1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:05,070 Hi, everybody, I really appreciate everybody coming here while it's so beautiful outside and it's going to turn, 2 00:00:05,070 --> 00:00:09,840 I hear, so you're missing the last rays of Sun. 3 00:00:09,840 --> 00:00:18,510 I first want to thank both Miles Lomror and units for inviting me today and for being a part of this of this meeting. 4 00:00:18,510 --> 00:00:20,820 I have a PowerPoint, which I should have opens. 5 00:00:20,820 --> 00:00:33,810 So this research that I'm presenting is mostly research for a new projects, a new project on the history of art economies in VR, in the DRC, 6 00:00:33,810 --> 00:00:45,780 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which I trace sort of craft economies and art economies that emerge around academic arts. 7 00:00:45,780 --> 00:00:50,010 And so the part that I'm going to be talking about is the academic art today. 8 00:00:50,010 --> 00:00:54,330 So I'm not going to be talking about popular culture. I'm actually talking about the opposite. 9 00:00:54,330 --> 00:01:03,720 I'm going to talk about state efforts and the use of state ideologies in attempts to try and control both appropriate and 10 00:01:03,720 --> 00:01:16,410 control a sort of an academic artistic field in Zaire at the time and use that to sort of further the goals of the state. 11 00:01:16,410 --> 00:01:20,820 I don't know how much of you know about sort of the history of Zaire, but this in 1970, 12 00:01:20,820 --> 00:01:25,380 one of which is this a sicko as he came to be called president of the Congo, 13 00:01:25,380 --> 00:01:31,500 declares authenticity or authenticity to be sort of the the state's official ideology. 14 00:01:31,500 --> 00:01:37,110 And the idea was that they were reorienting the country's cultural identity to so-called the 15 00:01:37,110 --> 00:01:44,700 indigenous African values intended to end the cultural alienation caused by the colonial experience. 16 00:01:44,700 --> 00:01:51,540 And so the goal of this new ideology was sort of a cultural revolution in which a new national 17 00:01:51,540 --> 00:01:58,230 authentic Zulu nation would be born out of the values and traditions of pre-colonial Zaire cultures. 18 00:01:58,230 --> 00:02:03,840 And in this paper, I want to address the role of the Mobutu regime's cultural politics of authenticity in the shaping of 19 00:02:03,840 --> 00:02:11,220 a post-colonial modernism in Zaire late 1960s into the late 1970s as a period that I will address. 20 00:02:11,220 --> 00:02:15,330 First, I'm going to talk about the creation of a national modern visual arts, 21 00:02:15,330 --> 00:02:21,270 quote unquote authentic inspiration by a group called Zaire in avant garde east. 22 00:02:21,270 --> 00:02:25,860 And I will talk about the ways in which their work became embedded in the public profile of the state. 23 00:02:25,860 --> 00:02:30,510 And then what I'm going to do second, which is to think more of interest to serve the Copperbelt project, 24 00:02:30,510 --> 00:02:34,290 is that I'm going to investigate the reach of these cultural policies in the Copper 25 00:02:34,290 --> 00:02:42,300 Belt Region through the career of two artists in Lubumbashi to Shinji Brothers. 26 00:02:42,300 --> 00:02:48,750 So most of you will probably know post-independence history of Congo is highly turbulent, 27 00:02:48,750 --> 00:02:56,160 but Botha commits the first military coup fairly early on, but then returns power to a civilian government. 28 00:02:56,160 --> 00:03:02,010 He commits a second military coup in nineteen sixty five, which becomes the start of a reign, 29 00:03:02,010 --> 00:03:07,710 an enormously long reign until 1997, when he removed by by Kabila, 30 00:03:07,710 --> 00:03:10,590 the father of the I was going to say, the father of the current president, 31 00:03:10,590 --> 00:03:16,020 but he's no longer the previous president, the father of the previous president. 32 00:03:16,020 --> 00:03:23,430 But this origin of the Mobutu regime in its structural origin in the colony, you could say, 33 00:03:23,430 --> 00:03:33,300 and its origin in a very undemocratic coup mean that's sort of the narrative of the past is a unique concern to the regime. 34 00:03:33,300 --> 00:03:40,500 And that helps explain why cultural politics is certainly in the beginning of the Mobutu's period were quite important to the regime. 35 00:03:40,500 --> 00:03:42,930 And so authenticity was supposed to help with this. 36 00:03:42,930 --> 00:03:48,330 Central to it was the belief that some suffered from cultural alienation, which manifested itself as, 37 00:03:48,330 --> 00:03:54,180 and I'm quoting an inferiority complex and a negative self-image and which led them to quote, 38 00:03:54,180 --> 00:03:58,500 copying and conforming to colonisation in a foreign model end quote. 39 00:03:58,500 --> 00:04:04,470 But that could be combated, according to the ideology, by a cultural struggle for the right person. 40 00:04:04,470 --> 00:04:10,170 idolisation the rehabilitation and the promotion of national creations and values. 41 00:04:10,170 --> 00:04:18,510 The most visible practises associated with this authentic authenticity were marches and public spectacles that included dancing and singing, 42 00:04:18,510 --> 00:04:27,030 which was known as any martial, political and cultural guttural, which also become the parts of this ideology that become the most reviled by the 43 00:04:27,030 --> 00:04:31,440 population because they're sort of forced to participate in these at a certain point. 