Famous Exhibition African Cultural Items Displayed as Critique of Art Anthrology

As AN ASPECT OF WESTERN intellectual history, the systematic study of African fine art must exist regarded as still in its infancy. A history of African art comparable in scope and depth to those achieved for the major Western and Oriental traditions lies in the time to come, although some promising ancestry accept been made. There seems to be lilliputian question, nonetheless, that art-historical questions have received—and continue to receive—comparatively lilliputian scholarly 'attention. Students of the arts of Africa take also been reluctant to confront the esthetic and artistic dimensions of their data; traditional art-historical and critical perspectives have been subordinated to the gathering and organisation of masses of minutely particularized behavioral data. Some younger scholars accept sought to approach African art as inseparable, for all practical purposes, from complexes of sound.

The predominance of these orientations in recent research—the "anthropological" on the one hand, and the "comprehensive/interdisciplinary" on the other—appears to be direct related to the circumstances surrounding the expansion of "area studies" curricula in American universities during the 1950s and 1960s. African area studies, in particular, were characterized by a strong interdisciplinary orientation, with especially heavy emphasis on the social sciences. Prior to the 1960s, information in whatsoever significant depth regarding the cultural and historical ramifications of item African artistic traditions was meager where it was not altogether lacking. Discussions of African art or, indeed, of well-nigh aspects of traditional African culture depended heavily upon the usually biased reports of missionaries and colonial administrators, ethnocentric and racist culture-history theories and reconstructions, unwarranted extrapolations from the known to the unknown, and other more than-or-less imaginative inventions. Other writers, for the most office mainly interested in European art of the early 20th century, sought to make a virtue of ignorance. Cultural information associated with the objects were dismissed as irrelevant to their "agreement" or "appreciation" of what were acknowledged to be high artistic achievement.

A stereotyped prototype of Africa every bit culturally impoverished had been challenged only by a minor grouping of skeptical—and dedicated—anthropologists. Their field researches showed the cultures of Africa to exist rich, resonant and magnificently diverse, with deep and complex histories. Especially important for students of the arts, their findings indicated pregnant roles for the arts in the functioning of many African communities. In some areas, fine art was shown to impinge upon the exercise of political authority and other forms of social command. In other areas, or at other times, fine art served to organize rites of passage—birth, maturation, and decease, for instance—or to render visible and tangible central elements of subtle and highly articulated metaphysical systems of the sort unremarkably described equally religious.

The teaching of a number of Africanist art historians trained during the '50s and '60s culminated in an opportunity to investigate African art in Africa. This experience, previously rare, provided opportunities to verify firsthand the strength and vitality of African civilization as reported past their anthropological predecessors. Since the methods and perspectives of anthropology had provided the only reliable guides to the realities of African culture which these students encountered in the field, it should non be surprising that their attempts to correct earlier distortions and misunderstandings regarding the nature and significance of African fine art should rely heavily upon these aforementioned methods and perspectives. I do not mean to deprecate the important results achieved in the study of African art within the frame of reference provided past these well-tested anthropological/ ethnographical modes. However, the fascination of exploring the interplay of fine art and other aspects of culture in Africa has tended to overshadow other dimensions of the fabric and other approaches to the discipline.

In particular, what might be described as the content of African sculpture has clearly not received the attending it deserves. For nowadays purposes, content is defined as one dimension of the affective power and complex of multiple meanings embodied in a piece of work of art. It originates in the orchestration of materials and techniques, and transcends both purely formal qualities on the one hand and comparatively explicit iconographical or symbolic associations on the other. As one of several possible approaches to content in African sculpture, I propose to consider media—their nature, how they are used, and what they seem to mean. At the primary level, conceptions which seem to chronicle to principles of assemblage in contempo Western art are often counted. African assemblage, however, exhibits a number of distinctive features. I special subcategory—here designated accumulation—raises issues which transcend consideration of course, extending to the function of art in fostering social cohesion and cultural continuity.

The formal luminescence of much traditional African sculpture is by now mostly acknowledged, and its affect on the history of 20th-century Western art well known. These facts have often provided an artery of approach to the original African forms, emphasizing their often hitting resemblances to comparatively familiar modernistic Western experiments in artistic construction, concept, and materials. The richness of African sculptural invention tends to obscure the limited range of formal categories in which the forms are realized. As 1 becomes familiar with the range of possible variations inside each localized idiom, the latitude available to individual artists for "personal statements" is seen to be very restricted.

