Art History in Africa

An Introduction to Method

J. Vansina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317869023
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Afrique

This is a pioneering introduction to a subject that is still at an early srage of academic development. It aims to provide the reader with a systematic method for the historical understanding of African art. Professor Vansina considers the medium, technique, style and meaning of art objects and examines the creative process through which they come into being. Numerous photographs and drawings illustrate his arguments, and help to explain the changes that have taken place.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

AFRICAN ART, ARTS OF AFRICA

‘African art’ is the label usually given to the visual and plastic arts of the peoples south of the Sahara, especially those of western and central Africa. Not only have students of African art limited themselves to a portion of the continent but they have been primarily concerned with the aesthetic appeal of sculpture and a description of the uses and functions of the objects in an ethnographic context. Thus the historical evolvement of the art forms, even the sculptural forms, has not been a subject of sustained research and, furthermore, other kinds of art have received scant attention. Thus defined, ‘African art’ is not the Art of Africa. Northern Africa, almost half of the continent in size, has been excluded from those studies because its arts clearly belong to widely flung traditions centered on the Mediterranean and the worlds of Christianity and Islam. These traditions can be called oikoumenical, from a Greek expression (oikoumenikos) meaning ‘the whole world’. They transcend local and regional cultures over many lands. The contrast with the regional traditions of art elsewhere is great. We cannot amputate half of Africa and then call a portion of what remains ‘African art’. Moreover, by its emphasis on sculpture even among regional traditions, the artistic expressions of eastern and southern Africa where sculpture is not the major form of artistic expression in recent times are also slighted.

Because of this, the present book deals with art in Africa and its history. It is not an art history of Africa. There are as yet not enough monographs to write such an art history, as too many scholars in the field of ‘African art’ have been allergic to historical pursuits. But we deal here with historical problems of the art of Africa before A.D. 1900. This book is an exposé of the approach to art history in general as it relates to Africa. It is an introduction to the questions art historians should ask about the objects of study and to the ways they should follow when seeking answers to such questions. It applies the general epistemology and methods used in the discipline to the specific situation of art in Africa. It should also be of help in evaluating historical hypotheses made about art in Africa. If this book becomes a stimulus to historical study, its purpose will be fulfilled along with the hope that one day it will indeed be possible to write an art history of Africa.

ART AND ITS HISTORY

Art is a term of western culture but a very inexact one. The threshold between what may be judged a work of visual art and another kind of man-made object is often a matter of dispute. For example, in our time, the distinction between what was once considered to be music and what noise has become frayed. A lapidary definition of art is therefore meaningless. All we can say is that art deals with form and expresses images or metaphors (Layton, 1981:4–15).

Yet an ‘aesthetic’ drive is universal. Everywhere and at all times people have made objects or manufactured decorative patterns that are unnecessary from the point of view of use. Even cooking pots are not entirely determined by use. Their shapes vary from place to place over time and archaeologists use them as prime determinators of ‘culture’. There exists everywhere a need for the formal expression of values by metaphorical means, an appeal to the senses of sight and touch. The visual and plastic arts are means through which this need can be satisfied. Any made-made object studied from the point of view of form may be an art object, and form is a major concern of any study of the arts, whether or not the objects will be lasting, whether or not the object was made just to express form, whether or not the object is a man-made thing or merely an embellishment of some other object, such as painting on the human skin. Art historians also investigate iconography, the characteristics and meanings of pictorial renderings or of symbols whose arrangements, and even specific location in compositions, affect the form of the art or, conversely, the form affects the iconography. They further study media and technologies as methods and materials that allow a concordance between the artistic conception and the aesthetic form of the work of art.

