Illustrations by Oona Kauppi.
Originally published in print November 2020.
How many houses have you visited, where you’ve barely noticed the couple of African masks on the wall? Your friend’s house with the giraffe statuettes on the dresser? Your grandparent’s flat, where the ‘Tree of Life’ statue stands in the corner of the living room? Or maybe even your own house? Colonialism and mass tourism has spread African art far and wide over the centuries, so much so that its significance in Western culture may be a lot deeper than it appears.
There is very little information on the authorship and motives of traditional African art, despite the importance attributed to singular works. One could argue that perhaps recognition, a concept of individualist cultures, was not a concern on the continent. Isidore Okpewho, in his article ‘Principles of Traditional African Art’, thinks that, despite this, we should give African artists more credit. They expressed the various aspects of their daily life, such as religion, through the objects they created. Their art carried with it the traditions of their community: rites, ceremonies, and others. Yet the production of artistic objects, Okpewho points out, was also influenced by the amount of support behind each artist. If an institution sponsored them (such as royalty), the likelihood of artefact production as well as survival over time is higher. If, on the other hand, an object was produced in isolation from an institution, religion or a support system, there was a lower chance of survival. This would explain why most of the African art that survived was religious by nature. In addition to this, tourism and demand may have affected which artefacts were marketed as ‘souvenirs’ (and still are). Due to the similarity in style among commercialized artwork, the originality of the artist was often compromised. African art, the art Europeans brought back home, became a fairly homogenous group.
Although African art is still considered to be about religion, it has been admired for centuries, mainly for its beauty. Despite the apparent homogeneity of the objects, the materials – wood, brass, ivory, among others – are expertly shaped. The details of what are mostly human (or semi-human) forms are delicately carved. The objects are smooth and shiny. Their style favours the geometric, and, more often than not, simplicity. As Okpewho claims, landscape would have affected this artistic style. Style also varied depending on the region in which the artist lived – as such, objects from Igbo and Fang tribes may have looked entirely different. The mix of realistic and symbolic factors, the first of which was often human faces/bodies and the second of which may have referenced deities and the imagination. This tendency is called ‘magical realism’ in literature and is common in South America; in art, it would have encouraged similar smatterings of unreal with the real. The Western art movements of Abstraction and Cubism, among others, can visibly be seen to have had some basis in African art. Some artists were even ‘obsessed’ with African art. Yet the propagation of African art, and its motivation as a colonialist souvenir, can be seen to have encouraged the cult of exoticism. As a result, racist behaviour in the Western world may have had some roots in these dislocated artefacts, empty shells in their new context, beautiful but strange.
The question is, is this phenomenon a twisted form of cultural appropriation, and if it is, is it negative? Is the aesthetic value of traditional African art ultimately more important than moral implications? If the original purpose of an object was to be a souvenir and not to be appreciated within a community, is there any issue at all? And yet, is it possible that indigenous art, not so fundamentally different from other art, encouraged feelings of otherness in the Western world, despite the fact that it was greatly admired? On one side of the looking glass, a Black statue is only a statue. On the other, moral problems appear in abundance when art is removed, forcefully or not, from its original setting.
Sources:
Clarke, Christa. The Art of Africa. 2006. https://www.metmuseum.org/-/media/files/learn/for-educators/publications-for-educators/the-art-of-africa.pdf
Okpewho, Isidore. ‘Principles of Traditional African Art’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 35, No. 3, p. 301-313, Spring 1977. https://www.jstor.org/stable/430290