44 00:04:31,440 --> 00:04:40,650 But what is also what I think is more known is that during this period, Zaire aeons were required to africanised their names, 45 00:04:40,650 --> 00:04:46,170 so they were required to like, discard their Christian names, africanised their names, africanised their clothing. 46 00:04:46,170 --> 00:04:49,920 Many colonial monuments are removed from the city cityscape. 47 00:04:49,920 --> 00:04:55,680 You can see it's sort of this this effort to or to, you know, turn the page, if you will. 48 00:04:55,680 --> 00:05:02,100 The very vagueness of automaticity also makes it a very powerful rhetorical tool for the regime. 49 00:05:02,100 --> 00:05:06,540 It was simultaneously a new aesthetic vision and a tool for political action, 50 00:05:06,540 --> 00:05:12,570 for the forging of a national culture and for the promoting of centralised state authority over ethnic or cultural divisions. 51 00:05:12,570 --> 00:05:19,230 It was also, as we shall see, the theoretical and political foundation for the creation of a post-colonial modernism. 52 00:05:19,230 --> 00:05:25,560 These cultural politics also found expression and implementation in what Tony Bennett has called the culture complex, 53 00:05:25,560 --> 00:05:29,670 which comprises of and I'm quoting a range of sites in which distinctive forms of 54 00:05:29,670 --> 00:05:35,400 expertise are deployed in making culture as a set of resources for acting on society. 55 00:05:35,400 --> 00:05:39,240 These sites, which include libraries, museums, heritage sites, schools and so on, 56 00:05:39,240 --> 00:05:43,650 but also a range of knowledge, practises and disciplines such as ethnography and art history, 57 00:05:43,650 --> 00:05:50,940 are aimed at bringing about quote calculated changes in conduct by transforming beliefs, customs habits, perceptions and so on. 58 00:05:50,940 --> 00:05:56,580 Most of these institutions and disciplines are connected to particular rationality of government, 59 00:05:56,580 --> 00:05:59,580 as he argues, and in my view, to say here these institutions, 60 00:05:59,580 --> 00:06:09,720 including museums, art schools and National Ballet and National Library and Archives National Cultural Festival, and plans for a national theatre now. 61 00:06:09,720 --> 00:06:13,290 Two of these institutions are going to be central to my talk here. 62 00:06:13,290 --> 00:06:20,820 The first is a museum or museum. The Institute for National Museums. 63 00:06:20,820 --> 00:06:26,400 This is a 2006 photo, and this institute was actually one of the subjects of my first book. 64 00:06:26,400 --> 00:06:29,430 So it pops up in this in this project as well. 65 00:06:29,430 --> 00:06:39,030 It was founded through an agreement with Belgium in 1980, between nineteen sixty nine and 1971 to create a national museum for Congo. 66 00:06:39,030 --> 00:06:43,380 It actually came in response to a request for restitution of the collections of 67 00:06:43,380 --> 00:06:49,230 the African Museum in Belgium that Zaire had had that Congo had done at the time. 68 00:06:49,230 --> 00:06:56,640 And this is what if one of the ways in which Belgium tries to deal with this by offering sort of this collaboration deal. 69 00:06:56,640 --> 00:07:00,510 So Zaire hope to gain the resources and knowhow necessary to reclaim the creation 70 00:07:00,510 --> 00:07:04,500 of knowledge about traditional cultures from Western knowledge production. 71 00:07:04,500 --> 00:07:10,860 The other institution is the Academy of Fine Arts in the capital of Kinshasa. 72 00:07:10,860 --> 00:07:18,990 It has colonial roots. It was founded as an equal look by the brothers of the Christian schools, the Belgian brothers of the Christian schools, 73 00:07:18,990 --> 00:07:24,690 but its renamed academy to Bozak in the 1950s and like many other cultural institutions. 74 00:07:24,690 --> 00:07:31,560 The school was intended to safeguard African cultural traditions from the so-called detrimental influences of colonial modernity. 75 00:07:31,560 --> 00:07:36,180 Although students were allowed to practise new art forms such as painting their 76 00:07:36,180 --> 00:07:40,460 education focussed on artisanal or decorative production and the teaching of Western. 77 00:07:40,460 --> 00:07:48,200 Art history was avoided at all costs during the 1970s, this school becomes nationalised and becomes a state school, 78 00:07:48,200 --> 00:07:52,160 and all of the artists I'm going to discuss in this paper were trained there. 79 00:07:52,160 --> 00:07:59,810 Also, many also did stints at European art schools as spaces where the embodiments of cultural authenticity was preferred, 80 00:07:59,810 --> 00:08:06,020 preserved and practised in museum, and the art school were theoretically able to transfer this authenticity back to a nation 81 00:08:06,020 --> 00:08:10,070 and its population through their exhibitions and educational and artistic activities, 82 00:08:10,070 --> 00:08:15,170 altering the position of historical museum objects in the narrative of progress and creating a space 83 00:08:15,170 --> 00:08:21,290 for a new modernism to emerge from it instead of being near representatives of a culturally pure past. 84 00:08:21,290 --> 00:08:29,840 They now played a role in the making of the modern future of slavery as a nation, as museum objects, historical arts would to help educate a museum, 85 00:08:29,840 --> 00:08:37,550 visiting the public on the richness of pre-colonial cultures now firmly cast in the context of the post-colonial nation states. 86 00:08:37,550 --> 00:08:42,140 Their presence behind the glass of display cases also suggests the deeply altered relationship 87 00:08:42,140 --> 00:08:48,650 between the viewer and the object where the former is transformed into a modern citizen. 