(The Museum of Modern Art, New York; CAAC; The Pigozzi Collection)
Chéri Samba (b. 1956)
Problem of Water, 2004
On view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
Perspective Discussion of news topics with a point of view, including narratives by individuals regarding their own experiences.
Thirsty for solutions
African artist Chéri Samba speaks to the theme of scarcity amid abundance
Chéri Samba’s “Problem of Water,” 2004. On view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; CAAC; The Pigozzi Collection)
How stupid some ideas look in retrospect — and how prescient some pictures.
Chéri Samba, who is from Congo, painted this work in 2004. It’s called the “Problem of Water,” and it hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Like many of Samba’s paintings, it features the artist himself — in this case, spiffily dressed in red suit and red shoes, and riding a rocket to Mars.
He’s in search of water. He has two buckets in which to carry whatever he might find back to Earth, where, as the title suggests, there’s a problem. Although Congo is the most water-rich nation in Africa, about three-quarters of its people experience acute shortages of clean drinking water.
Dangling from Samba’s left hand, to light his way, is a gas lantern. This minor irony also speaks to the theme of scarcity amid abundance: The surrounding cosmos is lit like chandeliers by a surfeit of stars.
“Problem of Water” isn’t just about water, of course. It’s about the perils of techno-utopianism, and of thinking that to solve an urgent problem, you have to do something extreme, unlikely and against human nature.
More often, solutions are close-at-hand (which doesn’t mean they’re easy). You could fix the police by abolishing them or replacing them with robots, for instance, or you could do the work of changing their training and tactics and introducing accountability. One doesn’t have to go to Mars.
Samba is the best-known of a coterie of African artists who, although already celebrated in their homelands, came to wider prominence only after a 1989 exhibition in Paris called “Magiciens de la Terre.” Organized by Jean-Hubert Martin, the show highlighted the ways in which the West’s guilt about colonialism had blinded it to the merits of art coming out of societies scarred and irrevocably transformed by colonialism.
[A poignant utopian impulse informs the work of this great African artist]
The affluent markets and museums of New York, London and Paris had long valued African carvings and masks (in part for their influence on modernism). But they tended to dismiss most contemporary art from Africa as “inauthentic,” sad and naive.
Which is nothing if not naive.
Samba, 63, was born in Kinto M’Vuila, a small village near Madimba, in the lower Congo, one of 10 children. His father was a blacksmith, his mother a farmer. As a student, he copied comics and sold them to friends. When he was 15, he moved to Kinshasa, where he painted advertising billboards and transposed comic strips onto canvas.
As Samba’s reputation grew, so did his political engagement. Working on a large scale (this painting is 53-by-79-inches), he addressed a wide variety of subjects, from the effects of his country’s rapid modernization to the AIDS crisis and post-9/11 conflict. He took all of this on with a wit “so quick and disarming,” wrote curator Robert Storr, “one only realizes how caustic it can be after having first succumbed to its charms.”
Samba wanted his work to speak to as many people as possible. He made multiple versions of works he liked. He set up a studio system to increase his production and introduced text to make people linger over it longer. And he made himself the sly subject and twinkling star of his own work.
But look, here, at our hero’s anguished expression. He tried so hard, went to such extreme lengths! All to no avail.
Of course, there actually is water on Mars. But almost all of it is ice.
Photo editing and research by Kelsey Ables. Design and development by Junne Alcantara.
