Congo Vision: A Homeland As Its Artists Render It - Magnin-A

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SATURDAY, JULY 25, 2015
New Ethicists on Twitter: Nicki Minaj and Meek Mill
This was a week for rumbles, for
striking back at unchallenged wisdom. Sometimes the
desire to speak truth
to power is so strong it
outweighs any backlash that such interjecCRITIC’S
tions might cause.
NOTEBOOK
Sometimes that’s exactly the point.
Witness the recent conflagrations
JON
CARAMANICA
initiated by Nicki Minaj and Meek
Mill. They have been an item for several months and are currently on tour
together — Ms. Minaj is the headliner,
of course. On Tuesday, both took to
Twitter with fast, feeling-motivated
fingers. Ms. Minaj was concerned
about how the media normalizes and
rewards certain types of beauty above
others; Meek Mill was focused on preserving truthfulness in a genre that’s
long prized it. As the smoke cleared, it
became evident that hip-hop’s most
prominent new couple are also the
new ethics police, animated by principle and standing firm and tall.
Ms. Minaj went first. On Tuesday,
after not receiving an MTV Video Music Award nomination for video of the
year (though she did receive other
nods), she underscored what she believed was a persistent bias in the
Nicki Minaj and Meek Mill
challenged norms this week.
kind of videos that receive attention:
“If your video celebrates women with
very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year,” she wrote on
Twitter. She was aggrieved but cool,
reasonably assailing the ways in
Continued on Page 4
CHRIS PIZZELLO/INVISION, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
‘Daily Show’
Race Dispute
Is Recalled
By Writer
By DAVE ITZKOFF
A former correspondent and writer for
Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” has
disclosed that he and its host, Jon Stewart,
engaged in a heated argument about a segment perceived as racially insensitive. In
his recounting, the correspondent, Wyatt
Cenac, who is black, said Mr. Stewart became defensive and frequently shouted expletives.
The dispute, which Mr. Cenac detailed
this week in a podcast interview, is more
than just a behind-the-scenes blowup at a
popular TV program. It is in jarring contrast to the reputation of “The Daily Show,”
a news satire that has had a wide berth to
address matters of race, and of Mr. Stewart, who is one of the few white performers
to have tackled these issues frequently and
unsparingly.
Producers at “The Daily Show” say that
they are constantly re-examining how they
create their comedy segments and that
they are aware of “blind spots” in their
process.
But Mr. Cenac’s account has nonetheless surfaced at an especially awkward
time as Mr. Stewart prepares to step down
as its host on Aug. 6 after a 16-year run.
Mr. Cenac, who worked on “The Daily
Show” from 2008 to 2012, recounted the
fight with Mr. Stewart in an episode of
Marc Maron’s podcast that was posted on
Thursday.
In the podcast, Mr. Cenac described
events at “The Daily Show” in 2011, after
Mr. Stewart did an on-air impression of
Herman Cain, a black business executive
who was seeking the 2012 Republican
nomination for president.
Mr. Cenac compared Mr. Stewart’s impersonation to the Kingfish, a racially stereotyped character from “The Amos ’n’
Andy Show,” and said it struck him as “a
little weird.”
For days afterward, the Fox News Channel, a frequent target of “The Daily Show,”
seized on Mr. Stewart’s imitation and criticized it as racist.
When Mr. Cenac later tried to discourContinued on Page 6
ANDRÉ MORIN
Congo Vision:
A Homeland
As Its Artists
Render It
By RACHEL DONADIO
Of Warriors,
Vagabonds
And Anger
The Lincoln Center Festival typically
packs all manner of theater, music and
dance offerings into a month. Its director,
Nigel Redden, has acknowledged the difficulty of figuring out how
many performances of each
work to present. The festival
probably overscheduled the
entertaining opening event,
MUSIC
“Danny Elfman’s Music
REVIEW
From the Films of Tim Burton,” which drew big audiences at the start
but sold inconsistently through the eightperformance run.
