Art in Senegal

Contemporary African art suffers from the attention given to what most deem “traditional” styles and media. Masks and tribal creations dominate galleries and markets, and few people get beyond handicrafts to see modern and contemporary works, even when they’re looking for it.

I encountered this problem in Senegal in my small search for modern art. I saw plenty of arresting masks and lovely weavings, oodles of awful paintings being peddled to tourists (some are painstakingly and morbidly made out of butterfly wings), and some lousy modern art in a downtown gallery. I visited the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noir, which is known as the IFAN Museum. Here gorgeous masks, instruments and traditional statuettes and costumes are gathering dust - I was the only visitor during the hour I spent in the museum. My hosts, after two years in Dakar, had never even heard of the place.

And then there was the public art. Public art has always fascinated me because of the not-so-secret idea behind its installation: “Everyone who walks by needs to look at this!” When public art is instituted by the state, then, it takes on an educational and even pedantic meaning; when the public erects art independent of the state, it can reject and challenge official mores. In Dakar, the monuments and graffiti were fantastic, although for different reasons.

The most dramatic monument in Dakar, and perhaps across Africa (this is its intention, anyway) towers over the road from the center of city to Ngor. Its unsubtle title is “Monument of the African Renaissance.” The sculpture is 164 feet tall (the Statue of Liberty is only stretches 151 feet) and depicts a stylized African family as it reaches, with equal parts yearning and determination, into the future.

Or at least that might be the propagandistic type of reading the government intends. In reality, as this article points out, the project has been controversial and unpopular. I queried every cab driver with whom I could communicate about the statue and none was particularly positive. One man said he hoped the monument would draw tourists, but he didn’t sound too convinced. Others railed against the cost of such a venture (the Economist estimates this cost to be $27 million, and it’s being paid not to local craftsmen but to a North Korean company*) in a poor country, in an expensive city where most natives can’t even afford to live. One man I spoke to was just dismissive: the monument is stupid, in his estimation, and he didn’t want to talk about it.

Interestingly, none of the Senegalese people with whom I chatted about the monument mentioned anything of concern about the actual design, or anything at all about the composition for that matter. Sure, these are nearly naked people, but how is that different from any other art works on sale in the market? The topic was raised, finally, by another American I met at my hostel in Saint-Louis. Muslims object to the portrayal of half-naked women, he informed me. In my very informal conversations on the subject, no one mentioned anything about this problem, so I remain unconvinced. Westerners love to say that Muslims can’t stand nudity whereas a lot of Muslims buy modern art and wear bikinis.

Other public monuments lined the road from the neighborhood in which I stayed to downtown Dakar, but their meanings were less overt and their scale less imposing. The most thrilling public art, however, was the graffiti that adorned a road’s retaining walls.

I passed this graffiti several times in a taxi before walking back over to look at it longer, and ended up crossing the busy street and clambering atop the concrete divider to photograph it, much to the befuddlement of passing drivers. Maybe if tourist shops sold paintings as beautiful as these I’dve bought some modern art rather than carting home various masks of dubious origin. For, despite my concern with looking past the stereotypical conceptualization of African art, masks are still beautiful. . . and monuments are too large to take home as souvenirs.

*Someone should write a book about this trend: the monuments and museums being built by North Koreans across the Africa and the Muslim world. Cairo’s military museum contains many slightly skewed paintings and sculptures by North Korean artists, and the city also boasts a huge monument to one of the Israeli wars, complete with tanks and airplanes, which was also built by North Koreans. I believe that Syria houses a similar monument. Here is one article I found on a preliminary search, which contains the following passage:

“Only the North Koreans could build my statue,” says Mr. Wade, sitting in a red velvet chair in his palace. Moreover, they offer monuments at a good rate, he says: “I had no money.”

An international monument-building business! Outsourcing patrimony! Who knew?