A fine Eastern Pende Panya-Gombe African mask. Coll.: David Norden
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A fine Eastern Pende Panya-Gombe African mask. Coll.: David Norden |
Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture'
Found in the
New York Times November 22, 2002, Friday
ART REVIEW; A Show Bursting Out
By HOLLAND COTTERTo buy the catalog click on the image below.
*Through an exercise of immense wit -- no art is more entertaining -- and
moral gravity, it records history, the record of where we came from and where we
may be going.
History is the theme of the show, which has been organized by Alisa LaGamma,
an associate curator at the museum. Divided into four sections, the first on the
creation of the world and mankind, it opens with a heart-melting sight in the
form of an eight-inch-tall terra-cotta head of a young woman, made between the
12th and 14th centuries in the city of Ile-Ife in what is now Nigeria.
According to Yoruba myth, Ile-Ife was the birthplace of the first humans,
black and white, who were sculptured from clay by the artist-god Obatala, or by
the supreme creator Oduduwa, who fashioned the continents. Either would have
been proud of modeling this young woman's comely face, scored with undulant
lines like flowing water and glowing with serene self-confidence.
To the same degree that early Nigerian naturalism falls comfortably on the
Western eye, the Adam and Eve figures carved from wood by a Senufo sculptor in
Ivory Coast or Mali present challenges and excitements. Nearly four feet tall
with broad shoulders and wedge-shaped heads, their bodies taut with held-in
energy, their skin glowing as if filled with sap, they are tremendous and tender
things, complementary emblems of the difference-in-sameness balance that keeps
the universe in motion.
Once human beings arrived on earth, power politics inevitably followed, and
explanations of how government, enlightened or otherwise, came to be is the
subject of the show's next section. The story told by the ceremonial masks of
the Kuba people of Congo includes an incestuous romance. One mask, encrusted
with cowrie shells, represents the first Kuba king. Another personifies his
sister, by whom he had children. She is depicted with a strip of beadwork
covering her mouth like a seal and her cheeks streaked with painted lines that
might be tears.
Luba kingship, by contrast, had more decorous origins. It began with the
appearance of a foreign hunter-prince, the young and dashing Mbidi Kiluwe, who
established order in an unruly world and whose son, Kalala Ilunga, initiated a
dynastic line. To reaffirm this lineage, each new ruler is equipped with a set
of ceremonial objects modeled on Kalala Ilunga's, including a staff of office, a
bow stand, an abstract map of Luba history known as a memory board and a
divination bowl.
The bowl at the Met is attributed to the so-called Buli Master, a
19th-century artist who was the subject of the first special exhibition
organized in the Rockefeller wing, in 1980. It is carved in the shape of a woman
holding a hollowed-out calabash to be filled with objects used to extract
information from the spirit world. With her grave, downcast face and her body
curved over the bowl as if to protect it, she makes a stirring figure, not only
as a brilliantly realized sculpture but also, as Ms. LaGamma writes in her
exhibition catalog, as a ''profound commentary on the human spirit's desire to
obtain knowledge and influence the course of history.''
Family genealogy is also preserved and celebrated through art. For the Fang
people of Cameroon, the reverence for lineage focuses on the bones and ashes of
forebears. Thought to insure fertility and the safe birth of children, the
relics are kept in special containers and guarded by carved ancestor figures
with pudgy, infantile bodies and vigilant adult faces.
The Baga people of Guinea express clan or family identity through masks and
headdresses based on stylized, hyperbolic animal, bird and insect forms. A
butterfly mask has an eight-foot wing span; two very different masks represent
serpents, one as tall as a tree and as thin as a spear, the other a thick,
sinuously curving column patterned with Harlequin-like black, red and white
diamonds. Together they suggest an intense but objective intimacy with the
natural world, of the kind hinted at by the social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
when he described finding answers to the most complex existential questions in
''the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness that,
through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.''
This sense of identification, or connectedness, is highly developed in the
carved Ci Wara antelope headdresses of the Bamana people of Mali. This
sculptural type has long been an emblem for African art and culture
internationally. Mali's national airline uses it as a logo. The 40 examples
gathered from American collections for the Met show add up to an optical coup de
théâtre, as a similar ensemble did in ''Bamana: The Art of Existence in Mali''
at the Museum for African Art last year.
The revelation in that earlier exhibition, re-emphasized at the Met, lay not
in how consistent a particular form could remain through many repetitions but in
how inventive it could be. Ci Wara is the name of the mythical Bamana hero who
introduced agriculture and gave humans a knowledge of plants and animals. It is
also the name of the agricultural fraternity that stages masked performances in
his honor, and finally of the masks or headdresses themselves, which are
composite images of several animals, including antelopes, anteaters and birds.
The show has textbook examples of the sculpture, including male and female
pairs. With their squat bodies, beaklike snouts and tapering horns, they share
basic features, though the male is distinguished by his windblown mane and the
female by the fawn she carries on her back. The variations on these classic
types and on the subgenre of horizontally oriented headdresses called n'gonzon
koun are astonishing: stripped-down or elaborate, realistic or abstract,
changing from place to place, artist to artist. In some cases, the shape is
dictated by whether a headdress is created for religious ceremonies or popular
entertainment, though often forms and functions are interchangeable.
The Met's installation thrillingly conveys the virtuosity in just this one
example of the countless types of sub-Saharan sculpture. What the show cannot
do, of course, is fully convey the kinetic dimension of this performance-based
art, which is fundamental to how it was imagined and how it appeared to its
intended audience.
This is a recurrent issue with museum displays of objects that do not neatly
correspond to the Western concepts of art. And while we may have grown tired of
revisiting the problem, it remains important, a matter of seeing clearly. Like
the bronze temple figures of Hindu gods from South India, displayed in the Met's
Asian galleries and assembled en masse in a glorious show at the Arthur M.
Sackler Gallery in Washington this fall, the Ci Wara sculptures achieve their
ultimate meaning in movement and as part of a dynamic environment. In public
processions, the Indian images exchange glances with their devotees; this
interaction gives them life. When the Ci Wara headdresses are worn by acrobatic
singers and dancers, the sculptures as much as the performers are seen as
vivacious.
Ms. LaGamma, thoroughly alert to all of this, has included a fascinating
compilation of filmed Ci Wara performances in the exhibition, many of them shot
by the art historian and collector Pascal James Imperato. They are given far
more prominence than in any Met show I have seen before, and this is good. They
may be no substitute for being there when an organic, process-based form of
African art is danced to completion, but they are just the right finishing,
amplifying touch to an economically executed, grandly conceived show. Published: 11 - 22 - 2002 , Late Edition - Final , Section E , Column 5 ,
Page 29
To buy the catalog click the image
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Metropolitan Museum of Arts General Information: 212-535-7710 related articles: Couples
in African sculptures and Echoing images
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