88 00:08:48,650 --> 00:08:58,880 Now, one of the bodies of scholarship that this particular chapter addresses is this sort of emerging body of scholarship on African modernism. 89 00:08:58,880 --> 00:09:07,100 A lot of the kind of art that I'm describing here and art that was made in in academies in Senegal and in Nigeria, for example, 90 00:09:07,100 --> 00:09:14,810 but also in southern Africa, has for a long time been regarded as derivative as not interesting enough as modernism in their own right. 91 00:09:14,810 --> 00:09:24,110 That is starting to shift significantly under the influence of writing, much of which is coming from African scholars as well, 92 00:09:24,110 --> 00:09:34,940 who sort of are concerned with sorry, the exclusionary narrative established by the canon of art historical scholarship. 93 00:09:34,940 --> 00:09:40,400 Not only are Western narrative silence on the practise of modernism outside the global north, the critique goes, 94 00:09:40,400 --> 00:09:47,330 they also ignore the fundamental role of colonialism in the encounter of framing of the other in the genesis of modernism. 95 00:09:47,330 --> 00:09:54,680 In response, scholars of Africa have been writing and analysing African modernism by dismantling the false universalism of Western modernity, 96 00:09:54,680 --> 00:10:02,420 which casts these modern isms as derivative. Some instead argue for a plurality in a global city of modernism, 97 00:10:02,420 --> 00:10:10,100 arguing for multiple sensors as opposed to a centre periphery model in understanding modernist art and literature, 98 00:10:10,100 --> 00:10:16,100 which is heavily influenced by sort of the Senegalese example in the Nigerian example is attempting to change the very definitions of 99 00:10:16,100 --> 00:10:25,400 modernism by contesting the exclusionary mechanisms therein and relocating the origin of modernity to the African continent itself, 100 00:10:25,400 --> 00:10:33,740 which is a much more radical move in a way. And it's particularly scholars of architecture that have been very productive in this sense. 101 00:10:33,740 --> 00:10:37,760 There's an older book by Gwendolyn Wright that talks about sort of the French Empire this way. 102 00:10:37,760 --> 00:10:43,310 And then there's work by Johan Le Guy, who works on the Congo, which argues a similar point. 103 00:10:43,310 --> 00:10:49,220 So what is the mobilities modernism that I describe here? And where does it fit into this larger history? 104 00:10:49,220 --> 00:10:53,480 What I call the which is modernism describes the artistic production of a group of artists, 105 00:10:53,480 --> 00:11:04,760 many of whom refer to themselves as the artists who pledged to translate the tenets of ideology and authenticity into a new Zaillian modern arts. 106 00:11:04,760 --> 00:11:09,230 I'm less interested in this paper in the artistic work itself. I'm also not an art historian. 107 00:11:09,230 --> 00:11:14,490 I'm a historian. Then, in the ways in which the Mabuti state used it to create a particular image of itself through the 108 00:11:14,490 --> 00:11:20,300 incorporation of a particular kind of modernist art into the nation's representational heritage. 109 00:11:20,300 --> 00:11:26,420 This strategy carried traces of some of the practises that accompanied late colonial cultural policies in the Congo, 110 00:11:26,420 --> 00:11:29,820 but was both by the Mabuti state and the artists involved. 111 00:11:29,820 --> 00:11:38,690 Very self-consciously conceived of as modernism, Elizabeth Hani theorising of Senegalese modernism is useful for the Zaillian case, 112 00:11:38,690 --> 00:11:45,260 especially for use of stagings of modernity or overlapping in succeeding modern moments of modernity. 113 00:11:45,260 --> 00:11:52,910 The particular modernism, promoted in the early 1970s under Mobutu, is one but one of several stages of modernism, 114 00:11:52,910 --> 00:12:00,920 and specifically its artistic modernity and specifically its artistic extension modernism in Congo Zaire. 115 00:12:00,920 --> 00:12:08,330 It is equally important to recognise, as Hani does, that modernism can be simultaneously hegemonic and enabling. 116 00:12:08,330 --> 00:12:13,250 While Buddhist modernism entails some appropriations from Western modernism as a form of nationalism, 117 00:12:13,250 --> 00:12:18,200 actually that was interpreted, these intersected with local artistic practises. 118 00:12:18,200 --> 00:12:27,350 So I'm going to talk about three things now I'm going to talk about the event that sort of started the avant garde this Zoe as a as a movement. 119 00:12:27,350 --> 00:12:32,060 I'm going to talk about this sort of origin story, and then this is the most important part. 120 00:12:32,060 --> 00:12:37,730 I'm going to talk about their rise in this cultural complex of the Mabuti site here. 121 00:12:37,730 --> 00:12:45,370 All in the early to mid nineteen seventies. And there are a number of strategies that are used, and after that, 122 00:12:45,370 --> 00:12:52,810 I'm going to talk about centralisation and ethnicity in the Kuiper Belt, as I said. 123 00:12:52,810 --> 00:12:58,780 One of the tactics strategies that the Mobutu regime used to gain international 124 00:12:58,780 --> 00:13:04,420 visibility was to organise large or Africa wide or global events in Zaire. 125 00:13:04,420 --> 00:13:09,760 A very famous famous example of this is the rumble in the jungle, the famous, you know, boxing match. 126 00:13:09,760 --> 00:13:15,820 Another example is this is the meeting of, you know, Africa in Kinshasa. 