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.
``Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African
Sculpture'' remains at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street,
(212)535-7710, through April 13, 2002
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