Notes on Contemporary Ghanaian Art: Histories and Emergences
A General Picture
To come to terms with the complexity of the art of our times let us look back and place where we are in relation to events that antedate the present. Before all the chatter about contemporary art (the epoch that emerged after postmodernism from the late 1980s into our present dispensation), the category we refer to as art today has itself undergone many a transformation. Since the middle of the nineteenth century— the period within which the modernist paradigm of art is generally dated and the aeon of “art for art’s sake”— protocols related to ways and means of doing or making things had changed following the reconstitution of social organizational and governmental structures from feudal or monarchical systems into industrialized and commodity-driven ways of regulating work, leisure, labour, and social life— i.e. the capitalist modernity which has endured till our present times. Embedded in modernist art is the tacit assumption that art will purify itself from within while affirming its autonomy. This rationale has tended to an aesthetic sensibility that eulogizes medium-specificity1 by privileging the medium of artistic expression, be it painting or sculpture, over every other aspect of coming to terms with art as such.
But the history of modernism— from its early, high, and late periods— is also inundated with polemics on art with consequent shifts and changes: more particularly when taking the interventions of the transgressive avant-gardes (constructivists, dadaists, dissident surrealists), the neo-avant-gardes (neoconcrétismo artists, minimalists, conceptualists, feminists, and so on), and the postmodernist movements into account. Modernist presuppositions about authorship, originality, and purity of medium had generally entered into a crisis from the early decades of the twentieth century into the postwar period. This resulted in a disposition that would, first of all, begin from profaning this purist ethos and postulate art as an attitude to making, a “situation of being”2, rather than always resorting to preset styles, idioms, or conventional media. By the 1960s artists had begun to move beyond generic categorizations into creating ambiguous objects as well as situations which lacked clear classifications. Pre-1960s formalist discourse was largely based on structural terms— grounded on the internal part-by-part relations within a work of art— but after the neo-avant-gardes breakthroughs and the genre-defying work produced thereafter, form came to be established as unpredictable, more open-ended, and subject to “infinite extension” (as Scott Burton put it when describing the works in Harald Szeeman’s watershed 1969 exhibition titled “When Attitudes Become Form”3).
If modern art offers the sacred experience of an autonomous and siteless work of art authenticated by the artist’s hand in its making and protected from the unpredictable dynamics of literal time and space within the pristine interiors of white cubes in galleries and museums for pure contemplation by the eye and the mind4, then the late modern into the postmodern era proposed arguments that would secularize this conviction by shifting the site of interest from what exists solely on the pictorial plane of a painting or boundaries of a sculpture (which accounts for its shape as well as surface) into unpredictable site-specific dynamics. This was achieved for example by relating the artwork 1) to particular conditions within its physical location, i.e. lighting, topography, distance, temperature, etc., 2) to the spectator’s realtime bodily and sensual engagement in spite of the “disembodied eye” and 3) by creating a consciousness of the social and political implications of the work of art. Further, if modernist avant-gardes were driven by a stylistic approach to making art (inextricable from its dependency on the medium of expression) before considering the content of their work, later artists would invert this by making the medium or formal expression of an idea secondary to its content, and context i.e. its physical and external permissive conditions.
Postmodernism also challenged the transcendent and totalistic essence of modernism and replaced it with a relativistic ethic by beginning its critique of modernist singularity from difference as such5.
The Case of the Gold Coast
Suffice it to say that there exists a plurality of modernisms and that their evolutions have not been uniform across the world. Concurrent with the first and second industrial revolutions, the so-called Enlightenment age— which gave birth to the notion of a unilinear direction of history with the European man at its center— consequently effectuated a colonial anthropological program which mediated non-European cultural contexts. So much so that from the late nineteenth century onwards official art in former British colonies in Africa and south-east Asia, for example, was determined by inherited functionalist child-centered educational programmes originally designed for working-class populations in the metropole to churn out “bread-winners who could keep the pot boiling”6 with such subjects as cartography, illustration, calligraphy, penmanship, and handiwork. This means-ends system had factored out Fine Art as the exclusive preserve of the gentry and privileged mechanistic drawing as the primary basis of picture-making for its underclass7.
In the case of the Gold Coast (pre-independence Ghana) the history of modernism is mediated by British colonial presence and the dogmatic actualisation of the utilitarian essence of educational systems left over by other European merchants and Protestant Missionaries (Swiss, German, and Scottish). This was based on the false separation between liberal and vocational education. The imperious implementation of this de-contextualised and mechanistic ethos of late Victorian era art education8 in colonial Gold Coast effectively proceeded to determine its artistic world-picture while effectively immuring any subjective or experimental attitude to the practice of art. That is to say, “in the Victorian and pre-World War II epochs the colonial subject was afforded a very narrow conception of visuality which sidestepped important aspects of the complex incentives afforded by the practice of the discipline, even at a time in the history of art when alternative forms of visuality and representation were beginning to elicit legitimation”9. As such, art education in the Gold Coast was “conducted on the literal, optical and descriptive reading of the world”10. Meanwhile, the two-year teacher training subject in art, Hand and Eye Work11, was introduced in the Government Training College in Accra in 1909. Ghanaian sculptor Vincent Kofi has described its form as “still life drawing” and its method as “drawing just what you see”12.