For traditional Africa, the accumulated wisdom of the past, represented by "formulae" in all aspects of culture, provided an acculturative and cohesive mechanism of enormous potency, to be tampered with only at the risk of potentially grave consequences. Art, in particular, served to define and focus group identity and to reinforce the sense of community which provided the simply context in which individual identity was meaningful or fifty-fifty believable. Far from stifling the creative impulse, we must conclude that these fundamentally conservative systems of shared values, emphasizing continuity and stability rather than alter and claiming, have imbued the forms of African sculpture with an uncompromising and unequivocal sense of conviction which is the source of their often extraordinary affect. This characterization of African sculpture as essentially conventional and conservative is not contravened by recent field enquiry which has shown that African artists and critics also respond to formal qualities; or that in some communities, such specialists fifty-fifty possess a developed vocabulary for explicating their judgments as to esthetic qualities—as if this should come equally something of a surprise! The point, of course, is that social utility and esthetic quality are non—and never take been—necessarily incompatible; for nigh cultures, the positive role of the artist in objectifying and reinforcing the values of his community has been resolved in terms of a delicate and complex remainder of esthetic and other priorities. Acceptance of and operation within conventional limits on "artistic liberty" usually carried compensation in the form of increased leverage in the social, political, and economical spheres.

At one level, practically all African sculpture could have entered into the discussion which follows, since a puristic "truth to materials" appears to take been infrequent in traditional African sculpture. Masks, for example, typically incorporate a diverseness of materials whose presence is primarily dictated by "applied science" issues continued with keeping them in identify during the dance, or which serve to encompass transitions from mask to body-covering or costume.

A fractional inventory of the materials they employ include accumulations of dried claret, millet beer, palmwine, and other libations; fomentations of sheanut "butter" or any of several types of oil, sometimes mixed with powdered camwood or blood-red ocher; the skulls of minor animals or birds; fur, feathers, teeth, and claws; the skins of snakes and other reptiles; the horns of diverse antelopes; tortoise and other types of shells, peculiarly cowries; strips, sheets, and $.25 of iron, brass, copper, and other metals; local and imported woven textiles and other types of fiber constructions; drinking glass heads, mirrors, bells, and oddments such equally spent shotgun shells, all unremarkably associated with a more or less elaborately carved wooden core element.ⁱⁱⁱ

These substances and elements may provisionally exist divided into 2 broad categories—POWER and DISPLAY—on the basis of their visual characteristics. (In particular instances, however, some types may belong to either category, or partake simultaneously of the qualities of both.) Often they are employed in what seems at first glance to be unorganized, overwhelming profusion.

Closer inspection of a reasonable number of examples of whatever item African accumulative configuration invariably reveals that even those which seem almost random and accidental in composition are actually developed in accordance with consistent principles wherein what is used, and how, varies within adequately narrow limits.

Display materials (beads, bells, fabrics, mirrors, etc.) are primarily oriented toward enhancement of the splendor of the objects to which they are fastened. They normally carry associations of prosperity and cosmopolitan composure for the private or group on whose behalf such sculpture is created. (Most DISPLAY materials had recognized commutation-values in traditional economies; cowries, in particular, were widely used as currency.)

The second category of materials—horns, skulls, and sacrificial accumulations, for example—is connected with the arrangement and exploitation of Ability.

Nowhere, in my opinion, accept the special qualities of power materials been enunciated with more discernment than in Robert Goldwater'south give-and-take of the Bambara boli:

The boli found 1 of three types of altars current amidst the Bambara (the others beingness tree stumps and stones), and are also a kind of symbolic fetish. Composed of a diverseness of materials—woods, bark, roots, horns, feet, claws, honey, precious metals, etc.—which symbolically correspond the portions of the universe, they are covered with a thick blackness chaff, in office the dried blood of the sacrificially offered animals. The boli have many forms, or almost no form at all, simply some are shaped as hippopotami, others as human beings. Employed in all the of import religious societies, the boli, Dieterlen explains, "occupy a signal place in the religious and cosmogenic representations of the social club centered upon them. On the one manus, their limerick makes of them a summary of the universe. On the other, they are a summary of the society, for all its members are included within them since, as a matter of fact, each of them has provided ane portion of the elements that compose them later having impregnated it with his existence by roofing it with his saliva while pronouncing his name." The dissimilar boll are preserved in sanctuaries either within or on the outskirts of the village, and may be approached only by the chief of the village, or other qualified religious persons.

Opinions will differ as to whether the boli are "works of art." If conventional concepts of artisanal skill are the criteria of judgment, they would hardly seem to qualify, although it must be recognized these objects have a very definite "style," in the sense that the employment of traditional techniques produces controlled and expected results familiar to the Bambara and identifiable past a stranger as a Bambara artifact. Thus there is hither at least a arts and crafts. But in a deeper sense too they are works of art, since they issue from an imagination that does more than than imitate appearance and so functions for the observer every bit an imaginative focus, mysterious notwithstanding real. A footling reflection will admit that information technology is not entirely the materials of their industry that makes them "awful" objects and that their consequence—which combines fascination and repugnance—is related to having once been objects of awe. ⁴

Surface

According to conventional Western attitudes, a work of fine art should usually exist the product of a single mind and its evolution should terminate when it leaves the artist's studio. Accordingly, the main work of curators and conservators becomes that of returning the object every bit nearly equally possible to this pristine condition (or some other more or less arbitrarily chosen state) at which signal it is then carefully maintained. This enterprise may include repairing impairment, restoring lost elements, and removing varnish, overpainting, or earlier repairs and restorations judged unsatisfactory. In other words, the restorer and his client value the advent of an object at some early on stage in its existence more highly than the record of its irresolute circumstances over time, especially every bit this record incorporates the more-or-less drastic pattern decisions affecting the object made by the succession of custodians through whose hands it had passed.

