Joanna Grabski and Carol Magee, eds.

: African Art, Interviews, Narratives:

Bodies of Knowledge at Work. Published by: Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, 2013, 206 pp. $80.00 cloth, $28 paper. ISBN: 978-0-253-00691-2
Jonathan Zilberg, Center for African Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Joanna Grabski and Carol Magees edited collection, African Art, Interviews,
Narratives: Bodies of Knowledge at Work, is a highly reflective collection of essays
about the work of constructing art history out of interviews. Designed to unsettle and
open up the relationship between interviews and scholarship it speaks to the work of
anthropology by aiming to better understand the nature of the interview process itself,
how we produce and convey meanings from interviews and related documents. While it
will be of particular interest to anthropologists working as museum curators it will be
equally useful to any professional whose craft largely depends upon interviews.
Each of the contributors considers the importance of being self-reflective about
the nature of the interview process and how narratives about art and artists are
strategically used not only by those who write about African art but by the artists
themselves. Patrick McNaughton, a senior Africanist scholar, sets the tone by revisiting
his work with Mande blacksmiths and a hunters bard. He considers how ones agenda
informs how we identify and collaborate with certain individuals rather than others and
how and why one pursues certain issues and not others. Paradigmatic of the books
purpose as a whole, McNaughton emphasizes how these issues have significant
implications for a reflective evaluation of anthropology as work in terms of how our
intellectual livelihoods are constructed through the narratives we weave, or for that

matter contest and complicate, and the nature of collaborations and ongoing
relationships that emerge in the process.
McNaughton puts forth a series of textbook ideas and questions on the work of
the artist and the work of the anthropologist or art historian in studying artists lives and
works. He writes: When you ask artists to talk about their work and experiences, will
you learn about who the artists are, or who they want to be, or who they want you to
think they are? [p.13] In essence, the work of talking about art how and why it is
made, and its history is completely different from the work of making art. Hence
McNaughton asks whether we really should expect a complete or exact answer about
their work and what it means and why they made it? [p. 13]. Accordingly, he calls for a
balance between clarity and obscurity, given that an interview does not include things
that the artist chooses not to share or, for that matter, things that the anthropologist or
art historian does not bring into the conversation. As political agendas may be implicitly
involved, and especially working towards the goal of achieving a state of factuality in
which accepts ambiguity and contradiction, McNaughton stresses that anthropologists
cannot and should not avoid shaping what we say based on our experiences [p. 15] In
this way, we attempt to put into words that which may be of no interest to the artist. In
short, there is an incommensurability in the nature of our work and theirs. Artists
sometimes simply talk about their art and lives in ways that obscure what the
anthropologist is seeking to know in order to advance their own professional stature. By
way of contrast Silvia Forni discusses the artist Seni Camara whose life and work has
been mystified not by her own intent. Indeed the range of narrative possibilities is as
broad as the type of arts considered in these essays.

The other authors, scholars at different stages in their careers and artists as well,
explore these and other issues in a wide range of African art forms and contexts. Each
provides nuanced and complex analyses which variously serve to counter previously
simplified or flattened dominant historical narratives about African art. For instance,
Joanna Grabski, a relatively younger scholar, arrived in the field in 1998 just after the
death of two leading artists, Moustapha Dime (1952-1998) and Djibril Diop Mambety
(1945-1998). During her interviews, the artists frequently referred to Dime and
Mambety, leading her back to consider the early days of the Dakar art world and above
all to the affection those earlier artists had for their professor Pierre Lods. In so doing,
Grabski provides a counter-narrative to the dominant scholarly vision of Dakars postcolonial art history as a Senghorian project for the figure of President Leopold Senghor
has overshadowed the role of lesser known figures also involved in the Senegalese
post-independence art world in the 1960s. Grabskis interviews have brought Lods out
of Senghors shadow. In this way Grabski argues absences can be productive, that is,
can be crucial to revising flat interpretations [p. 33] fostered by previous dominant
narratives.
Silvia Forni considers the late Senegalese ceramic artist Seyni Camera who had
little if anything to say about her work in stark contrast to the mythology the exhibition
world and art markets built up around her as a magician of the earth. Forni shows how
narratives created through exhibition catalogs have long-lasting effects on the way
artists are subsequently defined. These narratives can either support or undermine what
artists have to say about their work as they respond to discourses which have been built
around their identities and art. For example, on a broader level, though some modern