Incidentally, it would take a nativist colonial art teacher, George Alexander Stevens, to initially pose any significant intellectual opposition to such weaknesses in British education in the Gold Coast. In a speech delivered at a staff meeting at Achimota College14 in 1928 in which he made recommendations for curriculum reforms, Stevens explicitly repudiates the Educational Code of 1887 created by the British colonial government by emphatically stating that “[o]ne cannot trace in the [Educational] Code any real policy of artistic development in the [Gold Coast] by means of the educational system”. He viewed the latter as “drawn up as if there were no indigenous arts in the country at all, whereas these were then in a much more flourishing condition than they are to-day [sic].”15 Stevens continues with the insightful remark that “[t]he scientific and mathematical subjects which have been allowed to creep in under the general term ‘drawing’ in the form of geometrical, model and scale drawing, must go back to their proper place”.16 This “proper place” recounts the class-based structure of segregation in art education familiar to Stevens since the nineteenth century in industrial Europe and North America (as was the case in the Government Schools of Design in Somerset House and South Kensington in London and its kindred in the American Boston Normal Program by which it was official policy to teach drawing as a subject in public schools, not in any way that could “enable the scholar to draw a pretty picture, but [sic] to so train the hand and eye that he may be better fitted to become a bread-winner.”17).
Source seid’ou k. 2006. Theoretical Foundations of the KNUST Painting Programme: A Philosophical inquiry and its contextual relevance in Ghanaian Culture [Unpublished PhD Thesis]. Kumasi: KNUST. 483-484.
Stevens was then a young graduate of the prominent Slade School in London and had been appointed as the first art master of the Government Training College, and later Achimota College, during the period between the World Wars from 1925 to 1929 in colonial Gold Coast. He mentored the sculptor and craftsman Herbert Vladimir Meyerowitz (who became his successor) as well as Margaret Trowell and Kenneth Murray— both becoming influential colonial teachers in Uganda and Nigeria respectively. Stevens had been influenced by Roger Fry’s primitivist formalism and was an advocate of teaching “indigenous village arts and crafts”18 at Achimota19. Stevens’s “multiculturalist” art programme which carried nationalist stimulus for the Gold Coast learner was continued by Meyerowitz who introduced the teacher training Art and Crafts Specialist Certificate (ACSC) course in 1937 at Achimota20. Among Meyerowitz’s students are Amon Kotei, Ernest Victor Asihene, Kofi Antubam, and John Christopher Osei Okyere— all of whom became prominent Gold Coast artists with some significantly shaping the postcolonial educational agenda of the newly independent Ghana nation state.21
KCT Arts and Crafts Specialist Course (ACSC) was based on the Art Class Teachers’ Certificate (ACTC) in the British Government Schools of Design. Source seid’ou k. 2006. Theoretical Foundations of the KNUST Painting Programme: A Philosophical inquiry and its contextual relevance in Ghanaian Culture [Unpublished PhD Thesis]. Kumasi: KNUST. 131.
“I have always held up that the purpose of drawing and painting and the like, is pictorial or plastic expression, a concrete as well as the [sic] abstract motive of hand-and-eye training.”— George Alexander Stevens (1928)22
The moderate but necessary curricular modifications made during the late colonial and post-colonial periods of west African states like Ghana and Nigeria— owed to the vitality of Pan-Africanism, Negritude and liberation movements across other “subject cultures” at the time— opened up possibilities of adapting indigenous African cultural content onto established occidental formats (whether in drawing, painting or sculpture). For instance, the nationalist intentions of Kofi Antubam’s23 response to art development in post-Independence Ghana offers a variation of this syncretism whiles the Zaria Art Society’s theory of Natural Synthesis24 and the Khartoum School offer other such homologous mid-century attitudes to reforming stultifying epistemologies in the context of Nigerian and Sudanese modernisms respectively. They were variously contesting the hegemony of Euro-Christian and Islamic influences in Africa. By this time the development of art in these regions had become restricted to the conservative and monogenetic conception derived from colonial instruction that was incontrovertibly impervious to the connections between history, culture, economics, science, and technology.
Kofi Antubam’s schema of the African conception of ideal beauty. 1963. Source seid’ou k. 2006. Theoretical Foundations of the KNUST Painting Programme: A Philosophical inquiry and its contextual relevance in Ghanaian Culture [Unpublished PhD Thesis]. Kumasi: KNUST. 502.
seid’ou k. 2006. Theoretical Foundations of the KNUST Painting Programme: A Philosophical inquiry and its contextual relevance in Ghanaian Culture [Unpublished PhD Thesis]. Kumasi: KNUST. 535.
