Scott Mitchell
designer, historian, and critic

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Hal Foster’s “The Artist as Ethnographer” and Ikem Stanley Okoye’s “Ojeikere and the Architecture(s) of Photography”

Response — Hal Foster’s “The Artist as Ethnographer” and Ikem Stanley Okoye’s “Ojeikere and the Architecture(s) of Photography”

In this week’s response, I would like to focus on the projection of artistic, critical, and/or historical practice onto the other. This is intended both as a close reading of Hal Foster’s “The Artist as Ethnographer” and as a cautious critique of Ikem Stanley Okoye’s “Ojeikere and the Architecture(s) of Photography”.

Foster refers in his opening to Walter Benjamin’s “The Artist as Producer”, wherein Benjamin argued that the artist, in an act of radical political intervention, should position themself among the proletariat as a challenge to bourgeois culture and artistic practice. Our discussion, however, is drawn primarily out of Foster’s 1995 concern with a new critical model among artists and the art community. Foster argues that while the “object of primary contestation” has not changed—the advanced art world is still concerned with exclusively defining “art”, its audience or community, and its identity—it is the ethnic “other”, rather than the proletariat, with whom the art world is aligned. Despite this shift, Foster continues to argue that Benjamin’s model has persisted in three important ways, that the political transformation is always located elsewhere in the other—in the old model, the proletariat, now the “oppressed postcolonial, subaltern, or subcultural”—that this other is outside of self, and third, that access to the other is dependent on one’s self-identification as other.1 Complicating this third point, particularly, is the realist assumption, wherein the other possesses an authentic truth lacking in oneself, and the primitivist fantasy, wherein the other has exclusive access to some primitive, yet subversive, process. It is the political truth and power of such alterity—a unique authenticity and subversive process—that draws the artists to self-other.

It is not the individual artist, however, that Foster is primarily concerned with, but the threat of structural “ethnographic self-fashioning”, ideological patronage, and the subsequent rise, rather than the undermining, of anthropological authority.2 As anthropology becomes “prized as the science of alterity” and the “lingua franca in artistic practice and critical discourse”, it enables the artist to play ethnographer, reading and writing entire cultures as easily-consumable aesthetic texts.3

Foster argues that this is not unique to art. He does, however, focus on site-specific art, where “authenticity, originality, and singularity” of the community, neighborhood, and institution, are prized as “sited values to develop”, spectacle, and cultural capital.4 The examples he does provide, in the main text and in the footnotes, focus primarily on institutional imports, either of an artist into a community, or a community into the field of art. In one case, it is through institutional structuring of the project through limited engagement that the artist eases into an ethnographic refashioning of “readymade” participants.5 In another, social goods are coopted by the artist and literally remixed as a cultural capital.6

Foster is no less concerned with the critic and historian’s role, however. In the end, Foster concludes that though there is the possibility for innovative collaboration, artists, critics, and historians too often find themselves in the “impossible place” of projecting ones own practice onto the other.7 For critics and historians specifically, we are instead left to question our own role and the role of the field itself on, presumably, a case-by-case basis. This is a daunting occupation, particularly in African photography, as we have repeatedly discovered, due to the confused and poorly understood history of photographic practice among global art critics and historians and that African photography-as-art has passed into the expanded field of culture is not in question. Unlike Foster’s examples, however, what we are left to question is not new commissions, nor new works, but rather institutional and critical insertion into the collection, curation, and historiography of existing work. Complicating the issue further is the critical question of the identification of art, and the construction of a canon.

Ikem Stanley Okoye’s essay addresses this issue of canonicity through the work of wide range of works by Nigerian photographer J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere. Okoye argues that in the early writing of African photography’s history, only a small number of “salvaged” artists, “photographic moments”, aesthetics, and subject matter were selected for critical consideration. Ojeikere, he argues, was one of a few photographs how has been able to break free from such narrowed interests through a practice that shifted between genres and styles, particularly between “documentary” and art.8 To have done this, Okoye relies on two important definitions within Ojeikere’s work, that his early work is of a kind, process, and aesthetic quality different from his later, a point that we will return to shortly.

Ojeikere, as Okoye explains, is most widely regarded for his decades-long project of photographing, in rigorous repetition, the hairstyles and scarves of Nigeria’s young, urban women. The skillful depiction of the anonymous subject, and mastery of visual distortion, dazzling structural qualities, and careful control of light are all well-understood in this work and do much to place Ojeikere among the most important modern Nigerian photographers, even if he has been a late arrival to the discussion. It is, however, his earlier work, particularly the early architectural commissions, that Okoye is most interested in addressing. Okoye reads in this work an open exploration of themes, granted and understood to be be present in his later work, to which he ascribes an intentionality: “I also believe that Ojeikere intentionally signals the connections between these categories, and in this regard we need to recognize him as a pioneer.”9 The risk, here, of course, is in ascribing to the early architectural work some cultural value, a commodification even, that either did not exist in its making, did not exist for its early patrons (the architecture firm who hired Ojeikere), or is recognized as culturally valuable only in light of later comparisons. It is not entirely unwelcome, as it opens additional works by an already well-regarded and cultural, historically, and historically-embedded artist in the great work of a peoples’ ignored artistic production. However, it does so by emphasizing particular collection of works as subversive cultural artifacts through a potential othering.

Like the mix tapes of Project Unitê,10 have we entered into a moment of declaration of “authentic” and “innovative” production? I have not yet settled on a resolution for the work. Additionally, in light of both Hal Foster’s misgivings about the role of the critic and historian in applying an ethnography to the work and in Solomon-Godeau’s critique of the entire genre of documentary photography, I question whether Ojeikere’s early architectural work may be seen as anything but intentionally the work of an artist, despite its commercial origins. And yet, whether they are art or not, I cannot help but see the formal comparisons as indicative of the ongoing “struggle for an art photography” as constructs of the art historian.

  1. Foster, Hal. "The Artist as Ethnographer," in The Return of the Real. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996 annotation by Brandon Hopkins (Theories of Media, Winter 2003), 302. ↩︎

  2. Foster, 304–5. ↩︎

  3. Foster, 305. ↩︎

  4. Foster, 306. ↩︎

  5. Foster, 306. ↩︎

  6. Foster, 308n16. ↩︎

  7. Foster, 307. ↩︎

  8. Okoye, Iken Stanley. “Ojeikere and the Architecture(s) of Photography” in ed. Silva, Bisi J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere’, 25. ↩︎

  9. Okoye, 33. ↩︎

  10. Okoye, 306n16. ↩︎

Scott Mitchell