African Art in Motion: Icon and Act [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520324633

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AFRICAN A R T IN MOTION

AFRICAN A R T IN MOTION Icon and Act

By Robert Farris Thompson

National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C.

Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery University of California, Los Angeles

University of California Press Los Angeles, Berkeley, London

Frontispiece:

Color

Plate

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G h a n a , A s h a n t i , K c n t c c l o t h |detail]

DEDICATION for Nancy, Peachy, and Clark

Published under the sponsorship of the UCLA Art Council

The exhibition AFRICAN ART IN MOTION was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1974 by the UCLA Art Council All rights reserved. Reissued 1979 ISBN: 0-520-03844-4 (cloth) 0-520-03843-6 (paper] Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-91679 Printed in the United States of America 1

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TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD-J. Carter Brown and Gerald Nordland

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT-Robert Farris Thompson

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COLLECTOR'S NOTE-Katherine Coryton White

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PREFACE

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MAP

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CHAPTER ONE: AFRICAN ART AND MOTION

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CHAPTER TWO: ICON AND ATTITUDE Introduction 1. Standing 2. Sitting 3. Riding 4. Kneeling 5. Supporting 6. Balancing 7. Conclusion

47 47 49 68 74 80 84 96 Ill

CHAPTER THREE: ICON AND ACT Introduction 1. Dan Masks and the Forces of Balance 2. The Ej agham Leopard Mime and the Sign of Greatness 3. Yoruba Makers of Civilization 4. Yoruba Assuagers of the Witches 5. The Choreographing of Banyang Village Harmony 6. The Whirling Return of the Eternal Kings of Yorubaland

117 117 159 173 191 199 209 219

NOTES

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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APPENDIX: Texts of Artistic Criticism of the Dance in Tropical Africa, 1965-1973

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An object's measurement is of its greatest dimension: height, width, or diameter and is given in inches. Objects not referred to directly in the text are assigned alphabetical letters and are interspersed with those mentioned.

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LIST OF COLOR PLATES Color Plate I

Ghana, Ashanti, Kente cloth (detail)

Color Plate II

Ghana, Ashanti, Mother and child

Color Plate III

Zaire, Luba, Stool

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Color Plate IV

Dahomey, Yoruba, Egungun costume

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Color Plate V

Nigeria, Benin, Hip mask

Color Plate VI

Cameroon, Bamileke, Python headdress

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Color Plate VII

Liberia, Dan, Mask

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Color Plate VIII Cameroon, Ejagham, Ngbe dancer

Frontispage 46

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Color Plate IX

Nigeria, Yoruba, Epa mask

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Color Plate X

Cameroon, Ejagham, Basinjom

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An Overview of African Dance, an original videotape narrated by Robert Farris Thompson and edited by him from the master tapes recorded in the field and documented for the exhibition African Art in Motion, is available from the UCLA Art Council, 405 Hilgard Avenue, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90024. See appendix for illustrations.

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FOREWORD This exhibition is a true collaboration between collector and scholar. We wish to extend our gratitude, first of all, to Katherine White for her generosity in lending her collection for an extended period and for her willingness to participate in the development of a fresh exhibition concept. Thanks are also due Professor Robert Thompson for his wholehearted participation in the exhibition through his field trips, film and TV footage, and the final text and appendices. The UCLA Art Council, under the direction of Mrs. Franklin D. Murphy, President, has provided financial support for the exhibition which made possible much of the research and field trips. This tradition of support is an ongoing one for the Art Council and extends to the Council's major contribution to the renovation and expansion of the newly renamed Frederick S. Wight Art Galleries of UCLA. University support has taken many forms. Mr. John Neuhart of the Art Department has made the exhibition a matter of particular interest and has designed an informative and effective souvenir which has been published through the good offices of the Ahmanson Foundation. Mr. George Ellis, Mrs. Suzanne

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Jurmain and Miss Ann Goodwin have provided invaluable services in editing the manuscript and helping with preparations for printing. Professor Jack Carter, Associate Director of the Gallery, designed both the catalog and installation and has given form to many of the ideas generated by all concerned. We would like also to acknowledge the participation of many members of the National Gallery of Art's various departments, from early meetings in 1973 through to stages of realizing the exhibition. Their involvement has been varied and tireless. Finally it is to the artists in Africa that the thanks of all who see this show must go. Their imagination, their skill, and their uncanny sense of art in motion is what this exhibition ultimately celebrates. J. Carter Brown, Director National Gallery of Art Gerald Nordland, Director Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery University of California, Los Angeles

