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  Nobumasa Kiyonaga

  Katsushika Hokusai, Nami-ura

   

  Many Japanese feel astounded when they know that Hokusai is considered as the most famous Japanese artist in the Western countries. The art-historical assessment in Japan also turns out differently than one would probably expect from a Western perspective. For example, it was only in 1997 that one of his works was admitted as Japan’s cultural heritage for the first time by the Japanese Ministry of Culture.

   

  In order to understand this understatement, one needs to understand the socio-historical context of the time of the period when Hokusai produced this work: In the Hokusai's lifetime, an ukiyo-e master was considered as a mere craftsman. This, for example, represents a strong contrast to the Kano school artists, whose focus was primarily on Chinese painting. Many of the Kano school artists worked as the shogunate’s official painters, which enabled them to be part of the warrior class. In feudal society there was an unbridgeable clear class difference between those artists and ukiyo-e masters. Moreover, ukiyo-e was considered vulgar, as it was a medium for common people and some were even pornographic. Today “ukiyo-e” specially represents Japanese woodblock prints of the later Edo period. But actually the term ukiyo originally has a Buddhism-originated, rather pessimistic meaning, namely: “transitory world”, which contrasts to the word jōdo as “pure land” or “paradise”. “Ukiyo-e” in this context would mean “images from this world”. However, it was precisely in the Edo period mentioned about the attempt of reinterpretation, especially among townspeople, to perceive, affirm and even enjoy this temporary, worldly world as something positive. Accordingly, despite its originally negative meaning of the word, motifs that came to mean everyday, life-affirming, bourgeois life were often chosen for “ukiyo-e”.

   

  In the Hokusai's lifetime his artistry¹ in this sense certainly met with positive response and interest from the townspeople in Edo (today Tokyo). But it was French art critics and modern artists at the end of the 19th century who gave Hokusai “world-class” status. With the style of the so-called Japonisme they hoped to get impulses or artistic suggestions from the color woodcuts or lacquer works to overcome the hopelessly frozen academic European art from their viewpoint; bold, asymmetrical compositions, spontaneous drawing, strong colors, overcoming the central perspective. It seems clear that the view of these Europeans on Japanese works of art was from the beginning selective. And obviously Hokusai was an ideal projection here.

   

  In Hokusai's extensive oeuvre the “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” is regarded as his main work. Among all of Hokusai’s works, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” particularly has attached special attention in the West until the present day. Already in 1897 Camille Claudel (1864-1943) created her work “La Vague”, which was inspired by “The Great Wave” and in 1888 Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) pointed out the special nature of this work in a letter to his brother. Eventually “The Great Wave” established itself as an “global icon” as one acknowledged today². According to the English art historian Christine M. E. Guth, it was decisive for the enormous spread of the picture that in the West, “The Great Wave” was chosen as the title to differ from the original “The Backside of the Wave”. In this way, the image has been separated from the original context³.

   

  The fascination, which this work still holds globally today, certainly lies all in the geometrical or typically Japanese asymmetrical composition and the dynamic representation of the big waves. Thereby the horizon is set unusually low, which additionally serves to increase the effects. The position is actually very unnatural and almost impossible. Here it is important to point out that this perspective representation was a result of Hokusai's attempt to appropriate or interpret the European central perspective. It was in the early 18th century that the Japanese began to deal intensively with this Western style of painting. By directly connecting the foreground and the distant view without a middle ground, they found a particularly effective means of dramatic representation, which in reality deviated from the actual Western painting principles. The Japanese art historian Shigemi Inaga calls this typical Japanese expression “chūkei-datsuraku (falling out of the middle ground)”⁴. Many ukiyo-e masters liked to make use of this manner. Also in Hokusai's “The Great Wave” it seems to have succeeded impressively. As already expressed in the original title “Nami-ura” (the backside of the wave), the picture draws the viewer's gaze deep into the inner side of the devouring movement of the waves. Thereby a literally sublime feeling is awakened in the observer. In front of this mighty natural phenomenon, the people in the picture look powerless, as if they were merely driven by the waves. The holy Mount Fuji silently watches all this sight from far away.

   

  Mount Fuji, a 3776 meter high volcano, is not only the highest mountain in the country, but has been worshipped as a religious object in ancient Japan. On the one hand, Fuji with its rich water reservoir provided fertility, but on the other hand its eruptions caused great damages to the population. Accordingly, it was always regarded with a certain reverence and in the 9th century the first shrine for the fire god “Asama” was built on it. The mountain then also became a holy place for Buddhists. The Mount Fuji worship became especially popular during the Edo period. The most eloquent example is Hokusai’s “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji”. Otherwise Mount Fuji was chosen as subject of the painting again and again since the 11th century at the earliest. Later, at the peak of nationalism in Japan, especially during the second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War (1937-1945), the mountain was identified with the nation “Japan” per se and eventually became an authentic “national symbol”. After World War II it was then seen as a symbol of the new, revived Japan. Based on these historical backgrounds it seems obvious that many Japanese perceive something particularly familiar in the depiction of Fuji in the work “Nami-Ura”. In this sense, it is quite significant that Mount Fuji was recognized by UNESCO as a World Cultural Heritage in 2013, as a “sacred place and source of artistic inspiration”.

   

  Today, the image “The Great Wave” is often used for merchandising products of museums,  such as coffee mugs, plates, notebooks, ties, T-shirts, wristwatches or umbrellas, and is extremely successful. The Japanese government finally jumped on this trend at the beginning of the 21st century when it developed a state-sponsored marketing strategy based on “Cool Japan”, a neologism created by the American journalist Douglas McGray, in which the Japanese subculture such as manga or anime would play a major role. The motif was also used for the “Cool Japan” project. Guth sees this as the final recognition of Hokusai on the Japanese side⁵.

   

  Inaga writes that Hokusai was an artist who had gained his unique historical significance in the international context of Japonisme "as a sociological phenomenon“⁶. The shift in Hokusai's evaluation for over a century makes his creative approach a complex construct of the artistic, cultural and social development of the Edo period. Inaga notes that “many things that today are considered the essence of Japanese aesthetics were actually refined in dealing with imported culture. […] Cultural characteristics are not revealed in isolation, which shields itself from foreign influences, but rather through curiosity about the outside world“⁷. Especially Hokusai's art is a prime example of this statement.

   

   

  Footnotes

  ¹ The concept of art with the European sense did not exist in Japan at that time yet. For this reason the author avoids the term “art“ at this point. It was only after the opening of Japan to the Western countries in the 1850s  that the term was newly introduced from Europe as a translation word.

  ² Christine M. E. Guth (2017): 21 Seiki no Yōroppa · Amerika bunka no naka no “Ōnami” (eng: The Great Wave in Twenty-first Century Euro-American Culture), in: exh.cat. Hokusai and Japonisme, Tōkyō: Kokuritsu seiyō bijutsukan (The National Museum of Western Art) und Yomiuri shinbun Tōkyō honsha, p. 296.

  ³ Guth (2017): Ibid.

  ⁴ Shigemi Inaga (1999): Kaiga no tōhō ­– Orientarizumu kara Japonisumu e (eng: The Orient of the Painting: Orientalism to Japonisme, Nagoya: The University of Nagoya Press, p. 90ff.

  ⁵ Guth (2017): pp. 298-299.

  ⁶ Inaga (1999): p. 174.

  ⁷ Shigemi Inaga (2018): Nihon-bijutsu-shi no kindai to sono gaibu (eng: The modernity of Japanese art and its outside) Tōkyō: Hōsōdaigaku kyōiku shikōkai, p. 33.

   

   published June 2020

  

  Ernst Wagner

  Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kangawa

   

  A raging sea, mighty waves, spray falling like snow from their crests. The waves form huge claws that hover precariously over the fishermen in their fragile boats. Adapting to the shape of the mighty waves, the boats’ bows thrust their way ahead towards the left. The energy of the boats speeding forward is compositionally absorbed by the propulsive force of the water pushing to the right. Hypothetically, the viewer is positioned in the water and is in just as much in danger as the oarsmen.

   

  In the centre of the wave trough’s mighty movement, we see the static Mount Fuji diminutive in the distance. Although one could almost overlook it due to its size and similar colour to the water it is the central subject of this woodcut, one in a series of “36 views of Fuji”, completed by Hokusai.  Fuji’s peak lies in the golden section and serves as a stabilising element. The mountain, holy in Shintoism^[1], appears like a vision, promising (unattainable) security. A pale white cloud above it takes on the shape of the wave adding to the threatening atmosphere. It is somewhat irritating how Mount Fuji and the waves approach each other through colour, form and lines. Even the drops of water coming out of the spray look like snow falling on Fuji’s peak. The small rowers crouching in their boats do not even see the mountain. In comparison with the other pictures in the series, this sheet displays the most dramatic representation in juxtaposition to the calm steadfastness of Fuji. The other 35 sheets mostly depict Fuji in idyllic everyday scenes or in quiet, monumental sublimity. (The great differences in style show that the series was published over a span of several years.)

   

  The composition is like a snapshot of a scene at its dramatic climax. We, the observers perceive it from the distance and, at the same time, we are right in the middle of it. The giant wave is about to crash over the boat on the left, while the other two boats, swift as arrows, are heading right into it as well. According to historical accounts, they are fishing boats that are on their way back with their catch to the mainland, to Kanagawa, a place in the bay of Edo, today's Tokyo. But none of this is visible in the print. Instead, Hokusai illustrates a powerful and dangerous nature in which men must integrate themselves in order to survive. The picture displays the fishermen nestled within the frame of the wave. In this way, Hokusai creates a timeless and emotionally moving metaphor for man at the mercy of nature. He thus takes a specific artistic position that makes him interesting in comparison with European paintings by e.g. Caspar David Friedrich or William Turner who address a similar experience.

   

  The title and Hokusai’s name appear in the upper left corner of the print in Japanese script. The concept of combining image and script is typical for Far Eastern traditions. We can find more features that can be considered as typical for Japanese woodcuts: flatness, reduction of colours, graphic patterns (e.g. the light and dark stripes in the water) and black lines outlining or defining the objects. Hokusai uses these means with expressive exaggerations, which often take on caricature-like features, for example in the representation of the spray or the frightened fishermen in their boats.

   

  However, since Hokusai also uses Western pictorial principles, especially the conception of space and the idea of a dramatic climax, he created his own visual language, based on his reception of Western painting. This is significantly demonstrated by his treatment of spatial depth. Looking through the waves at the central motif – in this case Mount Fuji – from an observer's point of view is committed to the Western concept of perspective formulated in the Renaissance: the picture as a window to the world, which appears in perspective. In Hokusai's work, this European concept of space merges with the traditional Japanese art of colour woodblock prints, which was characterized by emphasized two-dimensionality, contrasting empty spaces, ‘abstract’ pictorial structures, and dynamic linearity. Hokusai's mediation between two culturally different pictorial conceptions ultimately led to his being more popular in the West today than in Japan itself.

