foam magazine #17 / portrait?
portfolio text
olitical message, the images also demonstrate what I have described p elsewhere as a postcolonial habit of nostalgia for a past hardly experienced or only vaguely remembered, for something lost even before it is known. What is more memorable about the series is that it marks Fosso’s firm transition from mere self-regard as the dandy in the mirror, to surrogate representation. The figure in the images is that of the artist, but he is only an actor playing different persona, a model in his own allegorical tableaus. He becomes the iconography, the vehicle for a different social message, the signifying figure. We find Fosso on solid ground again in his TATI series from 1997, a group of images in which he continues his role playing, appearing in one photograph as a pirate, in another as living room golfer, and in one of the most colorful photographs in the series, we find him cross-dressing as what he calls ‘La Femme Américaine Libérée’, the liberated American woman. In one of the most explicitly political and elaborately staged images, Fosso, dressed in an attire that crosses a colonial warrant chief with echoes of the late Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, appears as ‘The Chief (who sold Africa to the colonizers)’. Many of the images in the series remind us of Homi Bhabha’s mimic man, the damaged postcolonial who is left suspended between remnants of his pre-colonial self and illusions of a civilized or sophisticated, that is, Europeanized transfiguration. The images are tongue-in-cheek, powerful, even acerbic, yet beautiful masterpieces of satire. ‘La Femme Américaine Libérée’ reminds us of another famous and not so subtle critique of women’s liberation, the 1970s hit song, ‘Lady’, by Samuel Fosso’s countryman, the late singer and iconoclast Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. While Fela’s critique was directed at urban, nouveau-riche African women who challenged the chauvinism of male partners, Fosso’s piece shoots an arrow across the ocean to take aim at American feminism. Remarkably, the liberated lady played by Fosso is dressed in so-called African fabrics, the same print-cloth that fellow expatriate and British artist Yinka Shonibare popularized in the art world in the 1990s. A close reading of ‘La Femme Américaine Libérée’ would require a whole new essay, but there are two things that are important to note here. The first and obvious point is that the image, like a couple of other images in the series, shows the artist in a cross-gendered role, elabo
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rately dressed as a woman with finely executed make-up. More importantly, however, is that this cross-gendered role playing most clearly establishes the continuity between Fosso’s work as a contemporary, metropolitan image maker and the art traditions of his Igbo ancestry. While Fosso’s figure in ‘La Femme Américaine Libérée’ reminds us somewhat of the equally elaborately made-up images of Fulani men from the West African savannah, it also reminds us of the work of Fosso’s contemporary and fellow Igbo expatriate, New York art photographer Ike Ude whose Cover Girl series in the mid-1990s centered around the artist’s own self-portraits with elaborate but fine make-up. Fosso’s and Ude’s work both belong to a tradition of the cross-dressing Agbogho-mmam or Ogoli-na-acho-mma, a prominent figure in Igbo satire through which men dressed and decorated as beautiful women delivered laced commentary on current events and social trends. Fosso’s focus on the beauti ful self, though probably quite unconsciously so, and Ude’s well-known dandyism, both derive in large part from this element of Igbo culture. And now in his most recent series, African Spirits, Samuel Fosso delivers perhaps his most powerful work since the boyhood self-portraits. In this series Fosso transforms himself into some of the most important icons in Africa’s modern history, from the founders of the continent’s modern nation states, such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, to recent liberation icons like Nelson Mandela. In Fosso’s series there are images of Patrice Lumumba, liberator of the Congo, and we even see iconic figures from the African Diaspora, including a re-enactment of The Passion of Muhammad Ali, Carl Fischer’s photo graph of the former world champion for George Lois’s controversial cover of Esquire magazine in which Ali appeared as the martyred St. Sebastian, patron saint of athletes. Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the US military in 1968 marked a ground-shifting moment in 20 th century history and earned him a place in the pantheon of great African leaders. In African Spirits the boy photographer who shot images of himself to send to his mother becomes the master artist who inhabits and interprets the history of a continent. Yet, in all his references, roles, and re-enactments, there is one persistent and overarching presence in Samuel Fosso’s work: the handsome artist himself. +