AUTHOR'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I express a deep sense of obligation to Katherine Coryton White, whose collection inspired this volume. She made available a copy of her private archive, helped to defray expenses for two field trips to Africa, and extended gracious hospitality during the summer and fall of 1972 when I photographed and studied her collectioa I am also grateful to the UCLA Art Council — currently presided over by Mrs. Franklin D. Murphy — for funding two research trips to Africa and additional research in Los Angeles. Mrs. Herman Weiner, Chairman of the Exhibitions Committee, likewise has been helpful in taking the responsibility for financial matters related to this exhibitioa I am equally indebted to the man whose name is given to the new gallery in which this exhibition opens in early 1974 — Frederick S. Wight, scholar, director, artist, friend and former director of the UCLA Art Galleries, who first conceived of a West Coast exhibition of the Katherine Coryton White Collection. We are equally honored by association with his successor, Gerald Nordland, the present director of the UCLA Frederick S. Wight Gallery, who brings great expertise to the presentation of our project. Warm thanks to George "Rick" Ellis, curator of the UCLA Museum of Cultural History, for his extraordinary role in actualizing the publication of this volume and the installation of the exhibition. Suzanne Jurmain, also of the Cultural History staff, edited the book with efficiency and located materials from the Human Relations Area File. I am also grateful to the Museum staff for many services. My debt to UCLA is very deep, and I extend a special thank you to the following persons: Jack Carter, Professor of Art, who designed the catalog and exhibition,- his colleagues Dave Paley, Milt Young, Mike Robinson, and Will Reigle, who perfectly complemented his work; Larry Dupont, a first-rate photographer of the arts of Africa, especially chosen for this project; John Neuhart, a prime mover of the installation of the exhibition, who initiated me into the new medium of videotape and who, with Professor Mitsuru Kataoka, allowed me use of an Akai video unit in West Africa. Much appreciation is owed to former UCLA Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy, trustee of the National

Gallery of Art, who proposed the exhibition to his Washington colleagues, for the express purpose of bringing its content to the thousands of Afro-Americans in the greater Washington and Baltimore area. I therefore warmly thank the National Gallery trustees, the Director, J. Carter Brown, the Assistant Director, Charles Parkhurst, and members of the Gallery staff for their assistance and cooperation. I thank the Foreign Area Training Fellowship Program, which enabled me to study Yoruba sculpture and dance in Nigeria and Dahomey from 1962 to early 1964; the Concilium on Area and Foreign Studies at Yale, which awarded grants for further field study of Yoruba aesthetics in the summer of 1965 and again in the winter of 1967-8; The National Endowment for the Humanities, which generously sponsored fieldwork in Ghana and Cameroon in 1969; Professors Alan P. Merriam and Roy Seiber, authorities in the study of African traditional music and art, who encouraged me to pursue the history of African dance and art and led me to many valuable sources,- Neil Allen, who assisted during videotaping sessions in Cameroon and fully participated in the research bearing on the Basinjom cult; and Walter Clark, American consul at Douala, Cameroon. Pride of place is reserved for Africans, whose friendship and cooperation made this book possible. First and foremost, Ambassador and Mrs. Edward Peal of Liberia personally arranged for the author and his wife to study Dan sculpture in Nimba country, Liberia, in the spring of 1967. Thanks to their most careful attention, a fine interpreter, George Tabmen, was assigned to work with us in the field. All translations from Dan into English are his. Nigerian research was made pleasurable by Ekpo Eyo, Director of the Nigerian Department of Antiquities, as well as by Ajanaku, Araba Eko, always a rich and incomparable source of the lore of the ancient Yoruba. Chief Defang Tarhmben direcdy participated in, and made possible, my initiation into the Basinjom cult and shared a rich knowledge of the mystical dimension to Banyang life. Other helpful men of Cameroon were: Tabe of Fotabe, Ako Nsemayu of Mamfe ; and the Dahomean chiefs and elders of Otu were equally superb sources. Zaire research was facilitated by the

