From: rschust richschust@gmail.com [African_Arts] <African_Arts@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 9:44 AM
Subject: [African_Arts] A Fang statue and evaluating African art
To: African_Arts@yahoogroups.com
But although we know plenty about why modernists like Picasso, Nolde, and Kandinsky favored inventiveness and multiformity in their art, we are less inclined to accord an artistic temperament to African sculptors. It is in this sense that Rubin arrogantly dismisses the majority of the African pieces in Picasso's collection for their "poor-quality carving": they are "unauthentic 'tourist' works" that were "made by tribal artists for sale rather than for ritual purposes" (14). The fact that Picasso himself turned out numerous works en série specifically for the market is, in contrast, of little consequence to their aesthetic evaluation. Clearly for Rubin, as for many other critics, production for the market indicates the separation of African artists from their works, so that these works can better serve the artists and art world of Europe.
Here is only a portion of Africa's Art of Resistance, Manthia Diawara
http://www.artafrica.info/html/artigotrimestre/artigo_i.php?id=6
Three views of the Fang statue that was sold in Paris in June 1996 (Photo courtesy of Gérard Bonnet, Marseilles, France)
Like Western artists, dealers and collectors in the West usurp the authorship of African masks and statues. They themselves have become the most important sources of valorization for African objects. They set the terms of authentication and aesthetic judgment. Thus, when African masks and statues are auctioned at Christie's and Sotheby's in New York, or at Drouot-Montaigne and Drouot-Richelieu in Paris, it has become the convention to list their previous European owners and the museums that have exhibited them in the West. The fact that a mask or statue once formed part of the collection of a Charles Ratton, a Van Bussel, or a Pierre Guerre is a stronger confirmation of authenticity than the statement of any African clan member.
In 1996, a Fang statue was auctioned for more than a million dollars at Drouot-Montaigne, an event that inspired Le Monde to hail Paris the new European capital of primitive art (de Roux, 1996). The originality of the statue was confirmed not by the signature of the Fang artist but by the fact that it had once belonged to a Doctor Bergier (who had acquired it from a sailor in 1846) and had then joined the collection of Pierre Guerre. The statue's provenance was deemed all the more distinguished as it had been displayed in numerous Western exhibitions, including the Exposition Internationale des arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie (Palais Miramar, Cannes, 1957), Arts Africains (Musée Caution, Marseilles, 1970), and Art Fang (Musée Dapper, Paris, 1991). It was also a feather in its cap to have been the subject of analyses and appreciations by such Western Africanists as Michel Leiris, Louis Perrois, and Raoul Lehuard. Fang masks and statues in general are famous in the West for having been in the collections of Leo Frobenius, Jacob Epstein, Pablo Picasso, Raoul Guillaume, and Charles Ratton.
The statue that was auctioned in Paris is a Fang reliquary figure, about forty centimeters tall and made of hardwood. It is naked and brown, with the face, parts of the neck, the anus, and the navel painted with a black patina that causes it to gleam and sweat like a human being. The face is carved in the shape of a heart beneath a large round forehead. The eyebrows join the line that forms the nose and divides the left side of the face front the right. The eyelids are closed and painted over, connoting blindness caused by old age. The statue must have been an ancestor figure; its shiny forehead is bare, like a skull. Similar family reliquary statues have wide-open eyes which seem to be gazing intensely at someone or something. Some even have round metal plates, beads, or nails in the eye sockets to make their gaze more fearsome. But in spite of its closed eyes, this statue seems to return the viewer's gaze and creates an aura of omniscience.
In contrast to the eyes and the nose, over which hang the rounded forehead and long eyebrows. the mouth protrudes, occupying most of the chin and suggesting a resemblance to an oval-faced Neanderthal man. The statue is also notable because of the remarkable coiffure neatly arranged at the back of the head in symmetrical patterns, like palm fronds. Indeed, the hairdo of this Byeri statue, like that of many statues from Gabon, Angola, and the Congo, is so perfect that it forms an entity separate from the face. Compared to the face, which is geometric in its primitive simplicity, the coiffure exhibits a complexity of design that calls attention to its aesthetic autonomy. The face is as primitive—connotative of religion and vital forces front the ancestors—as the hairdo is beautiful and self-referential.