Unfortunately, “Delusion of the Fury,”
the unclassifiable music-theater work from
the late 1960s by the American maverick
composer Harry Partch, was scheduled for
just two performances on successive
nights. The fantastical, daffy yet affecting
ANTHONY
TOMMASINI
PARIS — The art practically leaps off the walls. A striking painting of President
Obama, Nelson Mandela and
Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese leader who was assassinated in 1961. Luscious
black-and-white photographs
of 1950s night life in Léopoldville, now Kinshasa. Whimsical watercolors from the
1930s.
These are among 350
works by 41 artists in “Beauté
Congo,” an electric, eye-opening survey of art from Congo
from 1926-2015 at the Cartier
Foundation here that offers a
window into a dynamic art
scene not often showcased in
Western museums.
“We wanted to create a
narrative that reintroduces
these exceptional artists into
the history of art,” said André
Magnin, a boisterous Frenchman who curated the show.
He has traveled to Congo for
decades, cultivating relationships with some of the artists
featured as well as buying
work on behalf of a major collector. “We wanted to show
the broader public exceptional works from a continent
where the television only
presents dark, disastrous images of war and illness,” he
added.
Mr. Magnin said the survey
was intended as a “political
and historical” gesture that
FLORIAN KLEINEFEN
Continued on Page 2
“Beauté Congo,” at the Cartier Foundation in Paris,
includes, from top, Chéri Samba’s “Yes One Must Think,”
of President Obama, Patrice Lumumba and Nelson
Mandela; Monsengo Shula’s “Sooner or Later the World
Will Change”; and a photograph by Jean Depara.
REVUE NOIRE
Delusion of the Fury
Searchers in a Spirit World Laced With Pop Clichés
City Center
production, created by the composer and
director Heiner Goebbels for the Ruhrtriennale in Germany in 2013, opened on
Thursday at New York City Center. Regardless of the financial and logistical restraints, I bet “Delusion of the Fury” could
have drawn solid audiences for a week. At
A sudden craving for Kentucky Fried
Chicken swept over me at one point during
the stage adaptation of the Haruki Murakami novel “Kafka on the Shore,” being presented through Sunday at the
David H. Koch Theater as part
of the Lincoln Center Festival.
It has been well more than a
decade since I’ve visited a
THEATER
KFC, but those familiar with
REVIEW
Mr. Murakami’s playful metaphysical mystery will recall that Colonel
Sanders — or rather a spirit taking the form
of that corporate icon — is among the
strange array of characters in the book.
So, too, is Johnnie Walker, the top-hatted
figure strolling across many a whiskey bot-
CHARLES
ISHERWOOD
Continued on Page 5
INSIDE
From Headphones to Headliners
The popularity of live podcast events
fuels two festivals in New York. PAGE 5
SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Kafka on the Shore From left, Mame Yamada,
Katrine Mutsukiko Doi Vincent and Katsumi
Kiba at the David H. Koch Theater.
tle. And by the conclusion of this visually arresting but ponderous three-hour production, performed in Japanese with English supertitles, thoughts of crispy chicken had
been swept away by a stronger craving for a
bracing glass of that liquor. Or indeed any
other.
The production, adapted by Frank Galati
(who earlier adapted and directed a stage
version of two stories from Mr. Murakami’s
collection “After the Quake”) and directed
Continued on Page 2
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THE NEW YORK TIMES, SATURDAY, JULY 25, 2015
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SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Ambulatory dioramas: From left, Anne Suzuki, Nino Furuhata and Naohito Fujiki in “Kafka on the Shore,” adapted by Frank Galati from Haruki Murakami’s 2002 novel.
Searchers in a Spirit World Laced With Pop Clichés
From First Arts Page
by Yukio Ninagawa (making his
third appearance at this festival),
features an alluring and impressive set design by Tsukasa Nakagoshi. The wide expanse of the
stage — usually home to New
York City Ballet and other dance
companies — is filled with large
glass boxes lit by fluorescent tubing. These vitrines, of various
shapes and sizes, are manipulated by black-clad figures so that
they slip and slide smoothly
around like ambulatory dioramas, giving the sweep of the
story an almost cinematic flow.