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cooperation of Sukari Kahanga and Kapambu Sefu of Kinshasa; and cordial contact was established with Mwika and Mwabumba Shamakondo of the Kahemba area Chokwe now resident in Ngaba quarter, Kinshasa. I also heartily thank Kabimba Kindanda, Piluka Ladi, and Ilunga of Luebo. They all advanced, in different ways, my thinking. In the United States, Roger Abrahams, Leonard Doob, Richard Henderson, George Kubier, Sheldon Nodelman, Claude Falisca, Richard Price, John Szwed, and Nancy Gaylord Thompson read portions of the manuscript and made comments and criticisms which clarified the exposition. Paul Gebauer, Baruch Elimelech, and Beatrice Luwefwa Kiyema were kind enough to read and comment on parts of the appendix. Dr. Mildred Mathias of the UCLA Department of Biology was also of assistance. I also thank Charles Davis, Director of the Yale Department of Afro-American Studies and master of Calhoun College, for many favors, many fetes, and much intellectual companionship. In the fall of 1972 I organized a graduate seminar at Yale on African art in motion in which I rehearsed some of the ideas in the present vol-

ume. I was rewarded by imaginative response from certain students, most especially Sylvia Boone and Peter Mark. In addition, Charles Cutter, postdoctoral fellow from the University of California, San Diego, and poet Larry Neal, lecturer in Afro-American literature at Yale, honored some of our explorations with their presence. Finally, I thank my wife, Nancy, and my two children, Peachy and Clark, who tamed the telephone, patiently endured les dejeuners sur les pages du livre-in-progress, brightened my heart and mind, and assured the peace in which I could write of African dance as consciousness, art, and aspiration, involving us all in deep and primary vitality. R.F.T

1 October 1973 Yale University New Haven, Connecticut

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ANOTE Africa is a verb to me. The vitality that comes from the ground is an awakening. The sunlight is special. It is huge, so dense it is hke walking through concrete. An artist, making the most ordinary thing, sees at high intensity. The texture of a simple country cloth expands in beauty. A lovely market stool becomes a moment of swift, tough abstract form. The unrelenting sun allows no weakness. A sculptor glides with it as shadows and shining surfaces reveal themselves. When a tool bites, the Ught decides. A sculpture in a room sheds the memory of the sun. It contains a sense of darkness, too— the revelation of anti-light, as if condensed by enormous pressures. The fhcker of synapse between the sun and anti-hght is the action here. This is why these objects are alive: why they pour energy into the air; why 1 stay in their fall-out. KATHERINE CORYTON WHITE

Opposite:

Color

Piate V

Nigeria, Benin, Hip mask

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PREFACE gown and mask and explains their meanings.6 While these lessons in iconography are being given, certain men firmly place two rifles in crossed position over the image, forming an ancient Ejagham sign of arrested motion, for it is believed that unless this is done, the image may move of its own accord and create trouble.7 The fact that the image of Basinjom must be moored magically, when at rest, is a metaphoric statement of inherent visual aliveness. Precisely this quality of active potentiality of the image is part of the subject matter of this book, in Chapter II, where I consider the motifs of stillness in preparation for their underlining by motion, in Chapter III, in contexts where dance extends the impact of a work of art to make a brilliant image seem more brilliant than could be imagined by ordinary men. The famed unity of the arts in African performance suggests a sensible approach in which one medium is never absolutely emphasized over others.8 Sculpture is not the central art, but neither is the dance, for both depend on words and music and even dreams and divination. Music, dance, and visual objects are all important, separate or together; and if motion conveys stature to music and art, sculpture deepens motion by condensation of several actions into one. These unities demand that we start with the shared norms of performance, before considering process or the function of a given object, dress, or dance. In the first chapter, consequently, I am suggesting criteria of fine form which seem to be shared among makers of sculpture, music, and the dance in some parts of Africa. I test this provisional aesthetic by art historical examination in which the documents of the past are sounded in order to see if these structural norms were present before the nineteenth century. In the second chapter I consider attitude, defined as the position of the body. These attitudes, when assumed, are said to restore ancient modes of self-presentation in contexts of important indication. A traditional man in Dahomey told me that a person who stands well—and by this he explained positioning enlivened with dignity and power—is born with that power.9 He made this observation while studying a photograph of a standing image of a woman, carved in wood, from northern Nigeria (Plate 3). Other Africans, in other places, have similarly insisted: commanding attitude and presence are ancestral.