These attitudes may be assorted with that exhibited by the collector who cuts downwards a painting to fit a particular space on his wall, or a government which countenances the melting-down of gold or silver ornaments for coinage or statuary bronze for cannon. The first body of attitudes and activities are praiseworthy antiquarianism, the 2d vandalism. Another perspective would treat of both equally reflecting design-decisions deriving from different sets of priorities. These divergent points of view seem to reverberate a deeper dichotomy: in Western culture, a sensitivity to art, music, poetry, and other "exalted manifestations of the human being spirit" which are appreciated substantially for their own intrinsic qualities, is opposed to more pragmatic "engineering" attitudes primarily oriented toward coping efficiently with the exigencies of daily life. It is customary to stress that the relative weighting given to each of these inclinations is internally defined by each culture and, inside societal parameters, by each private. Cultures and individuals tend to exist ranked higher on the scale of "civilization" according to the extent to which transcendental aspirations accept precedence over mundane pursuits.

Available show suggests that Africans perceive no such dialectical opposition. As noted before, esthetic decisions are definitely made, only they are comprehensible only in terms of a much wider set up of values. In general, African peoples manifest an exquisite sensitivity to objects and experiences, structures and relationships, but primarily as means to ends rather than as ends in themselves. For most African communities, the overriding objective of all beliefs and practices is the survival, orderly and constructive functioning, and prosperity of the customs and of the individuals who brand information technology up; in such a context, "usefulness" tends to be extremely broad of definition. Moreover, each community typically relates to its natural, supernatural, and cultural environment with rigorous pragmatism and a notable lack of sentimentality. Rarely is there any compunction, for instance, over melting down and recasting statuary ornaments or other configurations which take gone out of fashion or are otherwise no longer relevant to any particular functional context. Nor does any serious distress accompany acknowledgment of the fact that, despite reasonable care, about masks and figures eventually have to be replaced owing to breakage, weathering, insect impairment, or fire. Many types of objects are fabricated for one menses of employ—often quite brief—so discarded. Far from representing a tragedy, the fairly loftier rate of attrition of monuments in most African communities has had the effect of providing work for relatively large numbers of artists in each generation, for whom the products of only the preceding two or three generations are available as models and standards. In a broader sense, the entire body of inherited cultural patterns, representing the accumulated experiences, accomplishments, and wisdom of the past is typically evaluated in each generation and reinterpreted or adapted where deemed desirable in the light of available options and contradistinct circumstances.

Such a pattern of perceived and implemented distinctions between ends and means, and of continuous cultural stock-taking, may help to clarify the difficulty which many Africans living in traditional societies have in understanding the Western collector'due south motivation and rationale. In a traditional context, whatever else objects may be and do, they are first of all perceived as making statements most the cocky-identification of their makers and users. Conceptions of what we telephone call manner, form, iconography, utilise and function—the total configurations of houses, pots, weapons, thrones, and images of ancestors, for example—represent entities intimately leap up with detail cultural and social systems bounded in infinite and fourth dimension. Peremptory removal of an object whose presence sanctions crucial political, religious, or social functions may render the practice of those functions difficult if not impossible, representing a grave threat to the orderly life of the customs. Only an enemy would undertake to remove such an object. On the other hand, if a new structural component in the areas of juridicial authority or enculturation of the young, for example, has supplanted an earlier 1, objects associated with the supplanted system may be cast out.

More oftentimes, notwithstanding, prudence volition dictate that the before complex receive at least token maintenance for a menses of time by virtue of its previous importance to the community (usually expressed in terms of the rest of ability it volition have accumulated through many sacrifices or other devotions), or as a reserve or "backup" system in case the new system proves unsatisfactory. While the owners or custodians of such formerly of import objects may hold to role with them, they oftentimes express puzzlement at what possible use members of another group could have for relics at the same time useless and intimately bound up with the identity and cumulative experience of an alien people; deprived of their functional roots, the formal appeal as well as the constructive power of the objects wither away. As an even more than important consideration, such objects will too exist regarded as almost certainly hazardous to an outsider who is, by definition, ignorant of their proper use.

The French anthropologist Marcel Griaule reports traditions from the Dogon of Mali which poignantly illustrate the hazards of casual contact with such charged or contaminated objects and/or materials.⁵ The traditions in question are lengthy and complex, and deal with the origins of many features of the Dogon universe, including death. Initiated by an incident of cosmic incest, a chain of hating and sacrilegious acts introduced death into the world of mankind. A circuitous of red fiber costumes and associated carved wooden masks was adult equally a means of preventing the souls of the recently expressionless from interfering in harmful means in the world of the living:

Clothed in fibres, hoods and masks which they had woven and sculptured themselves, dancers in war-dress went to the terraces frequented by the souls. Against a background of funeral rhythms, they simulated, with their axes and lances, a battle against the invisible ones from which they emerged victorious; the souls fled and were guided by other rites to some other place of repose where all tribulation ceased. From that fourth dimension onwards, each death gave rise to this masked dance on the burial terrace which became the highlight of the ceremonies marking the close of the mourning period.