Antubam’s teleology25 had structured the evolution of art into three stages destined in the direction of social cohesion and “national pride” (traceable to Stevens’s and Meyerowitz’s influences26): beginning with the archaic stage characterized by distortions and “ill knowledge of natural rules”, then the intermediary “classical stage” which privileges a scientific approach where one becomes endowed with a consciousness of the “natural rules”, and finally to what he calls the romantic [or modern] stage, the apogee of this evolutionary process where perspective and three-dimensional realism in painting and sculpture are primal27. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear to observe that as long as it remained the basis of art education this adaptationist doctrine, no matter how well-intentioned, would miss any opportunities of “inject[ing] the practical curriculum with lessons of ex-centric, deskilled and conceptual practices already at play in African art, its cognates and material cultures, media, and technology beyond established art”28 [emphasis mine]. Antubam’s “earthy and illustrative” ideas for painting and sculpture “survived through the 1970s mediated through an eclectic mix of influences from American Ashcan, Regionalist and Social Realist Schools as the silent organising principle of late 20th century official curricula and evaluation criteria in art departments, faculties and examining bodies in Ghana”29.
A homologous syncretism to Antubam’s is perhaps also evident in the Zaria School’s mid-century anti-colonial pedagogic variant which overlooked the equally important performative, gendered, collaborative, and other extra-pictorial cognates “already at play” in the traditions and graphic systems of Nigeria’s indigenous arts. More so when we consider that Uche Okeke, one of its leading proponents, writes with an injunction in the “natural synthesis” manifesto that “[i]t is our work as artists to select and render in pictorial or plastic media our reactions to objects and events”30 [emphasis mine]. With the benefit of hindsight, it is worth noting that the capitulation of artistic expression to the structural dualism and mutual exclusivity of pictorial and plastic media silently (and inevitably) leads to the proscription of all other possibilities. For instance, an artist or learner of this apolitical school who might be concerned with ecological, identitarian or other such issues would be disinclined to actually use material life forms and consequent technological or social processes even if required. They would be expected to contrive the realisation of their ideas to those conventional optical formats alone. And this proclivity, as seen in the epigraph, had long been predicted by Stevens— decades before Antubam’s or Okeke’s convictions. To boot, it would seem as if the adaptationist approaches taken by these two schools would rather come to affirm the hegemony of occidental formats rather than decentralise it.
Stevens’s highly suggestive, perhaps even ironic, insight diagnoses this autistic over-reliance on rigid opticality as the necessary outworking of colonial Hand and Eye training; contending that the “concrete as well as abstract motive of Hand and Eye training”, as it relates to the teaching of “drawing and painting and the like”, is to make every determination of art conform either to pictorial or plastic expression31 and nothing else…
Towards the Contemporary
“The only maxim of contemporary art is not to be imperial.” —Alain Badiou (2003)32
“Art is something that is radically new.” statement made by kąrî’kạchä seid’ou. Handwritten and photographed by IUB.
By the 1990s mainstream trends in global art and exhibition making had jettisoned the siteless/nomadic modernist artwork and had deracinated it from its sacred confines, inserting it into a secular world of unpredictability and indeterminacy. The siting of art can be loosely said to have shifted from its modernist emphasis on medium (which was oblivious to the presence of the viewer); to the phenomenological (which implicates the human body with the art object and space within which they exist); to responding to the social and institutional frameworks of art; and then proceeding into the cultural epoch which includes the discursive, relational and community- or site-oriented turns33. Leading us into the ambit of the contemporary.
It is therefore crucial to distinguish the spirit of ‘contemporaneity’ from any of the antecedent paradigms shaped one way or another by homogenous or chronological time. If epochs before the contemporary are considered to have been responding in various ways to the latter—i.e. anachronistic temporalities which tend to be insular or independent of each other— contemporaneity becomes that which establishes (or reestablishes) coevalness between such temporalities. Put simply, the contemporary, while fervently participating and asserting itself in the present, constructs a relationship with moments past and those to come in a way that is incommensurate with linear time. The contemporary paradoxically asserts itself in the here-and-now and conforms to it if only by unsettling it34. This confabulation registers coordinates such as past, present, and future into adjacent anagrams in dynamic immanence and not as static elements in a structured continuum as such. This logic also renders “historical becoming”35 or coming to terms with what might have been forgotten from futures yet to come36 possible. Being contemporary therefore conditions a conception of art consubstantial to one which is inclusive of “all creative expression valued for their contemplative, aesthetic or theoretic value”37 with no a priori predilections. This secular regime of art always already begins from the multiplicity of artistic processes, mediums, trends, and so forth. In the sense that it matters little whether one is employing specialised artisanal methods, industrial processes, or traditional means of production, contrary to what pertained in colonial (or even postcolonial) instruction.
