with Senam Okudzeto on "Orthodox Drawing" and "Afro-Dada"

You are teaching the course “Unorthodox Drawing”. What do you mean by that and could you explain more about the structure of the class?

The course is called  “Unorthodox Drawing”, but since the establishment of avantgarde practice, there is nothing really “unorthodox.” It is more about looking at the history in ways which people have challenged drawing or taken it off the page and put into the space; using the principles of drawing to make dance or lines with their body or actions; or divisions of physical space.  I take the students through historical examples from Robert Rauschenberg to Yvonne Rainer and then ask “what was your preconception of what drawing is and how can you challenge that?” So the meaning of the word orthodox or unorthodox comes from the individual. It’s about how would you transform a drawing from your understanding, cultural background? My class ranges from 16 years old to much higher (roughly 75 years old). Given their age ranges, it’s also interesting to see how they work; their understanding of the world. What moves them, what doesn’t…

For instance, I’ve asked them to make a drawing that isn’t a drawing or using the materials of drawing in an unexpected and unusual way; to make a set of instructions, reflections or objects that play around with what they think drawing is. Some of them use videos, some do actions, some practice their drawing skills as we also work on formal drawing techniques focusing on body and the form – if they don’t feel confident as an artist or don’t have skills in a formal sense they don’t feel they have the authority to do something.

We do formal sketching as well. I’ve developed a technique which helps people to improve their drawing skills quickly. Every morning we do these rapid exercises and then tighten up the focus. In the afternoon, they have weird exercises designed to work on some of the principles such as “how to interpret the space”, “vision and perception.” Drawing is a language so vision and perception is culturally mediated. We practice to learn to recognize objects, spaces and environment and recognize how culture can intervene in vision and perception. These exercises help them to learn how to break up the picture plane, construct the space and to stop worrying about skill.  They say a good artist knows the limits of her/their/his skill and how to develop a sense of language. So, my teaching techniques attempt to take the pressure off of the idea of skill in a formal sense and start to push students towards think about drawing in terms of vision-perception and analyzing the space and creating a system to make constructions.

In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (2015), Michelle Wright points out the micro narratives in history that were excluded as a result of understanding of time in relation to science and how linearity was shaped from a ‘white’ perspective. In your talk you mentioned the influence of Afro-Dada in your work, which is another micro narrative. Among all other narratives that are excluded from the canon of European art history, why did you choose especially Dada, but not another movement?

I should have made it clear in my talk that ‘Afro-Dada’ is a term of my own invention. I’ve been using it for the past ten years to describe the objectives of my artistic and academic research, which are to uncover forgotten narratives of modernism in the canons of general and art history dating from the early twentieth century forwards.  Last year I taught a course at the Kunsthistorisches Seminar at the University of Basel called “Contexts of Modernity in Post-Independence Africa(s)” which dealt a lot with these themes and how they find form in material culture. Although you can see it as a micro narrative from a Eurocentric perspective, throughout history, the formation of Negritude and subsequent anti-colonialist narratives (that in part), found inspiration from the anti-bourgeois political actions of Dadaists like Tristan Tzara, became a major narrative for people of African descent. Anti colonialist movements, Pan-Africanism,  the achievement of complete changes of government systems through independence movements; the development of Black cultural Modernisms. These are narratives that relate to the self-determination of an entire continent of 54 countries … It’s a matter of cultural perspective to call this a micro narrative because for people of African descent this is a macro-discourse belonging to an overlapping shared world history that has been ignored for too long. There are hundreds of different theoretical influences in my practice, but my decision to define my practice as Afro-Dada is tied to a formal and political affinity with the Dadaists call for social revolt. For the past twenty years I’ve refused to be represented by a gallery, I run an artist’s led and funded NGO project in Ghana that supports education and heritage in the arts, I relate to Dada because I relate to its demands to turn the system upside down and invent a new order.

There is an ongoing failure within the larger canon of art history to incorporate narratives of black identity outside of its platforms of cultural apartheid. When I’m with the class I show them works of African artists, African-American artists as well European artists from the canon. I don’t make any distinction. We talk about Robin Rhode’s images alongside Nam June Paik, Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith… I show them a diversity of information by not necessarily tying it to one culture, but giving everybody an equal platform.