Pangaea: New Art from Africa and Latin America, Saatchi Gallery - exhibition review

A globetrotting new show offers astonishing enchantment and terrible beauty — if you ignore the curatorial gobbledegook crawling over it, says Brian Sewell
3 April 2014

The title of Charles Saatchi's new exhibition is Pangaea, a 20th-century word that conjures 20th-century fantasies of the world in its infancy when all the current continents were one. Imagine a single great landmass creaking as the primordial thrusts of its volcanic core did battle with the cooling forces of its single surrounding ocean until, some 200 million years ago, with one gigantic crack, it broke asunder. This first crack, roughly around the Tropic of Cancer, divided Pangaea into two smaller supercontinents: Laurasia, which we define as North America, Greenland, Europe and Asia (excluding India), and Gondwanaland, which comprised India, Africa, South America, Australia and Antarctica. When later cracks appeared, and into them the mighty ocean poured, they too were divided. Thus were formed the familiar lesser masses of Eurasia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica and the Americas, and with them the humbler oceans of our atlases.

What, then, should we expect of this first-ever Pangaean exhibition? Art and artefacts made by whatever proto-human pre-Palaeolithic creatures preceded man 200 million years ago, occupying a land so vast that it is beyond imagining? Alas, that is beyond the tenacity of purpose of even Charles Saatchi, and he has reached back only to the second phase of Earth’s development, to Gondwanaland — not the whole of it but Africa and South America, two modern continents that were once in the comfortable contiguity of spoons and lovers, not separated by the cruel Atlantic. With them he plays the sorcerer, brings them into the present day and argues that there are parallels in their respective modern cultures — parallels neither drawn from them nor emerging from a distant past but imposed by the “increasingly globalised art world” of the present.

I have been making this point for 30 years, for 30 years ago it was already clear that international media had engendered international forms of contemporary art and that nothing could prevent some fashionable foolishness in Manhattan from being almost immediately mimicked in Moscow and Mumbai. Now it is no longer almost. It is immediate. There had been international movements before — ancient Roman all over Europe and the Near East, Byzantine from Anatolia to Aachen, the Gothic of the north just reaching south over the Alps, the Italian Renaissance informing the architecture of even England, the Baroque reaching Batavia, Neoclassicism spreading to America and Australia — but all these took decades, even centuries, to mature, conform to rules and develop authority. In the International Silliness of most contemporary art, however, everything has become as suddenly ubiquitous as fried chicken and the caffé latte, with even human faeces as a popular medium. There is nothing specifically English about the work of Hirst and Emin, our super-paragons. They are merely international.

Let us forget Pangaea and Gondwanaland and instead look for some distinguishing quality that sets apart Saatchi’s African and Latin artists, all of whom have surprisingly long biographies that prove them to be thoroughly international, already widely celebrated and certainly not new kids on the block.

The exhibition opens with an installation in which enormous ants, half a metre long and with a leg span of almost a metre, climb the walls and crowd into a corner, as ants do. It is as infinitely extensible, repeatable and transferable as any Field by Antony Gormley, and is easy to imagine on the exterior of the Hayward Gallery or any of the facilities built for the Olympic Games. It is, however, an allegory of sorts and we are expected to interpret it as addressing the plight of the world’s asylum- seekers. Alas, I completely missed the point. But it has something of a wow factor and is at once astonishing, and then (worse still for its maker, Rafael Gómezbarros, a Colombian) gives pleasure, amusement and delight. It would be a wonderful decoration for a fashionable restaurant or in the entrance hall of Deutsche Bank, where it could take on an entirely different meaning.

I was impressed too by the vast wall-hanging of Ibrahim Mahama (Ghana), a gloomy, oppressive, Arte Povera decoration of old coal sacks sewn together, worn, torn and filthy. But again I missed the political and social argument and saw instead pathetic beauty, a beauty that could so readily be adapted to the stage. It could be a backdrop to Wagner’s Ring or any example of Italian verismo but I dare say that if one suggested its acquisition by English National Opera, the perverse panjandrums there would use it for Der Rosenkavalier and La Traviata.

From the exhibition guide I understand that Fredy Alzate (Colombia) “explores the inherent contradictions of uncontainable urban development” but what I saw in his huge ball of bricks was only an enchanting and desirable object, the whimsical welding of two tiny Byzantine domes into a globe, an amusing garden ornament, a thing that one must have for its mischievous thinginess, demanding to be touched.

Even in what I thought the explicit photographs of Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou (Benin), I missed the point. As they depict the Demoiselles of Porto-Novo — nubile young women wearing over their faces what appear to be ancient tribal masks — I took them to be a commentary on their indifference to the practice of prostitution by both the prostitute and the client. Agbodjélou makes us the clients and in his haunting corridors and enfilades our purpose is to discover sex at its raw simplest, the whole woman no more than a substitute for the urgent hand, the business profoundly primitive and as old as the hills. These photographs are still, silent, poignant, beautiful and terrible, in the best sense of that word. Agbodjélou’s intention, however, was quite other and has something to do with the reversal of colonisation and slavery.

One thing, then, is clear: these artists from Gondwanaland are as dependent on curatorial interpretation as any in western Europe. Among the 16 I have found four — a high quota — who seem, within their own parameters, to have some considerable virtue. But, according to the curator, Gabriela Salgado, I have utterly misunderstood their work and perceived what is not there. But should I trust her? She has, from the Royal College of Art, an MA in curating contemporary art, of which one essential discipline is glib command of the prolix international gobbledegook that only such curators speak; she is, indeed, an instrument of the “increasingly globalised art world” that now regiments the artist rather than releases him.

Pangaea: New Art from Africa and Latin America is at the Saatchi Gallery, SW3 (020 7811 3070, saatchigallery.com) until August 31. Daily 10am-6pm. Admission free.

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