D O C U M E N T I N T R O

InTrOducTIOn TO “arT, sIGns,
and cuLTures” (1977)

joshua i. 科恩

This document, translated from the original French, is an edited tran-
script of a conversation between the Senegalese painter Iba Ndiaye and
the French art historian Jean Laude. The conversation took place on the
occasion of the Festival des Arts et Cultures Africaines in Royan,
法国, 三月 1977. It was broadcast several months later, 在八月
of the same year, on the radio channel France Culture.

Iba Ndiaye (1928–2008; also written N’Diaye) was born in the cos-

mopolitan coastal city of Saint-Louis, one of Senegal’s colonial-era
Quatre Communes, and he therefore held French citizenship. 他
moved to Paris in 1948 to study architecture, and apart from a relatively
short stint in Dakar (1960–67), he would live in France for the rest of
his life.1 During the period in Dakar, Ndiaye emerged as a major fi gure
in post-independence Senegalese art, by helping establish Senegal’s
national art school, the École des Arts du Sénégal, and serving as the
curator of Tendances et Confrontations (Trends and Confrontations), A
landmark exhibition of contemporary art from Africa and the diaspora
that was staged at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, in Dakar in
1966. Jean Laude (1922–83), 同时, began his career in 1946 作为一个

For a brief overview of the artist’s life and career, see Joshua I. 科恩, “Iba N’Diaye,“ 在
African Modernism in America, 编辑. Perrin M. Lathrop (纽约: American Federation of
艺术, 2022), 154–55.

106

https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00354

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technical assistant to Michel Leiris in the Sub-Saharan Africa depart-
ment of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. He went on to pursue doctoral
work supported by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
(法国国家科学研究中心), for which he undertook research on both Dogon statuary and
modernist “primitivism,” publishing a landmark study on the latter
topic in 1968.2 Laude authored numerous articles and books over the
course of his career and gave talks at a number of major conferences
and festivals, including the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar.
What especially stands out in the conversation between Ndiaye and
Laude is the way that the distinguished Africanist plainly seeks to negate
Ndiaye’s cross-cultural experience and background, and arguably even his
very existence as a contemporary artist. 值得注意的是, 例如, 那
despite Ndiaye’s French education, 训练, 国籍, and longstand-
ing residence, his interlocutors in Royan never consider him as French,
or as belonging to France in any way. In the first and only question from
the forum’s moderator, Roger Pillaudin,3 Ndiaye is asked, “How can one
be a Senegalese painter today?” An onslaught of follow-up commentary
from Laude then frames Ndiaye deliberately in terms of ethno-linguistic
categories and a sweeping vision of “African” traditions that inform all
creative expression, including “the simplest gestures of daily life.”

Betraying an oddly inconsistent vision of national versus continen-
tal identity formation (French or Senegalese versus African), Laude and
Pillaudin’s remarks set parameters that are geared toward governing
how Ndiaye’s art should be discussed—even though, as it happens, 他的
work hardly gets discussed in detail anywhere in the conversation.
Ndiaye nevertheless succeeds in transforming his interlocutors’
assumptions into points of contention: Is he in fact a “Senegalese”
painter? Or an “African” one? Or none of the above?

Laude’s insistence on adhering to neat categories (语言学的, national,

artistic, ETC。), coupled with Ndiaye’s steady defiance of them, 一起

“Repères biographiques,” in Jean Laude: Écrits sur l’art, 编辑. Bertrand Dorléac, Jean-Louis
Paudrat, and Lucia Piccioni (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2019), 899–906; Jean Laude, 这
peinture française et “l’art nègre” (1905–1914): Contribution à l’étude des sources du fauvisme et
du cubisme (巴黎: 克林克西克, 2006 [1968]). For an English translation of the 1968 intro-
ductory essay, see Jean Laude, “Introduction to French Painting and ‘Negro Art’ (1905–1914)
[1968],” trans. Richard George Elliott, Art in Translation 5, 不. 4 (2013): 439–86.
Pillaudin was a French radio producer whose role in the conversation ended up being mini-
马尔. For an overview of Pillaudin’s professional activities, see “Roger Pillaudin, ancien col-
laborateur de la radio de service publique, RTF, ORTF et Radio-France, vient de mourir à
l’âge de soixante-neuf ans,” Le Monde (October 27–28, 1996), 21.

