The Repair from Occident to Extra-occidental Cultures: Reinvention and Reconstruction in the Work of Kader Attia
Résumé
The problem of “repair [réparation]” runs through the art of Kader Attia (b. 1970) for now going on a decade and a half. His interest began when one of his friends offered him some African material patched up with the help of a piece of Vichy fabric. Intrigued by this mending job, Attia developed an interest in African objects (masks, statuettes, and various other items) “repaired” in this way and preserved today in the greatest museums of the Western world. He was then able to observe that such objects either are rare there or are exhibited in such a way that their repairs remain largely hidden. For Attia, this de-monstration or occultation is the sign of the real difficulty the European scientific community experiences when thinking about such objects: integrating exogenous elements into their original creative context (buttons, fabrics, or coins from colonial society), they thus elude the reassuring taxonomies of Art History. The second stage, for Attia, was to look into the chronology of the reception of these African objects in Europe and to develop, on this basis, a basic postulate that now guides his work: according to the artist, around the turn of the Twentieth Century, when these “repaired” objects arrived in Europe (where they were considered crude, incomplete, formless, bastardized), the West was engaged in a quest for a kind of ideal of formal and aesthetic perfection, of which World War I constituted perhaps, paradoxically, the acme. (First paragraph)