This is the first of a series of five posts, one for each day of this week, that act as a remote participation in the workshop Theorizing Africana Receptions organized by Eos, a scholarly society dedicated to Africana Receptions of Ancient Greece and Rome. The workshop will take place at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Classical Studies in San Diego, California on January 4th, 2019, 10:45am-12:45pm, and here is the list of presenters and participants:
Anja Bettenworth (Cologne), “The Reception of St. Augustine in Modern Maghrebian Novels”
Sarah Derbew (Harvard), “Bodies in Dissent”
Ellen Cole Lee (Fairfield), “Reader-Response to Racism: Audre Lorde and Seneca on Anger”
Jackie Murray (Kentucky), Respondent
This week of daily posts ahead of the workshop will explore the connections between Eos as a project within Classical Reception Studies in the discipline of Classics and contemporary artists, philosophers and educators from Africa and the diaspora who participated in the documenta 14 exhibition that took place in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany last year. The mechanism for making these connections is by bringing the Eos panel into dialogue with the magazine Contemporary And (C&): Platform for International Art From African Perspectives, in particular the seventh issue focused on education (called ‘Curriculum of Connections’ and which was released to coincide with documenta 14, including articles by artist and other participants in the exhibition). As preparation for the workshop, Minus Plato* has become an informal distribution point for the print version of the magazine (both this issue, the most recent issue on the 10th Berlin Biennale and future issues) and one concrete, offline aspect of this project includes distributing print copies to the panelists and audience members at the Eos workshop in San Diego.
Each of the posts this week will create a pairing of concepts. (A theoretical framework inspired by the documenta 14 journal South of a State of Mind, which over its four-issue run from Fall 2015 to Fall 2017, brought together an eclectic range of voices to discuss Displacement and Dispossession, Silence and Masks, Language or Hunger, and Violence and Offering to articulate the key themes of the exhibition: contemporary decolonial critique, Indigenous knowledge, feminism, minor traditions within and outside the mainframe of modernism and post queer politics). These concepts are generated by the pairing of protagonists, the editors, artists, philosophers and educators writing in or interviewed for C& and the organizers, panelists and respondents of the Eos workshop, based on the original call for papers and the abstracts submitted by the panelists. When the panel actually meets in January, these blogposts, with their concepts and questions, and the dialogues swirling around them, may be folded into discussion in San Diego or left up in the air. Where these discussions go from there will be up for negotiation between the three entities and the respective websites of Eos, C& and Minus Plato. So, let’s get started.
Our first pairing of concepts is Mediation and Multiplicity and the protagonists are the editors and organizers of the workshop, in their Editors’ Note and Call For Papers respectively. (You can download a pdf of the full text of the C& issue here and the Eos Call for Papers here.)
The concept of mediation appears three times in three different senses in quick succession in the C& Editors’ Note:
From Aida Muluneh’s photography festival (Addis Foto Fest and the associated master classes to Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s views on knowledge production and philosophy to the recent #feesmustfall protest movement in South Africa through the mediation of art history in Yaoundé, this issue presents perspectives and possible strategies by players in the field of cultural mediation. The publication of this issue coincides with documenta 14 in Kassel, curated by Adam Szymczyk and his curatorial team, including curator-at-large Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. To mark the occasion, we interviewed participating artists from African perspectives such as Pélagie Gbaguidi and Akinbode Akinbiyi about their interest in the mediation of artistic knowledge.
What do the ‘mediation of art history’, ‘cultural mediation’ and the ‘mediation of artistic knowledge’ have in common? For the C& editors, if we backtrack through their note, the answer is: education. The art school at the University of Yaoundé in Cameroon specifically mediates art history, but taken together with a what can be learned from a Photography Festival in Ethiopia (Addis Foto Fest) or the decolonizing writings of a philosopher (Souleymane Bachir Diagne), they form a group process of ‘cultural mediation’. At the same time, two artists (Pélagie Gbaguidi and Akinbode Akinbiyi), both in their practice as a whole and for their specific contributions to documenta 14, bring their individual lessons to the table in terms of their own approaches to the ‘mediation of artistic knowledge’ .