African artists reject previous ethnic - often primitivist - narratives for others these
narratives have allowed them to confirm and enhance their sense of identity. The
essential point of this book is simply that there can be no totalizing narratives for African
art history or for that matter anything else in the work of anthropology.
Building bridges between the past and the present, Africa and the Diaspora,
Joseph Jordan compares the contemporary case of the Moroccan born artist Hamid
Kachmar. He finds parallels in Kamchars work with the legacy of Aime Cesaire, the
Surrealist Francophone poet from Martinique who was one of the founders of the
negritude movement of which the above mentioned Senghor was a Father figure.
Revisiting his interviews with the artist in the course of planning an exhibition of the
artists work Jordan argues that the oppositional politics in Kachmars work returns us to
Cesaires cultural resistance to colonialism. Kachmars art, in his view, echoes the
legacy of Frantz Fanon in a redemptive way through celebrating his native Amazigh
culture. Further afield, Kim Miller considers explicitly political issues through engaging
the work of the feminist activist embroidery work of Sandra Kriel, a South African artist.
Miller details how Kriels anti-apartheid radicalization took place, how Kriel
became empowered as an artist and a feminist. She goes on to relate her subsequent
success as a resistance artist through subversive stitching as in her For Our Fallen
Comrades series which used art as a means for public mourning providing an
alternative to the collective memorial ceremonies which were banned at that time. Carol
Magee on the other hand presents a very different kind of study and art that also speaks
to politics in South Africa and globally. This chapter is about the representation of the
work of Ndebele bead artists as modeled in photographs in the 1996 Sports Illustrated

swimsuit issue shot in South Africa. She explores the striking differences between local
and international reactions to such art. For instance, the Ndebele artists whom she
interviewed responded in very different ways to the images than she had imagined they
would. Magee had expected to find offense. Instead her informants were amused. One
for instance giggled about the absurdity of an adult model wearing a young womens
beaded ritual waist apron around her neck. The other photographs, such as the bare
breasted model with Ndebele mural inspired body paint generated even more animated
responses. In reflecting upon how these reactions ran completely contrary to the original
expectations which the author had brought with her into the field, Magee provides an
excellent example of the value of the work of the interview and how very different
cultural narratives inform our reactions to art.
Andrea Frohnes chapter expands upon the political dimension. She revisits the
politics and struggles over narratives of the past as they emerged and played out during
the controversial and highly contested process of planning, creating and completing the
African Burial Ground in Manhattan. Here the competition for merely the design of the
exterior part of the memorial became a major source of conflict over who would tell the
story, how and for whom. It lasted for over a decade beginning in 1991. The memorial
was finally opened in 2007 and the interpretive conflict is ongoing. For instance, one of
the most vocal critics of the project became a guide to be sure to be able to participate
in providing her view. Christine Kreamer, the senior curator at the Smithsonians
National Museum of African Art, adds to this reflection on the transformation taking
places in regards to memory and the public sphere as regards the work that museums
are doing towards inviting greater public participation. In her chapter, she revisits a

series of exhibitions at the Smithsonian which have included artists voices. Interviews
and oral histories have become part of a paradigmatic shift in museum practices. For
example, the African Voices Exhibition, a permanent hall with changing elements at the
Smithsonians National Museum of Natural History, adopted the strategy to foreground
the voices of Africans and people of African descent in the interpretive material on view
. . . [p.150]. In the same way, the National Museum of African Art has supplemented
their exhibitions of contemporary African art with filmed interviews in which the voices of
artists such as Sokari Douglas Camp and El Anatsui are included, that is, they talk
directly to the visitor about their own work. As Kreamer notes: Rather than reliance on
the authoritative voices of curators or other specialists, the paradigm has shifted to the
sharing of observations and information, a process that may have little to do with truth
and more to do with the appeal of a dialogic experience where all are welcome. [p.
159]. In essence to re-emphasize this point, the interviews are provided so as to allow
the artists to explain their own works directly to the public. They are in this way able to
explain for the record why they create such art and what it means to them. These
interviews are archived on the Smithsonians web site and this extends the working life
of these exhibitions and the power of the artists to provide their own narratives to a
global audience. Finally, echoing the main point of the edited collection, that there can
be no totalizing narratives, Kreamer concludes: The investigation of culture should not
result in a seamless vision. [p. 160]. Taken together then, the memorial project in New
York and the exhibition tactics at the Smithsonian are designed to engage and
incorporate multiple perspectives. This is done not only to address frictions within the
communities served and between the state and the civil society but to achieve the goal