127 00:13:15,820 --> 00:13:23,320 But a cultural example is that he invited the International Art Critics Association to hold their 1973 conference in Kinshasa, 128 00:13:23,320 --> 00:13:29,260 and it was the very first time that this association has met outside of the West. 129 00:13:29,260 --> 00:13:34,150 And it was also the first international cultural event organised by Mobutu, 130 00:13:34,150 --> 00:13:42,400 simultaneously creating an international audience in Zaire and local and a national audience from a ruthless international role. 131 00:13:42,400 --> 00:13:51,040 So this conference was important for several reasons. First, because he uses it to draw attention to his politics of restitution, 132 00:13:51,040 --> 00:13:56,320 his demand for restitution of these collections from from Belgium, he actually gives a speech there, 133 00:13:56,320 --> 00:14:00,640 which is sort of a practise speech for the one that he gives at the United Nations a couple of months later, 134 00:14:00,640 --> 00:14:05,770 which, amongst other things, discusses this topic of restitution. 135 00:14:05,770 --> 00:14:15,350 Second, it's also the occasion of a big exhibition both of historical art and of modern art in Kinshasa. 136 00:14:15,350 --> 00:14:24,110 So it ventured into the area of slavery and modern art. The exhibition was a lot less elaborately produced than the historical art exhibition. 137 00:14:24,110 --> 00:14:33,770 Most of the participants belonged either to the Art Academy in Kinshasa or its counterparts in Magashi. 138 00:14:33,770 --> 00:14:37,340 It wasn't received with a lot of enthusiasm by the foreign press. 139 00:14:37,340 --> 00:14:41,030 But a closer look at the way in which modern art was defined and received nonetheless 140 00:14:41,030 --> 00:14:45,920 reveals much about how national heritage was perceived and valued in the early 1970s, 141 00:14:45,920 --> 00:14:53,660 and under what circumstances modern art could be defined as authentic. Could it fulfil the same functions historical Zaire and art was forced into? 142 00:14:53,660 --> 00:15:04,430 Or was it a more resistance category? So there is a colonial history to this emergence of this modernism that I'm not going to focus on here. 143 00:15:04,430 --> 00:15:10,610 But in the 1950s in particular, you sort of see a movement which is led by part of the white elite in Kinshasa, 144 00:15:10,610 --> 00:15:21,110 particular to create this modern African arts whereby you whereby students of the academy were allowed to practise Western art forms like painting. 145 00:15:21,110 --> 00:15:26,420 But their work had to remain inspired by what was called the Bantu spirit. 146 00:15:26,420 --> 00:15:33,920 So that is sort of the the genealogy of what we are seeing in the nineteen seventies. 147 00:15:33,920 --> 00:15:42,560 There is it. We don't have images of the exhibition anymore, but there was a catalogue and this was the catalogue. 148 00:15:42,560 --> 00:15:50,510 The cover shows a red painting by painter Cheng Barghouti, which was one of the Shinji brothers from Lubumbashi. 149 00:15:50,510 --> 00:15:56,420 Two of the artists from the Bashi. His official name is Barnaby, but here he calls himself Sensibility, 150 00:15:56,420 --> 00:16:03,830 in which the lanky figure of a quote unquote traditional African kneels beside what looks like a glowing statue while extending a supplicating has. 151 00:16:03,830 --> 00:16:07,940 Right inside the cover is a picture of Mobutu and the image of a statue entitled. 152 00:16:07,940 --> 00:16:11,330 Mm hmm. So the militants buy the sculpture Leonel. 153 00:16:11,330 --> 00:16:18,140 The statue depicts a male African figure striding forward while clutching a burning torch with the arms stretched upward. 154 00:16:18,140 --> 00:16:25,700 Very masculine imagery. These few images encapsulated much of the spirit in which modern art was presented at the conference. 155 00:16:25,700 --> 00:16:31,850 Seemingly inspired by a certain interpretation of tradition, combative of its advocacy of so-called authenticity, 156 00:16:31,850 --> 00:16:40,430 and associated with the new states which paid for the catalogue, the organisation of the exhibition and has commissioned the militants the statue. 157 00:16:40,430 --> 00:16:47,390 So authentic modern art was grounded in the traditional while attempting to circumvent colonialism. 158 00:16:47,390 --> 00:16:53,570 However, state sanctioned modern as a year in art ended up with a philosophy that could be traced back to the late colonial era, 159 00:16:53,570 --> 00:16:59,540 promoting art of a modern or western form, but with an authentic inspiration. 160 00:16:59,540 --> 00:17:05,990 However, there was very little in this art that impressed the foreign press at this exhibition. 161 00:17:05,990 --> 00:17:11,570 The reviewer for art African Wear regretted the quote insufficiencies and contradictions. 162 00:17:11,570 --> 00:17:16,250 The Negro artists seemed to have a lot of trouble escaping a certain totemic exoticism, 163 00:17:16,250 --> 00:17:26,060 or the attraction of elongated figures circa nineteen five or even more so an expression of garish colours or else a faint, abstract painting style. 164 00:17:26,060 --> 00:17:32,000 What to say to these artists? They have to find their own painting style beyond imitation and quotes, 165 00:17:32,000 --> 00:17:38,120 and that is very much the way in which for a long time they were regarded in art historical. 166 00:17:38,120 --> 00:17:43,220 These African art, these African modern isms were described in art historical material. 