To turn to the Call for Papers for the Eos workshop, the field of Classical Reception Studies is represented in terms of the preference for the multiplicity of perspectives that challenge (and, you could even say, educate) the very idea of a monolithic discipline of Classics itself. Consider this interplay of the single and the multiple in the main section of the Call (which I have somewhat clumsily annotated below):
As Classical Reception Studies has burgeoned, existing models of appropriation, creativity, and dialogue struggled to capture the complexity of the relationship between classical works and their receptions. For example, studies often focus exclusively on one temporal point over the other, trace a direct line of influence from source to target, or hierarchize in such a way that source works become the privileged creative inspiration to a later ‘political’ manifestation. This is not just a scholarly problem. Artists themselves have rejected attempts to categorize their refigurations without acknowledging their idiosyncratic perspectives: as Romare Bearden said, ‘we must remember that people other than Spaniards can appreciate Goya, people other than Chinese can appreciate a Sung landscape, and people other than Negroes can appreciate a Benin bronze…an artist is an art lover who finds that in all the art that he sees, something is missing: to put there what he feels is missing becomes the center of his life’s work’ (S. Patton, Memory and Metaphor 1991: 31). Classicists have already begun to find new paths forward. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Lorna Hardwick has argued for utilizing a rhizomatic network of classical connections that recognizes multiple, non-hierarchical points of entry (“Fuzzy Connections” 2011: 43). Emily Greenwood has further developed Hardwick’s classical connectivity model by advocating the ‘omni-localism’ of classical works and of their Africana Receptions (“Omni-Local Classical Receptions” 2013). Striation or layering, as discussed in Deep Classics (Butler, ed. 2016) and “The Reception of Classical Texts in the Renaissance” (Gaisser 2002) respectively, has also been proposed as an alternative metaphor for conceptualizing the varied processes of reception. To that end we seek papers that go beyond a focus on one point of entry, privileged viewpoint or implied ‘tradition’ into the network of classical connections and offer a distinctive methodological contribution, a case study of a model through multiple receptions, or a novel theoretical analysis.
Yet my question for the Eos workshop is: what matters to you more, mediation or multiplicity? The variety of means of mediation espoused by the editors of C& still maintains a basic need for the transmission of knowledge across a range of sources and modes. However, the need to emphasize Classical reception as multiplicity over singularity (i.e. the privileged, authorized, and legitimated so valorized by the (traditional?) discipline of Classics) can be a simplifying and reductive gesture if the question of such a range of mediation isn’t addressed directly. Perhaps the problem of the discipline of Classics (and, remember, this critique is coming from the position of an ex-Classicist) is not a variety or multiplicity of engagements with ancient Mediterranean cultures, across time and space, but the unwritten requirement that such engagements must be mediated by an authorizing force, usually identified as a Classicist. Think of how many innovative authors or artists who generate truly visionary and exciting engagements with ancient texts are dismissed because they do not know ancient Greek or Latin? (Or if not dismissed, then mediated by a trained and professional Classicist). For readers of C&: how do the authorities within the field of Contemporary Art repeat or reject this canonizing mediation? (Think of art historians, curators, museum directors, etc). And for both Eos and C&: what do your platforms, in their focus on Africana art and receptions in all their complexity and multiplicity, share in terms of this question of mediation?
The body of this post has been framed by images of the work Checkpoint by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama for documenta 14 comprising hundreds of old jute sacks, collected by trading them for new ones, and then sewn together by a group of people the artist calls ‘collaborators’ in Athens and Kassel, then wrapped around the Torwache building in Kassel. The first photograph above shows the ‘collaborators’ in Sytagma Square, while the cover image of this post shows a photo of them in Kassel’s Henschel-Hallen hanging inside the Torwache. Mahama is mentioned in passing in the education issue of C& (p. 47) in an article about the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana and the close ties that some alumnae like Mahama had to the institution. How do the concepts of mediation and multiplicity play out in his work? To learn more about Mahama’s practice, here is a video of him speaking about his contribution to the Material Matters Library, a project organized by the documenta 14 education program, aneducation:
*For those of you who are coming to Minus Plato for the first time, here is a little background information. I started writing Minus Plato in 2012 as a space to develop my burgeoning interest in the dynamic between ancient Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, mythology and culture and Modern/Contemporary Art. Yet in November 2016, in reaction to Trump’s election, the blog took on a daily posting schedule that investigated what it meant to engage with Classics and Contemporary Art at that precise moment. At the same time, my preparations for and visit to the documenta 14 exhibition (in Athens in June 2017 and Kassel in July 2017, and again in September 2017), as well as the beginning of the process of my move from the Department of Classics to the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy transformed these blogposts, and by extension the blog itself, into a book called No Philosopher King: An Everyday Guide to Art and Life under Trump to be published by AC Institute in February/March 2019. My aim was to turn Minus Plato into a collective project, a radical ‘we’ that would reject the brute authoritarianism of Trump, as well as the authorizing narrative of the discipline of Classics in general. The failure of this collective project informs my particular version of collaboration that this current remote project is participating in, but now without Classics, and with Minus Plato focused on art and education after docuementa 14.