The neck not only supports the head but forms a smooth cylinder joining the face, which terminates in a pointed mouth with chiseled teeth, and the hairdo, which seems to be attached to the spine. The long, powerful neck also links the head to the square shoulders and the rest of the body, setting up a rhythmic movement between the face and the hands, which hold a bowl underneath the chin. Thus, the neck delineates the spatial configuration of this sculpture by establishing a relation between the shoulders, which form right-angled lines below, and the face and hairdo, which form a triangle above.
The statue rhythmically marks space and time in other ways as well. The lowered face with its closed eyes, the hands holding up the bowl between shoulders and chin, and the bent knees indicate three movements of the body that mark contrasting rhythms: downward, upward, and downward. The distended navel protruding like a small erection is typical of Fang statues, in which the navel often accentuates the sexual ambiguity of the female breast and the male genitals.
Fang statues are also known for their oversized buttocks, which form a circle around the waist and enhance the roundness of the thighs. What is distinctive about this statue is the fine taste with which the artist carved every part of the body. In most other Fang figures, the wide-open eyes, the interlocking sharp teeth, the three large cornrows forming the hairdo, and the exaggeratedly muscular arms, buttocks, and legs serve to reinforce the statue's role as a reliquary object and to characterize it as an ethnological artifact. But here, these canonical parts are tamed by the artist's hand and subjected to an aesthetic law that elevates the statue beyond ritual and ethnology.
To be in the presence of this statue—which gleams, and seems aware like a human being—is more than a religious experience or a discovery of tribal culture. The viewer is awed by the sense of artistic proportion and interplay between the different parts of the body. As one can see from the back, the shoulder blades extend all the way down to the waist, where they meet in a perfect V. This statue is like an architectural work that creates rhythmic relations among its various parts: in some places it harmonizes the movements, and in others it contrasts them. For example, there is a symmetrical relationship linking the circular waist, the triangular back with its broad shoulders, and the strong cylindrical neck which supports the beautiful coiffure. The symmetry and harmony denote a perfectly shaped and therefore superior body.
The Fang statue is thus an interlocutor with modernist art—that is, art from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was preoccupied with geometric shapes and physical power. The statue also exhibits a classic modernist trait: it establishes contrasts among these geometric shapes in order to define space. The oval face, with its finely delineated features, is admirable; whereas the plain, cylindrical neck is aesthetically unremarkable, except for the fact that it helps to reveal the stable spatial relationship between the head and shoulders. One can understand why modernists like Picasso and Braque placed African art in their ateliers, not only as inspiration but as models.
My concern with the maker's signature and with the aesthetic qualities of African art obliges me here to cite the artistic movement called modernist primitivism as a corroborating reference: its proponents were among the first admirers of African masks and statues. But whereas I stress aesthetics and authorship, critics of modernism stress the important role that African art played in such avant-garde movements as Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism.
According to Meyer Schapiro, modernist primitivism was responsive to African masks and statues because they were believed to be "charged with the new valuations of the instinctive, the natural, the mythical as the essentially human ... The very fact that they were arts of primitive peoples without a recorded history now made them all the more attractive. They acquired the special prestige of the timeless and indistinctive, on the level of spontaneous animal activity, self-contained, unreflective, private, without dates and signatures, without origins or consequences except in the emotions" (Schapiro, 1978: 200-201).