On Contradictions
In historicist terms, we know the contemporary regime of art to have been subsumed by the neoliberal political economic epoch since the dematerialised and/or discursive turn of art evolved with the financialisation of capital. (And here we arrive at the contradiction that results from the complementary relationship between contemporary art and global finance.) On the one hand, contemporary art, in unprecedented fashion, meaningfully operationalises the emancipatory imperative to open up the secular space of art to begin from a “purely generic multiplicity” or common ground for all without privileging any ethnicity or class society based on the principle of equality. On the other hand, the reactionary tendency of capital tames this radical potential for egalitarianism by exacerbating inequalities as it structures our political, social, economic, and techno-scientific world system on the extractive logic of capital accumulation and wealth concentration for the dominant owners of capital. The “class differences” produced as a result of this is the power relation between elites who have money and power (capital) and those who do not38. In short, financial capitalism is structured such that in its antidemocratic debt economy everyone “is a “debtor”, accountable to and guilty before capital.”39
And so the “concrete universality” promised in contemporary art is potentially undermined by the pseudo-universality imposed by the market über alles: as the former appropriates the deregulated but networked circulatory and distributive channels of the latter leading to an entrenchment of the extractive logic which guarantees the success of its elite institutions and personalities (artists, dealers, etc).
Therefore we simply cannot take the truth claim to freedom in contemporary art for granted especially when it thrives on forces that inevitably maintain the status quo by circulating capital for the benefit of a tiny fraction of humanity40. This claim to freedom and its correlates must be tested and verified according to the secular principles and axioms that exist under the rubric of contemporary art itself, in the direction of politics.
blaxTARLINES KUMASI
“My political strategy was […] to transform art from the status of commodity to gift.” —kąrî’kạchä seid’ou (2015)41
By 1999 South Meets West— the first international contemporary art exhibition to happen in Ghana at the close of the twentieth century featuring works in video, photography, installation, participatory intervention, text, computer animation, and more from the likes of Tracey Rose, Jane Alexander, Atta Kwami, Yinka Shonibare and others— had anachronistically happened in Accra at the National Museum42 amidst the overwhelming dominance of the “trade-fair flavoured salon style” of exhibition making in Ghana lacking in curatorial direction and relying on the patronage of tourists43. South Meets West spotlighted artistic practices from Africa which had already begun to expand their horizons beyond the aforementioned strictures in market and exhibition trends influenced by colonial instruction. Artists in this exhibition were dealing with site-oriented “themes such as apartheid, war, racism, violence, AIDS, neocolonialism and globalisation”44 but the monumental relevance of this moment was lost due to the entrenchment of the “picture theory of art” in Ghanaian art schools and consciousness45.
To confront and radically transform this phenomenon, one needs to be equipped with a politically sensitive will and the hope to create possible alternatives to the aforementioned oracle of inequality. And it is precisely this passion that triggered the “silent revolution”46 happening in Ghanaian art since the opening decade of the 21st century à la kąrî’kạchä seid’ou’s Emancipatory Art Teaching project47 inaugurated in the College of Art at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST)48 in 2003. seid’ou is a member of the first group of M.F.A students who actively transgressed official conventions of art at KNUST between 1993 and 199649. His long durational project implemented teaching methods that had began to smother centuries-old legacies of stultification by placing core emphasis on experimentation and the nurturing of the learner’s independence while radically updating the “epi-colonial” curriculum to maintain cognisance of coeval developments in the art world. With time, and through persistence with a team of colleagues at the Department of Painting and Sculpture, the curriculum came to include hitherto proscribed disciplines such as time-based media, new materiality, curating, text, performance, robotics, site- and context-specific practices, among others50. seid’ou’s project identified and subverted the historical, theoretical, and political underpinnings of the explicit (official), implicit (hidden), and null (missing) components of the KNUST Painting Programme’s curriculum which was based on pre-World War II Euro-American art influences51.
The substance of seid’ou’s emancipatory pedagogic project— the transformation of art from commodity to gift— stands as the raison d’être and lifeblood of blaxTARLINES KUMASI. The contemporary art institution based at the Department of Painting & Sculpture in KNUST used the final edition in its trilogy of large scale end-of-year exhibitions in 2017, titled Orderly Disorderly, to put forward the argument that if anything can be said to be art it must necessarily be invented52.
This affirmative, generative, and democratic principle throbbing at the heart of the “New Contemporary” emerging from Kumasi is what has reverberated around the country inspiring innovative and pioneering artistic practices and exhibition cultures alike.
— Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh is a Ghanaian curator and critic. He is a teacher at the Department of Painting & Sculpture at KNUST in Kumasi.
NB:The above text was originally written in 2020. A version of this modified version will be featured in the forthcoming publication by Nuvo Publishing Ltd., titled ‘New Perspectives: Contemporary Art from Ghana’ in 2022.
List of references:
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Antubam, K. 1963. Ghana’s Heritage of Culture. Leipzig: Koehler and Amelang.
Badiou, A. 2004. ‘Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art’. Lacanian Ink 23. The Woodster Press. ISBN 188830121X.
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Contemporary And, Department of Now (interview with blaxTARLINES— kąrî’kạchä seid’ou, Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu, and George Ampratwum, and curators Robin Riskin, Selom Kudjie, Patrick Okanta Ankrah, Mavis Tetteh-Ocloo — by Aïcha Diallo for Contemporary And (C&)). 2015. Published in C& print edition no. 7. Curriculum of Connections Focus: Education. 2017. 44-48.
Eagleton, T. 2003. After Theory. New York: Basic Books.
Fried, M. 1998. “Art and Objecthood.” In Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 148–172. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. First published 1967.