   

  The opening of Japan after 1853, forced by US gunboat politics – and supported by European governments – triggered trade between Japan and the world. At first, some Japanese woodblock prints were used as packaging material, which may seem surprising to lovers of this art form today. Fortunately, they were discovered and enthusiastically received by artists in France. Among those were Hokusai’s prints and his popularity grew rapidly throughout Europe and elsewhere. The collecting frenzy of Japanese art (Japonism), which was also triggered by this, influenced Post-Impressionism, Art Deco and Art Nouveau and, in particular, architecture and design such as was taught at Bauhaus. Just as Western visual language came to Japan, Asian visual concepts now influenced art in Europe.

   

  Ukiyo-e

  Hokusai, trained in painting and woodblock printmaking, is considered a master of the multi-coloured ukiyo-e woodblock prints. From the early black and white prints, an extremely refined multi-colour printing process with up to fifteen woodblocks was developed during his lifetime. For the production of the plates and complicated printing process there were highly specialized workshops, for which – in our case – Hokusai provided the templates. Compared to other prints, however, relatively few plates were needed for the 'Great Wave': three for the different shades of blue, one each for the colour of the boats and the sky, and black and grey. As some of the prints found today show considerable traces of wear on the plates, we can assume that hundreds or thousands of prints were printed from the same plates. The peaceful Edo period (1603 - 1867) had led to new forms of expression as well as to the mass production of woodblock prints, such as those by Hokusai.

   

   

   

  ^[1]              At 3776 m, this volcano is Japan's highest mountain. Its shape is elegant and at the same time monumental, memorable and easy to recognize. In Shintoism it is a holy place. Moreover, as it has repeatedly been a "source of artistic inspiration", not only for Hokusai. It was recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2013.

   

   

  published September 2020

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  Elfriede Dreyer

  Over the last three-and-a-half centuries, South Africa has experienced volatile and turbulent histories of a colonial, postcolonial and global kind. These brought on substantial nomadic movement of people, leading to political and social displacement, and hybrid identities. Since 1652, as a multifariously colonised country South Africa has shown cultural patterns of movement in and out of the country, and from place to place. The country is extraordinarily rich in mineral resources and gold, which has brought about massive wealth, but also instability. Johannesburg was established in 1886, due to the so-called gold rush, with fortune seekers and diggers flooding from all over the world to the country. Since then, the gold mines have attracted an influx of locals as workers, which contributed to much nomadism, but ironically – especially since 1948 during apartheid – such mine workers were allowed to work underground but once above ground they had to return to townships outside the large cities. During apartheid, non-whites or ‘people of colour’ were removed from the city and forcibly established in townships outside the city; they were only allowed as workers into the city; and had to carry passbooks (identity documents) on them all the time.

   

  Such nomadic identity as a result of marginalisation and displacement is still presiding, but for different reasons since 994 and the end of apartheid. From this time onwards there has been a immense influx of people from all over the African continent to South Africa in search of greener pastures. Whereas during apartheid many intellectuals and people ‘of colour’ emigrated from the country, over the past two decades there has been an outflux of people due to a strong degree of political uncertainty and actions of political redress in the post-apartheid constitution, or to convicted beliefs of ‘not belonging’ to the new political dispensation.

   

  Senzeni Marasela’s series of works entitled Waiting for Gebane (2015-2016) entails a continuation of her previous work, such as the embroidery series Theodorah in Johannesburg (2006) and Sarah, Senzeni and Theodorah come to Joburg (2011). In the latter works she explored her relationship with Johannesburg as city and experiences her mother had when she first arrived there. She used embroidery as technique and thread due to its associations of fragility, and conceptually she considered the issue of black women in migration to the cities. Theodorah was depicted as travelling to the city with the aim to finding out exactly what it is that has made many people disappear into Johannesburg. She is uncertain of what she is actually looking for. In the 2014 exhibition catalogue for Nomad bodies at the Wintertuin gallery of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (curator: Elfriede Dreyer), Marasela stated that “I continuously return to the city, looking and relooking as it undergoes massive transformation. Having grown up in a catholic environment, penance informs a great deal of methods which are labour intensive. The city of gold is important as a transitory space: people go through the city, they come to the city and many dream of this city. There is something impermanent about this city, and it is precisely at this point that I began to write my own histories. The social climate of the city has never been favourable to the women that enter it. It is deliberate that I leave the city arid, without indications of lived experiences, as I seek to build the Johannesburg I can safely occupy.”

   

  However, in Sarah, Senzeni and Theodorah come to Joburg the artist includes herself and Sarah Baartman also as nomads or pilgrims in the city. The three women’s plights are fundamentally different – Theodorah is on ajourney looking for her lost son Gebane; Senzeni is on her journey finding her foothold as individual, and colonial Sarah was displaced to Europe from the Eastern Cape– but they are one in their search for a place, recognition and restitution. They are each other’s doppelganger in their journey through the city of Johannesburg which forms the backdrop to the works. The metaphor of the rhizome is of particular interest to an engagement with nomadic identity in the context of a continent such as Africa. Already in 1987 Deleuze and Guattari (1987:7). coined the idea of rhizomatic being, stating that the “rhizome itself assumes many diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion in bulbs and tubers”. Living on a vast continent, Africans are accustomed to long journeys; however, poverty, violence, civil wars, imperial infiltrations and oppression have resulted in a generalised nomadic condition where people are constantly moving and travelling in the search for a better life and even survival. However, in a wider sense, globally, Rosi Braidotti (2011:3) states that the nomadic predicament and its multiple contradictions have come to age in the third millennium after years of debate on the “’nonunitary’ – split, in process, knotted, rhizomatic, transitional, nomadic – so that fragmentation, complexity and multiplicity have become everyday terms in critical theory.” Braidotti has been engaged since the 1990s with the question as to what the political and ethical conditions of nomadic subjectivity are, grounded in a “politically invested cartography of the present condition of mobility in a globalized world” (Braidotti 2011:4).

   

  Zygmunt Bauman (in Hall & Du Gay 1996:19) views the ontologies of nomadic identity as becoming critical when there is uncertainty as to where one belongs, a view that is crucially relevant to emerging urbanising African identity. `the figure of Theodorah can be aligned with the idea of the flâneur, which Bauman appropriates in his presentation of the stereotype of the pilgrim who as a stroller is on a teleological journey – ordered, determined and predictable (Bauman in Hall & Du Gay 1996:21). Comparing the contemporary world to a desert through its fragmentation, Bauman views it as being inhospitable to the notion of the pilgrim, being unable to leave a footprint in the sand. The forward march of the pilgrim (Theodorah) is equally compromised and in the context of the wind effacing footprints (of Gebane) and the rhythmical similarity of the desert environment, the pilgrim goes in circles (Bauman in Hall & Du Gay 1996:23). “The overall result is the fragmentation of time in episodes, each one cut from its past and from its future, each one self-enclosed and self-contained. Time is no longer a river, but a collection of ponds and pools” (Bauman in Hall & Du Gay 1996:25).

   

  As in these afore-mentioned works, in the series Waiting for Gebane the artist’s mother is depicted as going from her rural environment to the ‘big city’, Johannesburg, in a search for her son Gebane who left for the city and never returned. She becomes a nomad in her searching ritual, but it is a dystopian journey, providing no teleological “good ending” and leading nowhere, since she cannot find him. The works depict a potent image of Africans searching for a better life elsewhere, but simultaneously failing in finding answers to their economic and other dilemmas. Waiting for Gebane explores cultural and artistic mappings of the social and political power geographies and complexities that dominate cities. Of pertinent interest here is how people’s decolonial transition from rural to urban contexts have been voiced, claimed, renegotiated and contested, especially in the context of capital cities as locations where there is a conflation of global and local influences. Mendieta (2001:15, 23) argues that cities have become the “vortex of the convergence of the processes of globalization and localization … [and] epitomes of glocalization, to use Robertson’s language (1994)”; and that the “city is the site at which the forces of the local and the global meet: the site where the forces of transnational, finance capital, and the local labour markets and national infra-structures enter into conflict and contestation over the city.”

   

  In Marasela’s work, contemporary African identity is characterised by particular cultural histories, as well as by identifiable patterns of transitivity and how people construct their identities psycho-geographically. Dispossession of the embodied and embedded self is articulated so that the city and placelessness become sides of the same coin (Braidotti 2011:6). Braidotti (2011:7) argues that “The contrast between an ideology of free mobility and the reality of disposable others brings out the schizophrenic character of advanced capitalism”, which is nowhere more visible than in the political and social extremities in South Africa. Marasela’s work expresses the idea that meaning is created through the crossing of space and distance between bodies, or as Soja (1989:133) argues, “To be human is not only to create distances but to attempt to cross them, to transform primal distance through intentionality, emotion, involvement, attachment.”

   

  New decolonised Identities emerge through movement through in the world and interfaces with alterity. Often, it is a sense of alterity or the attraction to the exotic other that produces nomadism. Waiting for Gebane thus presents the ambivalent Baumanian idea of the pilgrim-tourist who keeps going in circles, driven by a non-teleological sense of survival and looking for a better life, which might not lead to a ‘good ending’. Nomadic identity is essentially rhizomatic here, and in South Africa – also in an amplified sense on the African continent – the drive to belong and the utopian quest for a better life have resulted in identity being redefined, renegotiated, rerooted and sprouting in many directions.

   

  About Senzeni Marasela

   

  Senzeni Marasela is a female South African artist of Zulu origin, born in Thokoza, KwaZulu Natal in 1977. She is currently completing a MA degree in Art History from Wits University (SA); she has exhibited widely in the national and international contexts; and she has been awarded several grants and residencies, for example from Devon Arts Residency (Scotland) The Ampersand Foundation and Axis Gallery in New York; The Thami Mnyele Foundation in Amsterdam; and the Kokkola Art Academy in Vasa. Her artist website is found at http://www.senzenimarasela.com.

   

   

   

  References

  • Bauman, Z. ‘From pilgrim to tourist – or a short history of identity’. In Hall, S and Du Gay, P (eds). 1996. Questions of cultural identity. London/New Delhi/Thousand Oaks: SAGE.

  • Braidotti, R. 2011. Nomadic subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. Second edition. Gender and culture: A series of Columbia University Press. New York: University of Columbia Press.
  • Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. 1987 [1980, French original]. A thousand plateaus. New York: University of Minnesota.
  • Hall, S and Du Gay, P (eds). 1996. Questions of cultural identity. London/New Delhi/Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
  • Mendieta, E. 2001. Invisible cities: a phenomenology of globalization from below. City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action 5(1):7–26.
  • Soja, E. 1989. Postmodern geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory. New York/London: Verso.