But very before long, the masks were non content with gesticulations in this limited theatre; they betook themselves to the public foursquare to enhance aesthetically their religious deportment.

This therapeutic action, even if it alleviated the lot of those who had died, helped to spread the evil amidst the men who pursued their immortal destiny. For these spectacular ceremonies excited their curiosity and their envy. Some of them took masks and fibre costumes for their own use. Others, thinking they were precious objects, hid them in holes in the rocks. Even so others, seeing the object which had caused the rites, bought a body to have a reason for sculpturing, painting, and showing themselves in the public square.

But the masks and fibres, being funeral material, transmitted their impurity to those who wore them and death, winning over one region later another, spread throughout the Dogon globe.

Other sections of the Dogon traditions reported by Griaule, and information from a number of other African societies, support the principle implied here: that certain forms and materials brought into conjunction and activated through advisable procedures accept the capacity to organize and concentrate what might be chosen "available capability." For the virtually part, power materials embody "signature elements" for the animal from which they take been taken, amounting to the distinctive survival equipment which characterizes each: for birds, their beaks, talons, or feathers; for the various types of antelopes, their horns; for snails or tortoises, their shells, and then on. Imitations in carved woods or other materials may, it seems, also serve. By virtue of the magnificently articulated survival system he represents, the leopard is typically accorded special significance in such transfers or borrowings; claws, fangs, and pelt may exist utilized, or pelt-markings emulated through spotting with pigment.⁶

Incantations, claret sacrifices, and libations of "spiritous" liquors may be used to introduce additional essences. A tendency to multiply media in Power contexts should probably exist seen as intentional design back-up, calculated to organize a wide spectrum of systematic responses to particular types of problems—health, prosperity, or social advancement, for example—through the employment of configurations and procedures which experience has indicated will receive a desired result. Thus, activation of objects through this process of transfer and concentration of energies or capabilities is cumulative in intent as well equally accumulative in attribute. The effectiveness of the principles involved is corroborated past the multiplication of elements and attributes unified by the residue of many sacrifices.

The investment of spirit principles in objects past invocation and convention, also frequently encountered in Africa, has been stressed in the literature. The conceptions involved seem fundamentally different from systematic exploitation of qualitative phenomena in Ability contexts, however. Procedures followed (sacrifices, adjurations, etc.) and observable signs of their effectiveness (e.g., possession of devotees) may exist similar in both cases; the spirit-principles in question are usually personalized in the form of deities or ancestors, however, and their symbolic presence in their detail formalism context unremarkably implies invitation and some measure out of willingness or volition. In dissimilarity, Ability sculpture may be said to draw straight upon essences, its effects conceived equally resulting automatically from proper procedures properly carried out.

Substance

William Fagg has argued that the principle of "increase" serves to organize life and art in African and other "tribal" societies.⁷ He proposes that a special sensitivity to lifeforms characterizes such societies by virtue of their closeness to nature in connectedness with subsistence pursuits. This sensitivity, co-ordinate to Fagg, is reflected in the frequency with which the exponential or "growth" bend appears in their arts—the helical spiral described by many types of germinating seeds, for instance, or the tendrils of vines, or certain horns and shells.

There is certainly nothing to dispute in the proffer that enhanced security, reflected in the multiplication of children, food supplies, animals, or other types of wealth, represents a pervasive goal for members of the societies in question (and very likely a universal man goal as well). It seems to me, notwithstanding, that the concepts of transfer and aggregating as outlined to a higher place may provide a more than valid framework than "increase" for because both the characteristics of pattern noted past Fagg and possibly other distinctive features of African (and other "tribal") societies.

"Increase" as used by Fagg, implies the possibility of creation or generation of matter or energy, of potentially unlimited expansion of the "adept things" of life, however defined. This premise may be said to have dominated Western approaches to nature at to the lowest degree since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, amounting to a fantasy popularly epitomized in recent times by the liberation of atomic free energy. Strikingly different conceptions are indicated by prove from a number of African societies, notwithstanding. Available matter and free energy —the resource upon which an individual or group may be able to draw—are perceived as manifestly finite and invariably entailed, therefore inevitably the subject of contention and competition. On the whole, 1 individual or group can prosper only at the expense (or through the largesse) of others.

Frank Willett has recently discussed the rock nomoli figures of Sierra Leone which are gear up up past Mende farmers in their rice-fields "to protect the ingather and make information technology prosper. Indeed, information technology is reported that the nomoli are expected to steal rice plants from the neighboring fields to this end, and that they are beaten if they do not do this successfully."⁸ A similar design of competition for resources seems to underlie the transfer of energy and vitality involved in headhunting, or in well-nigh reported instances of cannibalism, or conceptions of witchcraft.The most revealing information I take encountered in this regard are those reported by the anthropologists Laura and Paul Bohannan for the Tiv of due north-fundamental Nigeria.⁹

Co-ordinate to the Bohannans, the Tiv explain why some members of a community prosper more others through reference to the exceedingly complex principle of tsav. Manifestations of tsav include charisma, skill or talent, and "capability" in general, and those who accept it invariably prosper in all their undertakings.