Greenberg, C. 1960. “Modernist Painting.” York University website. Accessed [June 5, 2022]. https://www.yorku.ca/yamlau/readings/greenberg_modernistPainting.pdf
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Ohene-Ayeh, K. 2019b. Curating in the Void. https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/2019/01/20/on-universality-and-curating-in-the-void/. Accessed on 22/05/2022.
Ohene-Ayeh, K. 2017. Orderly Disorderly curatorial statement. https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/2017/06/29/orderly-disorderly-curatorial-statement/. Accessed on 16/04/2022.
Ohene-Ayeh, K. 2020. In Praise of ‘Ghana Freedom’: On the Nation’s Debut Pavillion at the 58th Venice Biennale. https://iubeezy.wordpress.com/texts/ghana-freedom/. Accessed on 10/06/2022.
O’Doherty B. 1986. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. San Francisco: The Lapis Press.
seid’ou k. 2006. Theoretical Foundations of the KNUST Painting Programme: A Philosophical inquiry and its contextual relevance in Ghanaian Culture [Unpublished PhD Thesis]. Kumasi: KNUST.
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seid’ou, k, Ampratwum, G, Kissiedu, K.B, Bodjawah, E, Akoi-Jackson, B, Ohene-Ayeh, K, Riskin, R, Ankrah, P.N.O, Tetteh-Ocloo, M, Kudjie, S, Kisser, A, Owusu- Ankomah, K, Gyabeng, F, Adashie, M, Haizel, K. 2021. ‘Exposing Something to Someone While Exposing Someone to Something: blaxTARLINES Exhibition Cultures There-Then-And-Hereafter’. African Arts Journal, vol. 54(2). MIT Press. 36-51.
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Endnotes:
1 For more on the formalist discourse of New York school critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, see Greenberg (1960) and Fried (1998). This discourse necessitated the binary distinction between art and non-art, the latter of which was likened to theater. Fried, apropos Greenberg, contends that “what lies between the arts is theater” (Fried 1998: 164), and that “theater has an audience— it exists for one— in a way the other arts do not; in fact, that this more than anything else is what modernist sensibility finds intolerable in theater generally” (Fried 1998: 163). But further on in Fried’s exposition he distinguishes theatricality (which he equates to what he terms “objecthood”) as the quality distinct from theater that is opposed to modernist art.
2 See Szeeman (1969).
3 See S. Burton, “Notes on the New” in Szeeman (1969).
4 See O’Doherty (1986).
5 Terry Eagleton describes postmodernism as the “movement of thought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge. Postmodernism is sceptical of truth, unity and progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends towards cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity.” See Eagleton (2003:13).
6 See seid’ou (2014b: 011).
7 British metropolitan educational policy “had reduced art education to a simple choice between fine art education for the gentry on the one hand [sic], and on the other hand, vocationalised education for working-class boys in the Government Schools of design in Somerset House and South Kensington.” See seid’ou (2014a: 2).
8 “Rev. Johann G. Auer, the first qualified teacher to work at the Akropong Seminary and inspector of schools proposed a comprehensive educational reform in 1863. The Auer Reforms were implemented later by the Rev. J. A. Mader, successor to Auer and the third Principal of the seminary (1868-1877). Among other things the Auer Reforms introduced the Middle School system which was later to be adopted by the British Colonial government and which operated unchanged until the implementation of the Ghana Education Reforms by the Ministry of Education in 1987.” See seid’ou (2014b: 016).
9 See seid’ou (2006: 59).
10 See seid’ou (2006: 58).
11 “Hand and Eye is a generic term for “free hand drawing and manual training targeted at the elementary education of working-class children. In European and American literature, “Hand and Eye” is a commonwealth of craft-based programmes variously referred to as Slojd, Husflid (Scandinavian), Travail Manuel (French), Manual Training (English), Arbeitunterricht, Gewerbeschule or Handfertigkeitsunterricht (German). It takes its theory from 19th century child-centered education schemes of Pestalozzi and Froebel. In its teacher training version, it was a drawing and craft instruction for the generalist teacher of children, not a course for a specialist artist. As a system of training it was underpinned by the objective of precise technical or contour drawing. […] In its 19th century dogmatic form, governments invested “hand and eye skill” in the mechanical, manual and ornamental arts with overt instrumental and remunerative value in socio-economic and educational policy. This was especially intended to aid the growth of industry and manufacture and, in the bourgeois formulation of working-class aspirations, to churn out bread-winners who could keep the pot boiling.” Op. cit. seid’ou. 2014. Gold Coast Hand and Eye Work. 010-011. George Alexander Stevens is cited to have described it as the “elemental mechanics of European drawing, painting and handicraft [light and shade, mixing of colors, accurate observation and perspective]”. See seid’ou (2006: 58).
12 See seid’ou (2014b: 010)
13 For further information on this see seid’ou k. et al. (2015); seid’ou (2006); seid’ou (2014a); see also Contemporary And (2015).