   

   

  published February 2020

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  Leonie Chima Emeka & Stefan Eisenhofer

   

  Born 1984 in Nairobi (Kenya), Armitage received his artistic training in London (UK). Living and working in both places today, he praises each of these cities as substantial to his creative practice. His inspirations spring from many different sources – from political events, mass media affairs and pop culture to personal memories and experiences as well as from Eastern African and European folklore. He merges together the stories and experiences of two cities and weaves them into a narrative of interregional interest. Often starting with Kenyan local myth he is developing global tales of political critique and rebellion concerning global demands on democracy, data protection, ecological and human rights — always overlaid  by the meaning of the break between the “West and the Rest”, between human and un-human, between the exploitation of life and its inviolable dignity. In his work, Armitage investigates the idea of Africa as a mirror for Western phantasies and success stories of the Global North: the wild and untamed nature on the one side and the violated racialized bodies and political and ecological catastrophes on the other.

   

  The painting “Baboon” was on view in the exhibition "The Paradise Edict“ at Haus der Kunst in 2020 as part of a series of five oil paintings depicting tropical animals. On tropical background various monkeys in erotic posture invite the viewer to an examination of sexuality at the boundaries between animality and humanity, erotics and exotics. Also the “Baboon” strikes the eye with its suggestive sexuality. In the clearing of an overgrown rainforest, the monkey lies on the ground in a very human attitude. A bare stone supports its right arm as if the ape was resting on a natural chaiselongue. Within the apparently wild environment, the animal seems rather cultivated.

   

  The baboon oscillates between human and animal; not only in its posture but also in its physique: Feet and face are animal, while the rest of its body looks almost human; it has no fur or hair but pronounced muscles on his bare chest. Despite its muscles the ape’s body looks youthful and slightly lanky. It reminds to Michelangelo’s David for which it is commonly known that the legs and arms are extra-long compared to his body in order to mark his youth. Like a juvenile not yet fully grown the baboon, too, has long arms and legs. Neither a child nor yet a man, both an ape and a human body, the baboon hovers between child and man, between man and animal, between innocence and animal sexuality.

   

  Instead of the characteristic fig leaf of early modern European sculpture, there is a large bundle of bananas between the monkey's legs. The individual bananas, sketched on the yellow surface, are quite phallic in shape and the banana bundle tends to overemphasise the male sexual organ, while the ape’s physical penis is hidden behind it. The banana is probably the most common fruit in the Global North that still bears the tag ‚exotic‘. It is not the monkey’s body, that is sexual; but the bundle of bananas both hides and emphasises the phallic and states an allegory for the conceptual connection between exotic and phallic.

   

  Its absence makes it ever more present, as its leaves the concretisation of sexuality to the viewer’s imagination. In fact the image could be both innocent or sexual, as not only the penis is hidden behind the bundle, but also the ape’s left hand that reaches out to his underbelly. We can not see, but only guess where it rests, and what it is doing there. In his suggestiveness Armitage opens a space of confusing erotic tension and a critique of the sexualisation of race. With the figure that hovers between youth, man and animal, Armitage challenges the relations between black masculinity and sexuality in the Global North. It was Franz Fanon in "Black Skin-White Masks“ (1952), who once posited, that in European Subconscious "the Negro“ is the genitals par exellence, reduced to a giant penis. In this painting Armitage investigates the complex relations between blackness and phallus in Western concepts of masculinity.

   

  Like many of Armitage’s paintings also the “Baboon” presents an overlay of heaven and hell and is taking up the title of the exhibition “Paradise Edict”. They are referring to African and European as well as global paradise fantasies and hopes. They are aiming often at an ordered, decreed and prescribed paradise. They reveal the mandatory and obsessive aspects of these Garden of Eden-Imaginations, disillusioning global Out-of-Africa-fantasies, distorting eternal and natural laws to man made illusionistic laws.

   

  Armitage uses lubugo, a fabric made from fig-tree bark, in lieu of canvas for his paintings. This cloth is Ugandan in origin and has a long history of social, religious and political meaning and use there. Armitage first came across lubugo in 2010 on a Nairobi tourist market. The use of this now somewhat Pan-East-African-material corresponds with his visual vocabulary. Armitage combines European with Eastern-African materials, forms and strategies and waves them into complex, yet alluring compositions that remember the entangled history of painting through the ages and continents and rewrites new relations in between.

   

  published January 2021

   

  About Michael Armitage's initiative in Nairobi "Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute (NCAI)" see Link.

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  Leonie Chima Emeka

   

  In 1682 a prominent French portraitist named Pierre Mignard (1612-1695) painted a large canvas of Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth (1649-1734), one of many mistresses to King Charles II of England. The artist depicts her in a richly adorned dress, sitting on an upholstered bench against the background of a stone balcony that opens to a stormy sea. With one hand Louise de Kéroualle gently embraces her page, an African child. The fashion to hold black slaves, especially children, climaxed in the late fifteenth century, but also throughout the seventeenth century slaves were present in wealthy European households as servants.

   

  Mignard’s painting lines up with other paintings of prominent provenance featuring African pages as an attribute of wealth: Titian’s Portrait of Laura Dei Dianti from ca. 1523 and Cristovao de Morais’ Portrait of Juana of Austria from 1535-1537 both depict an Italian respectively Portugal-based noblesse in company of an equally well dressed young African page. Like the duchess Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth the young female page, whose name is not conveyed, is dressed in beautiful European clothes. More peculiar however is the child's expensive pearl necklace. In the late seventeenth century pearl necklaces were a fashionable accessory for European women of extensive wealth. Imported from the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Oceans initially by Iberian traders — later also by British and other European traders — the white, oval shaped pearls were an important trading good and symbol of prosperity and wealth. As such the valuable jewellery seems rather out of place on the neck of the page. It seems much more appropriate on the neck of the Duchess.

   

  

  Fig. 1, detail

   

  Compared to her page, the Duchess’s jewellery appears almost humble, as she wears the same pearls on small earrings. In a much higher amount, the same pearls are mirrored in a shell that the laughing child offers to her serious looking owner. In the other hand the page holds a red coral; a material that has become exceedingly valuable in many regions of West Africa. The most famous example is the kingdom of Benin (today in the region of Nigeria), where the red coral rose to a symbol of royalty and was appointed for the exclusive use of the Oba (Benin sovereign) and his household. The red coral in the hand of the African child connects the picture to the intercontinental trading network between Europe and Africa.

   

  European merchants traded red corals from Mediterranean regions with West African traders or sovereigns in exchange for goods such as gold, ivory or slaves. In all her appearance, from her beautiful dress to her valuable attributes the representation of the African page refers to the trading network, which preceded her presence in the picture next to the Duchess. The servant acts as an attribute of wealth — well-dressed she represents the wealth of the person and house to whom she is made to belong to.  

   

  On the other side of the equator, there can be found relief works to a similar effect that allows us to further investigate the historical intercontinental trading network. Many brass reliefs, produced by the royal brass workshop in the kingdom of Benin in the 16th and 17th century, acted as attributes of economic and political power of the royal court. They represented the influence of the sovereign and the wealth of the palace where they were exhibited. A large corpus of brass plagues adorned the palace, which was the economic, religious, political and administrative centre of the kingdom of Benin. One example, currently in the collection of the anthropological Museum in Berlin, depicts two dignitaries flanked by two Omadas (palace servants) before the background of the royal palace. All of them wear pearl ruffs and headgear made of corals. Similar to Mignard’s painting, the corals also function as indicators of the far reaching diplomatic relationship of the Benin palace and symbols of the interregional economic influence of the royal household. The main trading partners to the kingdom of Benin had been Portugal and later Great Britain to whom they sold slaves, gold and ivory in exchange for brass, corals and weapons. However dissimilar the artistic technique of oil painting and brass relief might seem, in the coral they share iconographic meaning. The commodity of red corals make reference to the trading network between Europe and West Africa.

   

   

  Fig. 2, detail

   

  The trading relationships between Great Britain and Benin which were highly profitable for the rich and powerful in both kingdoms would change successively to an exploitative relationship; the final step to colonial subjugation was the British punishing expedition in 1897, which ended in the destruction of Benin and the robbery of the brass relief plaques to London, from where they were sold to institutions and private collections in Europe, the two Americas and Australia. Until today the royalty of Benin as well as the state Nigeria ask for restitution of the brass relief plaques and other works which were taken by the colonial power of Great Britain.

   

  Peculiar about the Benin brass relief are the Portuguese heads that are engraved on the four palace columns in the background of the effigy. The Portuguese have a distinctive appearance with long straight hair and astonishingly long, pointed noses. In other reliefs the Portuguese are often depicted with Manillas, a ring in the shape of a horseshoe. The foreign metal of brass was imported to Benin by Portuguese traders. The valuable material, an alloy of copper and tin, supplemented cowrie shells as currency in the kingdom. As such the reliefs which adorned the royal palace were made of a material that circulated as money. The Portuguese merchants are depicted on a material which was an important means of their trade. Similar to the child holding the means of her enslavement in her hands, also the Portuguese heads are represented on and with the commodities which preceded their appearance in the imagery. Also British traders were depicted on brass reliefs, mostly with the attributes of armours, weapons and helmets.

   

  At first glance the painting and the brass relief do not have much in common and a comparison seems rather pointless. One is an oil painting by one of the most famous portraitist of his time. The other was made by the prestigious royal brass workshop of the kingdom of Benin. When taking a closer look, however, one finds that both images — however different the outcome — both reveal similar means of constructing an image and its motive behind. The assets and people flanking the depicted patronages in the center of each image — on the one side the pearl necklace, red coral and the enslaved child, on the other the red corals, the manillas the Portuguese heads — build a network within the image that reflects on the economic trading network between both kingdoms. As both images were produced in the context of a royal court, and both intend to depict their far reaching trading relations, they may serve as documents to the complex histories and relations between the two kingdoms and if seen as such, may illuminate an important part of shard history that preceded the colonial era.

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• 

  Annette Schemmel

   

  The photo at hand was shot in Paris in the 1920s. We are looking at a beautiful young woman with very fair skin who seems to have sunken her head on a table as if for a rest, while her left hand is carefully exposing a polished mask made from dark wood. The woman is Kiki de Montparnasse alias Alice Prin (1901 – 1953), Man Ray’s lover, a model for many painters and herself a successful artist. Supposedly, Kiki was central for the myth of the Montparnasse as an artistic enclave in Paris.³ The mask is simply “African” in the eyes of my pupils at first. I want them to learn that we are looking at a portrait mask⁴ of the Baule people in Ivory Coast. Pupils should also understand that such carved portraits served to honor an important member of a Baule society, a woman in this case. A dancer wearing a similar mask would incorporate the portrayed notable at the occasion of ritual dances, thus celebrating her achievements.⁵ This specific mask’s features are balanced and dignified, harmonious but not realistic, a point to which I will come back later.

