Nov. 4th

This week we read three different articles. “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism, and Contemporary African Art” by Olu Oguibe. “African Art and Authenticity: A text with a Shadow” by Sidney Kasfir, and Hendonism, masquerade, carnivalesque and power.

I was unable to attend class on Thursday for discussion but, interpreted and understood the articles the best I could. The article by Kasfir caught my attention the most and dealt with the idea of Authenticity. While reading the article many questions arose to me about what makes something authentic? Is it the time period in which it was created? Kasfir’s article discusses the before and after scenario of colonialism. This meaning art made before the mid nineteenth century before it was (tainted by western intervention) as the article put it. The quote that got me thinking in the Kasfir article was “It would be said to lack integrity, implying that somehow nontraditional artist have detached themselves from their cultures and that their work is therefore inauthentic.” From what this article has presented in leaves me wondering where do the boundaries lye of authentic or inauthentic and is it appropriate so say it depends on the context in which the piece is presented and taken from.

In the Oguibe article the sentence “In each case, the gaze is deflected onto utopia, onto the significance of the other.” This quote was referring to how work that is being done is being attributed to a tribe as a whole not to the individual artist that created it and by doing so we lose the narrative behind the piece of artwork and directed to their backgrounds. What I took from this article was that when we look at African art or any other art that is foreign to us we are often looking at the racial side of the work rather than the narrative and what the artist is trying to convey. We see the skin color or stereotypes that we have attached to that particular group of people and make up our own assumptions or narrative based on their background.

Over all I think the message that these articles were trying to convey was we need to be more aware of the individuality of the work were viewing and not tag it with stereotypes and assumptions when we don’t necessarily understand what’s being presented.