Meschac Gaba worked on the Museum of Contemporary African Art between 1997 and 2002. Obviously, each of the nouns and adjectives in the work’s title deserves consideration, but, also, does the history of the work’s production and its placement in different institutional contexts. While Gaba’s entitling of his work as being a museum of contemporary African art instructs us to view – or read – it as a piece of institutional and post-colonial critique, the list of exhibitions it has been shown in is a reminder to take the terms of the museal and the contemporary seriously concerning both content and context. The history of the Museum of Contemporary African Art is also the history of the artist’s career between the first exhibition of the Museum at the Rijksakademie in 1997 and the final venues of the Documenta11 and the Palais de Tokyo in 2002; final, inasmuch as these were the last exhibitions displaying the Museum as a series of distinct and site-specific pieces, while the 2009 exhibition at the Fridericianum shows the Museum in its entirety – and with a time-lag longer than the “productive” phase of the series itself. Indeed, the Museum in the Fridericianum show offers both a retrospective of the artist’s work, and a retrospective of the exhibiting strategies of contemporary art; not only has the Museum since become museal, but so have the modes of production and representation it had been subjected to.
“Wedding Room”, 2000
Interestingly, the concept of the Museum predates these effects. One might wonder if Meschac Gaba anticipated the route the Museum would take, starting from the first exhibit at the Rijksakademie and continuing towards the Documenta and the Fridericianum show; in a slightly fantastic take on the topic, one might even think that the Museum itself chose Meschac Gaba and his exemplary career as a central motif to bring its own point across. This idea would not be lost on the artist himself; one of the strongest “rooms” in the Museum is the “Wedding Room” – a collection of documentary material and objects from Meschac Gaba’s own wedding, which took place as a part of the group show For Real at the Stedelijk in 2000. From the photographs, paraphernalia and DIY wedding presents emerges the image of an artist’s network – which is inevitably both professional and personal – and a set of the clichés of alternative artistic production: the artist as exhibit, the curator as artist, and any other number of “x-s as y-s” you could assemble from the terms describing the contemporary art world. The Museum of Contemporary African Art is to “critical art” what Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God is to “successful art” – a product of their respective system meant as an allegory for this system itself, reproduced from the simulated perspective of an outside observer but still fully functional within the mechanics of the system itself: just as Hirst’s diamond skull is an extremely expensive piece of contemporary art, Gaba’s Museum is post-colonial and institutional critique at its best. By being works of art and, at the same time, representations of what art (or, at least, the art system) is today, these pieces are, indeed, “contemporary” in a meaning that is more than a historic classification, and conveys a certain urgency. In the same time, their gesture of disclosing the inner workings of the art system is didactic, though didactic in a casual way: the viewer is not only in on the joke, but relieved of any burden of social or political accountability by, also, somehow being the joke’s target.
“Shop”
In this spirit, Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art is only “African” for anyone outside the continent; its being “African” is the materialised gaze of the interested “western” art crowd that looks beyond its borders only as far as both the beyond and the borders are clearly defined within the critical art discourse. In fact, there is more to be read into the title beyond the sequence of its words; it is that their respective meanings only appear through their interrelations. The “African” is the necessary other to be included into the contemporary art system, while the “Contemporary” conversely exists just as a model of inclusiveness, unthinkable without the participation of the “non-western” artist: “Art” cannot be “contemporary” as long as it is restricted to fixed traditions of production or reception that exclude even one kind of diverging artistic practice. But, of course, the focus on the “African” is exclusive, and the contemporaneity of an object is eliminated as soon as it enters a museum; once the opening reception is over, it has become yesterday’s contemporary art. Meschac Gaba uses these incongruities to good effect. His Museum is a museum without its core; it lacks exhibits or a collection, and is nothing more (or less) than the supplemental rooms and facilities of an art space; the shop, the restaurant, the library. Incidentally, these museal “peripheries” are the spaces where – in a traditional museum – exchange and contact between the visitors and the institution happens: goods are bought, food is eaten, discourse is reflected back into the institution as printed matter.
Installation View
Gaba succeeds to set a didactic, unmasking gesture (art and economy, the hegemony of western discourse, etc.) to a playful tone which supports the emancipatory approach; spaces marked by somehow “fake” interaction between visitor and institution, now relieved of a need for (economic!) efficiency, become “truer” places for the exchange of information and knowledge. With its core – exhibits and collection – left to his or her imagination, the visitor entering the museum is forced to reflect each room’s function as a function of his or her ideal museum, and, furthermore, an ideal museum for exhibiting contemporary African art. Thus, the merchandise in the shop is either Merchandise – with a capital M – for its own sake (and the sake of institutional critique), or merchandise for what we expect to see in a Museum of Contemporary African Art. Fortunately, Meschac Gaba knows well what we – the western audience – expect, and, being an enlightened western audience, we take pleasure both in the expected gaudy and arcane “African” art, and in our knowledge of the subversion of our expectations taking place, of the ironic quotation marks applied to the word African: most obviously, Meschac Gaba does not produce African art; his art is nothing else but contemporary, and could be only re-identified with the African continent by the means of a post-colonial narrative – e.g. the figure of the subversive “trickster” – which itself is part of the discourse of the contemporary. While this all is entirely sufficient to constitute a good – perhaps very good – work of art, the question remains if Gaba’s critique, which relies so heavily on the representation of a real or imaginary Africa, would be of any relevance within a local African artistic community, or if – due to its didactic orientation – it is restricted to the audience which is meant to be taught. Furthermore, one might question if the playful material aesthetics, the application of “Contemporary African Art” as a genre, do not subvert the potential for critique itself; Gaba’s collection of international banknotes depicting artists as representatives of national culture is striking enough in itself, and does not have to rely on a juxtaposition with a set of golden lumps, a symbolic element pervading the entire Museum – it makes the installation more interesting, though, or – to hint towards the omnipresent problem of irony within the contemporary – more “interesting”.