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Iba Ndiaye (1928–2008) and Jean Laude (1922–83) in conversation, Festival des Arts et Cultures Africaines, Casino

de Royan, 法国, 行进 26, 1977. Photograph by Max Peraudeau (1936–2022). Image from the collection of the Iba

Ndiaye Estate, 巴黎; published by permission of the Ndiaye Estate.

point to some significant and relatively obvious tensions between the
older epistemological paradigms encapsulated in structuralism and area
学习, 一方面, and newer paradigms associated with poststruc-
turalism and postcolonial studies, 在另一. 近几十年来,
Africanist art scholars informed by postcolonial studies have begun to
scrutinize the power dynamics between visual artists and their interlocu-
tors.4 Laude’s efforts to mastermind the conversation undoubtedly con-
firm and add historical weight to Olu Oguibe’s observation that “within
the scheme of their relationship with the West, it is forbidden that African
artists should possess the power of self-definition, the right to author-ity.”5
Even today, 这 1977 standoff between Ndiaye and Laude demands that
closer attention be paid to Eurocentrism—a mindset that few in the art
world or academia (then or now) would explicitly endorse, yet whose per-
sistent threat and critique in some sense became postcolonialism’s osten-
sible raison d’être. Eurocentrism is well known as a worldview that

看, 例如, Z. S. Strother, “African Works: Anxious Encounters in the Visual Arts,”
RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 不. 39 (春天 2001): 5–23; and Joanna Grabski and Carol
Magee, 编辑。, African Art, Interviews, Narratives: Bodies of Knowledge at Work (布卢明顿:
Indiana University Press, 2012).
Olu Oguibe, “Art, 身份, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art”
[1995], in The Culture Game (明尼阿波利斯: 明尼苏达大学出版社, 2004), 13.

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108

diminishes or disregards non-Western cultural histories according to
Western criteria. What is perhaps less familiar is a flip side to
Eurocentrism that developed among well-intentioned Western scholars
and educators around the mid-20th century. Through their studies, 和
through traveling or living outside the West, these scholars and educators
developed trenchant critiques of colonialism that led them to value the
local cultures they had encountered to the extent that these cultures, 所以
they assumed, could be claimed as resisting or escaping outside influ-
恩塞斯. This position remained linked to Eurocentrism insofar as it con-
structed a cultural Other viewed as separate from, and incompatible with,
the cultures of the West. In terms of the actual rhetoric employed,
尽管, the position was anti-Eurocentric: colonialism was condemned
for destroying local traditions, which in turn were revered at the expense
of allegedly “derivative” contemporary expressive forms emerging from
the same societies.

This inverted form of Eurocentrism was essentially Laude’s position,

as evidenced in his conversation with Ndiaye. Early in the conversation,
Laude seizes on Ndiaye’s characterization of his own multidimensionally
mixed (Wolof and Serer, Muslim and Catholic, Franco-Senegalese)
upbringing in Saint-Louis, only to then challenge this characterization as
essentialist, accusing Ndiaye of privileging his biological inheritance.
Laude then wastes no time in displaying his intellectual reliance on what
today registers as a rather reductive, structuralist conception of societies
and nation-states as generating distinctive, self-contained, undeviating,
and ubiquitous “signs”—overarching patterns, 流派, tropes, 为了-
digms—in visual expression. 这样, Laude’s side of the exchange
offers a clear example of French structuralist thinking in 1970s Africanist
art history. 至关重要的是, Laude’s structuralist framework mandates that the
French dimension of Ndiaye’s artistic practice lies outside the proper
order of things. Laude acknowledges, in a backhanded compliment, 那
Ndiaye speaks French “like a good French student,” but eventually he set-
tles on pondering whether “unconscious elements” might bring Ndiaye
back to “African expressivity”—or might not, in which case, Laude implic-
itly suggests, Ndiaye would remain a deracinated painter whose work
must be unsatisfyingly beholden to European art.