Above all, tsav is mystically unsafe . . . and this attribute is undoubtedly the most vivid one. Tsav is witchcraft substance, though possession of tsav does not necessarily point a witch . . . Tsav renders both practiced and evil constructive. That tsav will be used for evil purposes—at least sometimes—is confirmed by Tiv beliefs in homo nature and human being relationships. In itself, tsav merely endows a human with great potentialities; but information technology is the man himself who directs and controls the potentialities. In Tiv belief any sane man chooses to benefit "his own"; a good homo extends the connotation of "his own" through a broad range of kinsmen. Notwithstanding, every benefit to "his ain" is matched by someone's loss, and even "his own" are never certain that old it might not exist theirs. A human of probity may never have taken anything from his kith and kin. Nevertheless a human being of ability has more wealth than his neighbors and more influence than his peers. One cannot make something out of nothing . . . .

The ramifications of these principles of Tiv belief are amplified and reinforced in an earlier passage from the same section:

That aspect of personality which enables a homo to dominate a state of affairs, to turn events the fashion he wishes them to get, to command obedience and concenter loyalty—be it through charm, persuasion, bullying, or whatever means—is show of tsav. Tsav then gives power over people, and in a furiously egalitarian order like that of the Tiv, such power sets a man apart; information technology is distrusted, for Tiv believe firmly that no one can ascension to a higher place his fellows except at their expense. Furthermore, tsav in this sense of power tin be kept at bay simply by greater tsav. Thus all old people, by definition, accept tsav; if they did not, they would have succumbed to the tsav of someone else at an earlier age.

The gerontocratic organization of most African societies is well known. As is so clearly stated for the Tiv, the factor of longevity, the demonstrated survivalcapability of the elders, is the main source of their social leverage within the community. It elicits the deference of family members or other dependents or adherents, conferring an elevated condition often best-selling and institutionalized in the form of special political, religious, and social prerogatives. In the context of the redistributive economies which seem to predominate in traditional Africa, such prerogatives usually entail some mensurate of custodianship of the resources of the group, together with control of access to opportunities for individual advancement. All forms of wealth have on significance in terms of the networks of social relationships they may be used to forge.

For example, the priestly offices or loftier positions filled by elders in cults, "hush-hush societies," and other associations normally entitle them to receive regular donations of various sorts, such as initiation dues or sacrificial offerings, which they consume or appropriate every bit a matter of class. Such sinecures amount to a kind of social security for elders who no longer chase or farm, sanctioned by their control of access to the systems, procedures, and objects through which the deities, ancestors, and other spirit—and power—principles recognized past the grouping may be contacted. From the client's perspective, the premise seems to be that nothing significant ever comes free or even inexpensive, and that a desired improvement in one'southward circumstances will probably be proportionate to one's investment.

The anthropologist Daniel Biebuyck has described an instance of the functioning of these principles in his study on the Bwami clan of the Lega of eastern Zaire.¹⁰ According to Biebuyck, the initiation process at each level of Bwami culminates in the revelation and explanation of examples of a wide range of natural and manufactured objects. Among many others, such objects may include carved ivory or wooden masks or figurative sculptures representing a variety of subjects, pangolin scales, warthog tusks, or the skulls of several types of monkeys or other small creatures. They serve simultaneously as didactic devices and as emblems of achievement, exemplifying through associated proverbs and aphorisms the Bwami ideals of intelligence, judgment, composure, moral virtue, and social responsibility. Admission to progressively college dimensions of knowledge—and the status such accomplishment carries within Lega society—depends upon the extent to which a member is judged to approach these expectations, along with his power to replenish the increasingly heavy "ante" required for advocacy. These dual requirements may seem mutually incongruous until it is realized that the novice is non expected to provide the necessary goods entirely on his ain; rather, his power to draw upon the network of social relationships he will have previously established to assemble the required donations is itself a test of his credentials for advancement. A lower level, more general network of familial and other ties serves as a footing for elevation to another, more profound and specialized network—that composed of the Lega moral and philosophical elite. Not to the lowest degree important, such higher status carries the right to share in hereafter initiatory dues and to adopt the distinctive elements of costume and associated attributes which serve simultaneously to reinforce the cultural ideals of Bwami and to advertise personal achievement. Amongst the many Bwami images mentioned past Biebuyck is a carved wooden human being effigy with bent back. Information technology is used

. . . to represent the aphorism, "The Great-Old-I has seen many initiation objects; he goes bent under them," which refers to an sometime initiate who has helped many people become through the initiation and who, when some of them dice, takes over the trusteeship and guardianship of their initiation objects. The brandish of the object in conjunction with other figurines tells the candidate that he should accept good intendance of old, seemingly insignificant initiates considering they are loaded with powerful things.