Scenes from the book take place
mostly inside or just outside
these boxes, which represent locations as varied as a quiet private library, a teeming red-light
district, a long-haul truck and a
remote forest idyll.
Mr. Galati does a smooth job of
streamlining the book, but as is
often the case with stage versions of philosophically inquisitive novels (or for that matter,
nonphilosophically inquisitive
ones), story tends to take precedence over the less easily dramatized layers, which in this case include much rich meditation on
the quirks of destiny, the fluid nature of time and identity, the
echoing hollowness of human experience and the strange forces
that bring people into life-changing contact.
Broadly speaking, the story
charts the intersecting odysseys
of two principal characters, the
15-year-old Kafka (Nino Furuhata), whose self-chosen name suggests his precocious spiritual
alienation, and Nakata (Katsumi
Twin odysseys of a
boy and an old man.
Kiba), a childlike older man
whose brain was scrambled, we
learn in flashback, when he was a
young boy during a weird mystical occurrence on a school outing
in the forest during the war.
Since this trauma, Nakata has
been unable to read or write, but
he is able to converse with cats,
and picks up a few dollars to help
support himself by using this unusual gift to track down lost felines. (The talking cats — repre-
sented by actors in sleek fur costumes — are among the more engaging aspects of the show, with
the performers persuasively
mimicking the slinking of a Siamese or the playful rubbing of a
young tomcat.)
Both characters begin their
journeys in Tokyo, but Kafka
soon leaves the city behind. Unhappy at home with his famous
sculptor father and convinced
that he needs to flee to avoid a
dark Oedipal destiny, he moves
on and eventually finds a new
spiritual home in the small library run by the reclusive, beautiful Miss Saeki (Rie Miyazawa)
and her assistant, Oshima (Naohito Fujiki), who, in one of the
novel’s many odd surprises,
eventually reveals that he is biologically female but lives his life
as a gay man. (Long story — of
which there are many in the novel and which Mr. Murakami
makes a sort of comic motif.)
At roughly the same time,
Nakata’s search for a lost cat
brings him into the dark orbit of
an evil figure taking the form of
Johnnie Walker, a kitty killer
whose outrages so upset Nakata
that he is forced to murder him
(albeit at Johnnie’s express re-
Kafka on the Shore
Based on the book by Haruki Murakami; adapted for the stage by Frank Galati; directed by Yukio Ninagawa; translated by Shunsuke Hiratsuka; sets by Tsukasa Nakagoshi; costumes by Ayako Maeda; lighting by Motoi Hattori; sound by Katsuji Takahashi; hair and makeup design by Yoko Kawamura and Yuko Chiba; music by Umitaro
Abe; stage manager, Shinichi Akashi; technical manager, Kiyotaka Kobayashi; production manager, Yuichiro Kanai. A Ninagawa Company production, presented by Lincoln Center as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. At the David H. Koch Theater, 212721-6500, lincolncenterfestival.org. Through Sunday. Running time: 3 hours.
WITH: Rie Miyazawa (Miss Saeki/Girl), Naohito Fujiki (Oshima), Nino Furuhata
(Kafka), Anne Suzuki (Sakura), Hayato Kakizawa (Crow), Tsutomu Takahashi (Hoshino), Masakatsu Toriyama (Colonel Sanders), Katsumi Kiba (Nakata) and Masato Shinkawa (Johnnie Walker), Mame Yamada (Kawamura) and Katrine Mutsukiko Doi Vincent (Mimi/the Colonel’s Girl).
quest). Nakata, too, flees the city,
with the help of the friendly truck
driver Hoshino (Tsutomu Takahashi), who’s intrigued by this
strange codger who has the ability, among other things, to make
fish fall from the sky.
All of this, by the way, is merely the rough outline of the essentials. As the plot develops, many
more swirling currents develop,
each as surprising, mystifying or
simply bewildering as the one before. Unfortunately, even with an
extensive running time the production does not allow for the
characters to inhabit our imaginations as richly as they do in the
book. (And forget trying to parse
the murky layers of meaning.)