   

  Meanwhile I shall argue that Man Ray’s picture thrives on carefully staged contrasts. The title that has come to stick with this photograph hints not only at black-and-white photography itself, but also at the most obvious contrast, at the White and Black⁶ skin or surface of the picture’s protagonists. Yet there are further opposites linking the lady and the mask in the picture, namely the opposites of young, ultra-modern and lively versus ageless, “primitive” and inanimate, matt versus shiny, skin versus wood, a seemingly passive woman versus the upright face of the mask, holding versus being kept. The photo historian Wendy Grossman has described how these opposites relate: “Almost as if it were a direct cast, the vertical mask, with its shiny black patina, is a negative mirror image of the reclining model’s ovoid face, echoing her pursed lips, closed eyes, and tautly styled coiffure. Parallel symmetrical shadows extend beneath the two perpendicular forms, coupling face and mask in a shallow and austere space.”⁷

   

  Clearly, Man Ray has smartly staged the Black and the White. By the time he shot this picture, Man Ray was making a living of object photography in Paris, then the world capital of fashion. It might therefore come as no surprise that this picture made its first appearance in an early print medium dedicated to beauty and fashion, the Vogue magazine. When the issue came out in 1926, everything “exotic” was fashionable in Paris, especially arts from (indirect) African origin, such as Jazz, Josephine Baker or, well, the mask in Man Ray’s photograph.⁸

   

  Beyond its uncontested fashionable appeal “Noire et Blanche” unveils some deeper, more unsettling meanings, some of which I intend to unfold here. A simple reading is ready at hand if one places this artwork in the historical context of the colonial era. In 1926, the mask’s country of origin belonged to Afrique Occidentale Française. On this backdrop, the dreamy woman holding the mask in Man Ray’s picture appears to be a Freudian slip in the form of a photograph, an unconscious idealization of colonial domination. Are we looking at a personification of the imperial power of France carefully embracing its colony Ivory Coast?⁹

  Next, we could follow a feminist lead towards interpretation. This photograph stages two females, whilst an important third actor of this mise-en-scène is invisible, the male photographer. Through his camera, the male artist is looking at the passive naked woman und at the artefact of a culture that is foreign to him. Obviously, the mask has become passive, too, once removed from its original context. In this reading, Man Ray’s photograph appears as a staging of the desire for submission – the submission of the idealized female and that of the cultural “other”. As viewers, we are lured into this voyeuristic pleasure, unless we take some critical distance.

   

  Following a suggestion of some South African colleagues, we shall now look at this photograph through the lens of the Martinican author Franz Fanon. In his famous psychoanalytical text “Peau noire, masques blancs”, Fanon is pointing at the phenomenon of the essentializing construction of a Black soul (“l’âme noir”).¹⁰ Following Fanon, Man Ray’s photograph can be considered one of those efforts by European (and certain African) artists of the classic Modern era to catch hold of an imagined essence of Black culture. This effort needed to objectify Blackness in order to make this construct palpable and acceptable. Arguably, in “Noire et Blanche” the ’black soul’ lies in the hand of a white person and is reduced to an object, the sculpted mask. Furthermore, it could be argued with Fanon that Man Ray used the Blackness of the wooden object, the “noir” that is readily associated with the ‘continent of darkness’ in the collective imagination of Westerners,¹¹ in order to highlight his girl-friend’s Whiteness. We know that contrasts help at intensifying and it is no secret that White is a color (of skin) that Europeans tend to associate with innocence and purity.¹² Arguably, this racialized contrast of the “Noire” and the “Blanche” served to celebrate qualities that Man Ray projected onto Kiki de Montparnasse, his partner.

   

  So far, I have tried to make clear that the artwork “Noire et Blanche” is not only a showcase of female attractivity, but that this photo also has a violent dimension to it because it relies on certain colonial mechanisms of distinction. As an art teacher, it is my ambition to make this picture’s ambivalence understandable for my pupils. I know that pupils are more likely to learn if they are allowed to make their own discoveries,¹³ for instance by exploring ‘real’ scientific data through the Internet. From our classroom, we can access the Metropolitan Museum’s online collections, which include a comparable portrait mask.

   

  

   

  Website of the Metropolitan Museum, New York

   

  Other than the black-and-white photograph by Man Ray, the museum’s more recent color picture unveils the fine shades of brown and red tones that are characteristic of the tropical wood used for Baule masks. Obviously, such masks are not Black in reality. Furthermore, pupils can learn from the provenance info that the Baule mask in the Met’s collection was famous amongst art lovers and artists in Paris and Berlin already before WW1.¹⁴ This insight helps to understand why Man Ray might have chosen a similar object for his photograph: artists tend to learn from each other.

   

  As a continuation, I like to encourage my pupils to sum up the museum’s text about the characteristics of portrait masks by the Baule by means of notes in German language. In doing so, the learners realize that these masks are carved according to a complex canon of beauty, that the forehead is high for a reason, namely in order to represent intelligence, that the polished surface signifies good health and that a representation of a person can convey dignity even if the proportions of its face have been exacerbated. This is new to many youngsters, whose frustration with their own efforts at realistic drawing has shaped their preference for artists’ realistic skills. Pupils also learn from the online information that this mask can only be brought to live as part of a performance, thus discovering a problematic aspect of its preservation in a museum.

   

  Coming back to “Noire et Blanche” with this new knowledge, my pupils realize that Man Ray’s photograph is concealing much of the knowledge that is available today. They understand that it is worthwhile to research background information for non-European art, even if this requires leaving their textbooks behind and going an extra mile with their foreign language skills. In the course of the classroom discussion that follows we are wondering why a Baule community would have let go of their precious mask, a question leading to recent restitution debates.¹⁵ Furthermore, the teenagers understand that the coquettish presentation of the mask in the hands of a naked European woman might be read as a sign of lacking respect by members of its culture of origin. At this point of the discussion some pupils have experienced a change of perspectives. This experience of assuming a position previously perceived as ‘other’ in the course of a lesson is the very purpose of our engagement with this artwork at school, arguably it is also the purpose of looking at art altogether.

   

  Let me summarize this approach. Comparing Man Ray’s photograph “Noire et Blanche” with the mask from the Metropolitan museum’s collection is a way to scrutinize a canonical picture from a critical perspective without denying the aesthetic appeal of the historic photograph. By way of this lesson I hope to enable changes of perspective and to build sensibility for post-colonial readings of pictures amongst pupils. Taking a bold stance, I shall claim that such lessons are conducive to a more general type of visual competence because I like to think that my pupils’ experience with the implications of this attractive historic picture might encourage them to also critically scrutinize any other picture in the future.

   

   

   

  References

   

  [1] For a thorough photo-historical analysis read Wendy A. Grossmans insightful article “Unmasking Man Ray’s Noire et blanche”, American Art, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer 2006), pp. 134-47.

  [2] For instance, Man Ray is mentioned in the widely used text-book Epochen der Kunst. Von der Moderne zu aktuellen Tendenzen (Hsg: Robert Hahne, Oldenburg Schulbuchverlag GmbH, 2013, S. 150/51). In this book, information about him and the photo “L’Enigne d’Isidore Ducasse” (1920) are featured under the header of „Fotografie und Film im Surrealismus“. It can be argued that „Noir et Blanche“ is surrealistic as well, since it seems to be illustrating Lautréamonts famous phrase “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” (Lautréamont alias Isidore Lucien Ducasse, „Die Gesänge des Maldoror“, 1874.), with Man Ray’s “chance meeting” bringing together a white woman and a wooden mask.

  [3] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Prin (last accessed on August 26, 2019).

  [4] Wendy A. Grossman’s article “Unmasking Man Ray’s Noire et blanche leaves no doubt that the mask in the picture is actually an airport art version of a Baulé mask, by the way (p. 136).

  [5] Collection Records of the Metropolitan Museums (Baulé Masken), www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/317834 ((last accessed on May 3rd, 2017), also https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/319512 (last accessed on August 26, 2019)

  [6] In this text, I will spell Black and White with capitals in order to highlight the cultural construct of Race.

  [7] For the complex history of the title see Wendy A. Grossman, “Unmasking Man Ray’s Noire et blanche”, pp.140.

  [8] More about this fashion in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Baker (last accessed on August 26, 2019).

  [9] Research on Man Ray does not support this easy hypothesis however. In Wendy A. Grossman’s article from 2006, the origin of the photograph is described as an open-ended artistic process partly sparked by commercial interest, partly by a collaborator, but not by political intention. However, I would like to argue that art works tend to transmit more or less unconscious convictions of their authors and their peers, which makes of  artworks valuable witnesses of their times.

  [10] Frantz Fanon, “Schwarze Haut, weiße Masken”, translated by Eva Moldenhauer, Wien: Turia + Kant, 2013, p. 14, 147.

  [11] Fanon makes this point in “Schwarze Haut, weiße Masken” (2013), p. 158.

  [12] “Symbolik der Farben, Formen, Zahlen” in Lexikon der Kunst, Bd. VII. S. 153-154, E.A. Szeemann Verlag, Leipzig 1994.

  [13] I am here referring to pupils from eleventh grade of the Bavarian Gymnasium, whom the syllabus obliges to explore aspects of the body in art during half a year.

  [14] Collection Records of the Metropolitan Museums (Baule masks), www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/317834 ((last accessed on May 3rd, 2017), also https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/319512 (last accessed on August 26, 2019)

  [15] For a thorough introduction to this question read Felwine Sarr’s and Bénédicte Savoy’s “restitution report” commissioned by the French state. http://restitutionreport2018.com/ (last accessed on April 1, 2020).

   

   

  published April 2020

  Sound track / Hörimpuls Man Rays Noire et Blanche, 2018 (Schemmel): Link

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• 

  Dong Xiaoling

   

  "Father” is a huge portrait created by Luo Zhongli (born 1948) in 1980. The picture shows an elderly man with dark skin and fine wrinkles on his face wearing a white headscarf. He is holding an old bowl containing tea in both hands. The old man’s fingers are rough, there is still dirt embedded in his nails and there is dirty gauze wrapped round his fingers. He has only one tooth left in his mouth. In the wrinkles on his forehead, on his brows and on the end of his nose there are glittering beads of sweat. This is the typical image of industrious peasants in China.

   

  The importance of farmers was of great significance in China in the 20th century. Mao Zedong's assessment of issues concerning Chinese farmers commenced with the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, the peasants were liberated through a political revolution centered on the Agrarian Revolution; after the founding of the People's Republic, the common prosperity of farmers was achieved through the modernization of rural socialism. The role of the farmer changed from a participant in the revolution to a builder of modernization. Farmers were an important political foundation in the Mao Zedong era. Even today, there are still about 600 million farmers in China.

   

  As a result, most of the works depicting farmers were created after 1949. Regarding the painting “Father”, the portrayal basically conforms to the definition of ordinary farmers. With the change of context during history, the visual interpretation of identity is very much influenced by the opinions of the post-modern.

   

  Farmers are considered to be the people society relies on for a living – that  is the reason why the artist named his work "Father". The model for this work was a farmer in the Daba Mountains in Sichuan province of China. The Cultural Revolution began in 1966. Mao Zedong advocated that young people from the cities should go to the countryside to receive re-education through hard labor. In 1968, Luo Zhongli, who was studying at the High School attached to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, went to the Daba Mountains and stayed there for nearly 10 years. One Chinese New Year's Eve he saw an old man squatting outside a public toilet, guarding a pile of faeces as if he were guarding something of great value.^[1] This image of a peasant bearing the burden of humiliation made a deep impression on the artist's mind. In 1980, when the artist was a student^[2] at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, he created his work “Father” by combining the image of Deng Kaixuan^[3], an old man who was the artist’s landlord in the Daba Mountains , with the memory of the old man who had been guarding the pile of faeces. In 1981, Luo Zhongli was awarded the gold medal in the Second Chinese Youth Art Exhibition held in Beijing.