Amid the Lega, so, high social continuing is direct evident in the accumulation of important objects. Taking a broader frame of reference, my earlier ascertainment that the advent of powerful objects tends to reflect, at any given point in time, the record of their accumulating effectiveness and consequentiality is thus seen to be rooted in the real (or symbolic) aspect of powerful human beings. Complexes of regalia associated with of import positions in African communities virtually always incorporate Ability elements of some sort; in terms of visibility, however, materials described earlier equally primarily oriented toward Display considerations are unremarkably more prominent. Connotations of wealth and cosmopolitan sophistication ascribed to DISPLAY materials may thus plausibly be seen as references to accumulated POWER; rather than embodying piddling "dazzle" or shallow splendor, DISPLAY materials may be said to communicate information about results in contexts where Power materials refer to causes. Finally, this special significance of Brandish materials is not usually confined to "self-pattern" complexes for high-status individuals; rather, such usages typically cut across social strata as declarations of individual and collective identity and as age-, sex-, part-, and condition-markers within the group. On another level, arts of personal adornment serve to meter states of psychic vitality for the individual, projecting an external aspect which provides insights into internal realities.¹¹ By extension, DISPLAY materials attached to objects thus enhance the status and prestige of their owners, custodians, or sponsoring groups. Moreover, the ways in which DISPLAY materials and techniques are used in African accumulative sculpture seem straight to parallel the ways in which comparable (or the aforementioned) materials and techniques are used in personal adornment. One of the compositional principles involved in both modes—that of profusion—has been touched upon earlier. Other shared characteristics may exist elucidated through a brief word of the design implications of features as basic as the dark pigmentation and distinctive hair texture of African peoples.

Pare decoration among non-African peoples most commonly takes the form of tattoo—the injection of pigment to form designs in which line and/or color is emphasized; prominent scars are usually considered unattractive. In contrast, a broad range of types of what might be described every bit skin sculpture is known from Africa, characterized by patterns of relief decoration made up of raised keloids or depressed scars. The distinctive hair texture of almost African peoples also lends itself to sculptural development through elaborate plaiting processes, impregnation with various substances, and other techniques; the pilus of near Europeans, on the other hand, usually requires complex appliances and chemic treatments for evolution of sculptural course. In Africa, most traditions of skin and pilus sculpture emphasize aggregations of small, discrete units—plaits or keloids, for case—providing a richness of texture and complex detail which is often enhanced through the employ of oil or other cosmetics. This tactile quality seems to be paralleled in the massing of large numbers of comparably pocket-size Display elements—chaplet, cowries, or bits of metallic—on pieces of sculpture or people's bodies alike.

We may conclude this section with a last point which relates to the qualities of DISPLAY materials. Without question, the importation of large quantities of fluorescent plastic eardrops, inexpensive metallic pendants, and other mass-produced ornaments into Africa has put many traditional craftsmen out of work, a loss which is unfortunate from many points of view. Yet, such goods are presently ubiquitous in Africa, and while the colors, textures, and materials involved might look garish and tawdry on a white skin, they usually "work" magnificently on a black one. This fact seems to have been responsible, indirectly, for great wai I i ngs and gnashings of teem among Western connoisseurs of African art. I am unwilling to concur that nowadays-day preferences among African peoples for intense analine dyes, liberal use of files and graving tools in metalworking, and replacement of traditional finishes for sculpture by enamel paints represents a "breakdown of taste." I suspect that connoisseurs who use such terms are primarily responding to the "subtle richness" and "dignity" of traditional materials—ivory, rock, wood, or patinated metal, for instance—on the footing of their ain criteria for self-blueprint suitability. A consistent African preference for the most vivid 'and intense combinations of colors, textures, and patterns attainable, resolved in terms of the wider range of options made available by the conditions of modernistic life, seems a preferable explanation for nowadays-day choices than does a decline in sensitivity or a "breakdown of gustation." As with POWER materials, then DISPLAY materials and the ways in which they are used, far from existence naive and random, appear to be rooted in consistent and coherent systems of esthetic—and ultimately cultural—values.

Assemblage and Accumulation

Some general points of resemblance may exist discerned between this assay and Margaret Trowell'south proposal that the fine art of Africa may be divided into "Spirit-regarding Fine art," "Man-regarding Fine art," and "Fine art of Ritual Display."¹² Among other differences, even so, her categorizations seem to depend primarily upon stylistic judgments and interpretations of the sorts which are especially prone to ethnocentric distortions. In general, many of the words and concepts customarily used to bargain with the phenomena discussed here are similarly compromised, or entail unfortunate associations. For case, the term magic figures prominently in the literature; despite attempts to qualify its significant, magic seems to me to convey unavoidable implications of casuistry and triviality. Hence, the term does not announced in this discussion, since I consider that the behavior and practices existence examined clearly do not partake of these qualities. POWER and DISPLAY have been proposed equally core elements of what is intended as a more neutral frame of reference.