Rosalind Krauss, in contrast, sees in the image of the primitive a "ritual of transgression," and therefore a theory of modern art. Building on Georges Bataille's notion of alteration, Krauss claims that primitive art illustrates the contradictions embedded in language—the transgression of the meanings which human reason wants to insist are unequivocal, univocal, but which the words themselves betray as irresolvably diffuse. According to Krauss, and to many historians of modernity, this conception of the primitive as a theory of our modern condition became a powerful shaping tool, a way of rethinking all of the human sciences. And it is not just a historical phenomenon, since it appears in the work of such writers as Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida and their followers (Krauss, 1984).
From these perspectives on modernist primitivism, it is clear that African art, and Africans themselves, are interesting to the West only if they can supply a theory of how the West sees itself – in other words, if they can he timelessly primitive and thereby a compelling exception to the Western teleological narrative. Two widely reviewed exhibitions held in New York City—the show entitled "Primitivism" organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1984, and the one entitled "African Art" organized by the Guggenheim Museum in 1996—both took this ahistorical approach to African art. They saw the displayed objects as important only insofar as they bore a resemblance to the modernist art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or exerted an influence on it, or made an impression on Western artists. In the words of William Rubin, primitive art was valued because it had "an expressive force deemed missing from the final phases of Western realism, which late nineteenth-century vanguard artists considered over-attenuated and bloodless" (Rubin, 1984: 2).
In each of these considerations of primitivist modernism, the African artist remains invisible. All the praise goes to Western artists for discovering in primitivist modernism a way out of what José Ortega y Gasset called the "dehumanizing" effect of industrialization on the arts. While the aesthetics of African statues and masks supposedly helped modernist artists to counter the alienation of the individual in industrial modernism, the role of African artists in shaping the masks and statues is passed over in silence, and the aesthetic intentions of these artists are devalued in favor of the ritualistic function of the objects. What is emphasized in both primitivist modernism and the statues and masks is their ability to redeem the individual within the community—in other words, to make art into ritual, and ritual into art. Both make present at the same time the beautiful and the ugly, the exotic and the ordinary, the traditional and the innovative. Rubin notes that the Dan people of Côte d'Ivoire "not only explicitly appreciated diversity [in their masks] but recognized the value of a certain originality" (3).
But although we know plenty about why modernists like Picasso, Nolde, and Kandinsky favored inventiveness and multiformity in their art, we are less inclined to accord an artistic temperament to African sculptors. It is in this sense that Rubin arrogantly dismisses the majority of the African pieces in Picasso's collection for their "poor-quality carving": they are "unauthentic 'tourist' works" that were "made by tribal artists for sale rather than for ritual purposes" (14). The fact that Picasso himself turned out numerous works en série specifically for the market is, in contrast, of little consequence to their aesthetic evaluation. Clearly for Rubin, as for many other critics, production for the market indicates the separation of African artists from their works, so that these works can better serve the artists and art world of Europe.
The primitivist modernists, by valorizing African statues and masks as inspirers of their movement, also froze them in time. Simultaneously, they condemned in the work of African artists the very inventiveness and diversity that constituted its originality. Rubin both praises and damns African art when he finds modernist style in the variety of Dan masks, and at the same time snubs African carvers for feeding the tourist market. Most of the world's artists work to satisfy a certain demand. It seems to me that the African artist, too, achieves innovation through a response to market demands, the most important of which today happens to be tourism. Unlike Picasso, who collected "unauthentic" African art made for tourists, Rubin reveals his disregard for innovation on the part of African artists by insisting on ritual authenticity as the only criterion for judging their work.
Marcel Griaule, in an important article entitled "Gunshot," has criticized this desire for authenticity in African art, noting "the white's absurdity in declaring a Baule drum impure under the pretext that it's decorated with a man bearing a rifle." (Griaule, 1992: 41). Since the rifle is considered European, its presence in African art spoils its authenticity. For Griaule, it is the height of absurdity "when the other party refuses the African the right to 'make art' with a European motif, claiming first that it is European—a somewhat amusingly self-castrating remark—and, second, that it looks 'modern'" (41). When European artists borrow from Africa, this does not detract from the originality of their work, whereas African artists cannot borrow from Europe without being considered inauthentic. In other words, in Western artists can depict Africa exotically, why can't Africans represent Europe exotically—that is, with rifles?