167 00:17:43,220 --> 00:17:52,520 The New York Times wrote that the exhibit contained a quote Toe the line imitation of European and American Modernism and greeting Card Africanism. 168 00:17:52,520 --> 00:17:59,210 So in response to this criticism, a group of artists united under the name of the avant garde, etc. in their manifesto. 169 00:17:59,210 --> 00:18:04,730 And I'm going to put it up here. I'm not going to read all of it, but you can underline some important parts of it. 170 00:18:04,730 --> 00:18:10,490 They called for the country's ancestral heritage to serve as a solid basis for the creation of an arts quote, 171 00:18:10,490 --> 00:18:15,050 blessed with a young and animated with a youngbloods and animated by magic spirits. 172 00:18:15,050 --> 00:18:19,100 We wish to have our art recover its autonomy and its intrinsic personality 173 00:18:19,100 --> 00:18:23,870 through a brutal disposition of all stereotypical formulas of foreign origin. 174 00:18:23,870 --> 00:18:34,910 The group included the sculptor Leo, also trained in Austria and at the academy and recruited by Mobutu to teach at the academy. 175 00:18:34,910 --> 00:18:40,250 The sculptor Tumba and then the painter Schlemmer Hussein Mavhinga and the ceramicist von and on bass. 176 00:18:40,250 --> 00:18:44,840 And they have the support of the head of the Siberian Art Critic Association, 177 00:18:44,840 --> 00:18:50,300 Silverstone Buddy Banga named winner who becomes an important figure here with the exception of Buddy Banga. 178 00:18:50,300 --> 00:18:57,800 All of these artists have spent time at the academy at some point in their careers, and many of them became teachers there. 179 00:18:57,800 --> 00:19:03,620 I'm going to show you just a couple of images and I apologise for the bad quality of the photos, 180 00:19:03,620 --> 00:19:12,500 but they're often photos of photos or, you know, photos of scans because a lot of these original works are difficult to locate. 181 00:19:12,500 --> 00:19:16,250 It's different. I'll just speak of a visual language that united the work of these artists, 182 00:19:16,250 --> 00:19:21,740 most of their work in this period was heavily figurative, but influenced by a language of abstraction, 183 00:19:21,740 --> 00:19:28,010 sculpture, painting and mosaics, and appear to be influenced by early European avant garde in their use of flat, 184 00:19:28,010 --> 00:19:30,410 angular areas in the portrayal of bodies. 185 00:19:30,410 --> 00:19:38,150 Many of the artists I spoke with do not see their adoption of such European modernist language as appropriation on their part, 186 00:19:38,150 --> 00:19:42,320 since African sculpture was a source of inspiration for this visual language to begin with. 187 00:19:42,320 --> 00:19:49,490 So they essentially sort of claim to be the origin sort of the original practise, the practitioners of this, this kind of art. 188 00:19:49,490 --> 00:19:53,180 So where, according to the artist, did authenticity reside? 189 00:19:53,180 --> 00:20:01,340 This question often elicits vague answers about inspiration, but there are some clear patterns in the themes and subjects of the work. 190 00:20:01,340 --> 00:20:08,300 Lanky male figures with generic quote unquote traditional attributes like spear spears and shields figure strongly, 191 00:20:08,300 --> 00:20:18,080 as does the opposite female forms at times abstracted often in rural settings or engaged in activities and considered OK. 192 00:20:18,080 --> 00:20:28,640 I can do that to be female, so markets are dancing, which, as I said, was also a trove of these authenticity performances, right? 193 00:20:28,640 --> 00:20:34,040 There are very few pieces that, Oh, I love this picture, by the way. 194 00:20:34,040 --> 00:20:38,600 So this is a slightly older picture. This is legal in his updo. 195 00:20:38,600 --> 00:20:41,990 He's probably the most successful of these artists in the long term. 196 00:20:41,990 --> 00:20:47,600 And he actually died just just two weeks ago, and there was this huge event in Kinshasa for for his for his burial. 197 00:20:47,600 --> 00:20:52,040 So he's somebody considered to be very important. 198 00:20:52,040 --> 00:20:59,030 But very of the few of these pieces are actually, can you make clear connexions to certain pieces of historical art? 199 00:20:59,030 --> 00:21:04,670 This is one of the few ones that I know of the torso, and it's connected or it's inspired by the, 200 00:21:04,670 --> 00:21:12,770 I guess, a sculpture and the guess they glorification. And you can see this is so this is the his sculpture. 201 00:21:12,770 --> 00:21:17,330 This is a sculpture in his living room, so actually hasn't been yet. This sculpture in his living room was a bad picture. 202 00:21:17,330 --> 00:21:20,660 So. So I give you an example of a picture that's a little bit clearer. 203 00:21:20,660 --> 00:21:25,100 So that's the kind of statue it was inspired by. He's not not and then gets it. 204 00:21:25,100 --> 00:21:35,460 So there's there's not a connexion there. So one of the impediments to deeper envelop development of their philosophy and 205 00:21:35,460 --> 00:21:39,600 artistic process might have been the institutionalisation that they underwent. 206 00:21:39,600 --> 00:21:43,440 Their movement fizzled by 1977. Some members left notably, 207 00:21:43,440 --> 00:21:52,410 notably Bamba and others regrouped under the name of love actually and continued to work along the same lines as they had before, 208 00:21:52,410 --> 00:21:55,470 although it resulted in financial and professional success for some. 209 00:21:55,470 --> 00:22:02,340 The process of state appropriation that occurred appears to have stifled artistic expression and evolution. 