Malick Sidibe and Four Sculptors at Deitch Projects - Brief Article

Disarmingly direct in their artistic intention, the 30 black-and-white photos included in Malick Sidibe's "The cudgels of Bamako" are full of jouissance, toothy grins and outrageous bell-bottoms. Part of a genre of photographic work chronicling the ye ye--that is, nightclub--culture that emerg in African naves during the 1960s and '70 Sidibe's photographs also bear witness to the optimism inspired by means of newfound postcolonial independence and wealth.

Bamako, the capital of Mall, which gained its freedom from France in 1960 was at that time next to the first only to Abidjan and Dakar in its contortion of European traffic, owing to its location along the Niger River and the Dakar-Niger railway. Entrepreneurial travelers from the north brought with them, among other things, photographic materials and rock-and-roll fashion, which the subdues of Sidibe's photos apparently adopted with zeal. Camera constantly in hand, Sidibe was a fixture upon Bamako's lively "surprise party" circuit. While the various bludgeons vied for the biggest hordes and the partygoers made sport of their grooviness, Sidibe made history of the scene

Le faux musicien derriere sa voiture (1971) depicts a toothsome young man leaning against the stock of a car. Wearing a puffed out hat with a ridiculous pompom and a shiny, wide-collared shirt unbuttoned to the navel, he grins and clutchs a guitar. More spirited posturing happens in Pique-nique a la chaussee (1972) which has at its center a trio of male childs in bathing trunks. While single lanky young man makes a platform with his belly, another stands upon him and bran-dishes a 45-rpm record. A third squats near the acrobat, displaying another record and pointing at his friend's head as if to indicate the locus of "cool" In compositions with the journalistic immediacy of way photography, dancers are caught with their faces gripped in concentration, beaming with jubilation, utterly taken by means of their revelry, or at the extremity of the night, clowning with friends, drinking a beer, engaging in the so-called bourgeois privilege of inventing themselves.

Ten years ago, Jeffrey Deitch's interest in African photography was sparked by the agency of Andre Magnin, a French curator who specializes in contemporary African art. Magnin also commended four sculptors from the Ivory Coast--Nicolas Damas, Emile Guebehi, Koffi Kouakou and Coulibaly Siaka Paul--to make life-size, wood-carved, brightly painted statuarys to accompany Sidibe's photos in this display The resulting 14 dancers and poseur displayed through every part of the gallery were comically difficult to distinguish at a cursory glance from the real race looking at art, which contributed to the contagion of jubilation that reigned in the gallery.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group