The fact remains that, as absurd as Rubin's depiction of authentic African art may seem, it is the standard by which African art continues to be judged. African artists like Sidimé Laye must remain anonymous in order to give to their works a chance in the "primitive" marketplace. Modern painters, sculptors, and even some filmmakers and musicians from Africa and its diaspora must completely accept the stereotype of themselves as "primitive" to stand a chance of being considered artists.
This fact is often obscured by the Negritude movement's characterization of African art as the bearer of vital force. Léopold Senghor, in his fatuous essay "L'esprit de la civilisation ou les lois de la culture négro-africaine" ("The Spirit of Civilization or the Laws of Negro-African Culture"), is more interested in the symbolic interpretation of the images represented by African masks and statues. He is trapped in an ethnological reading of African art which considers only its functional role in society. For Senghor, rhythm and movement in African art can be understood only in terms of ritual—that is, the collective participation of musicians, dancers, elders, and ancestors in masquerade. In such a context, it is inconceivable for the masks and statues to have an autonomous identity as works of art. Senghor fails to note that the works' color and symmetry of design can reveal the artists' preoccupation with space and tulle.
The Fang statue discussed above is a classic modern sculpture with more textual similarities to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon or Joyce's Ulysses than to ethnological texts. Contrary to the Negritude view that African art is complete only in performance, this statue has an autonomy that is challenged only by the assertiveness of some of its constitutive parts. One of the characteristics of the modern text is its tendency to fragment—the ability of its components to form narrative entities separate from the whole. This is obvious not only in modern painting and sculpture, where different parts of a work may compete for the observer's attention and analysis, but also in literary texts like Ulysses, in which different characters play with time and space to make themselves the center of localizations that digress from the main narrative.
From the shoulders up, the Fang statue looks like the bust of an Egyptian pharaoh with a dynastic hairstyle. A narrative enigma is also evident when the statue is considered as a whole, with its downcast eyes, hands holding up a bowl underneath the chin, and bent knees. What action is being denoted here? The downcast eyes suggest that this reliquary figure is getting ready to drink front the howl. The bent knees participate in this narrative by connoting the statue's submission to the contents of the bowl: water, milk, or some potion with a supernatural power. The bowl, in this sense, becomes the most powerful locus of interpretation in the sculpture, forcing the whole body to obey it and creating unfulfilled curiosity on the part of the spectator as to its contents and significance.
It is also possible to read the Fang statue's posture as a gesture of offering: the bowl and its contents are being proffered to someone or something outside the field occupied by the sculpture. From this perspective, the downcast eyes and bent knees signify the reliquary figure's submission to a separate entity that is clearly in a position of power—a god, a king, an audience, or the artist. One of the qualities of the Fang statue is its ability to create by this gesture an off-field that is as pregnant with meaning as what is represented in its own field. In the absence of a signature by a Fang artist, the position off-field is represented by Western artists like Picasso and Braque, who appropriate for themselves the ideal spectator-position vis-à-vis African art.
By inscribing in the design of the statue an off-field audience, or a relation between the statue and an unseen presence, the sculptor anticipated an aesthetic judgment of the object by the beholder. It is true that most Fang reliquary figures seem to act as if they are in communication with an unseen presence. While many Fang statues, like the one under scrutiny here, seem to be holding out a bowl to this presence, others are proffering a horn in lieu of the howl or brandishing a knife in the right hand as if ready to attack. A few keep their arms down by their side. The intensity of the energy in all of them seems to partake of both submission and resistance. The ones with wide-open eyes and grinding teeth give the impression that they would rather attack the force giving the order than execute its dictates. The ones with closed eyes and the bowl or horn in their hands, like this one, register a "negative" energy that defines the quality of their resistance to submission. Their tense faces and muscles embody contradictory attitudes of surrender and resistance, gentleness and revolt.
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