14 The Government Training College was moved to Achimota as the Prince of Wales College in 1927 (later to become the Achimota College). It was founded by the then Gold Coast Governor Sir Gordon Guggisberg, Rev. A. G. Fraser, as Principal, and Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey, as Vice Principal. Achimota College was constituted of a secondary school and Teacher Training College. It is the nucleus which later splinters into Kumasi College of Technology which homed the Teacher Training College and School of Art after it had been transferred to Kumasi from Accra in 1952. The Art School remained in Kumasi to become what is presently the College of Art. In 1958 the Teacher Training College was also moved to Winneba as the Specialist Training College— what is now University of Education in Winneba. See seid’ou (2014a: 23)
15 See Stevens (1930: 149-150).
16 See Stevens (1930: 158).
17 U.S. Bureau of Education (1874) as cited in seid’ou (2014b: 011).
18 Stevens. (1930: 152). Stevens has also referred to native crafts of the Gold Coast as “bush art”, see Stevens G. A. (1962, February 22). Go Sukuu, savvy book, get sense. The Listener.
19 “Stevens’ own formative years had coincided with the early modernist period when Progressive educationists, taste outpourings from the Burlington Magazine and literature of the Arts and Crafts Movement were in currency and were drawing parallels between pure form, primitive art, archaic art and child art, and in the tradition of Rousseau and D. H. Lawrence, equating them with purity and sincerity” seid’ou (2006: 119).
“Stevens was an early advocate of a colonial variant of what came to be known in 1950s Zaria as Natural Synthesis which canonized Uli and other African traditions. He conducted research about local “crafts”, insisted that each student must study at least one local “craft” from their region, and he even used African artefacts as examples in his classes” seid’ou et al. (2015: 136). Also see seid’ou (2014a:12).
20 I paraphrase seid’ou in seid’ou (2014a).
21 “Gold Coast artists and art teachers trained in the Achimota tradition would engage their practice as extensions of what we designate as the “Stevens-Meyerowitz unconscious”. But one suspects that despite hints of Meyerowitz’s direct influence on Antubam’s carving style in the dry, angular expressionist style and the horror vacui compositions, the more distant Stevens unconscious seems to be more obtrusive in Antubam’s preferred painting and composition style. It even appears the Stevens unconscious was more pervasive in Gold Coast and Ghanaian painting until, notably, the post-Independence period and the era of the African Personality project when approaches close to Meyerowitz’s style negre advocacies would receive significant impetus from persistent advocacies of sculptors Oku Ampofo and Vincent Kofi on the one hand, and the painter Kobina Bucknor on the other.” seid’ou (2006:124). Also see Ohene-Ayeh (2019a).
22 Stevens (1930: 157)
23 Kofi Antubam (1922 – 1964) was a painter, sculptor and teacher whose ideas significantly influenced post-Independence art education in Ghana. See Antubam (1963).
24 Olu Oguibe, in reference to the Zaria Art Society manifesto authored by Uche Okeke, notes that “Natural Synthesis” permitted Nigerian artists “to research and incorporate into their work formal and symbolic elements from within their indigenous art traditions while retaining whatever is useful from the Western tradition. This was very much in line with the search for a new cultural identity in the immediate postcolony and would eventually form the ideological and formal bases of modern Nigerian art from the 1960s onward”. See Oguibe (2004: 184).
25 kąrî’kạchä seid’ou analyzes the essence of Antubam’s doctrine by tracing the thought back to colonial epistemology when he states that “[t]he “Renaissance Fundamentalism” of the [G.A.] Stevens School and a complementary teleology survived through the Ghanaian artist Kofi Antubam’s Levy-Bruhlian and retinal theory of art development. In Antubam’s schema, art naturally evolves from a “degenerate” and “prelogical” Archaic Stage through a transitional Classical Stage to a final Romantic [Modern] Stage which he equates with the mastery of Renaissance perspective, effects of atmospheric changes, three dimensions in painting and sculpture, and national pride. Antubam declared during the transition to Ghana’s Independence that the nation’s art was aspiring to the Romantic Stage after leaving behind a degenerate Archaism and refining the Classical Stage. His uncritical “dismissal” of early Modernist avant-garde as “meaningless abstractionists” and as “joker artists” who were “fooling around” does not seem surprising when weighed against the 1930s American Regionalist cynical stance towards the European avant-garde.” seid’ou et al (2015: 132).
26 For specific treatment of the Stevens-Meyerowitz paradigm in the Gold Coast see seid’ou (2006: 119-124).
27 “The art of a people changes and develops, passing through three main evolutionary stages if it is allowed to follow its natural course of growth. There is first a period of archaism featured by spontaneous expressions of disproportions and abstract symbolisms due to ill knowledge of the natural rules about things in their environment, distortions that spring from an almost fanatical belief in magic and superstition, crude execution resulting from the use of primitive implements and conservative attitudes in art. This is followed by a classical stage at which folk art gives way to creative art; a period of naturalism synthesised by serious research into and codification of existing native cultural conceptions, a search for and the use of natural rules with their resultant effect of a scientific and professional attitude in art. A third stage follows the particular people’s full realisation of themselves as a nation and the growth of their national pride. It is the time of dynamic movement and realism in art. Artists seek in all earnestness and expand in their means and method of expression by knowledge acquired from other lands. There is a general widening of scope of expression at this stage and artists become more and more conscious of the importance of perspective and the effects of romantic and atmospheric changes particularly in painting. And the expression of three dimensions in drawing and painting ceases to be a mystery.” As quoted by seid’ou in seid’ou (2006: 438).
