Art's Ambassador to Africa: Barthélémy Toguo

Who does Barthelemy Toguo try to engage? What consequences does his work deliver this Art World? What about those who actually work occupations which require manual labour? Perhaps for Toguo, these are questions that seemingly are up to interpretation by the viewer of the Art as it is nowhere clearly discernable. Then more questions: Who is the viewer in this scenario? The tour guide who is reciting big words like phenomenology and references Carl Andre with a group of 20 post-middle age women that follow her? The students who traveled 33.18 miles from New Jersey for an Art class? Or two French men out on a stroll who look to inform themselves of the latest products of the "high culture"? Certainly the man watering the street 100 yards from the gallery will not appear: he is too busy working.






Without reading the meager press release, which I doubt was written by Robert Miller (Could this be him?), one is left with little other than a 59 second video projection and the peanut m&ms I dropped onto the floor of the pristine vacant 20x30ft room doused in the smell of ammonia cleaner. The air hardly suggests that Toguo is a French educated Cameroon native who sells Art throughout high-cultural institutions in developed world in order to fund his Western contribution to the people of Bandjoun, Cameroon: the Bandjoun Station. The Bandjoun Station is an artist residency space which aims to bring in international Artists to the program to "stimulate creativity and the desire for culture." Toguo also makes a point to mention that these international Artists are brought in "in order to avoid the pitfall of the ‘African art ghetto.'" Taking those promises into consideration, it seems that Toguo strives to bring the West and the need for its Culture to Bandjoun instead of leaving the chiefdom to develop in the ways it as a community feels necessary. Here is discovered the contradiction in the overall form of Toguo's project when he makes a point to say: "It is essential that we find OUR OWN solutions in all areas, whether agriculture, healthcare, economy, culture, politics, education or sport." It is impossible that the people of Bandjoun find their own solutions for their problems if they are relying on foreign solutions rooted in foreign capital imported from the Western world.

Meanwhile, the press release explains how Toguo takes advantage of his traditions and values to submit to the hand of the Art World:
"His precise contribution to the cultural dialog on post-colonialism, particularly on France's legacy, uniquely conforms to the rules of the contemporary art world's internal vernacular idioms but derives its sources and strengths from entirely outside the western [sic] canon."




Of the video itself: Is it really worth $7,500 USD? What denotes its value in currency? Rather silly it is that video documentation of a performance which must have lasted more than a minute and could in comparable time be uploaded to a video proliferation service such as YouTube or Vimeo at no charge, would be equal to significant portions of many peoples' annual income, not to speak of his pieces Art going for $25k. It seems to me that Toguo is that of a philanthropist: harvesting the riches while distributing processed goods to those who have lost the conditions to support themselves to Modernism. At first it seems that he is performing a good deed, but if one looks closer they will find that it is only the commencement of the spread of the ever-morphing "post-"Modern disease in bed with Captialism which has kept classes divided for the last several centuries, if not more, disguised as a world of Art and Culture.

The link for the Bandjoun Station: [ http://www.bandjounstation.com ]

Mike Benevenia

Mike Benevenia and I met at the Civic Square Building last Thursday to introduce to each other what we have been studying at our time at the Mason Gross School. The recording of our conversation was lost, or never recorded during our meeting due to technical issues we had faced with a version of Garage Band. Charred remains can be found here.






Benevenia is a sculptor and painter working out of New Brunswick. After trip to Madrid in 2006, images of bulls, bull fighting and skeletal matadors appear often in Mike's paintings. They join various drawings and sculptures which contain vague notions of Christian mythology, which he acknowledges is present in the work, but says is a residual product of his upbringing and childhood. These figures take form utilizing welded steel taken from scrap or junk freely available.




In a similar approach to the use of ephemera in mail-art, Benevenia has taken his technique with junk steel to painting by mixing objects he finds such as bottle caps, shards of glass, bottle remains, and q-tips with paint and glue. Making most of his large works in the summer such as the aforementioned painting, Mike says it is one of his well liked pieces, though he was frustrated with the tediousness of its construction and was not sure if he wanted to make more. Part of his frustration comes from the painting courses he has taken at the Mason Gross School. He feels that much of the painting one and two courses are too occupied with painting dozens of still life type paintings, without making room for other forms of painting, experimentation in painting, or the teaching of specific painting techniques. It is this obstruction that has kept him from taking the courses. Mike's painting reminded me of Jan Svenkmajer who I then suggested for Mike to view. The shorts contain 'bits of junk' to be used for stop motion animations where human like figures devour their junk selves to further destroy the junk and create more human figures, similar to Mike's work in aesthetic and the materials used.





Benevenia had shown some of his sketches and collages where many consisted of images of animal carcasses, depictions of severed limbs, and dismembered bodies. An entire page was devoted to a May 5th 2008 Targum article where a man had jumped infront of an Acela train in order to end his life and scatter his remains along the tracks running through the station. The article had stuck out to me as I had saved it as well, amazed the authorities walked down the main steps of the station with semi-transparent red biohazard bags containing the remains. These images had me suggest to Mike to check out the Viennese Actionists such as Hermann Nitsch who had performed a ritual with a slaughtered lamb at the Round House on the Cook/Douglass Campus at Rutgers back in the 70's. They also lead me to show the PostNeoAbsurdist form of the meat poem, last performed at the Mason Gross Galleries at 'Morphemic Clamour' April 2007 and of which I have most frequently seen performed by Bradley Chriss. Meat poems are multi-faceted, and only require meat and text. All other registers of the performance are up to determination by the performer.

For his Visual Arts thesis, Benevenia plans to expand on his sculpture-costume that he began making his first year at Mason Gross. At the Livingston Arts Building, he had once staged a performance with a wearable bull sculpture and suggests that this might make a reappearance.

Upcoming from [PRO-][ANTI-] press: KUH[n] II

DADA Manifesto

The Cubists want to cover Dada with snow; that may surprise you but it is so, they want to empty the snow from their pipe and cover Dada like a blanket.
Are you sure about that?
Absolutely, the facts spill out from their grotesque mouths.
They think Dada might put a stop to their odious trade:
selling art for vast sums of money.
Art is worth more than sausages, more than women, more than everything.
Art can be seen as clearly as God! (see Saint-Sulpice).
Art is a drug for imbeciles.
The Tables are turning thanks to the spirits: pictures and other words of art are like strong box-tables: the mind is locked inside and becomes more and more fantastic as sale-room prices rise.
Comedy, comedy, comedy, comedy, comedy, my dear friends.
Dealers don't like art, they know the mystery of the spirit..........
Buy reproductions of signed works.
Don't be a snob, you are no less intelligent because your neighbour has the same as you.
No more fly shit on the walls.
There will be some in any case, obviously, but not quite so much.
Dada will certainly be increasingly vilified, its wire-cutters enabling it to cut through the processions singing 'Come on Darling'. What sacrilege!!!
Cubism represents the dearth of ideas.
They have cubed primitive art, cubed Negro sculpture, cubed violins, cubed guitars, cubed comics, cubed shit and cubed the profiles of young women. Now they want to cube money!!!
As for Dada it means nothing, nothing, nothing. It makes the public say, 'We understand nothing, nothing, nothing.'
The Dadaists are nothing, nothing, nothing, they will certainly succeed in nothing, nothing, nothing.

Francis PICABIA
who knows nothing, nothing, nothing.

from '391' No. 12 Paris, March 1920