The above link leads down a long dark rabbit hole of post-millenial essentialism. Essentialising what? The ‘Africa’ well-known and loved by popular Western European public culture. This issue of ‘Time Out London’ is dedicated to, and I quote: ‘Food, fashion, music and art: the influence of Africa is felt throughout London, and it's growing. Time Out takes a cross section of the city to see the effect of a continent on a capital’ (my italics)
By pasting a conclusively ‘hot’ semi-naked, black, we can only assume, African, man at centre-site, the ‘critical guide to arts, culture and going on’ does not begin well and the subsequent ‘cross-section’ of African culture in diaspora in London which it purports to explore only lapses into a rehashing common tropes cluttering most of the developed world’s geographical blindspot – exhibiting, yet again something other as the ‘Other’.
The African art section (as my chief interest) provides links with galleries who blatantly state that they present the work only of the African ‘masters’ who have achieved international acclaim. My placing of ‘masters’ in quotations is not to diminish the artistic achievements of individuals such as Cheri Samba and Twins Seven-seven but rather to highlight the perpetual foisting of Western European art historical terminology upon contemporary art practices in other parts of the world. Soap stone sculptures and ritual masks may indeed be considered art objects but what of the video, performance and installation art of African artists still practicing locally?
The food, music and market sections of the issue are dominated by representatives from Nigeria and Western Africa. I think that were the journalists to have done their homework they would have discovered a wealth of other cultural groups living, working and representing a much more layered post-colonial parfait [a running joke has re-named London as ‘Harare North’, due to the countless Zimbabweans taking refuge neath the shades of Wimbeldon stadium]
Comments at the end of the webpage provide the most interest and have been posted by various Africans living abroad. They are a mixed bag, and I would encourage readers of this blog to engage further with those.
My personal gripe stems from two articles I recently read, regarding the display of contemporary African art in European spaces in the early 1990s [‘Inventing the ‘Postcolonial’: Hybridity and Constiuency in Contemporary Curating’, Annie E. Coombes (1992) and ‘Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the Debate on Multiculturalism’, Néstor García Canclini (1994)] which both ask why, more than one hundred years after African artefacts were first presented in the Trocadéro in Paris [the objects which were so infamously inspirational to Picasso], manifestations of contemporary African visual culture continue to be toted in and out of white cubes in a supposed celebration of their ‘Diversity’, which is really just a postmodern way of saying ‘Difference’.
One possibly redeeming feature of this sorry ‘Time Out’ could perhaps be that of ‘Photos of London by the African Diaspora’, allowing a creative platform for individuals to tell visual stories of their London experience. While frighteningly generic in its term this could provide material for some further dialogue. But really, is this 2008?