How are we to make sense of Laude’s “structuralist” thinking, 在下面-
stood in this way, and of his often abrasive lines of questioning and com-
mentary? For Laude and many other scholars of his generation,
authenticity reigned supreme as an incontrovertible precept: the only non-

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109

Western art worth studying had to be organically Indigenous and free
from foreign contamination. 反过来, Laude’s generation tended to
admire European Orientalist and “primitivist” modern artists for appreci-
ating and taking productive lessons from non-Western material culture.
This tendency can be seen in Laude’s exultant observation that the French
painter Eugène Delacroix had learned much from Persian miniatures and
Moroccan rugs. Laude notably takes Delacroix’s connections to the world
beyond France to be relatively natural and uncomplicated, even while, 在
the subtler registers of his discourse, Ndiaye’s longstanding ties to both
France and his own West African origins appear to be hopelessly haunted
by colonial constructs. “The African artist,” Laude asserts, is “above all a
sculptor,” whereas oil painting derives from a matrix of Western cultural
ideas and techniques that “don’t belong to him.”6 As a painter, Ndiaye
vociferously challenges the premise that African art is quintessentially
sculptural, citing South African murals as evidence of the historically
“noble status” of African painting.

There are two fundamental reasons why this conversation between
Ndiaye and Laude has been selected to accompany this special issue of
ARTMargins devoted to Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global
Turn. 第一的, the dialogue between Ndiaye and Laude has historiographic
关联, inasmuch as it occurred in 1977, around the time when the
earliest iterations of postcolonial scholarship were beginning to appear.7
From that moment forward, humanities scholars in the Western (埃斯佩-
cially the anglophone) academy would increasingly turn their attention
toward writers and artists from the (以前的) colonies who were “writing
back” to contest the practices, histories, and legacies of colonialism.8
第二, the very format of this document—not a single-authored text
but a tense interpersonal exchange—parallels postcolonial studies’ ori-
entation as being chiefly concerned with forms of encounter (cross-conti-

Partha Mitter has theorized this timeworn double standard in art history—wherein Western
artists have the right to cross-cultural borrowings, whereas non-Western artists do not—as
“the Picasso manqué syndrome.” See “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-
Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin 90, 不. 4 (十二月 2008): 534–38.
The Ndiaye-Laude conversation took place in the same year as the publication of the first
monograph in art history to employ postcolonial methodologies avant la lettre, and the year
before Said’s Orientalism appeared. See Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of
European Reactions to Indian Art (牛津: 牛津大学出版社, Clarendon Press, 1977),
and Edward W. Said, Orientalism (纽约: 万神殿, 1978).
For one of the first edited volumes to appear along these lines, see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 编辑。, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literatures (伦敦: 劳特利奇, 1989).

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nental, cross-cultural, cross-racial) that have been structured by the
unequal power relations maintained under colonial rule and its after-
math. By no means does this orientation constitute the only, or even the
defining, feature of postcolonial studies. 然而, it remains one key
way in which the field can be seen as distinct from area studies, 和
indeed from all other fields that define their critical purview and exper-
tise strictly according to region, nation-state, 时期, 文化, religion,
种族, 等等.

为了我们的目的, two clear lessons for postcolonial art history may

be drawn from the conversation between Ndiaye and Laude. 给定
Laude’s single-minded celebration of “authentic” Indigenous African
artists (IE。, not modern African artists living in France), one lesson is
that rigid anti-Eurocentrism, as a guiding principle, can turn out to be
just as stifling as Eurocentrism itself. With this insight, scholars may
wish to think twice about devising projects geared exclusively toward
combatting Eurocentrism, despite the longstanding marching orders to
that effect from some schools of postcolonial theory. Another lesson
concerns Iba Ndiaye himself. 为了确定, over the course of the conver-
站, the artist’s patience is repeatedly tested as his legitimacy comes
under attack. But Ndiaye ultimately holds his own against Laude’s
aggressive paternalism, and he calls into question a number of the
French art historian’s assumptions concerning the perceived axes and
obligations of artistic identity. To return to “signs”—Laude’s preferred
term—Ndiaye’s intransigence and confidence ultimately endure as
signs that postcolonial art history must not be written as a narrative of
victimization.

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111 D O C U M E N T I N T R O image

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