I have just described to you one of the four or five decent pieces in Africa Remix. I am tempted to stop there. I would like to quit on a positive. But the critic’s task is to deal with the bad as well as the good, so it behoves me to fill you in on the rest of the bleak, drab, graceless, repetitive, irritating, misguided, confusing, unrepresentative and, above all, depressing arrangement of contemporary African art that the Hayward Gallery has put on show under the silly teeny title of Africa Remix. If you’re planning to slit your wrists and need some suitable framing, do it here.
Britain has begun grinding through the gears of a year-long Africa celebration. There are exhibitions, concerts, lectures, retail opportunities, food tastings and all the usual events that get roped into culture fests. On my way to the Hayward, I happened upon a jazz concert by African musicians in the foyer of the Festival Hall. After the exhibition, I rushed back in there, like a drowning man swimming for the surface. I see that many such concerts are planned for the year. Even the great King Sunny Ade is coming to the Festival Hall. Where do I queue? It is always fun around the edges of an international culture fest — at the concerts, the dance-ins, the book readings. Where they invariably go wrong is in their central exhibitions, the big set-piece attempts to give the festival some bottom and a sense of direction. These often have a clear sense of scale, but never a clear sense of purpose. The good intentions are always there, but the map gets drawn as they go along.
The Hayward has set out to mount a comprehensive display of contemporary African art. The whole of Africa is its hunting ground, and the first sentences you read, on the first placard you encounter, prepare you for the worst: “Africa is the most culturally and linguistically diverse continent on earth. It comprises more than 50 countries, with a total population of over 800m. This exhibition features the works of 75 artists from 23 countries across the continent.” According to my back-of-the-catalogue calculations, that leaves 799,999,925 Africans and 27 entire African countries overlooked already. Who, therefore, are we going to encounter? Lots and lots of South Africans, it turns out: 13 of them. The girl with the punchbag, Tracey Rose, is a white South African. There are two Bothas: one born in Pretoria, the other in Durban. Six artists from Johannesburg. Two from Cape Town. It is a huge chunk of the show. And the 27 African countries that aren’t represented must stare across at this mountainous South African presence and wonder what their crime is.
I think I can answer that. Their crime is not making the sort of art you encounter at biennales everywhere, all the time. The South Africans are much better at that. William Kentridge’s famously inventive animations were at the Serpentine a few years ago, and have circled the biennale circuit for decades. Marlene Dumas is here, and her paintings are currently on show at Charles Saatchi’s gallery, as well. It’s not the fact that both are so obviously unrepresentative that rankles most, or even that Dumas lives in Amsterdam and is possibly the most expensive and fashionable painter currently going to auction. The white South African experience should also have a say here. What rankles is that these artists can be seen too easily already. You come to a show such as this hoping for fresh insights, not old favourites.
The other big grouping that unfairly dominates these proceedings is a large francophone contingent from North Africa, which tends to live in Paris. In fact, there are more Parisians in this Africa show than were ever involved in any of the French impressionist exhibitions in Paris: eight of them. They come from Algeria, four from Morocco, three from Cameroon. None of these imbalanced mathematics would matter a fig if such artists didn’t all make the same kind of art. But they do. Half- progressive, half-traditional, post-exotic, post-pleasurable, post- instinctive, it’s an art that reeks of the evening class and the post-structuralist seminar. I need only name the subsections into which this display is divided — History & Identity; City & Land; Body & Soul — and you will sense immediately the crushing, post-imperial drabness of this thinking. By the time I had read the third caption, wittering on hopelessly about “memory and landscape”, I had had enough. And I was only in the second room.
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So, the display is lumpenly and unhealthily PC. It successfully evokes the atmosphere of a conference in Paris on post-colonial identity, but manages to miss out on a gigantic range of other African experiences. Unbelievably, that may not be the worst thing about the show. The worst thing about it is its sheer tedium. The relentless grimness of the displays. The endless heaviness of the aesthetics. The drab textures. The beige moods. Even those proper African artists who offer doses of authentic African insight suffer from this heaviness. It lies, on this evidence, at the very heart of the African experience. And it makes you weep.
Room one makes clear that turning scraps into art is a pancontinental obsession. El Anatsui from Ghana sews thousands of crushed bottle tops into a giant wall hanging. Dilomprizulike from Nigeria collects a garage-load of junk and transforms it into a life-size bus queue. Mozambique’s Titos builds a plane out of packing cases and hangs it from the roof. A few steps ahead, there is an Eiffel Tower welded from discarded lock parts by Gonçalo Mabunda from Mozambique and an armchair he made from unwanted AK-47s. Antonio Ole from Angola gives us the wall of a shantytown sculpted from the wall of a shantytown. Within a few steps of the show’s beginning, we have journeyed across the entire African continent and all we have seen is junk, and a sad effort to transform it. In the exhibition shop, they are even selling dinky watering cans made from reused beer tins and biscuit boxes. Poverty supplies the textures; retail opportunities supply the form.
I would like to like these endless transformations of junk. There are so many of them, so cleverly done. And post-colonial evening classes in identity don’t teach you how to turn a circuit board into a city skyline, as Allan deSouza from Kenya can ingeniously do. Only a hard life teaches you that. But the relentless junk assemblage brings with it a repetitive and feral atmosphere that succeeds not in alerting us to all the natural creativity on show, but manages, instead, to weld the event to gloom. These are Mad Max moods. Harsh. Failed. Worn out. Desperate.
I doubt that Africa Remix sought actively to rub our noses in the problematics of Africa. The show’s title may be ghastly and faux-trendy, but it isn’t meant to be glum. The Identity section sports a couple of jovial attempts at game-playing and mask-wearing that are most welcome. There are even some jokes. Aimé Ntakiyica, of Burundi, photographs himself in lederhosen and a kilt. Samuel Fosso, of the Central African Republic, dresses up as a Mobutu-type chief, and this grateful show uses the results for its publicity posters, because they are vivid and fun.
But Fosso’s fashions are entirely unrepresentative. The most representative work here is Pascale Marthine Tayou’s L’Urbanité rurale, 2004. She is from Cameroon, but works in Belgium. A set of DVD machines, with their packaging newly discarded, show an African village having a road built through it. The chirping of birds alternates with the roar of trucks. The bulldozers cut into the grass and expose stretches of livid red soil that seem to glow. This isn’t road-building, it’s scarring. This isn’t progress, it’s rape.
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Africa Remix is at the Hayward Gallery until April 17