Author: Elizabeth Giorgis

Reviewer: Arefaynie Fantahun

Modernist Art in Ethiopia (New African Histories) Ohio University Press (February 11, 2019)

360 pages, ISBN-10: 0821423479, ISBN-13: 978-0821423479

An updated expansion of her doctoral dissertation in History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University, Modernist Art in Ethiopia is the first monograph published by Elizabeth Giorgis, a professor of Theory and Criticism at College of Performing and Visual Art, and Director of the Modern Art Museum: Gebre Kristos Deta Center at Addis Ababa University (AAU). The author draws on various expertise in this riveting work which examines the course of Ethiopian visual modernism in broader terms that reconnect with those of social and intellectual history, debunking myths and clichés along the way. Elizabeth served as the director of the foremost national archive of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES) at AAU for six and she has been engaging with a wider audience through a popular weekly radio program on Sheger 102.1 FM, which she has been hosting on the role of intellectuals and Ethiopian modernism.

Drawing on a diverse range of sources, archival documents, newspapers, and literature, Elizabeth presented an illuminating analysis that sheds light on the history of the progressive, experimental, visionary tendencies in Ethiopian modernist thought. The approach is scholarly yet accessible and Elizabeth relentlessly examines the feature of Ethiopian modernism and those who have shaped it, by demonstrating the impact they have had on Ethiopian social, and political systems and their participation in the contemporary dialogues of the international art world. But importantly, the study is framed within a Pan-African context, taking the Battle of Adwa, fought Mar. 1, 1896, as “frame of reference-considering its historical significance as a point of departure for modernism’s perception-the victory conjured fantasies of invincibility for many Ethiopians, but for countless others, it represented the political, institutional, and social boundaries of Menelik II’s aggression to the south.”

As the author writes in her foreword, ‘Ethiopian modernity and modernism are constitutive of the larger political and ideological history of modernity. And as Walter Mignolo indicated, “Coloniality…is constitutive of modernity-there is no modernity without colonilality.” When we think along Mignolo’s lines, coloniality is the stability of colonial practices embedded in the project of modernity through which Western ideas and ideals are ingrained in the non-West.”

Before we go any further, let’s allow Elizabeth a longer statement of her case:

The orthodoxies that shape the studies of Ethiopia-its culture, history, and aesthetic imagining- call attention to the categories that conjure the images of the country and, most importantly, the extent to which these studies, as fields of study, have undermined the intellectual philosophies that shaped African American, African, and West Indian strands of thought. This exceptionalist perspective, in some of its central positions, has subsequently reduced the significance of the colonial myth and ideology.  Furthermore, in a fundamentally hegemonic body of knowledge, it has fostered an implicit, twofold assumption in its definition of Ethiopia. The first is a superior northern and Semitic imagination of Ethiopia. The second is the non-Semitic variety that the field of study persists in construing as an inferior antithesis, and its vast body of knowledge continues to be absent in the wings of history.

The book highlights key questions and issues such as on the assumptions and writings of the West, much of with obvious biases, about Ethiopian art, the power relations between cultures in the modern global hierarchy and the country’s supposed singularity. The publisher’s note puts the central question this book pursues as this. “If modernism initially came to Africa through colonial contact, what does Ethiopia’s inimitable historical condition—its independence save for five years under Italian occupation—mean for its own modernist tradition?”

It is no easy task that Elizabeth Giorgis’s book has taken on, and the whole undertaking is complex and fraught, as almost anything said about one is untrue of the other, making generalities suspect but the author does a wide-ranging and diligent work, explaining the type of vision the artists faced and internalized. She structures the book in chronological order, the first chapter setting the stage for the modernism by painting a dynamic picture of the country early to mid-twentieth-century Modernism (1900-1957) and the formation of the Fine Art School. Elizabeth shows how Italy’s colonial interest was put to rest at the Battle of Adwa, disrupting the broader colonial imaginary and contributing to bringing a marked shift from preceding periods and bringing forth modernism into the fore. She explains how engagement with Ethiopia became important, as a curious object of colonial inquiry, resulting in many foreigners who arrived as travelers, engineers, technicians.

The second chapter provides an overview of the intellectual thought of the 1960s, during the heyday of the Ethiopian Modernism. Describing the period as the heyday of Ethiopian modernism, the author places Ethiopian visual modernism within an institutional and ideological context, carefully pondering the words of a group of intellectuals who aired their views in favour of change in the columns of the state-supported Berhanena Selam (“Light and Peace”) newspaper. In the third chapter, one of the most important in the book, Elizabeth pays a high compliment to the commitments of the foremost exponent of modernist aesthetics of the 1960s, Gebre Kirstos Desta and Skunder Boghossian and their Students. The following chapter illustrates the revolutionary motherland or death period and the final chapter, entitled “Contemporary Art in Ethiopia,” discusses the period from 1995-2015, a timely picture of the Ethiopian art scene.