In the large theater, the performances likewise are unable to
register powerfully, especially
since the sometimes densely
philosophical dialogue and the
myriad oddities of the plot require us to pay close attention to
the titles high above the stage.
Still, the actors give winning if
mostly economical interpretations of their characters.
Although Mr. Furuhata looks
closer to 13 than the 17 years old
that Kafka sometimes pretends
to be, he is touching as this young
fellow, still trusting and kindly
but possessed of a dark worldliness — and eventually a sexual
charisma that has surprising consequences. Mr. Kiba’s Nakata
Visions of a Homeland
As Its Artists Render It
From First Arts Page
sought to disprove the common
misconception that art in Africa
had skipped several generations
from the traditional works of the
past to those made after many
African countries became independent of their European colonizers. (Belgian colonial rule in
Congo ended in 1960.) Although
much of this show is dedicated to
contemporary artists like Chéri
Samba, who painted the image of
world leaders, the earliest works
here have rarely been shown in
such numbers, and the exhibition
makes a strong case for the continuity of rich artistic production
over the last century.
“Beauté Congo,” which runs
through mid-November, begins
in the 1920s, when the husbandand-wife painters Albert and Antoinette Lubaki and the artist
known as Djilatendo moved from
decorating traditional huts to creating works on paper at the request of a Belgian colonial administrator. The Lubakis’ watercolors, often of animals or leaves,
fall somewhere between realism
and fantasy, while Djilatendo’s
geometric patterns hover between traditionalism and modernism. The show fills all of the
exhibition space at the foundation, which is housed in a glass
box designed by Jean Nouvel.
In the late 1920s and early
1930s, work by the Lubakis was
shown in important museums
and galleries in Europe. Djilatendo was represented in an exhibition in Brussels along with Magritte. But after 1935 and a fight
between curators, they stopped
producing and were eventually
lost to history. Mr. Magnin said
he went in search of their work
after learning about it in a book
he stumbled upon in 1989 in Zaire,
as the country was then called.
(It is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.)
“Beauté Congo” also showcases the artists who participated
between 1946 and 1954 in an academy “for popular indigenous art,”
as the catalog puts it, started by a
former French navy officer and
artist, Pierre Romain-Desfossés.
They include vibrant, naturalistic
underwater scenes of fish and of
birds in trees from the 1950s by
the artist known as Bela, who
worked as a night guard for
Romain-Desfossés before taking
up painting, which he did with his
fingertips, without a brush.
In the 1950s, the photographer
Jean Depara, born in 1928, captured a moment in Léopoldville,
where rumba was all the rage
and ladies of the night wore cocktail dresses. His images, in rich
silver gelatin prints, recall those
by the Malian photographers
Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé,
but unlike Mali, Congo isn’t a
Muslim country, and its night life
is racier.
Various works in the show are
dedicated to the “Rumble in the
Jungle,” the politically charged
1974 boxing match in Kinshasa in
which Muhammad Ali defeated
George Foreman, a moment of
black pride in a newly liberated
country. These include photos
and a colorful painting by Moke,
who worked in the popular style
and died in 2001. Steve Bandoma,
born in 1981, revisits the match in
his 2014 “Cassius Clay” series,
done in papier collé with ink. “I
try to go against the stereotypes
of African artists,” Mr. Bandoma
said at the exhibition opening. “I
define myself as an artist, not an
African artist.”
Today, Moke’s cousin Monsengo Shula, 55, a self-described
ANDRÉ MORIN
Above, the 1974 Ali-Foreman
fight in Kinshasa (“Untitled”),
by Moke, and left, J P Mika
with “Kiese na Kiese (Le
Bonheur et la Joie).” More
images: nytimes.com/arts.
