Mike Tyson-conqueror Kevin “The Clones Colossus” McBride, former Irish heavyweight champion and 1992 Olympian, returns to the ring Saturday night, July 10 for the first time in more than two years against veteran Zack Page in an 8-round bout at Mid-Hudson Civic Center in Poughkeepsie, New York.
The 37-year-old McBride (34-6-1, 29 KOs), fighting out of Boston, is best known for knocking Tyson into retirement. The 6-6, 280-pound Irishman stopped Tyson in the sixth-round of their June 11, 2005 fight in Washington D.C. McBride fought three times after that, his last October 6, 2007 against Andrew Golota, and he’s been inactive ever since.
“Everything in training camp has been as good as we had hoped,” McBride reported his training camp in New York City. “I’m looking forward to fighting again. It’s a good start. I want to win and then get right back in the ring again. If I can put a few good wins together, I hope to be able to have an opportunity to fulfill my dream of becoming the first Irish-born heavyweight champion of the world. I’d like to fight again in Ireland, too Titanfall 2 Ps4 Price.
“First, though, I have to take care of business Saturday night. I do want to send my condolences to Eddie and Tony McLoughlin (McBride’s new advisors). Their brother, Jimmy, recently passed away. He was going to go to my fight.”
Page (20-29-2), who has replaced Robert Hawkins, is a veteran sporting wins against former world champion Lou Del Valle, as well as Cisse Salif and Jeremy Bates.
“The change of opponent doesn’t bother me at all,” McBride said. “It’s really all about how I perform Saturday night. I’m not concerned about going eight rounds, if needed. The more rounds, the better, for me to get some of the rust off. It’s just going to be nice fighting again.”
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast
SALIF
DIABAGATÉ, an artist here in this nation’s financial capital, stands by
a pile of sodden debris outside his bungalow studio. He reaches for a
bit of sticking-out cloth, gives it a tug, then pulls until he frees
some canvas painted with symbols and words. He spreads it out, creased
and dirty, on the ground.
“I
made this to look like a traditional hunter’s shirt with amulets and
talismans,” he says, pointing to small pouches sewn on the painting’s
surface. “The soldiers must have thought it was dangerous. Bad magic.”
The
soldiers were government troops who, a year earlier, had broken into
the studio and bivouacked there when violence gripped Abidjan during the
climax of a decade of civil war. Mr. Diabagaté, now in his early 40s,
was in Berlin for a show when “the crisis,” as it is called, erupted. He
couldn’t get back until it was over. By then the damage was done. The
soldiers had burned his sculptures and dumped his paintings in the rain.
Could
this one be salvaged? Probably not. He’d have to focus on making new
work, though no one was buying. “Art is what you give up,” he says, “if
you’re trying to hold on to cash.”
Even
in stable times life can be hard for artists in West Africa. Not that
art ever stops being made. Cities like Abidjan, Dakar in Senegal, and
Bamako in Mali are saturated in it. Murals cover public walls and the
sides of trucks and buses. Pottery, metalwork and weaving, in styles new
and old, fill open-air markets. Portraits of jazzy beauties, Sufi
saints and culture heroes (Che, Mandela, Obama, Madonna) are for sale
everywhere.
But
the elements that in the West make a healthy contemporary scene —
galleries, museums, collectors, journals, critics and a steady,
responsive audience — are in short supply. And the degree of isolation
of individual artists from others across the continent and from art
developments worldwide is almost inconceivable to an urban Westerner who
takes instant global communication for granted.
Both
despite and because of such isolation, local artist networks coalesce
occasionally into tight and efficient collectives like Huit Facettes in
Dakar, more often as loose affinity groups of fellow art students and
friends. For a visitor, like this art critic on a monthlong trip in
Africa, such groups can be difficult to find in cities that have nothing
resembling art neighborhoods. But they’re there.
So
are a few alternative spaces, conceived on a Western model, often with
Western backing, like Raw Material Company in Dakar; Appartement 22 in
Rabat, Morocco; and Zoma Contemporary Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Raw Material, run by Kuoho Koyo, a curator from Cameroon, encompasses a
gallery, a library stocked with foreign catalogs and magazines, and a
cafe-bar. It’s more than just an urbane hangout. You could practically
live there.
And
there is one large-scale mechanism for artists in West Africa to show
their work: the broad, typically biennial surveys of new art. Bankrolled
by government money — much of this comes from France, which still
wields powerful cultural influence over its former colonies — these
showcases are designed to grab global attention and bring in the larger
art world.
Yet
even in these ostensibly international forums Africa and its artists
remain oddly set apart. The two oldest still-functioning events of this
kind in Africa, Dak’Art in Senegal and the Photography Biennial in
Bamako, are restricted to exhibiting primarily artists from this
continent (or, rarely, foreign artists of African descent). Partly for
that reason attendance stays small. From outside, these shows are seen
as provincial; at home, they’re viewed as events for foreigners.
And
whether they’re strong or weak — the 2011 Bamako biennial, in late
fall, was strong, visually ambitious and cosmopolitan in its thinking —
they suggest some basic questions about contemporary art here and across
the continent.
What,
for example, does the “African” in African contemporary art mean, if
anything? Is African, as a brand, an asset or a liability? Must art
signal its African-ness — make reference, say, to traditional forms or
African subjects — to succeed in an exotica-loving global market?
Likewise, can updated versions of traditional African forms — ceramics,
for example, or performance — be presented as contemporary, without
forfeiting, to Western eyes, an aura of authenticity?
In the end these questions fold into a more general one: How can 21st-century Africa, on its own terms, join the larger world? AT LEAST AT ONE TIME AND IN ONE PLACE
African contemporary art meant something positive and functionally
specific: in Senegal during the immediate postcolonial era, the arts
were a cornerstone of a national developmental strategy.
Under
the label Negritude, Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Paris-educated poet who
became his country’s first president in 1960, promoted an aesthetic
that blended African culture, black racial consciousness and European
Modernism. Artists who adhered to his racial philosophy and his approved
painting style — semi-abstraction incorporating tribal motifs — got
lots of exposure. Senghor pushed their careers hard at home and abroad.
After
he left office in 1980, however, the state support ended. Resistant art
trends had sprung up, and Negritude fell into disesteem. Critics were
calling it a tool of power politics designed to aggrandize a leader.
They viewed its celebration of blackness, simultaneously ingratiating
and isolating, as neo-colonialist in its effect, calculated to keep
African art from integrating internationally.
More
than half a century later Negritude’s uneasy ghost lingers. But many
younger artists born during the Senghor years are fed up with its
latter-day incarnation, Afrocentricity, which they find constricting and
retrograde. The Senegalese painter Soly Cisse, who was born in 1969,
exhibits internationally and divides his time between Dakar and Europe,
points to an art education system that has Negritude veterans as its
high-ranking teachers. “Art is a way of looking at the world, whether
you’re black or white,” he says. “Identity in Africa is a prison.”
Walk
through the streets of Dakar, Abidjan or Bamako and the first
impression is of wide-open vitality: of unrushed, everyday busyness,
constant but rarely chaotic. Ask a question, and you’re likely to find
yourself in a fast-moving conversation, which will often touch, volubly,
on local and national politics.
That
vitality came through in the recent Bamako photography biennial, which
took place well before the recent military coup and rebel separatist
incursions that have thrown the country into turmoil. Subtitled “For a
Sustainable World,” it was an intensely, topically African show. Many of
the most vivid images were of ecological nightmares in progress
throughout West Africa. A separate North African section documented the
inebriating first days of the Arab Spring. The photographs made clear
that no one is more alert to Africa’s problems and promise than Africans
themselves.