210 00:22:02,340 --> 00:22:06,930 And I want to take a closer look at that sort of process of appropriation, 211 00:22:06,930 --> 00:22:12,630 which was which was at times a mutual process and the way in which they become embedded in sort of state representations. 212 00:22:12,630 --> 00:22:23,170 This is bulma. This is an example of the kind of ceramics that he produced. 213 00:22:23,170 --> 00:22:31,360 He also didn't say so this is at the Department of Water in Kinshasa, it's still there one. 214 00:22:31,360 --> 00:22:36,700 So there a particular ways in which they become established. 215 00:22:36,700 --> 00:22:40,720 There is their role in the museum collection that I'm going to talk about a little bit. 216 00:22:40,720 --> 00:22:47,380 There is their sort of role in a Siberian written canon on modern art. 217 00:22:47,380 --> 00:22:57,130 There is their role in the arts academy and in sort of their role in the public space. 218 00:22:57,130 --> 00:23:04,870 The museum gets a department of modern art. It's led by Buddy Buddy Binga, the arts critic, and it starts collecting modern art. 219 00:23:04,870 --> 00:23:10,240 What it collects is almost exclusively the work of these modernists. 220 00:23:10,240 --> 00:23:19,240 By this time, however, there is another sort of art movement popular art movement in Congo that most of us are much more more familiar 221 00:23:19,240 --> 00:23:25,450 with those very colourful paintings by the popular painters as they're often called or the or the urban painters, 222 00:23:25,450 --> 00:23:31,150 as some call them. Surely somebody is one of the famous examples right here, and they were also, 223 00:23:31,150 --> 00:23:36,130 you know, it's a movement that was very clearly visible on the copper belt as well. 224 00:23:36,130 --> 00:23:41,640 They are seen as sort of outside the state, 225 00:23:41,640 --> 00:23:46,090 sort of pushing these modernist sort of in response in part to these popular artists because 226 00:23:46,090 --> 00:23:53,650 they're gaining traction out in the exterior sort of outside of the country as true Syrian artists. 227 00:23:53,650 --> 00:23:58,250 And this this sort of the state moves to sort of combat that. 228 00:23:58,250 --> 00:24:01,420 And so the museum actually only collects the modernist. 229 00:24:01,420 --> 00:24:08,710 As I said, they're not allowed to collect the popular painters, which as a consequence means that the museum organises all these exhibitions abroad. 230 00:24:08,710 --> 00:24:15,640 What gets exhibited abroad are these modernist, at least by by the museum. 231 00:24:15,640 --> 00:24:25,810 The other thing that happens is that I said, there's sort of a canon in the art historical canon created often by these avant garde, these themselves. 232 00:24:25,810 --> 00:24:33,110 But Dibango becomes a prolific writer and actually as well, he writes on sort of the history of these avant garde. 233 00:24:33,110 --> 00:24:39,380 Just as well as I said, this art gets used in exhibitions. 234 00:24:39,380 --> 00:24:43,840 I'm going to skip ahead a little bit because I don't want to run out of time to talk about the copper belt, 235 00:24:43,840 --> 00:24:49,300 so state and presidential patronage played a crucial role in the development of these artists. 236 00:24:49,300 --> 00:24:51,160 The article, to me is very important. 237 00:24:51,160 --> 00:24:59,420 As I had said before, almost all of them become appointed as teachers and they have, you know, and continue to play for a long time. 238 00:24:59,420 --> 00:25:05,320 A baby girl at the academy, there's numerous art historical publications, 239 00:25:05,320 --> 00:25:10,600 and another important outlet for state patronage was its use of the politics of 240 00:25:10,600 --> 00:25:15,040 this place and space in the monumental ization of the work of these artists. 241 00:25:15,040 --> 00:25:20,980 As I said, one of the things that the military regime had done was the removal of these colonial monuments. 242 00:25:20,980 --> 00:25:25,690 Several of them are replaced with works. So this is one of the. 243 00:25:25,690 --> 00:25:34,310 I'm going to skip this. This is one of the examples of this, again, is a statue created by earlier, 244 00:25:34,310 --> 00:25:42,530 and it's put in place of where the Stanley statue was in Kinshasa, Iwo Jima, which is sort of an interesting side of itself in the city. 245 00:25:42,530 --> 00:25:47,660 But so their presence in very public spaces, on squares, their work on squares in the city of Kinshasa, 246 00:25:47,660 --> 00:25:54,200 but also on a lot of new buildings that are built in this period. 247 00:25:54,200 --> 00:26:01,610 Almost all of these buildings built by the state or affiliated organisations and institutions are built by foreign architects. 248 00:26:01,610 --> 00:26:11,930 But you almost always see these modernists being asked to sort of almost paint cover that up as sort of, you know, create this decoration on these, 249 00:26:11,930 --> 00:26:22,070 on these buildings that africanised these buildings or that sort of stimulated the process of zero zation of these buildings. 250 00:26:22,070 --> 00:26:29,690 I think you have another example. Yeah, this is one of Yola outside the door to a theatre. 251 00:26:29,690 --> 00:26:33,530 This is another one. And it's not just a state that does this. 252 00:26:33,530 --> 00:26:38,990 Other institutions, as I said, sort of start to do this as well in emulation. 253 00:26:38,990 --> 00:26:48,680 This is a statue at the entrance of the bank commerciales it was which was commissioned from the from early also as well by the bank to be put there. 