Mexico, I tarried a day in Dallas to check out the city’s highly-publicized Arts District and to savour a fine Berenice Abbott exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art. A local couple has given the museum a swatch of Abbott’s New York City images, where that marvelous spirit (who recently died in her 90s) tried to do for her adopted metropolis what her intellectual mentor Atget did for Paris.
 
I noticed during my visit that there was soon to open an exhibition exploring the state of contemporary African art. I’ve had a hanker for that sector ever since my son Michael and I attended the First World Negro Arts Festival in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966. A splendid Cote d’Ivoire cotton appliqué tapestry has graced the main wall of my living room ever since.
 
So I stopped over again on my way back from Mexico to check out “Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art,” which closed recently.
 
Alas, it was a great disappointment. The catalog—especially the essays by Susan Vogel, curator of New York’s Center for African Art (which originates the show)—was so much better than the art displayed as to pose a paradox: Critics who are so eager not to appear Eurocentric run the graver risk of legitimizing kitsch, even trashy art.
 
The traditional objects displayed to establish an historical ground for the new work were so much stronger aesthetically as to highlight the crudeness of the current work in an embarrassing way.
 
The essays attempt to exorcise false ideas about African Art. “Traditional art today,” Vogel argues convincingly, “cannot be seen as corrupted, for it was never pure, never homogeneous, never isolated.” Agreed. And: “As the 20th Century reaches a close, African artists, like their forebears before them, have chosen to renew useful old forms, to take on new ones, and to cast off others in an ongoing process of organic decay and renewal.” Right.
 
Except there was very little connection between this rigorous thinking and the objects on display. It’s high time we unshackled the agenda of African art from the covert primitivism trip that most Westerners bring to their expectations. I still think the sculpture that expat Scot Frank McHugh triggered in Rhodesia puts this stuff to shame.
 
There were a few refreshing departures in the show from this run-of-the-mill lousy. For example, Ghanaian wood artist Kane Kwei (b. 1924) fetched himself a beguiling schtick in symbolic coffins—illustrated in his Mercedes Benz-shaped coffin (1989), from Rotterdam’s Museum for Folk Art. “When people die,” he suggests, “they like to travel to heaven in different ways—some by land, some by sea, and some by air.” (Yes, Virginia, there is a Pan Am 727 coffin!)
 
Zairian painter Cheri Samba (b. 1956) has an attractively insolent independence. When critics harangued her for inserting painted __________ on her canvases, she snarled: Heh, I’m the artist. If my public doesn’t dig it, I’m the loser.
 
“Lutte Contres Les Moustiques” is a canvas on which a couple has arisen from their marital bed to flail away at a midnight flight of mosquitoes. “Dear, you kill those on the right while I’ll fight with the leftists.” A nice pun. I wonder if Mobutu got it. I could samba to Cheri’s tunes, but it’s very minor stuff as painting.
 
Nigerian S.J. Akpan (b. 1940) seems to have cast a niche in realistic concrete figures—probably an outgrowth of trade sign icons. Neat, but compared with a nearby Nimba female dance headdress by an unknown early 20th-Century Baga artist, bush-league stuff.
 
Ivorian Koff Kouakou (b. 1962) has carved “Gentleman’s Suit,” “Portable Computer” and “Pair of Shoes.” It’s the kind of stuff the better students in high school shop class might do. “Art”? Only in the most strained of definitions.
 
There were even two “happening” sculptures by Sokari Douglas Camp. “Alali Aru” (“Festival Boat”) has an electric motor that makes the oars pull and the waves rock. I like it, but I don’t love it.
 
Strangely, the African-derived jackets and vests on sale in the shop were among the strongest pieces “in the show.” And even more strangely, they bore the couture label of Cassowary / Philadelphia!
 
The highly touted I.M. Pei Symphony Hall in Dallas looks better on the inside than from the outside. It’s about as far from the sleekly successful integration of his triangle at the Louvre as it’s visually possible to be.
 
The Dallas complex is a congeries of ungainly angles and uncompromising vistas working at cross-purposes. It has budget cuts written over every stone—where there isn’t a donor plaque. (No such thing as an anonymous donor in Dallas.) I can’t speak for its acoustics because I had to sweet-talk an affable guard into letting me take an off-hours peek.
 
The street furniture in the Arts District is patina-less and uninspired. NeoDeco echoes emptily down a little patch of tree planting trying bravely but unsuccessfully to look arboreal.
 
The Texas Sculptors Association and the Texas Visual Arts Association enjoy free access to the streetside exhibition rooms that flank the LTV skyscraper. I popped into a sculpture exhibition, and in a warehouse full of what I call MFA / Interstate Art, I found two sweet pieces—one a rattlesnake cannily constructed from welded bits of barbed wire, the other a wire-mesh concave nude worthy of Gaston Lachaise.
 
The engaging Texan who was holding down the fort groused that Symphony Hall marked the second time Dallas had Pei’d I.M. The wildly-disliked City Hall was also designed by the Sino-American minimalist.
 
Calloused in Dallas, a battered town accustomed to being beat. And I hope I won’t sound condescending when I say the Museum of Fine Art has the best museum lunchroom in America. I had beef all thymed up with wild rice mini-pancakes. Slurp. And chocolate chip pie: What a way to clog a heart.
 
Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, May 20, 1992