   

   

   

  Controversy caused by "Father"

     

  Today, the people viewing this large-size portrait may not be able to imagine what the people felt 40 years before when they stood in front of the large-size portrait “Father” for the first time. Those people experienced a visual shock and an impact to their values when they first saw this over 2-meter high portrait of a farmer. At that time, people were used to seeing the huge portraits of Mao Zedong or Marx only, and the monotonous idealized paintings of workers, farmers and soldiers.

   

  During the Cultural Revolution, works of art were of the "revolutionary romanticism" style that is red, light, bright, tall, large, and full. A picture was required to contain brightness and sunshine as well as strong colors, especially red, and even shadows were not allowed to be painted in cool colors. The characteristics of such a picture is vividness and fine detail, and there are almost no traces of the brush. The themes of the works are mainly revolutionary idols and the history of the revolution. In this artistic style the happiness and prosperity of the country and the people are praised. This form of painting depicts a paradise full of sunshine and no pain, a utopian world of social optimism and revolutionary idealism. The depiction of Mao Zedong was always as an extremely tall well-built man in the center of the picture, in fact completely the image of a supernatural god. Mao Zedong was worshipped as an idol.

   

  As an intellectual, Luo Zhongli had his own interpretation of this. "True and benevolent farmers and the like make me feel that there are people whose nature is unpolluted. The people are simple, honest, rustic. ‘Men of the earth’ with soil permanently under their fingernails. This kind of simple, down-to-earth nature often makes me feel ashamed".^[4] The artist makes use of a huge portrait, a method traditionally used in nation leaders' portraits to express their sympathy, empathy and respect for ordinary farmers. At the same time, the artist tried to use painting to explain two kind of "truths", the moral truth and the artistic truth. This method is to use the truth of art to criticize the hypocrisy of morality. At the time this was however dangerous and controversial.

   

  In fact, even for a long time after the smashing of the “Gang of Four” in October 1976, the “Mind Emancipation" had not really begun. At the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China held in December 1978, the Communist Party of China clearly showed that the core of their work would be shifted from class struggle to the economic construction of modern socialism. However, at this time people's minds had still not been completely liberated from the shackles of the Cultural Revolution. Regarding the standard of artistic "authenticity", artistic creation at this time was still following the logic of the Cultural Revolution.

   

  Shao Yangde (Chinese art theorist at this time) wrote an article in 1981 titled "Creation. Appreciate, comment, read "Father" and discuss with relevant reviewers"^[5]. The article triggered a wide-ranging, long-lasting and intense academic debate on the field of Chinese art theory. Shao Yangde believed that "Father" showed the image of a farmer of the old society: numb, passive, sluggish. Therefore the painting gave the impression that farmers were submissive and pessimistic. He accused the artist of not injecting "noble revolutionary ideals" into "Father". "The image vilifies the peasant”. In fact, the living standards of Chinese farmers had nearly reached rock bottom during the Cultural Revolution while the political theorists were trying to convince the farmers that they were the masters of society and lived in paradise. This view also proved that between 1976 and 1980, many people in China were still living in utopian dreams and were unwilling to recognize reality. Luo Zhongli's "Father" shows a strong critical realism opposite to the rigid thinking at that time.

   

  A dramatic irony is that before the work was sent to Beijing to join the Section 2 National Youth Art Exhibition, at the insistence of Li Shaoyanchairman of the Artists Association of Sichuan Province, Luo Zhongli replaced the cigarette that was originally behind the left ear of the farmer with a ballpoint pen (image below). In this way he showed that the man was an educated farmer with noble ideas in the new era. The artist's compromise was in the hope that his work would pass the intensive political investigation before a work of art was accepted, and thus been sent to Beijing. However, this modification shows the great irony of utopian fantasy.

   

  

  Luo Zhongli, 1980, detail © Luo Zhongli

   

  When the works were successfully exhibited in the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in 1981, “Father”, the image of a farmer who endures the suffering and never complains, deeply moved hundreds of millions of people. The huge size and the hyperrealism of the picture were extremely fresh but tacit to those Chinese people who saw the work at the museum. Li Xianting, the editor of the official media "Fine Arts" magazine at that time, was also moved by the human compassion shown in the work. For this reason, in 1981 he used "Father" as the cover of the magazine. Only through the undisguised expression of reality can art find the truth it has lost.

   

   

   

  Changes in social thinking after "Father"

   

  In terms of artistic language itself, China originally had its own context of development and its own system of language. However, Chinese art since 1949 has been mainly influenced by the realistic art of the former Soviet Union, coupled with the Cultural Revolution’s censoring of the traditional Chinese context and the ban on Western contemporary art. Under the influence of this aesthetic inertia, representational realism has become the most acceptable visual narrative method for the public.

   

  Luo Zhongli was inevitably influenced by the American photorealist Chuck Close at that time. However, instead of deliberately hiding traces of personality, emotion, and attitude to create a flat and indifferent picture as Chuck Close did, Zhongli added these feelings to his picture. "I feel that this form is most conducive to powerfully conveying all my feelings and thoughts. The arts of the East and the West have always absorbed and been influenced by each other. Forms, techniques, etc. are just the language that conveys my emotions and thoughts. If this particular language can say what I want to say, then I will learn from it.”^[6] The artist seems to have used a more calm and objective approach, but made the most subjective elucidate of a farmer in the work "Father".

   

  To the general public at that time in China, Chuck Close and modern art in Europe and America were unfamiliar and so far away. Even at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, the school had bought a Japanese-published "Complete Works of the World" but it was locked in a cabinet. The students had to press their faces against the window, brush the condensation from their breath off the glass, and view the book as they would a cultural relic in a museum. Such a book would take 1-2 months to read and absorb –but only under such conditions it was possible to read about Western modern art.

   

  For a period of time after this work, a group of artists who were contemporaries of Luo Zhongli returned to their innermost selves in pursuit of their own spirits and emotions. They became more willing to pay attention to people's daily life, and wanted to explore and express the beauty of human nature in ordinary life. The spiritual essence of their paintings was the continuation of the humanitarian sentiment.

   

  It is precisely because of the success of “Father” that the artist was sent by the government to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium at the end of 1983. He developed a comprehensive and deep understanding of European art and phenomena. Later, he held a personal exhibition at Harvard University in the United States, and thus gained a wide international reputation. Since then, his use of different techniques to express the language of painting has become more pioneering and expressive.

   

  In addition to reflecting on and breaking through the constraints of the political dogma on art, Chinese artists are eager for artistic change. Art theorists have begun to introduce and translate a large number of works on the history of Western modern art, for example Herbert Read‘s: A Concise History of Modern Painting (1979), H. H. Arnason’s History of Western Modern Art (1986) and many more. In the 1980’s, influential art newspapers such as "Art" (reissued in 1976), "Art Translation Collection" (founded in1980), and "World Art" (founded in 1979) began to publish articles on a large number of Western modern art genres and artists. Faced with the influence of foreign culture as well as domestic social pressure to achieve modernization, the ruling party has adopted a more accepting attitude.

   

  Precisely at that time, Western modern art and post-modern ideas came together and quickly merged in China. There is 1985 Art Trend^[7] movement, the 89 Art Exhibition^[8] etc. So far, Chinese modern art has entered the experimental stage on a large scale and has been continuously reconstructed.

   

  However, what is significant is that the village in the Daba Mountains where the artist once lived has now lost its former prosperity. As villagers have started to go to work in cities across the country, the village has become very glum and mediocre, in sharp contrast to the prosperity of the cities. And those farmers who have moved to the city are also working hard to transform themselves into a part of the city. Farmers, who once held an important position in China's social structure, are now gradually being urbanized under the drive of the market economy, and are being marginalized in the city.

   

   

   

   

  References

   

  • Michael Sullivan, Art and artists of Twentieth-Century China, Shanghai, 2012
  • Gao Minglu, Chinese Avant-Garde Art, Jiangsu Fine Arts Press, 1997
  • LvPeng YiDan, The Art History of China Since 1979, Beijing, 2011
  • WangYong, A History of Art Exchange between China and Abroad, Beijing, 2013

   

   

  Footnotes

   

  ^[1] During the Cultural Revolution, China's economy was extremely weak and faeces was the most important source of fertilizer in rural areas at that time.

  ^[2] During the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, universities stopped accepting students, and the college entrance examination did not begin again until 1977. Luo Zhongli was admitted to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1977.

  ^[3] Deng Kaixuan was a farmer in the Daba Mountains. Luo Zhongli lived in the farmer’s home when he was in the Daba Mountains. Deng Kaixuan was also the model for the painting "Father". He has passed away now.

  ^[4] Gao Minglu, Chinese Avant-Garde Art , ( Jiangsu Fine Arts Press,1997)P70

  ^[5] “Fine Arts" Magazine, （Beijing，1981）Issue 9, P57

  ^[6] "Fine Arts" Magazine, （Beijing，1981）Issue 2, Page 4

  ^[7] The 85 Art Trend refers to an art movement towards modernism that emerged in mainland China in the mid-1980ies. The young artists at that time were dissatisfied with the line of leaning to the left of the art world at the time, and with the Soviet socialist realism art stereotypes as well as some values ​​in traditional culture. They tried to find new blood from Western modern art, which triggered a nationwide art trend.

  ^[8] 89 Art Exhibition, "Chinese Modern Art Exhibition" held at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in February 1989. This is the first exhibition of concentrated Chinese avant-garde art including performance art and installation art. The artist Xiao Lu shot her installation "Dialogue" and the exhibition was forced to terminate. The shooting incident of "Dialogue" has therefore become a symbol of the 89 Art Exhibition and has an important position in the history of modern Chinese art.

   

   

  published September 2020

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• 

  Karin Guggeis

  Objects from the Global South in early collections of the Global North often lack any information about their specific local context. This is also true for this wooden sculpture made from a single block of hard wood, carved with different figures and forms on two sides and painted with natural colours in red, white and black. It was acquired in 1893 by the “Royal Ethnographic Collection” (Königlich Ethnographische Sammlung) in Munich, today the Museum Fünf Kontinente. No specific information about its geographic origin, its producers, users or use was documented in the inventory book. “Huge four-edged block, 1.80 high made of heavy wood, double-sided carved with human figures and lizards, heavily damaged by termites” is the only information recorded. The wooden block was sent from “Cameroon” (Kamerun) which is therefore documented as its region of origin. It was given to the museum as a present by Max von Stetten, a colonial officer in the German colony.