254 00:26:48,680 --> 00:26:50,000 So we get this policy sort of. 255 00:26:50,000 --> 00:26:59,270 The state patronage is emulated by the Siberian elites and I don't have time for anecdotes, but interesting anecdotes since we can call. 256 00:26:59,270 --> 00:27:03,890 Or have you heard of Cintiq and the Hall of Fame is he's one of the most famous. 257 00:27:03,890 --> 00:27:09,290 One of the things he's famous for is is as a contemporary art collector on the African continent. 258 00:27:09,290 --> 00:27:14,390 His father, who was the director of the movie movement as bank as it said, 259 00:27:14,390 --> 00:27:20,180 actually started collecting art in this period and started also with the modernists and then went on to art historical arts. 260 00:27:20,180 --> 00:27:24,830 So that theme and began the collection has its origins here in this time period. 261 00:27:24,830 --> 00:27:30,140 Actually, then there is, and this is very important, and I don't have a whole lot of time to talk about this. 262 00:27:30,140 --> 00:27:32,510 But then there is cultural diplomacy. 263 00:27:32,510 --> 00:27:39,740 These are the artists that get on the aeroplane that are invited to get on the aeroplane with Mobutu when he goes to China, for example. 264 00:27:39,740 --> 00:27:48,530 And the interesting thing is that this this has some real effects, and this tells us a lot about how we write about these African modernism. 265 00:27:48,530 --> 00:27:56,300 So because we look at how they circulate in the global north, we we don't look at how they circulate in the global south because, for example, 266 00:27:56,300 --> 00:28:04,760 some of these artists have commissions in China and continue to have commissions in China for quite for for many decades, actually. 267 00:28:04,760 --> 00:28:08,060 So our sort of view is skewed there as well. 268 00:28:08,060 --> 00:28:16,070 But it is through sort of this accompanying of Mobutu on these visits that they are able to sort of broaden their audience that way. 269 00:28:16,070 --> 00:28:22,220 OK, so let's talk about of authenticity of the cover, but these are the Shenmue brothers. 270 00:28:22,220 --> 00:28:25,040 They're actually call. Their name is Becca. 271 00:28:25,040 --> 00:28:38,660 Their mother was a local woman from Albertville at the time, and their father was a may be former missionary, 272 00:28:38,660 --> 00:28:47,210 very eccentric figure, but who did sort of occupy himself with sort of the fate of his, of his children. 273 00:28:47,210 --> 00:28:54,000 And they are sent through these connexions with another missionary, Mark Orlando, who was the director of the Art Academy in Kinshasa. 274 00:28:54,000 --> 00:28:57,290 So their sense of Kinshasa to the academy, they're so they're educated, 275 00:28:57,290 --> 00:29:01,370 they're in the 1950s, so they're contemporaries of many of these avant garde artists. 276 00:29:01,370 --> 00:29:08,270 And although they were never part of the movement, they played a central role in the reach of her Buddhist cultural politics into the mining belt. 277 00:29:08,270 --> 00:29:14,780 Although early in their career, they benefited from the support of a number of missionaries as well as French ex-pats. 278 00:29:14,780 --> 00:29:19,970 They distanced themselves from them as soon as soon after independence. 279 00:29:19,970 --> 00:29:23,570 I could talk about their work a little bit. I'm going to skip that part, but you can. 280 00:29:23,570 --> 00:29:31,790 You can look at it. Despite encouragement of the presidential office to relocate their workshops to Kinshasa in the early 1970s, 281 00:29:31,790 --> 00:29:36,890 they maintained a certain level of political and financial independence by remaining in Lubumbashi, 282 00:29:36,890 --> 00:29:41,570 although they did benefit from the state patronage and cultural diplomacy of the Mobutu regime, 283 00:29:41,570 --> 00:29:47,370 thanks to carefully maintained gallery presence and a network in the capital that opened their own gallery in the capital. 284 00:29:47,370 --> 00:29:50,150 Actually, in their self-representation, 285 00:29:50,150 --> 00:29:57,230 they lean heavily on the evolution of their branding from the brothers as they call themselves originally to the brothers Shinji, 286 00:29:57,230 --> 00:30:04,550 which was the name of their grandfather on their mother's side. In Canuto Shaniya's autobiography, The Story of Their Name changed just told us. 287 00:30:04,550 --> 00:30:13,370 Following inspecting their work in 1968 on a 1968 visit to Lumumba, Mobutu, misled by their European name, 288 00:30:13,370 --> 00:30:20,450 enquired why he was not being shown the work of Congolese artists, as Canuto tells it. 289 00:30:20,450 --> 00:30:24,900 This was a bit of a watershed moment, and upon reflection, they changed their name. 290 00:30:24,900 --> 00:30:30,910 So this story does just. This started this a couple of things. 291 00:30:30,910 --> 00:30:37,000 One, it has the brothers participating in authenticity well before it becomes a state ideology too. 292 00:30:37,000 --> 00:30:45,280 It does associates them with a spirit of authenticity without associating it with its face as an ultimately repressive state ideology. 293 00:30:45,280 --> 00:30:45,640 Three. 294 00:30:45,640 --> 00:30:53,290 Mobutu is in there origin story, but in reality, I was able to find that they don't actually change their name and since 1973, when they have to. 295 00:30:53,290 --> 00:30:58,600 So this is sort of a story that the story tells us about their pragmatism when it came to politics. 