Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity by Terry Smith & Okwui Enwezor & Nancy Condee

Author:Terry Smith & Okwui Enwezor & Nancy Condee [Smith, Terry & Enwezor, Okwui & Condee, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art
ISBN: 9780822342038
Google: DE4kAQAAMAAJ
Amazon: 0822342030
Publisher: Duke University
Published: 2008-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Michel Allégret and André Gide, Voyage to the Congo, 1928. Film still. Public domain.

Michel Allégret and André Gide, Voyage to the Congo, 1928. Film still. Public domain.

If the Tate Modern were an institution working beyond the smug reflex of Western museological authority it would have found right in its own context artists such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode, the Nigerian-British photographer whose work—formally and conceptually—involves a long, rigorous excursus into the distinction between the nude and nakedness as it concerns the African body. The analytic content, not to say the formal and aesthetic contradictions that Fani-Kayode’s photographic work introduces us to about the black body in contrast to the modernist nude is quite telling. More substantial is its awareness of the conflicted relationship the black body has to Western representation and its museum discourse.12 This makes the absence of works like his in the Nude/Action/Body section of the Tate Modern the more glaring. Many other practitioners deal with these issues, but Fani-Kayode is important for my analysis for the more specific reason of his Africanness, his conceptual usage of that Africanness in his imagery, and his subversion of the fraught distinction between nakedness and the nude in his photographic representation. Fani-Kayode’s pictures also conceive of the black body (in his case the black male body with its homoerotic inferences) as a vessel for idealization, as a desiring and desirable subject, and as self-conscious in the face of the reduction of the black body as pure object of ethnographic spectacle. All these critical turns in his work make the Tate Modern’s inattention to strong, critical work on the nude and the body by artists such as he all the more troubling, because it is precisely works like his that have brought to crisis those naturalized conventions of otherness that throughout the history of modern art have been the stock-in-trade of Modernism. Whatever its excuses for excluding some of these artists from its presenta

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