   

  The post gained a new layer of significance through its inclusion in the almanac “The Blue Rider” (Der Blaue Reiter), one of the most famous and important publications on art in the early 20th century in the Global North. The almanac was edited in 1912 by two artists based in the environs of Munich, Franz Marc and the Russian Wassily Kandinsky. They designed the publication as a starting point for a new epoch of art, rejecting academic art and encouraging new forms of artistic expression. Thus, Kandinsky and Marc included reproductions of different non-canonical art forms, such as artworks from the Middle Ages, folk art, art made by children – and non-Western artworks, in those days called “art of the primitives” (Kunst der Primitiven), among them this sculpted block from Cameroon. In this way, the editors of the almanac aimed to break down the hierarchies between art forms from different times, regions and levels of professional skill, and to expand the canon of art in the Global North.

   

  The editors’ fascination with non-European art had different roots: Wassily Kandinsky was a trained ethnographer and often visited ethnographic museums. Franz Marc, since his visit to the ethnographic museum in Berlin in 1911, especially admired sculptures from Cameroon. Thus Marc included a photograph of this wooden block to illustrate August Macke’s article “The Masks” (Die Masken). Marc captioned the picture simply “Cameroon” (Kamerun), its known geographic origin, and the country whose sculptures he admired.

   

  

   Fig 1: Almanac "Der Blauer Reiter" (page 58-59)

   

  In his article, the artist Macke stressed that for Africans their “idols” (Idole), as he called their sculptures, were a “visible expression of an invisible idea”, “a personification of an abstract term”. He also stressed the equality of the art forms from different times and regions. For example, Macke valued bronze works from the kingdom of Benin, in what is today Nigeria, and other ethnographic works, because they are just as expressive as a grave marker in the cathedral at Frankfurt. To demonstrate this non-hierarchical attitude to art from different regions and times, Marc and Kandinsky placed two photographs side by side on a double page in the almanac – on one side the Gothic figure of a knight, and on the other a bronze plaque showing a soldier from the kingdom of Benin, which also was in the collection of the Munich ethnological museum by then (Fig 1).

   

  The later fame of the almanac, and of its publishers Kandinsky and Marc as artists, led to the wooden sculpture being named “The Blue Rider Post” in the narrative of the museum.

   

  It is significant for global art history dominated by the Global North that, in contrast to our broad knowledge in respect of the European admirers of this object, very little is known about its original local context in the Global South. The state of our knowledge concerning its producer(s), its patron(s), its use, its specific place of origin, the meaning of special forms, colours, figures or gestures sculptured is poor. There are two reasons for this. First, in the Global North, there has been little interest in investigating its local context. Second, it is actually very difficult to carry out such investigations in respect of such badly documented early works in ethnological museums. To unfold these difficulties: the common method used to trace the local context of poorly recorded works is to look for stylistic similarities and ethnological background information concerning comparable objects in other collections or publications. Spending long periods doing fieldwork in the place of origin is too time- and money-consuming, as there are numerous badly recorded objects, especially in the early ethnological collections. Moreover, in the Forest region of East Cameroon, the assumed place of origin, there are numerous small ethnic communities which have been inadequately studied. Thus the poor results of previous research in the Global North are the following: The sculpted post is valued as unique in ethnological and art publications. Only single figures and their gestures show similarities with a few other objects in collections of the Global North. The current suggested origin of this carved work in view of these stylistic similarities is among the Lundu or Mbo people in the Forest region in East Cameroon. There it was probably used in a cult.

   

  A new approach has been made possible by a provenance research project of the Museum Fünf Kontinente, funded by the German Lost Art Foundation and the Bavarian State Ministry for Science and Art. In collaboration with scholars from Cameroun and the presumed source communities, members of the project are exploring the provenance and the local context of this special Cameroonian wooden block, as well as the whole collection from the German colony of Cameroon donated by Max von Stetten to the museum between 1893 and 1896. Hopefully the blank sheet regarding the original context of this wooden block will be filled.

   

  For comparison, also read Patrique deGraft-Yankson's analysis of this object here.

   

  The post in the context of the the repatriation discourse: Link

   

  References

  • Eisenhofer, Stefan (2009): Kulthauspfosten (?). In: Bujok, Elke (ed.): Der Blaue Reiter und das Münchner Völkerkundemuseums. Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde München, Hirmer, München. S. 16-18
  • Erling, Katharina (2000): Der Almanach Der Blaue Reiter. In: Hopfengart, Christine (ed.): Der Blaue Reiter. Bremen, Köln. S. 188-240.
  • Kecskési, Maria (1999): Skulptierter Holzblock. In: Kecskési, Maria (Hg.): Kunst aus Afrika. Museum für Völkerkunde München. Prestel, Munich, London, New York. S. 116.
  • Kecskési, Maria (1982): Zwei beschnitzte Holzblöcke. In: Kecskési, Maria (ed.): Kunst aus dem Alten Afrika. Pinguin, Innsbruck. S. 238-239, 72.
  • Macke, August (1912): Die Masken. In: Kandinsky, Wassily/ Marc, Franz: Der Blaue Reiter. Piper, Munich. S. S. 53-59.
  • Marc, Franz and Kandinsky, Wassily (eds) (1912): Der Blaue Reiter. Piper. Munich.

   

   

  published March 2020

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• 

  Osuanyi Quaicoo Essel

  The seated human-like figure is centrally placed with the head occupying almost the centre of the entire composition while the hands rest gently on the laps. The head and the face of the human figure is rendered in planes and cubistic orientation, a style reminiscent in precolonial African wooden sculptures. Hands of the figure received similar cubistic treatment with less details as in realistic depiction. Interestingly, there is a deliberate subtle emphasis on the head size of the figure. In African sculptural renditions, the human head is considered as seat of wisdom and, therefore, presented bigger to defile the realistic canonic proportions and connote its Afrocentric symbolic essence. This concept of head re(presentation) is termed as African proportions (Amenuke et al, 1991).

   

  To create a harmonious contrast of colour and shape, tints of yellow forms an arc-shaped design around the head. This treatment possibly suggests a halo effect characteristic of saintly figural paintings in Western art traditions. It also mimics a turbaned human figure. As an artist who hailed from a predominately Muslim community, this stylistic treatment, perhaps, pays tribute to his religious cultural background. The eyes are presented with dark brown rectangular dabs, with the forehead gently highlighted with bright yellows, a treatment that puts the human figure in a meditative mood and sanctimonious character. Though Uche Okeke presented the work in a portrait orientation, the skilful placement of the human figure, and the peculiar colouration of the head regions creates a triangular effect when imaginary diagonal lines are projected from the bottom corners of the composition to the halo-shaped found on the head. Similarly, the haloed effect on the head and the elongated pharaonic beard creates an imaginary inverted triangle resonating a visual excitement. 

   

  Symbolically, yellow depicts riches and royalty in African colour scheme. With this schematic colouration, Okeke gave a clue to the kingly characteristics of the human figure. The white looking garment of the figure also adds to the sanctimonious conjecture of the figure as in African colour symbolism. The artist’s use of luminous chromatic reflection of the tint of yellow and dark shades helped in achieving the sense of depth in the garment. Complementing the overall kingly posture of the human figure is its elongated pharaonic beard and bodily language as found in sculptures of ancient Egyptian kings.

   

  Okeke skilfully deceived viewers of this composition into believing that it is symmetrical per its stylistic tendency, yet an intense observation reveals a psychedelic mutation of the placement of the fingers, padding of the background with tree-shaped figures in rich application of tints and shades of black, yellow and brown to create contrast of colours and shapes. Placement of the trees in colour variations and the sprouting of the branches forms a psychedelic cross and contribute to breaking monotony. The patchy effects of the intense yellow forming the negative spaces adds to creating a perceptual believability that the human figure wears a contemplative mood per the facial looks. There seem to be gentle highlights of the yellow from the shoulders to the halo-shaped object.

   

  Per the compositional portrayal, Okeke showed a kingly and majestic posture of, perhaps, the Christian religious icon in Africanised bodily posture and cultural praxis. This compositional contextualisation feeds into his personal manifesto that he did not subscribe to borrowing Western artistic accent hook, line and sinker. Neither was he comfortable with resorting his Nigerian indigenous artistic traditions without modification. He emphasised in his manifesto that it is ‘… futile copying our old art heritages, for they stand for our old order. Culture lives by change. Today's social problems are different from yesterday's, and we shall be doing grave disservice to Africa and mankind by living in our fathers' achievements’ (Okeke, n.d). For that reason, he appropriated western artistic accents and fused them with Afrocentric artistic concepts and perspectives to achieve a hybrid artistic language which is not purely African nor Western, but yet circumvent the boundaries of artistic cultural traditions in general. The fusion lends itself to exploring the familiar and the unfamiliar to create a renewed breed of art. He called this effect ‘natural synthesis’. Emanating from Nigerian non-conformist artist group named Zaria Rebels, Okeke sought to reinterpret the Western artistic style of realistic depiction, perspectival detailing, accurate proportions and tonal gradation he was exposed to by the Eurocentric-inspired faculty in the so-called formal education setup in art in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. As part of the pioneering post-independence artists in Nigeria, Uche Okeke was experimenting for a renewed artistic accent for his creations through the assessment of his Nigerian cultural values and the new artistic training he had been exposed to in order to arrive at the boundary of these two traditions.

   

  Using this painting in teaching and learning in the context of collective memory could inspire relevant competencies in the learners. Gathering inspiration from the artistic pursuit of Okeke, learners could fuse multiple artistic traditions of the artworld to arrive at their individualised artistic accents. Teachers could engage learners in this manner by asking them to borrow and appropriate a foreign artistic style and fuse it with their nationalistic art making techniques to develop a new breed of art or concept. Teachers could also discuss with learners about the fact that gathering artistic inspiration is multicultural with no boundaries. Furnishing learners with links to the biographical account of the artist for them to understand his cultural nuances remains key in the process. It would also be beneficial to guide learners to explore with their own interpretation of the artwork (figure 1). Teachers could also provide learners with printed copy of the painting and ask them to redraw this religious-centred figure to suit their own religious understanding and cultures.  This approach addresses the competencies of critical thinking and problem solving; creativity and innovation; cultural identity and global citizenship; and personal development.  

  
  References

  • Amenuke, S. K., Dogbe, B. K., Asare, S. K., Ayiku, F. D. & Bafoe, A. General knowledge in Art for
  • senior secondary schools. Evans Brothers Limited.
  • Okeke, U. (n.d.). Natural synthesis. final okeke natural synthesis manifesto 1960.doc (live.com)

   

  

  Mahmoud Malik Saako

  The image is presented in a form of a male figure in a seated position with long beard, white turban, white robe, long sleeves and a probably waist band. The painting represents fairly the complexion of a male, black bearded and wearing a face mask, with hands resting on the laps possibly in a meditation mood. The Background is probably a wooded environment or garden with tall trees of two colours (black and yellow). The figure seated probably on a staircase or an amphitheater. The sun ray penetrating through the tree created shaded patches reflected on the image.

   

  An Islamic perspective: I base my interpretation of the painting on Islamic perspective as one of the foreign region that had an early contact in northern Nigeria as early as 15th century long before Christianity and eventual colonization of Nigeria by European power (the British) and its possible independence in the 1960. The emir is mostly male usually dressed with a white robe, long sleeves and a white turban tied around his head to signify his authority. The painting perhaps represents an Emir of the Zaria state at that time sitting in a garden relaxing.

