DANIEL LLOYD explores representations of the women of Zimbabwe and finds little to praise In Praise of Women, ArtAfrica’s exhibition of Zimbabwean sculpture, which took place in the gardens of Magdalen College, was a very curious affair indeed. Ostensibly intended as a showcase for indigenous Zimbabwean stonework, it was largely controlled and curated by middle-aged westerners, and the works carried hefty price tags. Apparently a display of folk-art, the pieces seemed strangely derivative, inducing nothing so much as a sense of deja vu. A mass of contradictions. A curate’s egg. The reasons behind the unsatisfactory feelings which one takes away from the exhibition are several, and are perhaps indicative of a wider trend in populist art, particularly that which emerges from Zimbabwe. To most westerners, that country is a blank space on their mental embroidered tea-towel of the cultural map of Africa. It falls vaguely south of the Pharaohs, east of Youssou N’Dour, north of the Rainbow Nation. The tradition of stone sculpture is, ironically for a country whose name translates as “house of stone” in the language of the Shona people who make up a little over four-fifths of its population, rather recent, having taken off around the 1970s. And therein lies the problem. It has, throughout its entire cultural history, been supported and encouraged by westerners and white farmers. Zimbabwe has no great history of tourism, and that has certainly declined in present times. So, in order to attract buyers for these pieces, they must be hawked around the world (this particular exhibition is taking place in Oxford, London, Copenhagen and Uppsala) in a boutique dressed as a museum. Worse still, in order for the work to sell, it must be saleable. It must be user-friendly. Hence the sense of deja-vu: this is “African art” for the lowest common denominator. There are the obligatory big–buttocked earth mamas, faces with vaguely “tribal mask–like” features, and abstract depictions of wombs and the female form. That is not to decry the technique of the sculptors who achieve remarkable effects of texture and colour with the huge geological wealth of Zimbabwe. Nor the setting, which, with the dreary rain of a typical Oxonian summer brought out wonderful tones in the stone that the heat of Harare might not. Sadly the subject matter does not engage with the realities of life. On the one hand, one could argue that the depiction of such elemental subjects as womanhood, birth, or childhood are in some indefinable way universal; but on the other, where is the engagement with rape, incest, prostitution, misery, poverty, pain, queues for bread? This exhibition sanitises the lives of the “women of Zimbabwe” and does them a disservice. It turns them into sitting-room curios, inoffensively genial, un-challengingly joyous. In Praise of Women has received much adulation, yet it is rather patronising; we ought to demand more of our artists. The exhibition ought to be retitled “A Present from Zimbabwe” – we ought to ask ourselves whether “A Present from Eastbourne” would have the same reception. www.artafrica-online.comARCHIVE: 0th Week MT2003
