SERIOUS SUBJECTS : Morality, Politics, Coffins Are Treated With Wit in ‘African Art Show’ at Guggenheim

What a way to go--in a coffin custom-designed to resemble your proudest possession. Kane Kwei, a Ghanaian carpenter-turned-artist who died last summer, built wooden Mercedes-Benzes to house the remains of wealthy businessmen, onions and cocoa pods for local farmers and a hen with chicks for women with large families.

Four of Kwei’s car-shaped coffins and numerous witty paintings by Kenya sign painter Joseph Bertiers are included in “The African Art Show,” an exhibit at Guggenheim Gallery, Chapman University, through Wednesday. Although a brief biographical handout is available in the gallery, what’s missing is a sense of the larger context of this work--the traditions it draws upon, and how it’s viewed and used by Africans.

A couple of years ago, when Kwei’s work was included in “Africa Explored: 20th-Century African Art”--a stereotype-shattering exhibit in New York at the Center for African Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art--viewers learned that the coffins are one of several new “functional art” forms invented in Africa.

Produced on commission for the multiethnic inhabitants of towns and cities, the coffins incorporate a respectful attitude toward tradition (by honoring the dead) as well as a spirited celebration of contemporary life.

When Kwei’s dying uncle, a fisherman, requested a special coffin, Kwei came up with the idea of making it in the shape of a boat. Orders from other people poured in, and the family workshop began turning out about two dozen standard models, which are displayed at funerals and then buried.

Needless to say, this form of art isn’t destined to be seen outside of the locality that produced it, and even there it has a short above-ground life. It won’t come as a surprise that the coffins shown in American and European museums and galleries are commissioned expressly for that purpose. But that practice does lead to a sticky question of authenticity.

When the original purpose of a work of non-Western “functional art” is changed to conform to the “art for art’s sake” credo of Western art (normally made for display purposes only), something gets lost in translation.

The four coffins on view--including a white Corvette convertible and an orange racing car with Goodyear tires and a gaudy fuchsia satin lining--were commissioned by Ernie Wolfe, the owner of Turkana, a Los Angeles art gallery that loaned all the works in the exhibit.

Even though Kwei frequently makes car-shaped coffins, the knowledge that these particular pieces were inspired by the exotic car mania of a white American fan removes some of the mystique or the “vibe” or whatever it is we feel when looking at an object truly connected with its culture.

Joseph Bertiers’ paintings are part of a different phenomenon, which the New York exhibit categorized as “urban art.” Made by self-taught sign painters who borrow their styles and imagery from comic books and advertising, these images nevertheless tend to reflect serious views of morality and politics.

Bertiers, a 28-year-old self-taught painter from a merchant family, started out making idiosyncratic signs for Nairobi retail businesses. One of his beauty parlor paintings shows a shop with rows of hairstyle alternatives and a sign that reads, “If you are in a hurry just leave your head and go.”

Several signs warning shoppers that they can’t buy on credit combine sprightly mottoes with images of deadbeats’ funerals (“He’s no longer Mr. Credit but Mr. C. Cash”) or gravestones (“No credit He is dead so don’t ask him here”).

Eventually, Bertiers vented his impatience with the narrow world of painting-to-order in the satiric scene, “Painting a cat . . . I really hate it.” At the apocryphal Turkana Cats Painting Centre, cat owners watch men paint colorful patterns on their pets, one of which is shown tied to a tree branch.

Supported by Wolfe’s patronage, the artist branched out into commentaries on shop-owners’ greed, male-female relationships (“Who are to seduce, men or women?” one painting inquires), police brutality, AIDS, alcoholism (“My Bottle Is Failure”), political hacks (“If U’ vote for Me, the jobless will b’ employed, all the unmarked roads will b’ done so!”) and other topics.

In one of these untitled paintings, delicately painted orange and yellow bomb blasts illuminate a scene with running figures, an uprooted tree and a “no credit” shop sign. A painted legend reads: “In case of atomic bombs: 1) calm, do not panic 2) pay your bill 3) run like hell.”

Government oppression is a major theme of Bertiers’ work. One painting shows police breaking up the loudspeaker rant of an itinerant preacher whose sign reads, “ ‘Jesus Christ’s a Conemam,’ (con man) says Anti-Christs.” Another painting shows calm at a produce market in Nairobi in July, 1990, a few moments before a riot. Two organizers of a pro-democracy rally in this one-party country had been imprisoned a few days before the event was to begin.

“One Day B’4 the release of Nelson Mandela” artfully incorporates several separate images and places them in a manner resembling various techniques (split screens, wipes, floating newspaper headlines) of cinema newsreels.

We see protesters and a cameraman outside Victor Verster prison, where the anti-apartheid activist spent the final portion of his 27-year term on a charge of treason. A newspaper floating in the sky shows Mandela facing a bank of microphones, presumably after his release. And we also see him working on the prison farm under a menacing police guard.

Sometimes Bertiers is just out to have some fun, however. A painting with the legend, “They couldn’t expect it happen, so it was just like a daydream,” shows a dumbfounded family watching the dog wash their car.

The special fascination of Bertiers’ work for a Western viewer is twofold. He portrays a world that adopts certain aspects of contemporary urban Western life with gusto while clinging to vestiges of a rural past.

Spotlights and microphones seem to pop up everywhere (at weddings and outdoor church services as well as political rallies). Yet the major forms of transportation are old-fashioned buses, many of which are seen parked at the fringes of the scenes in the paintings. (Known as matatu in Swahili, these buses are famous for their fast speeds, crowded conditions and the touts who ride outside trying to persuade more people to hop aboard.)

The other tantalizing aspect of this work has to do with its conceptual qualities. Bertiers’ unfettered combinations of texts and imagery allow him to comment dryly on a scene that otherwise would appear quite straightforward. His disjunctive scenes and written commentary combine real-world observation with a view from deep inside his mental landscape.

The gallery handout explains how Wolfe was the first to collect Bertiers’ paintings and, by doing so, liberated him “from the bondage of commercial work.” But it neglects to point out Wolfe’s gallery affiliation, as well as the fact that his gallery loaned all the works in the exhibit.