DISPLAY materials and techniques, as noted earlier, serve primarily to advertise the prosperity, vitality, and cosmopolitan sophistication of the sponsoring individual or group, representing the visible, tangible resolution of psychic vigor and force. By virtue of their manifestly public function, masks and elements of costume comprise the majority of objects making up this category. Such objects unremarkably participate in an ensemble which includes prescribed patterns of sound and movement; thus, they are usually difficult to appreciate in a museum context, stationary and stripped of their accouterments. Some DISPLAY configurations are realized well-nigh entirely during the initial fabrication stage; others accept shape through the accumulation of elements over time, a way of evolution which is typical of Ability sculpture in general.

Ability sculpture is activated through the transfer and concentration of essential qualities in the form of a wide range of attributes derived from a diversity of sources. The objective of these procedures is the system and exploitation of the qualities inherent in such attributes for the benefit of an private or grouping. Some of the larger, more awesome types of Power sculpture are customarily maintained in shrines of express access, with the intention of protecting the object from contamination (which would impair its capability), and of protecting the community from the effects of uncontrolled exposure to the power principles information technology embodies. Other Ability sculptures, normally smaller and somewhat less imposing, are the prerogatives of individuals or small groups (such as families), and are more closely bound up with the routine of daily life. They may be stationary—part of a domestic chantry ensemble, for example—or portable, meant to be carried about or worn. While both stationary and portable POWER configurations are generally perceived every bit sharing functional qualities at some level, the relationships involved have been largely obscured by the affluence of terms traditionally applied to them: charm, amulet, talisman, "medicine," and fetish, among others.

Until recently, much European literature regarding Africa used fetish every bit an charabanc term to denote all aspects of African religion, including associated sculpture. Leon Kochnitzky was referring to this latter use of the term in the post-obit etymological sabotage:

Fetish comes from the Portuguese feitiço, a fabricated object, a faux, equivalent to the Latin adjective factitius, the French factice, the Italian fittizio. Information technology became pop after the publication of De Brosse'due south essay Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches (1750). Information technology corresponds to nothing that exists in Africa. In his Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, Littré gives the following definition of a fetish: idole grossiere qu'adorent les Négres (a coarse idol adored by the Negroes). Now, nosotros know that an African statuette is non an idol, that it is seldom coarse, and that the Negroes exercise non admire it. ¹³

Authors of some contempo publications on African art take shown an unfortunate and regressive willingness to apply the term fetish to the body of fabric which has here been designated Power sculpture. Even leaving aside the psychiatric connotations of fetish, singularly unfortunate in the nowadays context, the peculiar antecedents and associations of the term equally sketched by Kochnitzky must seriously compromise attempts at rehabilitation. (Periodic revivals of the term archaic to refer to the arts of Africa, Oceania, and Native America must fail for many of the same reasons.)

In contrast to Brandish elements, which in one course or another seem to be represented in near traditions of African sculpture, applications of Ability principles seem more confining in geographical distribution.^xiv Immediately credible is the remarkable concentration of POWER configurations in the belt of rolling grasslands and scrub wood on the southern fringes of the Congo River Bowl, extending from the mouth of the Congo to Lake Tanganyika. In this surface area, POWER materials are used in the form of implants, attached capsules, massive overmodelings/usually of the abdominal region), or additive elements. Certain of these distinctive usages announced to be localized on d subregional basis: the Lower Congo River Bowl to the westward, and the area more or less betwixt the upper reaches of the Sankuru and Lualaba Rivers in the east. More than detailed studies of the distributions of particular conventions may yield insights into art-historical relationships.

Other concentrations of POWER sculpture are located in the Western Sudan (particularly in the area where Mali, Upper Volta, and the Ivory Declension share mutual borders), and in certain sections of the Republic of guinea Coast, particularly the "Poro" area of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the western Ivory Coast. The traditions involved tend to showroom a wide range of condiment elements associated with a thick, overall sacrificial patina. Isolated instances of Ability traditions are also plant elsewhere in W Africa—the "blackened" ancestral stools and other heavily patinated objects of the Akan-speaking peoples of Ghana, for instance, and certain Nigerian traditions.

The principle of accumulation has been proposed here equally a distinctively African artistic convention, 1 which relates in significant ways to the phenomenon of assemblage in modern Western art as discussed past Seitz.¹⁵ Since his assay is extended to "folk" and "primitive" forms (pp. 72, 83), I conclude with a brief evaluation of the validity of this proposition, emphasizing points of similarity and difference between the two bodies of material. Seitz'due south definition of aggregation (p. 6) as referring to objects which are "assembled rather than painted, drawn, modelled, or carved," whose "elective elements are preformed natural or manufactured objects or fragments not intended equally art materials" seems broadly applicable—with minor reservations—the African data.