THOMAS SALVA/LUMENTO, VIA THE CARTIER FOUNDATION
autodidact, works in the popular
vein, but with an “Afrofuturist”
twist. The exhibition features his
2014 painting “Sooner or Later
the World Will Change,” of African astronauts in outer space,
with an African statue at the center of their satellite.
Also on view are colorful futuristic cityscape sculptures, archi-
tectural models gone wild, by the
artist Bodys Isek Kingelez,
(“Phantom City,” 1996) and
Rigobert Nimi (“The City of
Stars,” 2006), who uses found material and castoff electronics.
Born in 1965, Mr. Nimi lives in
Kinshasa without electricity, Mr.
Magnin said. At the show’s opening, Mr. Nimi and other artists in
the show spoke of the challenges
they face. “For an artist to become a celebrity, he has to go to
Europe,” Mr. Nimi said.
Congo’s current government
has come under fire by human
rights groups for its repression of
dissent, and most of the works in
the exhibition shy from direct political confrontation. Mr. Samba,
one of Congo’s best-known artists, veers into the political with a
work depicting a child soldier
with the words “I am for peace,
that is why I like weapons.”
“Beauté Congo” has received
positive reviews in France since
it opened on July 11, but there has
also been some criticism. Pascale
Obolo, a filmmaker and the editor
of Afrikadaa, a cultural journal,
found fault with the “very neoco-
naturally wins our hearts with
his deadpan confessions of his
own stupidity and genial ability
to catch each of life’s curveballs
as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. Ms. Miyazawa’s Miss
Saeki has an ethereal, almost
ghostly presence, her soul still
bound up in a tragedy in her past.
The supporting players, too,
make vivid impressions, with Mr.
Takahashi’s jovial Hoshino particularly warm and welcome.
Masato Shinkawa is flesh-crawlingly effective as Johnnie Walker,
who feasts on kitty hearts. And as
Colonel Sanders, Masakatsu Toriyama both looks and acts the part
of the avuncular fellow so familiar to us all, at least from distant
television commercials.
Owners of the KFC brand, however, might not be quite so
pleased with his representation
here. The colonel proves helpful
in leading Hoshino to a mysterious stone that is a sort of portal
into the spirit world that Nakata
is in search of. But he’s also a
pimp who insists that Hoshino
sleep with one of his girls before
he will be granted access to that
stone. That’s a long, strange
story, too — and so, in sum, is
“Kafka on the Shore.”
lonial and paternalistic” attitude
of Mr. Magnin and others who
bring African art into European
museums. “We’re in a world of
globalization,” she said. “We
don’t need France or Belgium in
order to show art from Africa.”
Some questioned why the only
woman included in the exhibition
was Antoinette Lubaki, from the
1930s, and why, for instance, the
show did not include the prizewinning artist Michèle Magema,
born in 1977, whose work has
been shown widely in Europe.
“I’m sure they exist,” Mr. Magnin
said of female artists. “Unfortunately I haven’t met them.”
Others questioned the possible
commercial implications of the
show, since Mr. Magnin acquired
work by some of the artists featured here in building up the
holdings of Jean Pigozzi, a businessman, with what Mr. Magnin
said was the largest collection of
African contemporary art in the
world, with 12,000 works.
Hervé Chandès, the director of
the Cartier Foundation, said he
wasn’t concerned. “If André
hadn’t been there, I couldn’t have
done the exhibition,” he said. “I
needed someone with the knowledge of the artistic life of Congo.”
Back at the exhibition opening,
some of the artists thanked Mr.
Magnin for championing them.
“He helped me a lot after he said,
‘Find your style,’” said the artist
J P Mika, standing by one of his
paintings, which also features
Mr. Obama and Mr. Mandela. In
this one, each man is split in half,
depicted simultaneously as his
younger and older self. Mr. Shula,
who painted the African astronauts, said he hoped being included in the show would drive
up prices for his work. “Of
course,” he said.
Nearby were rich color photographs from the 2011 series “A
View,” by Kiripi Katembo, born in
1979. They show images of Kinshasa reflected in puddles. A
world turned upside down, saturated with grit and color and
love.