use a basic verb which means "to dance." This word, vine, unites the dance with further worlds of artistic happening. Thus a person can sometimes "dance" a top, setting the toy in motion, or "dance" a cutlass, twirling the blade artistically, causing it to glitter before the metal bites into the wood.1 This broad conception of the dance is widely shared in subsaharan Africa, viz. that dance is not restricted to the moving human body, but can combine in certain contexts with things and objects, granting them autonomy in art, intensifying the aliveness an image must embody to function as a work of art.2 Motion enlivens stillness with precisely the contrastive logic utilized by an Ngbaka sculptor in the north of Zaire, who carved a portion of a musical instrument in the form of a part of the human frame (Plate 1) in order to add, quite literally, body to beauty in sound.

THE TRV PEOPLE OF NIGERIA

The spinning top, to return to the Tiv, and the flashing cutlass are objects invested with independent aura and importance. They are things made more impressively themselves by motion. Detachment 3 and sharing of human vitality, involving masks, headdresses, staffs, raiment, and even pottery and furniture, classically unite the inner being of the thing with the inner being of the self. The phenomenon is, fundamentally, poetic. It is a means of gaining access to sacred worlds conjured in artistic shapes.4 Africa thus introduces a different art history, a history of danced, art, defined in the blending of movement and sculpture, textiles, and other forms, bringing into being their own inherent goodness and vitality.5 Dance can complete the transformation of cryptic object into doctrine; dance redoubles the strength of visual presence; dance spans time and space. Yet the work of plastic art has a logic and a power of its own. This is especially true in Africa, where the work of art is displayed on domestic altars or within a sacred grove. Thus Basinjom, famous oracle mask of the Ejagham and Banyang people of western Cameroon (Plate 2), remains vital even when at rest, within its private portion of the forest. This is the site where neophytes in the second grade of the cult are taught the lore that makes them effective warriors against witchcraft and, in the process of these lessons, the initiator points to various parts of the XII

Plate 1

Zaire, Ngbaka, harp, wood and skin, 26"

Plate 2 Cameroon, Basinjom mask and costume, wood, fabric, etc., 75"

Received traditions of standing and sitting and other modes of phrasing the body transform the person into art, make his body a metaphor of ethics and aliveness, and, ultimately, relate him to the gods. The icons of African art are, therefore, frequently attitudes (exceptions will be considered) of the body, arranged in groupings which suggest a grand equation of stability and reconciliation. Thus icons of elevated happening and command, viz. standing, sitting, and riding on horseback, seem balanced by icons of service or submission: kneeling, supporting with the hands, and balancing loads on the head. These seem leit-motifs in the history of African plastic art. They coexist, some of them, as early as the dawn of the Nigerian image some several hundred years before the birth of Christ. Theirs is a timeless purity, creating worlds beyond the social turmoil we call experience, alternatives to objective time and, indeed, to the history of art itself. For these icons of perfected stillness and repose have lasted longer than the Roman Empire, longer than the Byzantine. African icons remain tresors de souplesse, in the memorable phrase of Jean Rouch, for traditional sculptors in West Africa seem more influenced by the vital body in implied motion, by forms of flexibility, than by realism of anatomy per se. Flexibility and balance as modes of iconic phrasing form

a major portion of our interest and, at the risk of anticipation, I should say that I am concerned with social balance in art and dance, with the ability of the performer to move from one unstable setting to the next without a loss of humor (refusal to suffer) or composure (collectedness of mind). In the third chapter I return to the theme of a history of danced art, combining the icons of standing, sitting, balancing and so forth, with action, and ponder the meaning of their combination. There are many things to consider in these unities, but one thing seems paramount: if spirits challenge gravity by moving on stilts twelve feet in the air to dance rhythms in the forest villages of Liberia; if athletes in Nigeria can carry nearly a hundred pounds of carved wood and shoulder this burden for a quarter of an hour while dancing before their king; if Dahomean initiates into a society honoring the collective ancestral dead can spin and spin and spin and spin and spin (Plate 4) until the very concept of human dizziness begins to lose its force—then anything is possible. I hope that the reader will return to the real world from the brilliance of this realm calm and purified, eager to live, strongly and well. Robert Farris Thompson

Plate 4 Egungun dancer

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