   

  Using an African mask: The use of an African mask to represent the figure was done deliberately or perhaps to avoid revolution from the Muslim community of disrespecting their leader which the author was much familiar in this volatile society especially, the intolerance nature between Muslims and Christians at this era in the Zaria state. The mask as a tradition signature that ubiquitous across many cultures that can be used to represent the religious discourses by appropriating and manipulating them to produce art forms of the past to produce a mythology for the present.

   

  Lessons

  1. The image portrays the power of the emir in the Zaria state with a possibly palace and vineyard or gardens where he retires to relax. The seat or staircase/amphitheatre is constructed within the park for relaxation.
  2. It also shows the importance of trees because the natural air and shade provided. It reflects the symbiotic relationship between man and the natural environment or biosphere.
  3. The long beard is a reflection of the age of the figure, combined with the white turban tied around the head which is a symbol of power and authority of the emir within the context of an Islamic state. Again, the white long robe coupled with black beard and the white turban is a reflection of the dress code of the emir within the states dominated by Muslims. The waist band (blue sea colour) is used to tie the robe for easy movement.
  4. The facial representation of the figure doesn’t conform with normal human head based on the eyes, nose and mouth. It is probably a mask of an Egyptian pharaoh to imbibe the spirit of the Pharaoh as a kingly figure that wielded much power. A story that is synonymous in both Islam and Christian doctrines except the West Africa Indigenous Religions that do ascribe this myth. The use of the mask also simmer the tension of using identifiable imagery that would have rise tension in this probably consecutive Muslim state. The use of masks within the Africa context show the spiritual powers embedded in them that the wearer or user is mostly possessed and transfigured a situation that can only be explained by adherences to that particular belief system.
  5. The black and yellow tall trees depict the diverse nature of the ecosystem and the symbiotic relationship mostly exhibited in the environment. This shows the complex nature of the human society with diverse cultural and different colours complexion that need a person with wisdom and patience to rule, like the emir who assumes the position of an Egyptian Pharaoh.
  6. Uche Okeke, was a revolutionary artist who tried to break away from normal art presentation handed to Africa by the white colonial powers. This diversion was to Africanize the art industry in West Africa and Africa at large. This where Okeke decided to use the Pharaoh mask from Egypt that was considered even among Europeans of the cradle of human civilization in the world.

  

  Ernst Wagner

  I argue in the following text from a special position. Firstly, I was present in Bayreuth on 26.4.2022 when the two co-authors, Osuanyi Quaicoo Essel and Mahmoud Malik Saako, discussed the painting in a larger circle. The representatives of the Iwalewa House clearly expressed their doubts about the (traditional) title of the painting "Christ".^[1] Perhaps this brought the question of who was depicted in the painting, Christ or another person, to the fore. This question also shapes my discussion of the painting presented here. It became the guiding theme behind which other topics disappeared, such as the question of the painting's function (what was it created for?), its biography (how did it come to Bayreuth?) the role of oil painting (is it a European import), the context of the debates on modern art during the independence movements in Africa (does the painting belong to a global modernism after the Second World War or does it mark a Nigerian path? ^[2]) - to name just a few.

   

  My own interpretation is therefore less an independent approach to the work than a response to the positions presented with the intention of building bridges between the approaches by introducing a meta-level. Whether this is convincing, whether the bridge is sustainable, is for the reader to decide. But more on that below.

   

  Traps through aesthetic stereotypes that lead to false classifications / interpretations

  And a second preliminary remark: I didn't like this picture at the beginning. It reminded me too much of the religious pictures of the 1950/60s of my childhood. They were popular for death pictures back then: A mixture of a bit of Pre-Raphaelite and icon-inspired imagery, soaked in the formal world of a moderate and esoterically inclined modernism (Franz Marc). The intention was easy to see through: To somehow keep alive that which, in my view, was no longer contemporary at all, and to do so through a bland, unconvincing and even less convincing adaptation (a kind of "modern facing"). This is also why, when I saw the picture hanging at the entrance to the Iwalewa House from the corner of my eye, I immediately saw a Christ.

   

  Iconography - inclusion of other perspectives

  

  Detail

   

  In the discussion mentioned at the beginning, the intervention of Mahmoud Malik Saako was really surprising for me - against the background of this perception, which was shaped by my own stereotypes. The halo (which I saw - see detail) was a turban (which Malik saw). But I could not counter his view. There was no argument for the interpretation as a halo. This is also true now when I read Malik's text (like Osuanyi's). So I first had to recognise my stereotype in perception, which had lured me onto a perhaps (?) wrong track, I had to get rid of this, unlearn something, in order to be able to open up to the other perspective.

   

  Why I - retrospectively - still speak of "perhaps wrong", a research on Okeke's work has confirmed as meaningful. After all, there are obviously works in his oeuvre that iconographically quite certainly represent Christ or St Mary, as an internet search reveals (see fig. below). The auction house Bonhams (Abb.1) states - even if for 1963, two years after our work: "in 1963 ... the Passion of Christ was a recurring theme for the artist. He had produced the stained-glass designs of the Fourteen Stations of the Cross in Munich earlier in the year." (www.bonhams.com/auctions/25800/lot/28 accessed 14 Sept 2024)

   

  

  Christian motifs in Uche Okeke's Ouevre between 1962 and 1963 found by the author on the internet (May 22, 2022)

   

  Perhaps this is why the discussion about whether Christ or a Muslim is depicted makes me feel uneasy. In my mind, the question is connected with the attributions or depreciations: To whom / which faith does the work of art belong? Does it belong to the Christians, the Muslims, or the traditional believers in northern Nigeria, if, as Philipp Schramm or Mahmoud Malik Saako suggest, one also discovers a traditional wooden mask?

   

  New approach and reflection on its anchoring

  Hence my attempt to think of the painting in a different way, i.e. not from the artist's point of view and what he or she wanted to represent. In doing so, it is clear to me that I am taking a specifically Western approach to a modernist work (where I now place Okeke's painting) with my new approach. This approach is based on the loss of a binding iconography and a fundamental openness / never-quite-unambiguity of 'autonomous' works of art for a Western-oriented, middle-class audience. In addition, my proposal for interpretation is based on a specific position in the interpretation of images, from production theory to reception theory (in the context of constructivist epistemology). The loss of a binding iconography is accompanied by a greater significance of form (which is now itself charged with content to compensate for the loss). In a next step, I therefore try to examine the image - beyond a positioning in the question of whether it is an "Islamic" or a "Christian image" or a "traditional image" - form-analytically.

   

  

  Analytical composition with auxiliary lines. (c) the author
  

   

  Form analysis

  The dominant, almost penetrating axial symmetry in a very high longitudinal format speaks of high order; the pyramidal structure of the figure also speaks of calm and stability, indeed of sublimity and dignity, of quiet, immovable power. And this dignity is not fed by external insignia or theatrical staging, but by a calm that radiates from within. It is a picture in front of which one can become calm if one trusts the order as a viewer.

   

  The striking human figure contributes to this effect. Although clearly figurative, it does not represent - to the degree of abstraction - a concrete portrait or a human being that can be grasped by the senses. This is most obvious in the geometricised eye area, which is shaded in various dark zones. This makes the gaze ambiguous: is the figure looking at the viewer, is it looking forward, is it looking inwards (contemplatively, with closed eyes)? Together with the geometric rhythm of the picture's surface (the symmetry, but of course above all the parallels that can denote eyelid, tear sac, eyebrow - or not) support the depiction of a human being in an abstracted ideal form that remains open to itself, as in a mask. The latter is also characterised by the fact that the viewer immediately sees what has been made, what has been assembled, as in the case of the moustache, for example.

   

  The figure sits quite classically in front of a middle and a background: at the bottom the zone (again - between two-dimensional and spatial effect - strongly abstracted) is divided into horizontal stripes, which become slightly narrower towards the top. They again suggest something familiar (a wooden bench), but this remains ambiguous. In the upper zones, the tree trunks (without leaves) form the liveliest, least symmetrical, most restless element in the painting, even if the alternation of light and dark again shows the abstracting hand of the artist.

   

  With this spatial layering in clear zones (background, trees, seat, figure), but also the geometric reduction of the forms, the picture looks like a carved relief. The colouring also fits in with this, for example when the "sky" behind the trees as well as the lighter trees have the same colouring as the face, while the beard, eyes and the dark trees form a second colour zone. The lightest zones are formed by the robe and the shape around the head. Despite the large spectrum in the area of light-dark contrast, the picture does not appear colourful, rather like a natural wood relief. An effect that is again particularly evident in one detail: the way the hands are shaped is reminiscent of hands carved out of a piece of wood.

   

  This character is supported by the way Okeke uses oil painting. He clearly outlines the contours of the surfaces. The objects are each assigned a main colour, applied impasto with broad brushstrokes. The modelling creates plasticity, lightly set with internal structures enliven the colour surfaces.

   

  Conclusion

  The degree of abstraction, the modelling construction of the figurative out of a colourfulness, the strict symmetry of the composition, the tectonics of the pictorial space unfold a tableau that nevertheless - and this is now decisive - creates zones of ambiguity in the figurative. The viewer must fill these with his or her own ideas. The viewer's gaze is directed towards the picture, but the eyes do not look back. In this respect, the painting is suitable for contemplation, meditation, spiritual experience. In seeing the painting, one's own can come to rest. And so the distinction between the Christian halo, the Muslim turban and the ritual mask can also come to rest in the contemplation of the painting.

   

  This consideration is based on an 'ideal viewer' of the work, i.e. it is reception-aesthetically oriented. If one finally turns it once again to production aesthetics, one could interpret the work as an attempt by the artist in which it experimentally unfolds what a spirituality beyond the distinction traditional - Christian - Muslim could look like.

   

  Footnotes

  ^[1]              Philipp Schramm's position becomes clear in his text (https://www.bayfink.uni-bayreuth.de/de/Sommerausstellung-2021_-Not-yet/audio-not-yet---welcome/index.html).

  ^[2]              Perrin Lathrop, "Uche Okeke," in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed May 21, 2022, https://smarthistory.org/uche-okeke/.

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• 

  Dong Xiaoling

   

  In the 13^th century, when traffic and information were sparse, Marco Polo, a Venetian, came to China by land and served the Chinese Yuan imperial court from 1275 to 1295. The white Chinese porcelain vases, which he took back to his motherland and which are archived at San Marco Museum in Venice today, are reputed as a symbol of the Chinese vogue that went viral in Europe 300 years later. The Travels of Marco Polo has stirred European’s imagination of China^[1] , and also promoted Europe's maritime exploration.

