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The Production of Social Space as Artwork 251
Hazoumé, and Pascale Marthine Tayou have thoroughly dismantled the randomness
and poverty of the bricolage aesthetic by elaborating new sculptural and pictorial
devises with recycled material: Olé with his painterly and monumental refabrications
of urban architectural fragments; Adeagbo with his mnemonic recontextualizations
of archives of colonial and postcolonial history in his sculptural and sign painting
appropriations; and Hassan with his arresting collages of masks, portraits, and crowds
fabricated out of torn surplus billboard advertising prints that manifest an unusually
raw festishistic power. Hazoumé’s plastic masks fashioned out of cut-out plastic jerry
cans on the other hand reside uneasily between genuine sculptural experiments and
afro-kitsch. The larger and more critical question is why has the bricolage aesthetic
persisted for so long all across Africa, and in fact seems to be acquiring an even
greater acceptance in the work of even younger artists. The upshot is that for some
reason recycling as an aesthetic option strangely continues to be seen by many
artists as a proper artistic choice for making art. This perhaps owes to the erroneous
notion that using recycled, impoverished material in clever ways somehow transforms
and elevates the assembled oddities into innovative, albeit uncanny artistic
products that raise local curiosity and please benevolent development workers.
40. Tokunbo is a Yoruba term that literally means “second child,” but in the typical
wry humor that accompanies responses to bleak socioeconomic conditions in
most African countries, the term has come to stand for the vast secondhand market
in objects of Western technological products such as cars, computers, electronics,
and assorted machines that have been reconditioned and made suitable for export
to Africa. The scale of the Tokunbo trade far outstrips that in new technological
products and increasingly has come under state scrutiny for the effects on the environment,
productivity, and safety.
41. In fact it seems unimaginable that there could be any other reason for this
response to secondhand, recycled commodity-fetish products of the developed world
beyond the survivalist strategies of people caught in the grips of brutal global economic
restructuring. It is also to such survivalist strategies that artists and intellectuals
have turned in order to protect their autonomy as critical producers of culture.
42. Kan Si, “Dimensons Variable,” 122.
43. A number of the critiques that accompanied the reception of “Documenta11-
Platform 5,” which devoted a strong part of the exhibition to exploring the relationship
between representation and the domain of social life, were based on abjuring
the political and ethical in the conception of the work of art. Typical of such
responses were criticisms from neoconservative writers such as Michael Kimmelman
of the New York Times, Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post, and Christopher Knight
of the Los Angeles Times.
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