Koyo Kouoh
Introduction
Koyo Kouoh
Issa Samb is a Senegalese sculptor, painter, actor, philosopher, performance artist, writer, and critic. For decades, he has been creating a galaxy of interconnected universes in which the signs of everyday life are transformed into altars to personal obsessions.
One of those obsessions is politics and politicians, in particular Senegalese politicians, whom he has frequently described as mindless people. In keeping with his readings of Marxist philosophy and aesthetics, many of his sculptural assemblages take the paradigm of revolutionaries—Che Guevara, Amílcar Cabral, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Lech Wałe˛sa, the Black Panthers—as their subject matter, suggesting the possibility of harnessing the energy of the visual arts to support the struggle of the weak and disadvantaged.
In 1974, along with filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty and an interdisciplinary group of artists, writers, musicians, actors, and filmmakers, Samb founded the Laboratoire Agit-Art. Its multi-disciplinary actions were directed against the formalism of the École de Dakar, a style of art practice developed at the National Art School of Dakar and drenched in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s philosophy of Négritude, which promotes the difference between African and European in the same way that it strictly respects the separation of forms and disciplines in the use of African symbolism. Aiming to transform the nature of artistic practice from a formalist, object-bound fixation to a process that is based on experimentation and agitation, ephemerality rather than permanence, political and social ideas rather than aesthetic notions, Agit-Art developed a distinct “aesthetic of the social.” Audience participation was paramount to the group’s work, which privileged communicative acts over the embodied object. Neither utopian nor self-referential, it grounded its actions in the immediate sociopolitical situation. Today, many of the founding members have passed away, but the group’s spirit persists and continues to be materialized in all of Samb’s work.
The following text by Samb is written in the cryptic, elliptical, elusive, evanescent, and erratic style that he has developed throughout his career. It begins with quotations in no particular order. The first one refers to an imaginary HE who is nevertheless a HE whom everyone is supposed to know: the African politician, and precisely the Senegalese politician. The quotations continue with a story that took place in Dakar in the mid-1980s, when the mayor had all stray dogs slaughtered because one of them had bitten his daughter. Samb reads this event as a process of the manipulation and brutalization of society, juxtaposing it with the actions of Hitler. Far-fetched? Exaggerated? Perhaps not. One can see it as a perfect example of associative thinking and writing: the line of thought begins with the slaughter of dogs, goes on to the German shepherd, an animal that for Samb has the same value as a human being, and leads to Hitler, the personification of cruelty and manipulation.
The text ends with the death of Steve Jobs and the Internet’s incapacity to solve emotional problems or to cure diseases, cancer in particular. Samb has neither an e-mail account, a bank account, nor a cell phone, does not watch TV or indulge in the modern frenzy of life and the constant pursuit of wealth and recognition. And yet one cannot fail to recognize the incisive character of his observations on the course of the world: how systems develop, how people develop, how they behave, how they relate, how they feel. Le sentir (“to feel,” not the feeling itself), as he often states, is the most important human activity. Themes such as affection, commitment, faith and beliefs, sorrows and joys, failures and success, are continually revisited and treated as fields for investigating the complexity (and simplicity) of being.
ON THE ART OF RECORDING TRIVIAL IDEAS, IN THE FORM OF A PROJECT OF PLACING, DISPLACING, AND REPLACING THE CONCEPT IN ITS ENVIRONMENT WITH A VIEW TO PRECIPITATING ITS FALL is a piece of writing that reads like a long, unpunctuated song. The style is elliptical, dense, and compact, interspersed with pauses, reflections, references and quotations, reminiscences and fabulations; a style that reflects the absence of boundaries between poetry, pamphlet, novel, and diary. It is an accumulation of real events and the thoughts and emotions they trigger. These are seemingly unrelated, and yet they are spun with a recognizable, common yarn: the duty of an artist to his immediate environment.
March 13, 2012
Koyo Kouoh (b. 1967) lives and works in Dakar and is the Founding Artistic Director of RAW MATERIAL COMPANY, a center for art, knowledge, and society; she is Agent for dOCUMENTA (13).