In a number of particular respects, however, of import differences are axiomatic between African and modern Western forms, equally in Seitz'due south emphasis (pp. ten, 38) on the creative person's "ironic, perverse, anti-rational, fifty-fifty destructive" orientations and intentions, or the primacy (pp. 38–39, 83) of the artist's ego and unique vision in making choices and structuring juxtapositions, or Seitz's characterization (pp. 38, 73–76) of the materials of aggregation as predominantly the detritus of industrialized, intensely urbanized civilization. None of these associations use to the African data, which emphasize consensus and consolidation, and the affidavit and reinforcement of social values and cultural continuity. Every bit noted earlier, DISPLAY configurations may be realized past a unmarried creative person in a single period of piece of work, and perhaps adapt nearly closely to the definition of assemblage offered by Seitz and quoted above. The majority of POWER sculptures, on the other hand, involve the participation of many easily over a considerable menses of time; the evolution of such objects may thus be said to begin rather than end when the basic forms have been defined, and to these the term accumulative seems nearly validly applied. In a fundamental sense, the bulk of the creative free energy invested in a work of accumulative sculpture, and quite possibly the. source of its special fascination, resides precisely in the unique succession of gestures of commitment and involvement each records and embodies.

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NOTES

1. The following essay is a revised and expanded version of my introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition, African Accumulative Sculpture: Ability and Display, held at the Stride Gallery, New York 21 September–nineteen October 1974. It is based in substantial part upon my studies of the arts of the peoples of the Benue River Valley of Northern Nigeria. Field research in Africa was fabricated possible past a grant from the Strange Area Fellowship Program (1964–66) and a FulbrightHayes African Expanse Studies Centre Faculty Inquiry Fellowship (1969–71). I wish to express my gratitude to the agencies responsible for both these awards. Several of my colleagues and graduate students at U.C.L.A. who read and criticized this version (or the earlier one) also deserve my thanks.

2. William C. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage, Garden City, The Museum of Modernistic Art, 1961.

iii. Many of the beliefs and practices discussed here are defunct, or persist but in attenuated grade in isolated locations. Nevertheless, descriptions are couched in the present tense, the "ethnographic nowadays," a convention which is convenient but uncomfortable for one who is past training and disposition an fine art historian.

4. Robert Goldwater, Bambara Sculpture from the Western Sudan, New York, The Museum of Primitive Art, 1960, p. 10.

5. Marcel Griaule, Folk Art of Blackness Africa, New York. 1950, pp. 71–75.

6. Leopard skin is 1 of the most widely distributed attributes of loftier political or religious office in Africa. Information technology seems to me very likely that transfer of "capability" of the sort being discussed is involved in this pattern of association, rather than mere metaphoric innuendo.

vii. Due east.g., William Fagg, "The Study of African Art," in Simon & Phoebe Ottenberg, eds., Cultures and Societies of Africa, New York, 1960, pp. 471–72; William Fagg & Margaret Plass, African Sculpture: An Anthology, London, 1964, pp. 148–58.

8. Frank Willett, African Fine art: An Introduction, New York 1971, p. 98.

9. Laura & Paul Bohannan, The Tiv of Central Nigeria (Ethnographical Survey of Africa: Western Africa, office Viii), London, 1953; later quotations from pp. 84–85.

10. Daniel Biebuyck, Lega Culture: Art, Initiation, and, Moral Philosophy amidst a Central African People, Berkeley, 1973; afterward quotation from caption, pl. 64.

11. A number of scholars take recently sought to explore dimensions of cocky-design in Africa, concentrating on modes, media, and techniques regarded as distinctively African. Connections with leadership roles, broad(y defined, were discussed by Douglas Fraser & Herbert Cole (eds.) and their contributors in African Fine art & Leadership, Madison, Wisconsin, 1972. A landmark study of Tiv conceptions of personal beautification by Paul Bohannan, "Beauty and Scarification amongst the Tiv," Man, vol. 56, no. 129, 1956, pp. 117–30, and a more general compendium past Roy Sieber, African Textiles and Decorative Arts, New York, The Museum of Mod Art, 1972, bargain with wearing apparel, jewelry, hairdressing, scarification, toothchipping, and other more or less drastic modifications of the trunk. Every bit a point of related interest, Robert Thompson, "Esthetics in Traditional Africa," Art News, vol. 66, no. 9, 1968, p. 43, translates the Yoruba phrase significant "this land is civilized" as literally "this portion of the earth has lines upon its confront." The reference is to facial scarification, but in a larger sense human is defined through his ability to impose a pattern and guild upon the blank slate which nature provides.

12. Margaret Trowell, Classical African Sculpture, London, 1954.

13. Leon Kochnitzky, Negro Art in the Belgian Congo, New York, 1958, p. 2.

14. Cf. the fashion-regions proposed in Roy Sieber & Arnold Rubin, Sculpture of Blackness Africa: The Paul Tishman Collection_, Los Angeles. Los Angeles Canton Museum of Art, 1968; for examples of relevant traditions from Zaire, see Joseph Cornet. Art of Africa: Treasures from the Congo, London. 1971 and Martin Friedman, Art of the Congo, Minneapolis Walker Art Center, 1967.

fifteen. See footnote two.