28 See seid’ou et al (2015: 133).
29 “The late 1980s and 1990s saw the hegemony of touristy Afrokitsch, eclectic and superficial juggling with established Social Realist and early modernist pictorial styles and romanticised African subject matter.” seid’ou et al (2015: 134).
30 See Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (1995: 208-209).
31 See epigraph. Stevens has also stated that “I do not consider that the doctrine [by which] we teach art in [Gold Coast] schools to train taste and observation and not to turn out artists is really adequate.” Stevens (1930: 156)
32 Alain Badiou presented this as the ninth thesis in his lecture titled Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art given at The Drawing Center, New York, in 2003. The full thesis states that “[t]he only maxim of contemporary art is not to be imperial. This also means: it does not have to be democratic, if democracy implies conformity with the imperial idea of political liberty.” The transcript of this lecture was published in edition 23 of the journal Lacanian Ink in 2004, edited by Josefina Ayerza. See https://www.lacan.com/frameXXIII7.htm [accessed 09/06/2022]
33 See Kwon (2002). For Kwon, institutional critique and conceptual art, informed by the contextual thinking of minimalism, developed a different model of site specificity that implicitly challenged the “innocence” of space and the presumption espoused in the phenomenological model of its universal viewing subject. She says that if minimalism returned to the viewing subject a physical body, institutional critique insisted on the social matrix of class, race, gender and sexuality of the viewing subject. Further, she says that while minimalism challenged the idealism of the autonomous art object by deflecting its meaning to the space of its presentation, institutional critique complicated this displacement by highlighting the idealism of the space of presentation itself. This move, she infers, shifts the site to encompass a relay of several interrelated but different spaces and economies to include the studio, gallery, museum, art criticism, art history, the art maket, that together constitute a system of practices that is open to social, economic and political pressures. She says that to be “specific” to such a site reveals the ways in which institutions mold art’s meaning to modulate its cultural and economic value, undercutting the fallacy of art’s and its institutions’ autonomy by making their relationship to the broader socioeconomic and political process of the day apparent.
34 I owe this thought to Giorgio Agamben in the essay “What is the Contemporary?” published in Agamben (2009).
35 See Agamben (2009: 50).
36 I owe this thought to seid’ou in his deliberate misreading of the Akan Sankɔfa myth in his curatorial statement for the KNUST end of year exhibition titled “Silence Between the Lines”. See seid’ou (2015).
37 See seid’ou (2006: 74).
38 I paraphrase Maurizio Lazzarato who writes that “Capital has become the Great Creditor, the Universal Creditor. […] property remains one of the major political stakes of neoliberalism, since the creditor-debtor relationship is a product of power relations between owners (of capital) and non-owners (of capital)” in Lazzarato (2012: 8).
39 See Lazzarato (2012: 7). Lazzarato further helps to clarify things when he states that “debt is finance from the point of view of the debtors who have to repay it. Interest is finance from the point of view of creditors, security-holders who guarantee they benefit from debt. Politically, the debt economy seems to be a more appropriate term than finance or financialized economy, not to mention financial capitalism, since with it one can straightaway understand what is at stake.” Ibid. 24. And that “the creditor-debtor relation concerns the entirety of the current population as well as the population to come. Economists tell us that every French child is born 22,000 euros in debt. We are no longer the inheritors of original sin but rather of the debt of preceding generations. “Indebted man” is subject to a creditor-debtor power relation accompanying him throughout his life, hom birth to death. If in times past we were indebted to the community, to the gods, to our ancestors, we are henceforth indebted to the “god” Capital.” Lazzarato (2012: 32).
40 Suhail Malik, a contemporary thinker critical of contemporary art’s internalisation of neoliberal market systems and advocator of “another art than contemporary art” discusses this tendency for inequality embedded in the contemporary art market system in his lecture at Goldsmiths College Department of Art in 2019 titled Contemporary Art, Neoliberal Enforcer. See full lecture at https://youtu.be/ivQjEBaJh5g .