Plate 1.1 Divination board. Wood. Used in ifa divination. Ardra, Republic of Benin. Ulmer, Museum. Height 55cm, Width 34cm. Before 1659

In practice our illustrations are mostly taken from architecture, especially public architecture, sculpture and painting or drawing, whether figurative, stylized or decorative only. The illustrations like the text are but an introduction to the field. Hence they represent such works of art as can be most easily linked to historical concerns, leaving such art historical problems as body painting in East Africa or sculptured hairstyles in southern Angola aside altogether, because those manifestations of art are ephemeral, and thus very difficult to document in the past. If we consider a work of art as in Plate 1.1, we can illustrate the types of questions it raises. Is this a tray? Where does it come from? When was it made? How was it made? Is it what it pretends to be? Is it unique in its general form or one of several or only a copy of something else? What was it used for? What did it mean? How does it fit in the whole of artistic production in Africa and elsewhere? Who made it? For whom? A jumble of questions pours out. The job of art history is to answer these and to do so in an orderly manner, first identifying the object as to authenticity, place and time of production, the artist, the manner of fabrication, the style, the meaning and the socio-cultural context relating this to the whole culture. Then it examines the idiosyncrasy of the object in comparison to others, that is, the conditions, circumstances and quality of its creation both internal and external. Finally it places the object in a general framework of the evolution of similar and related art forms in Africa, and by inference, in the world. This book follows this order of asking questions throughout.

As to the art object cited, it is authentic. It came in the seventeenth century (before 1656) to Europe from Ardra, a town on the coast of the present Republic of Benin (Dahomey). Its maker, the exact location of the workshop in which it was made, and the date of manufacture are unknown. Our information about it stems from a catalogue in 1659:

A sacrificial board carved with strange, marvelously rare and horribly devilish images, which the King in Ardra, who is a vassal of the great king of Benin, and his most important officers and people of the same province, use to employ for the sacrifices to their gods or fetishes and on which they are wont to sacrifice to them. And this sacrificial board has been desecrated* by the ruling king of Ardra himself and has been used by him (Exoticophylacium: 52).

It was a board used for divination. Ifa is the name for a god linked to it, for the system of divination of which it was a tool, and for a cult whose priests are the diviners. The face on the board may be Ifa’s or Legba’s, another god who tricks people into offending the gods. Many details of its iconography are still not understood. Most occur on other objects from the seventeenth to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ifa boards are still made in the general area. It was probably not the first ifa board of its type to be made, although it is the oldest of those recovered. ‘Foreign’ influence has not been detected in it. In general it belongs to a great tradition of sculpture in western Nigeria labelled ‘Yoruba art’ of which it is the earliest dated specimen. Note that the object was not found in a town inhabited by Yoruba speakers (Willett 1971).

Why should there be an art historical study of Africa for until recently there have been doubts that it was possible or even desirable (Volavka 1979)? First, perhaps, because art from remote times exists there. Some graphic works survived from dates as remote as 25 000 B.C. in Namibia and 6000 B.C. in the Sahara. African visual and plastic arts have a long and complex past. Secondly, works of art are always transformations of whatever kinds of realities people experience. And, in a given time, the nature of the art of a culture evolves as a response to realities – seen, felt or taught – which artists then record, with as much perfection of form as their talents can summon, in objects that may be descriptive or expressive, symbolic or decorative. As social and cultural values of a people change with time, so do the substances, statements and aesthetics of their art. This is history, and the more we can know about the art of successive times and places, the better we are able to understand the perceived realities of a people as expressed in their art.

The art history of African regional traditions, however, is still in its infancy. There are various reasons, of which the one of most concern is that only the merest fraction of art has survived, compared to the mass that was once in existence. As this book will argue, however, we can still recover much of the history of these traditions. The main reason for a lack of interest in the history of these arts was simply the haphazard development of the field of ‘African art’ and the circumstances surrounding the ‘discovery’ in Europe that Africa had an art.

For a long period the study of regional arts in Africa were contained in the expressions of a Western aesthetic response, as if it were a wonder of nature or of outer space, an exotic specimen in the gallery of visual images in Europe. Later, more serious students turned to the determination of style and the position of the work of art in its social and cultural milieu, but – barring a few exceptions – without considering any time scale, instead they used an immobile ‘ethnographic present’ tense to describe the object in its context. It was as if creativity in Africa had been frozen after some genesis when the known types of icons were crafted by the hands of some hero of a founding myth. Clearly this approach will not do. It still deprives works of African art of the full measure of attention and study they deserve if they are to be properly understood. It is faulty because even the contexts described for some objects may not apply to older works of art, created in circumstances very different from the ones observed by anthropologists. An historical analysis is absolutely necessary before a study of art in Africa, initiated by descriptions of style and context, can be completed.

