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the curator, is a devout Afrobeatnik, and has spent time in Nigeria to better understand Fela’s life
and work. After listening to a Fela song in a New York bar in 1991, he followed the careers of music
and musician, and later started a local group devoted to Fela’s music. Jump n Funk began in
August 2001 as a launch party “to keep up the momentum because [the Fela Project under which
the exhibition was held] had no institutional support at that time”, Schoonmaker writes in From West
Africa to West Broadway, the book accompanying the exhibition. “Rich Medina was DJ and together
with ZGM we began a monthly party at Shine Nightclub on West Broadway and Canal” . We must
recall that Afrobeat witnessed a real resurgence not long after Fela’s passage, and that this is on-
going. Scholars such as Sola Olorunyomi, Michael Veal and Tejumola Olaniyan have either
published or are working on books about Fela and his work. By 2001, MCA had released at least a
dozen CDs of Fela’s songs. Afrobeat musicians like Femi, Tony Allen, and Kayode Samuel are
pursuing their own careers, and in Nigeria alone, younger musicians Lagbaja and Dede Mabiaku
have openly acknowledged the influence of Fela’s work. The exhibition, or more precisely the Fela
Project, is best seen in the context of this global warming. So much for the thaw in Afrobeat
bemoaned in the account of the traveling critic of innovative music!
Still the irony must not elude us. Fela spent his life and talent challenging different kinds of
standardization, asserting difference. His Pan-African views did not admit of such ‘tools of Western
imperialism’ as AIDS and population control. While people expressed concern that the lesions
covering his body might be due to HIV infection, Fela derided infatuation with sexual control in the
song ‘Condom Scallywag and Scatter’, a complex work in which he also satirized pervasive
prostitution in African cities. A rarity in popular music, Fela’s compositions are long and comprise of
his solo improvisations both on keyboard and saxophone, a repetitive chorus that opens and
concludes a track, and the main stretch of singing, all peaking at not less than fifteen minutes. It
took a while for this iconoclastic move to find acceptance, but Fela’s gifts proved ultimately
overwhelming. Veal has explained this as a deliberate attempt at opposing the commercialism that
rules the music world, in much the same way as Paul Gilroy understands Miles Davis’ attitude
toward the institutionalization of jazz, as contained in Davis’ famous attack on trumpeter Wynton
Marsalis. The exhibit at the New Museum represents, however, a huge effort at institutionalization,
cannily validating Fela’s musings on a rainy morning in July 1995, when he recalled the vision of a
global fascination with Afrobeat. Ideologically, museums and galleries are tools of canonization,
means of packaging an oeuvre, with a sophisticated eye on its commercial value.
This is something that Schoonmaker, as an independent curator, surely knows. The comparison
may be hyperbolic, but he seems a localized, twenty-first century version of the great Ulli Beier, who
worked as a cultural facilitator in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s. But the extreme commodification
of culture in the world today determines this curator’s horizon in manners that Beier needed not
bother about, not to mention the fact that Schoonmaker’s relationship to his subject is necessarily
affected by the current nature of global communication and the phenomenally transformed sense of
the person in many parts of the world.
The democratization of media of communications and the attendant profusion of images, coupled
with the mobility of people across vast spaces, have been seductively described as cultural flows,
with the suggestion that all of this is changing the way people view the world and their places in it.
This planetary situation relies on a sense of events, incidents and phenomena as cultural facts--
that is, a large-scale fashioning of exchangeable materials out of everyday life. It is not a total
phenomenon yet—I’m doubtful that it is meant to be—but the nature of this reality is that it does not
care how much of the world is under its gaze. It behaves as if everywhere is wired.
The resistances in Fela’s private life in the political context of Nigerian or African life as well as in
the marketing of music on a global scale are all accidents of history that would have been difficult to
package, or might have been packaged differently, if Fela had died of an illness other than AIDS.
Schoonmaker has a distinctly populist style as writer and curator. In his introduction to From West
Africa to West Broadway, he writes that it is an irony that Fela should have died of AIDS, because
the musician had total contempt for such foreign notions as AIDS. Imagine the kind of impact Fela
would have had on AIDS education if he had accepted the epidemic as a brutal mass-murderer,
Schoonmaker muses. The fact is that Fela captures New York partly on the strength of his gifts,
both aesthetic and political, and partly because the more sensational aspects of his life jell with a
global imaginary about African lives. Political violence and the AIDS scourge continue, for good or
ill, to be two powerful means of apprehending African realities by outsiders.
This is why, for me, the work in the exhibit that speaks most directly and evocatively to this
predicament is Sokari Douglas-Camp’s ‘Open and Close, Chop and Quench’. Playing on the title of
two of Fela’s popular songs, the sculpture in the shape of a woman is kinetically staged to open
and close its legs, in the dance-step that Fela’s song teaches. But it extends the sexual meaning of
this gesture by suggesting the danger of untrammeled sexuality in the age of HIV; hence Chop and
Quench, Nigerian Pidgin for ‘eat and die’. If you look at this sculpture for a few moments, you will
notice that the pendulous motion of the legs comes to a stop. Then it resumes after a while. This
may not be entirely accidental; the mechanical motion probably points to the terminal nature of
biological lives.
It is important that both in the actual selection of participating artists, and in the contents of the
accompanying book and catalog, Schoonmaker treats Fela as both an individual life and a global
symbol. Nigerian artists dominate the exhibition in terms of number but not all of them show works
that follow the pattern of Fela’s life. Other participating artists come from Burundi, Chile, England,
Germany, and so on, and seem to view the world from perspectives that are tangential to Fela’s
philosophy. The exhibited works of Olu Oguibe and Odili Donald Odita grapple with the profligacy of
the Nigerian state and society, in ways that resonate with songs like ‘Army Arrangement’ and
‘Authority Stealing’. Oguibe’s “National Graffiti” (1988) is the oldest work in the exhibition, and it is
instructive that in terms of their figuration on the raffia mat, the popular expressions and images
match those of Ghariokwu Lemi, who designed many of Fela’s album sleeves. Odita’s “Tomorrow
Can Wait” is an installation, a wheelbarrow filled with bundled wads of naira notes, resting on thick
black paint to ironize on the wastage of the country’s oil-wealth, while Moyo Okediji’s flamboyant
paintings locate Fela’s political and sexual excesses in the revolutionary spirit of the African deity,
Ogun. Another work, Marcia Kure’s ‘History of Africa By Fela’ (2002-3), is a 59-panel installation,
each panel standing for a year of Fela’s life. This is interesting because its incompleteness
suggests that something has been truncated, possibly the musician’s continental vision, and Fela
actually died at 58. But there is also the sculptor Roberto Visani, resident in Italy, whose two
sculptures, “You See The Hut Yet You Ask, ‘Where Do I Go For Shelter?’” (2002-03) are part of a
series. They are constructed from guns, walking stick, and other scraps to question
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