41 See seid’ou & Bouwhis (2019: 193).
42 South Meets West is an exhibition organized by Kunsthalle Bern and Historical Museum of Bern in collaboration with the National Museum of Ghana to stage the exhibition in Accra, Ghana. The Accra exhibition happened from November 9th – December 5th 1999 with a two-day curatorial workshop from 10th-11th November, 1999. The exhibition curators are Dr. Bernhard Fibicher (Kunsthalle Bern, assisted by Eszter Gyarmathy), Dr Yacouba Konaté (Université d’Abidjan-Cocody, Côte d’Ivoire), Dr. Yvonne Vera (National Gallery Bulawayo, Zimbabwe). Participating artists are Jane Alexander, Fernando Alvim, Meshac Gaba, Kendell Geers, Tapfuma Gutsa, Atta Kwami, Goddy Leye, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Tracey Rose, Yinka Shonibare, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Yacouba Touré, Minnette Vári, and Dominique Zinkpe. The catalogue included texts by Oladélé A. Bamgboyé, Dr. Bernard Fibicher, Kendell Geers, Clive Kellner, Dr. Yacouba Konaté, Atta Kwami, Simon Njami, Prof. Joe Nkrumah, Tonie Okpe and Sarah Zürcher. A modified version of the exhibition was shown in Bern, Switzerland (at the Kunsthalle Bern and Historical Museum of Bern) between April 6th – June 29th, 2000. There was no publication produced for the iteration in Switzerland, it was intened to be experienced live, although the exhibition in Ghana came with a catalogue. See South Meets West (2000).
43 See seid’ou et al (2021: 38)
44 See South Meets West (2000: 9).
45 I have also written about the fact that the first Ghana Pavillion, titled Ghana Freedom, at the 2019 Venice Biennale was a missed opportunity to reflect on the significance of this historical moment which incidentally occurred on the 20th anniversary of South Meets West. See Ohene-Ayeh (2020).
46 See seid’ou et al. (2015). Also Contemporary And (2015).
47 kąrî’kạchä seid’ou is a poet, artist, mathematician and philosopher who joined the faculty at the Department of Painting and Sculpture in 2003. On his appointment he initiated his Emancipatory Art Teaching pedagogic project which introduced “Interactive Series” [seid,ou, 2006], a seminar programme in Kumasi to host contemporary artists and art professionals for talks, workshops, exhibitions, overviews and critique sessions. He also converted his Drawing Class into a curatorial project of guerrilla exhibitions on campus and in the city of Kumasi. Campus and city alike came alive with site-specific exhibitions with critiques and overviews each year. In the mid-2000s, seid’ou found kinship with younger faculty such as Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu (Castro), George Buma Ampratwum and Dr. Edwin Bodjawah, amongst others, who through their work and networks, joined forces to sustain the changes in the ethos of the art curriculum at KNUST. seid’ou’s project, based on the egalitarian principle of equality, served as the impetus for the founding of the dynamic community known as blaxTARLINES in Kumasi, Ghana in 2015. See Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh (2019b). See also seid’ou k. et al. (2015). Prior to this, a “small revolution in art and practice” was instigated in the last decade of the twentieth century by a pioneer group of M.F.A students who actively challenged official conventions of art at the KNUST Department of Painting and Sculpture between 1993 and 1996.
48 For an extensive reading on this subject the reader may access Bodjawah et al (2021: 22-35)
49 The other MFA students who were politically motivated about their art practice at the time include Kwamivi Zewuze Adzraku, Emmanuel Vincent Essel (Papa Essel), Caterina Niklaus (with Agyeman Ossei and Atta Kwami as kindred spirits). It is however recorded that after this class graduated censorship tamed any kind of dissent at the Department. See seid’ou, et al (2015: 134).
50 “Barrelling down since the late nineteenth century, this [colonial] intellectual legacy had plagued the College of Art in KNUST until what has been described as a “silent revolution” began to materialize at the dawn of the millennium when a collective of young lecturers – inspired by Dr. kąrî’kạchä seid’ou’s “Emancipatory Art Teaching” project27– were able to successfully expand the curriculum from its retinal, quasi-hierarchy of genres, medium-specific stranglehold to implement emancipatory ideas for artistic practice conditioned on radical indifference (to genres, materials, subject matter, processes, etc). Graduates thus develop political and material sensitivity to their practices.28 Instead of uniformly following a ‘tradition’, each artist is challenged to develop an independent practice. In this School art is paradoxically defined as beginning from a multiplicity and emanating from a void. According to this new logic, its content can be regenerated in an egalitarian system for the art student or exhibiting artist.” See Ohene-Ayeh (2019a).
51 In a conversation with seid’ou I commented that: “In your unpublished PhD dissertation you identify, apropos Elliot Wayne Eisner, three interrelated components of the form and content of the KNUST Painting Programme’s curriculum thus: the explicit or official curriculum, the “implicit” or hidden curriculum and the “null” or missing curriculum. In this sequence, the “picture theory of art” constituted the bedrock of officialdom and functioned in the explicit curriculum, while the “virtual but real” hidden curriculum operated on the bourgeois capitalist assumption of the genius artist whose legitimacy is hinged on the production of portable and potentially saleable paintings. This, as you go on to explain, accounts for the invisibility of Huit Facettes, Laboratoire Agit’Art, Maria Campos-Pons, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Berni Searle, Chris Offili, and other relevant histories in the painting curriculum, in relation to the privileging of pre-World War II Euro-American modernist figures and movements. And this is where the hidden and null curricula overlapped prior to your artistic-pedagogic interventionist project.” See Akoi-Jackson et al (2021: 16). Also see seid’ou (2006: 294–297).
52 I paraphrase from the curatorial statement. Ohene-Ayeh (2017).
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