296 00:30:58,600 --> 00:31:06,220 But the fact that they were still telling it in the mid 2000s also tells us something about their allegiance to a certain idea of authenticity. 297 00:31:06,220 --> 00:31:12,490 Like many of these artists, actually, they benefit, so they benefit from this culture complex. 298 00:31:12,490 --> 00:31:18,010 They participate in a lot of these exhibitions that the that the museum organises. 299 00:31:18,010 --> 00:31:27,670 They're in the museum collection they teach at the academy, but in Lubumbashi, not in Kinshasa, they're in the national collection. 300 00:31:27,670 --> 00:31:31,600 What they're less active in is sort of these public pieces. 301 00:31:31,600 --> 00:31:40,960 They don't do as much of these public commissions as the others do. They have a much broader feel, though they do sculpture. 302 00:31:40,960 --> 00:31:46,450 They do these sort of copper beaten copper sculptures, if you will. 303 00:31:46,450 --> 00:31:51,880 That's that you see emerging around in around the 1970s and a little bit earlier in the copper belt. 304 00:31:51,880 --> 00:31:55,270 So they sort of range a little bit more, and that also makes them earn more money. 305 00:31:55,270 --> 00:31:57,580 They had quite a large workshop. 306 00:31:57,580 --> 00:32:03,040 So in many ways, the Mabuti state had refurbished the structures of the colonial state spatially, culturally and politically, 307 00:32:03,040 --> 00:32:09,190 although it sought to construct the impression of a rupture with a colonial past through the ideology of automaticity. 308 00:32:09,190 --> 00:32:17,380 This intersected with an intellectual and arts on artistic impetus that was present in Silurian intellectual and artistic circles. 309 00:32:17,380 --> 00:32:21,880 Avant garde movements elsewhere produce models for rupture in the production of modernism. 310 00:32:21,880 --> 00:32:23,110 But in the case of Zaire, 311 00:32:23,110 --> 00:32:30,910 the dual promotional and politically constraining frameworks provided by the regime resulted in an appropriation and narrowing of their efforts. 312 00:32:30,910 --> 00:32:35,170 Authenticity This appeal existed mostly in the first half of the 1970s. 313 00:32:35,170 --> 00:32:39,910 By the middle of the decade, the corrupt and authoritarian nature of the Mabuti regime was fully appearance, 314 00:32:39,910 --> 00:32:46,150 and the marginalisation of the Ministry of Culture and Arts led to a lack of resources for cultural institutions. 315 00:32:46,150 --> 00:32:55,540 The brutal regime launched the ideology of Mobutu ism, which largely supplanted at the earlier focus on culture with a focus on the figure of Mobutu. 316 00:32:55,540 --> 00:33:03,250 And if if talking to these artists sort of, you know, indeed, from about 2016 to today, 317 00:33:03,250 --> 00:33:09,160 they talk with a lot of nostalgia about this earlier period and about the promise that they saw in authenticity. 318 00:33:09,160 --> 00:33:14,740 But they also talk about their great disappointment in that it was much more narrow than they were imagining. 319 00:33:14,740 --> 00:33:23,200 And it was it was sort of the statelet effort and they were given not given a whole lot of space to sort of do with it what they wanted to do with it. 320 00:33:23,200 --> 00:33:30,040 While this idea in modernist strive to comply with Western notions of artistic authenticity as the product of a creative singularity, 321 00:33:30,040 --> 00:33:36,370 they were doomed to fail in the eyes of most foreigners. Had it not been for the support of the state, there would have been swallowed by history. 322 00:33:36,370 --> 00:33:44,710 The publication's monuments and their presence in the museum collection and the at the academy kept them from sinking into obscurity. 323 00:33:44,710 --> 00:33:51,580 While for Western modernism, the appropriation of African art and and its authenticity have been crucial. 324 00:33:51,580 --> 00:33:55,450 Almost any adaptation of so-called Western techniques or topics by African artists 325 00:33:55,450 --> 00:34:00,340 was considered inauthentic or an inferior mimicry of European artistic traditions, 326 00:34:00,340 --> 00:34:06,040 despite their limited international acclaim. These modernists gained a permanence on their artistic scene in Zaire through their 327 00:34:06,040 --> 00:34:09,820 dominance in the official art historical record and the National Museum Collection. 328 00:34:09,820 --> 00:34:17,140 Their work's presence in public spaces and their powerful positions at the Art Academy sort of have some longevity. 329 00:34:17,140 --> 00:34:23,830 Although their legacy at the academy has been very contested since the late 1990s, there's been a lot of sort of generational conflicts there. 330 00:34:23,830 --> 00:34:28,630 The traces of their presence are still visible in the city and have even been renewed in some cases. 331 00:34:28,630 --> 00:34:34,990 For example, Leela made monuments for the city and for the states until his death a number of weeks ago, 332 00:34:34,990 --> 00:34:40,090 and Bomba chronicles the history of the artist wistfully recalling the quote Political 333 00:34:40,090 --> 00:34:44,890 Revolutionary Art of the Buddhist Revolution until his death two years ago. 334 00:34:44,890 --> 00:34:50,200 The centralisation of the academic art scene around the academy in Kinshasa continues to this day. 335 00:34:50,200 --> 00:34:52,210 However, like the Shinji brothers, 336 00:34:52,210 --> 00:35:00,490 artists from Katanga and elsewhere need to circulate in artistic circles in Kinshasa in order to gain national and international traction. 337 00:35:00,490 --> 00:35:01,162 Thank you.