“Rural” and “Urban” Locales as Complements: Reflections on the Contexts of Ceramic Art Practice in West Africa

INTRODUCTION In 1984, Sidney Kasfir published a paradigmbreaking article titled “One Tribe, One Style? : Paradigms in the Historiography of African Art.” In it, she “effectively concretized the alternative of approaching African art as products of distinctive individuals as well as of diverse and changing interests and ethnic groups” (Hallen, 1997, p. 2). In the early 1990s, Kasfir followed this up with a defining debate over what had become, according to her, the “Modernist paradigm” and “a flawed attempt at paradigm-breaking” engendered by the “’Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and the “Magiciens de la Terre” at the Centre Pompidou in 1989, respectively. Kasfir’s “African Art and Authenticity: A Text With a Shadow” (1992) remains an important contribution to the persisting imperatives of paradigm-breaking in current art historical scholarship and the (re)presentation of African art by Western institutions and scholars. Such an intervention remains imperative in a field in which Western institutions and scholars continue to set and sustain the parameters that “Others” are expected to follow to receive validation. This lopsided intellectual and cultural power relationship have been put to question in the past by a number of African scholars (Appiah, 1999; Hassan, 1999), calling attention to the need to constantly reevaluate the methodology of studying and (re)presenting African art in a world largely dominated by Western-constructed mills of knowledge production and dissemination. Kasfir’s (1992) article succeeded in laying bare the many contradictions that question longheld canons and the authenticity paradigms that have governed the categorization, acquisition, presentation, and commodification of African art in recent history. It inspired a vigorous debate among scholars, museum curators, and art collectors (especially Ravenhill, Mudimbe, Drewal & Kasfir, 1992; Hirsch, 1993). Yet it is doubtful if Kasfir’s paradigm-breaking advocacy has had any far-reaching impact in the way Western scholars and institutions still categorize and engage with African art and cultural production. This lack of far-reaching paradigm-breaking appears similar to her remark about the use of the “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art” and “Magiciens de la Terre” exhibitions by postmodern critics (among them, Araeen, 1989; Clifford, 1988; McEvilley, 1984, 1990; Michaud, 1989) to comment upon the intellectual appropriation of African and other Third World art by Western museums and collectors. She observed that “most mainstream institutions and a surprising number of scholars . [continued] to think about African art and its public presentation as if this debate were not taking place at all (Kasfir, 1992, p. 41). However, as noted by Hassan (1999, p. 217), there have been glimmers of positive subversion as seen in major exhibitions of African art that came underway in Europe and the United States since the mid1990s. Yet Hassan has argued that the deeply entrenched “traditional” and “contemporary” dichotomy that has largely defined the field of