of offering multiple open ended inclusive narratives so as to preclude the possibility of

totalizing narratives.
Returning us to the classic practice of the anthropological study of African art,
that is, at its most ethnographic, another senior Smithsonian curator, Mary Jo Arnoldi
revisits her work on youth masquerades in Mali. She shows there how interviews are
collaborative phenomena, how performances embody cumulative histories, and how
different groups not only own these masquerade histories but depending on ones
age, gender, and other status criteria have different competing histories about the
past. She concludes that though her initial impulse had been to forge a cohesive history
she ended up deciding that any attempt to reconcile the very different oral traditions
would flatten out the history of the masquerades and masks she was studying. As she
puts it: Indeed the polyphony of these oral traditions can contribute to a more nuanced
and complex art history for the masquerades [p. 138], a point germane to the essence
of all the other contributions.
Two of the chapters stand out starkly for their roguish creativity, the chapter by
Akinbiyi and the other by the performance artist deSouza and curator Purpura.
Akinobode Akinbiyi, the Oxford born Nigerian artist, certainly comes across as the most
philosophically inclined and reflective of all the artists considered here. Akinbiyi is an
iconic example of the contemporary African artist who draws on many influences and
yet is constantly thinking of how his language and identity informs his work. Here he
adds a playful creative dimension, clearly a critique of the often stultifying paradigm of
the traditional interview [p.96], by interviewing himself. He explores the serendipitous
process of discovery he uses in his urban photography. His goal is to show how he has

made an art form of adventure, how by chance or whim he encounters the people and
the places which populate his work. Adding further force to Akinbiyis creative and open
ended chapter, the artist Allan deSouza uses humor to engage the audience and
provide a forceful critique of the interview.
In the highly unusual final chapter on Undisciplined Knowledge, Allan deSouza,
an artist, and Allyson Purpura, a curator at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discuss the ways knowledge about contemporary African
art is produced and how competitive power relations affect writing about art. This is not
so much an interview as a creative dialogue about the practice of taking an interdisciplinary, roguish, raw, and yet rigorous approach to their work respectively as artist
and curator. Desouzas interest in deconstructing art historical confabulations about
mystical truths is deliberately provocative, that is, undisciplined and some might well
think though that deSouza and Purpuras essay is too undisciplined. But one way or
another it certainly takes the collection and the nature and the work of the interview into
wholly new territory.
All in all, these essays provide compelling examples of the transformations taking
place in the anthropological and historical study of African art today, specifically the
nature of the work done through and with the interview. They are concerned both with
providing more complex narratives than previously found in African art history and put to
work to improve the effectiveness and inclusive reach of exhibitions and memorials.
They provide text book examples of the continuing influence of artists of the past in
terms of how contemporary artists use stories not only to honor those artists but to claim
authority for their own work through a narrative of lineage. Above all, the critical issue is

this. Interviews and data such as academic or non academic studies, exhibition catalogs
and media reports all create narratives and meta-narratives. As these function in art
worlds to authorize and project the power of representation we should be careful to
collect, examine and account for competing narratives so as not to flatten out history
through simplification.
To end with McNaughton then as I began, he emphasizes that, beyond accurate
and thorough, deeply careful accounts of artists work we should accept ambiguity as
reality rather than hard and fast answers about what their art means no less their very
natures and their life histories. We should pay careful attention to absences, what is
strategically left out, the self-promoting competitive agendas involved by artists and
authors, to contradictions and conflict as to confabulation. Here lies the irreducible
paradox in determining fact and fiction in creating art history, a search for accuracy and
objectivity in a world of colliding fantasies and goals. Revisiting a career of data
provided through interviews, McNaughton advises that we should be careful to take into
account both artists intentions and peoples reactions. He emphasizes that it is
important to resist the temptation to reductively produce simplistic explanations that,
one might add, introduce new insufficiently complex meta-narratives because they are
easy to grasp. For this reason, this is an all important text particularly for graduate
students in anthropology. However, it should be emphasized as a singular point of
critique that throughout these essays there is a notable lack of significant engagement,
theoretical or otherwise, with the academic literature on narrative and narrativity. And
that absence surely calls for future work.