Part of the pleasure of this book is the original depiction of the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s that gave birth Zebany and Arada sensibilities, the rise of elite modern class in the center of Addis Ababa who drew from European aesthetics to shape the way how they perceived the modern. This is a satisfying survey of pivotal moment of the colourful and exciting period. “The poetics of arada produced an art form that was a beautiful as it was powerful. It is essential to understand that this art form was profoundly rooted in the affective place and space of a new era, symbolized through the images of arada and expressed in a very personal way.”

Arada, the author says, was responsible for having launched a new cultural metropolis that in turn marked the development of original practices in art. “For the most part, the artwork that was produced consisted of similar themes, but even so, the artistic outburst took place during this period, including the music and literary movements of the time, established the generation’s most profound legacy. It deeply influenced the generation of writers, musicians, and visual artists that followed,” she added.

In later chapters, Elizabeth shines most when she treats Skunder Boghassian (1937-2003) and Gebre Kristos Desta (1932-1981), the two figures who she says fundamentally changed modern art in the 1960s. Her devotion and reverence, particularly to Skunder is palpable, so much so that the book at times comes as his intimate biography than a book on Ethiopian modernism. The long stretch in the introduction makes it understandable.  “Nothing was customary with Skunder, even the friends who delivered shreds, odds and ends, ruins and scraps to his studio. It was amazing that so many people thought of him when they saw the queer and the anomalous and considered such things a bounty for their friend. The truth is that, by 1999, I had also become this type of friend. The regulation and uniformity of my world, so closely related to my former career in banking and finance, had been disrupted by the furiousness of Skunder’s place. I found that I had begun to relish the beauty of wreckage,” part of it reads.

This also means other painters such as Afework Tekle described in the book as “this self-styled Ethiopian ‘artist’”, are poorly served. The meagre references to Afework are not at all complimentary, and some readers may feel hard done by the treatment, considering his status as Ethiopia’s foremost artist and one who has won world recognition. The author is surely aware of this as she herself said, “The book does not claim to account for all facets of Ethiopian modernism; rather, it aims to shed light on key episodes of its unexamined history.”

Elizabeth traces how the values and ideals of modernity were an integral part of Ethiopian modernism’s history and she counters the familiar Western narrative of Ethiopian Christian art that have readily reduced the multifaceted complexity into a limited essence.

“European writers had, therefore, often framed Ethiopian church art within these two contractionary accounts of exceptionalism and primitivism. On the one hand, the narrative transcribed Orthodox Christianity as triumphant history of Ethiopia’s greatness, which contributed to its “non-Africanness”; on the other, it denigrated Ethiopian artistic skill, which could never compare to what European writers considered art.”

To state those facts is not to make an accusation but rather face historical reality, without which consideration not much in Ethiopian modernization project makes sense.

One dominant view the book questions is the Derg period has put an end the innovative music of the 1960’s and 70’s. Instead, the author, rightly argues the period was characterized by musical interventions and the outpourings of theatre or literature within the larger cultural propaganda of the regime. “As musicologist Betre Yohannes argued, music was one channel that burgeoned during the seventeen-year history of the Derg. Semeneh said: “Local musicians often refer to the 1980’s as the Golden Era of Ethiopian Music,” in contrast to Western writers who have frequently failed to acknowledge the musical progress of the area.”

The overviews of the artistic movement and modernist project are combined with theories and approaches such as Mesay kebede’s philosophical discourse on Ethiopian failure to modernize, Frantz Fanon’s psychological analyses of the effects colonialism on the colonizer and the colonized, Fikru Negash Gebrekidan’s ground-breaking work Ethiopia in Black Studies, Egwale Gebreyohannes’s concern about the absence of traditional knowledge in the early establishment of introduction of higher educations, Vladimir Lenin’s theses on the National Question.

Ultimately, Elizabeth’s powerful book suggests the need to fashion a new national narrative against the “Orientalist constructions” which “paradoxically contributed to sentiments of exceptionalism.”  As she explains, Orientalism does not occur in an ideological or cultural void, nor is it simply imposed from outside. “It is, on the contrary, a joint project between those who produce and who replicate.”

“No one book can account for all of the remarkable features of Ethiopian visual and intellectual culture. But I do hope this volume provides a critical glimpse into artistic movements and their relationship to intellectual thought as well as to national and transitional histories and movements of art,” she writes in the conclusion.

Elizabeth Giorgis teaches us about the modernist and contemporary Ethiopian art and visual culture, in relation to its vastly complex socio-political backdrop –and with this book she has provided a valuable contribution in a project of truth-telling and repair. The author’s awesome linguistic skills have allowed for the use of particularly rich sources materials not normally available to English speaking-readers. Not all of the presentation of facts and arguments are based on original research but the book synthesizes a vast body of scholarship, much of it by Ethiopians themselves. This is an indispensable text for anyone interested in the Ethiopian modern art and could serve as a stepping stone to further exploration.   

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