Project a Black Planet review: spits out the dreary academic theory that should sing | Art

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is an artist with the mindset of a great novelist. His contribution to the Barbican exhibition on Pan-African art and culture is worthy of a Booker prize. He paints fictional characters rather than portraits – the girl is reading intently, a man stands alone in fancy clothes like Pierrot, another in a cool green shirt. You wonder if they’re siblings, their scattered ways take them into modern life like it’s out of a Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen novel.

For this new group of paintings he has a room with white walls to himself. Although his modern youths are caught in their cages along the walls, at the end of the room, contrary to them, hang pictures of African elders, good parents. Together they form a fascinating, unfinished, and fascinating account of what happened outside the diaspora. Can today’s youth join these nobles and find a way back Africa? Do they want to do it again? As the poet Aimé Césaire asked: “Who am I, who are we?”

Césaire was one of the founders of Négritude, a French cultural movement that fought colonialism in the early 20th century by affirming blackness and asserting African heritage and traditions. It presents the artistic beginnings of these major exhibitions along with the political idea of ​​Panafricanism that also appeared at the beginning of the 1900s. From this point of view, the curators consider what they describe as “Panafrica, the promised land… a field of intellectual research whose lines – movement, abandonment, and anticipation – have been drawn here mainly through the medium of communication.”

There must be something to this because, perhaps through discussions with these managers, Yiadom-Boakye was inspired to create a disturbing art. Other artists, too, show images that build and move. El Anatsui’s 1995 work called The Ancestors Converged Again is a group of sculptures, magically carved from found wood: it seems that he has found these creatures instead of creating them, releasing their ghosts from the hunted trees.

El Anatsui restores and revives here the ancient African tradition of wood carving. Négritude artist (as described here) Agnaldo Manuel dos Santos did the same in the 1950s in his sculpture of a half-man, half-pangolin creature that is another compelling piece.

But the show doesn’t play. Instead, it spits out ideas. Each section is structured as a story, with artworks chosen to reflect the conflict: one space is based on the ideas of sociologist Stuart Hall, which does not appear to show. This is a show that wants to show a familiar place, Panafrica, and make it real, which can be a powerful political magic. To achieve this, it must be combined with technical skills. Instead the curators approach their poetic tales with leaden prosaicness. Instead of taking you to Panafrica on the wings of thought they stop to reset their learning machine.

As a result, the vast mix of art, from mid-19th century sculptor Ronald Moody to Marlene Dumas’ painting through Do the Right Thing, is a mixed bag, often boring. And there is bad. The show is heavily influenced by fantasy stories around Pan Africa and it doesn’t stop at… Africa. While this wonderful dream of an imaginary continent was being built in the 20th and 21st century, you ask yourself, in Africa and for the people of African origin all over the world?

The book goes so far as to ask bluntly: “But what if Africa was not a place or a person but a state of mind or a way of doing things?” Think about it – that’s millions of people just a few minutes away. The more it spreads into fantasy, the less interesting or engaging the show becomes.

You find yourself drawn to artists who move away from big ideas, back to life. Claudette Johnson is famous because her pictures express herself and others clearly: her painting captures her in a race, fast and electric, she captures her anger: it is real. Another impressive work is Liz Johnson Artur’s multi-decade documentary of Black London life, a complex and disturbing mix of protests, markets, music and comedy. They take pictures of you giving an honest report.

A time like that is lost due to the confusion of the modern art of the 1950s, the document glasses and the artistic connections found in the heads of the managers. Panafrica isn’t a bad idea for a show, so why did the show miss out and turn what should have been a very clear and interesting story into a dry story?

By reading too much, I think.