If history and a methodical approach to history are essential to the study of art, art history is also relevant to any general history. It is essential because any history cannot be called general if it does not include art, and because art is a contemporary and authentic expression of the concerns of an age and a community, while changes in art reflect changes in such concerns. Because historians of Africa have also neglected the history of its art, the last chapter in this book briefly discusses how art can contribute to the general enterprise of historians. For art objects are often primary evidence of times long past.

AFRICAN GEOGRAPHY

Africa, the second largest continent and the most massive in outline, forms with nearby Asia and Europe the Old World. And an old world it is, as mankind itself evolved in Africa and spread from it to the rest of the world. The continent is deeply marked by its vegetation belts and its orography. From north to south a belt of mediterranean vegetation fades into the largest desert of the world, the Sahara, crossed only by the oasis ribbon of the Nile. Further south grasslands, called the Sahel in West Africa, gradually covered with dry forest as one moves south, give way to rain forest near the coast of West Africa and all across central Africa. East Africa’s elevations keep a wide corridor of grassland of various sorts open to the south. At about lat. 4° south of the Equator grasslands and dry forest appear again only to fade in more open country further south and finally run into the deserts and extremely dry lands of Namibia and the interior of Cape province. There, a mediterranean type of vegetation suddenly appears again in a tiny portion of the continent around the Cape proper.

Fig. 1.1 Vegetation zones and art traditions of Africa

Gradually the vegetation belts have shifted and the Sahara has not always been a desert, but the rain forest has always been there. These facts are important because the desert and the forest have acted not as absolute, but as partial barriers to communication. Thus the shape of the continent and the vegetation belts show that southern Africa was the most isolated from the rest of the world, central Africa was cut off from the lands north by the forest and the desert (after c. 2000 B.C.) separated West Africa from North Africa. East Africa communicated with southern Africa, but the existence of a great geological rift containing a string of major lakes separated it from Central Africa and hampered communications.

The oceans around the continent provided their own highways and barriers. East Africa was part of an Indian Ocean world in which the monsoons regulated the seasons for trading. The currents and winds of the Atlantic Ocean prevented any passage west of the Sahara until the caravel, that space-shuttle of the Renaissance, was developed. When the door opened from c. 1450 onwards European ships could reach all of Africa’s coasts, but not its interior defended by deltas, waterfalls and lethal tropical diseases unknown to Europeans. The Mediterranean in the north has served at all times as a link, more than as a barrier. It was the heart of what was to become the oikoumene around it. That the oikoumene encompassed all northern Africa and all northeastern Africa as well as its eastern seaboard to Mozambique – the limit of the monsoons – is therefore not surprising. Because the Sahara dried up only gradually and last of all on its western flank, and because of its gold deposits, West Africa never totally lost contact with the oikoumene, but still never became a part of it.

One effect of the geography of the continent has been that in certain areas droughts were numerous and populations had to be nomadic or migrate often, preventing the creation of bulky works of art. Thus sculpture and a complex architecture were precluded in large portions of the interior of eastern Africa, and in southwestern Africa.

THE DAWN OF ART IN AFRICA

Some two thou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of plates
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 2: IDENTIFICATION
• CHAPTER 3: SOCIETY, THE MOTHER OF ART
• CHAPTER 4: MEDIA AND TECHNIQUES
• CHAPTER 5: STYLE
• CHAPTER 6: THE INTERPRETATION OF ICONS
• CHAPTER 7: CULTURE AND ART
• CHAPTER 8: THE CREATIVE PROCESS
• CHAPTER 9: THE CREATIVE PROCESS: FOREIGN INPUTS
• CHAPTER 10: WIDER PERSPECTIVES
• CHAPTER 11: ART IN HISTORY
• References and further reading
• Index