   

  However, before the opening of the new sea route between China and Europe in the 15^th century, Chinese porcelains were rarely exported to the European market as a commodity. The trade of Chinese porcelains to Europe was monopolized by Arab merchants, while European merchants could only obtain fewer Chinese porcelains from West Asia and Egypt in the form of intermediary trade. Unlike silk and spices, which were easy to carry and transport, Chinese porcelains were mostly sold locally by means of land transportation because of their fragility and weight. They were closely connected with local culture, after which they were imprinted with local aesthetic characteristics and shipped to Europe. However, Chinese porcelains were not what they had always been. Forerunner of great geographical discoveries as he was, Zheng made seven large-scale ocean voyages during Ming Dynasty from 1405 to 1433, but did not establish direct contact with Europe.

   

  Comparatively, European humanism and capitalism were at an embryo stage. From the 15^th century to the 17^th century, European fleets represented by Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands carried out sailing explorations in order to seek new trade routes and trading partners as well as develop the capitalism in Europe.

   

  First, Chinese porcelains were shipped to Europe as ballast. However, the European upper class favoured them by virtue of their smooth texture, delicate and hard casing and exquisite emblazonment. European royal nobles and bishops all were keen on owning Chinese porcelains to show off their wealth and status. European royal families’ love to Chinese porcelains did not ease in spite of the fact that they had little understanding of the materials and techniques and far away China. Philip II of Spain (1527-1598) had a collection of 3,000 pieces. Although Europe started importing Chinese porcelains on a big scale, a mysterious atmosphere always clung to these exquisite utensils. At that time, some people in Europe even thought that Chinese porcelains could play an anti-virus effect.

   

  The French doctor Loys Guyon (1527-1617) and Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) of England studied Chinese porcelains. Père Francois Xavier d'Entrecolles (1664-1741), a French missionary, was in Jingdezhen, China, for 7 years during the 17^th century. In 1712 and 1722, he wrote reports on the details of Chinese porcelains making which he observed and inquired into and mailed them back to the Jesuits in Europe, making it possible for French to imitate porcelains locally.

   

  Already in 1575, Italian Medici Grand Duke Francesco's factory made an attempt to produce porcelains, which was the first imitation recorded in Europe. Such a kind of Medici pottery bottle with blue and white patterns is collected in the Louvre. Both the white glazed blue painted pottery in Delft, the Netherlands, and the Nevers kiln in France have imitated the decorative style of Chinese porcelains. However, in terms of materials, they came in pottery or soft porcelain. The alchemist Bottger did not calcinate the earliest European porcelain at Meissen, Germany until 1709. In this process, the aesthetic taste in Europe had gradually changed. The fashion of loving oriental artifacts had gradually spread from nobles to rich bourgeoisie. As the demand for relatively cheap goods had also become more and more vigorous, porcelains had gradually turned a part of the daily life of the common. The nature of Chinese porcelain had gradually changed from collectibles to daily commodities.

   

  In order to meet the needs of European society, East India Companies in European countries imported a large number of porcelains from China in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. In China, this kind of porcelain for export was called export-purpose Chinese porcelain.^[2] From the change of shape and pattern the export-purpose Chinese porcelains can be roughly classified into traditional styles, hybrid styles and foreign styles.

  1. Traditional styles (The shape and decoration of porcelain have not been influenced by foreign styles, and are no different from products on the Chinese market.)

  From the opening of the new sea route in the 16^th century to the lift of the ban on maritime trade in 1684, it was illegal for Chinese to export porcelains. As per the ban on maritime trade in the Ming Dynasty, non-governmental maritime trade was strictly prohibited, while official tribute trade was allowed with strict restrictions. Foreign countries could only conduct limited official trade with the Ming authorities. Since then, the Qing authorities have repeated the ban on maritime trade. The production and shipment then were at great risks.

   

  Merchants usually purchased Chinese porcelains in Guangzhou and then shipped them abroad from Macao, making the export-purpose Chinese porcelains dominated by traditional Chinese style at this stage. It influenced the early stage of the Chinese style in Europe as well as the reproduction and imitation of Chinese porcelain with soft pottery in Europe. Chinese porcelains were mainly used as daily necessities, such as dishes, bowls, bottles and pots. But there were few ornamental porcelains as well. The decorative patterns mostly came in cloud-dragons, deer, horses, cranes, monkeys, flying butterflies, birds and insects, folding branches and flowers, fairy ladies with babies, city walls with mountains and waters, auspicious characters, etc.

   

  

  Unknown, Blue and white porcelain vase, 1700-1710, Victoria and Albert Museum London.

   

  The style of blue-and-white porcelains represented the life of the easterners to Europeans. A great number of Chinese porcelains of this kind are recorded in the archives of Dutch East India Company.

   

  On the one hand, few Chinese porcelains were exported to Europe with a higher price; on the other hand, the pure oriental shape made Chinese porcelains deviate from the daily needs of Europeans. For example, easterners’ habit of eating rice and using chopsticks makes bowls the most common utensils in the East, while westerners’ custom of eating bread and using knives and forks has not made bowls, with a deep-walled shape, the mainstream of European tableware by far. Because the typical Chinese tableware consists of fewer parts compared to Western dining habits, Chinese porcelain dishes could only be used for holding cakes and pastries in Europe. For example, porcelain pen containers were used as wine cooler, and porcelain fish tanks were used as flowerpots... Chinese porcelains were constrained in terms of use, and often modified or displayed as ornaments. Therefore, a new style came out in the course of development.

  2. Hybrid styles. (Chinese traditional style couples with foreign ornaments and vise versa, or Eastern themes couple with Western ones for hybrid ornaments.)

  It is the stage of free transformation of Chinese style porcelains. Among this type, porcelain with traditional Chinese themes, or a mixture of different themes from China and Europe, combined with European shapes is the most representative. Part of the changes in the shape of European porcelain came from metalware, and part from the changes in lifestyle brought about by trade. For example, since the 17^th century, Europeans have been importing black tea and coffee from the East and chocolate from Mexico. These hot drinks come brown in color after brewing, and white Chinese porcelains serve as the most suitable drinking utensils. The emergence of new eating habits has promoted the transformation of Chinese porcelain utensils. The Dutch enlarged the size of traditional Chinese small teacups and designed a lug.^[3] Kraak porcelain^[4] and Mandarin style were the most representative.

   

  

  Unknown, Dish, ca. 1635-1655, Kraak Porcelain, Diameter: 47,5 cm, Bibliographic Reference: Clunas, Craig (ed.). Chinese Export Art and Design. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1987, p. 38, fig. 16.

   

  Kraak porcelain is a form of blue and white porcelain exported from Wanli Period of Ming Dynasty (1573-1620) to early Qing Dynasty. It was mainly shaped in dishes, bottles and bowls, and represented by trimmed patterns. These patterns came round, diamond-shaped and lotus petal-shaped, with designs of flowers, birds, fish and insects, landscapes, figures and auspicious mascots commonly seen in Chinese porcelains. Later, exotic religious myths and social life themes appeared in trimmed patterns. In terms of techniques, the traditional way of drawing the outline of the pattern on the surface of the porcelain body with a writing brush and then filling it in with color was adopted. Kraak porcelain is a kind of export-purpose porcelain with the largest quantity and the longest influence period of more than 100 years. After that, blue and white porcelain in Kangxi Period (1662-1722) of Qing Dynasty came in western rendering techniques in drawing, showing a maximum of eight or nine color gradations on the porcelain body. And it drew much popularity among westerners.

   

  The word “Mandarin” was a name for Chinese officials when Portuguese traded with Chinese merchants in the 17^th century. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, many missionaries and painters came to China and recorded their experiences there, including their life and work with Chinese officials in addition to preaching.

   

  Most of the decorative patterns depicted the life of officials and wealthy merchants in Qing Dynasty, who enjoyed a rich and leisurely family life. These descriptions and landscape paintings further aroused European‘s curiosity about live in China. Aiming at this market opportunity, Guangzhou Porcelain Workshop launched Mandarin style products for European and American markets. Some patterns use the perspective technology of European oil paintings, and the expressions of the characters are vivid, which conforms to the aesthetic orientation of Europeans. These patterns presented a desirable pastoral oriental atmosphere for westerners. Playing in picturesque courtyard gardens, hunting in enchanting springtime, harmonious coexistence between human beings and nature, and vivid home life scenes embodied elegant Chinese costumes, fascinating home decoration, exquisite garden scenes, and charming family happiness. These themes greatly satisfied Europeans’ curiosity and yearning for the East.

   

  

  Unknown, Three Vases, 1700-1720, Procelain, Jingdezhen, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

   

  3. Foreign styles. (Chinese porcelains satisfying the requirements of European merchants in terms of shapes and patterns, calcined elaborately to serve European consumers’ needs. Most of the patterns were drawn in strict accordance with the prints and patterns as required by customers, so they were usually called custom-made porcelains.)

  One type was produced in the 17th century. Since Europe had not yet mastered the technology of porcelain-making, Chinese porcelain workers imitated the pottery of European style according to the requirements of European merchants. Chinese Porcelain competed with European pottery in this way and earned a lot of silver used as currency.

   

  

  Unknown, Vase with Angel, 1700, Porcelain, H: 36cm, Victoria and Albert Museum London. Bibliographic Reference: Clunas, Craig (ed.). Chinese Export Art and Design. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1987, p. 60, fig. 40.

   

  Another type emerged when the Chinese style in the West reached its peak in the 18th century and Chinese characters and landscapes imagined by Westerners appeared in the patterns. The pictures are humorous and interesting, while the number is quite limited. In addition, there were porcelain carvings, figures and animals.

   

  The pattern was typically formed by heraldry (the special signs of European and American aristocratic guilds, groups, etc. In the 18th century, China sold up to 600,000 kinds of heraldry porcelain to Europe). In addition, characters (out of Greek or Roman fairy tales, the Bible, European customs-based sketches), ships, landscapes, flowers, etc. used to be popular themes among Europeans. Besides, European living habits were taken into consideration in terms of modeling.

   

  

  Unknown, Souceboat, ca. 1740, Porcelain, L: 18,4cm, Victoria and Albert Museum London. Bibliographic Reference: Howard, David Santuary. Chinese Armorial Porcelain. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1974, p. 295.

   

  Apart from blue and white, multicolored and famille rose ones were among this kind of style. Because of the higher cost, longer period of capital occupation, more complicated procedures and greater commercial risks, this variety did not turn a mainstream among export-purpose Chinese porcelains in spite of their distinctive features. Especially in 1769, the first production line of British Wedgwood Porcelain Plant rolled off, when European porcelain production began to leap from the handicraft era to the industrial era. Since then, importing Chinese porcelains has grown unprofitable, and the porcelains in Chinese style turned gradually out of date.

   

  In the course of trade development for nearly 300 years from the 16^th century to 19^th century, from “Made in China” to “Making Chinese Porcelains”, the Chinese vogue going viral in Europe represented a process of Europeanization of Chinese cultural practices. In this process, lacquerware, woven carpets, clothing, furniture, wallpaper and garden architecture were as well used for reference, quotation and modification in Europe, and finally integrated into the social context of Europe, influencing and even changing the artistic outlook of Europe. Nowadays, the shortened distance and accessible information across the world enable us to see the diversity of cultures more quickly and accurately. More possibilities for cultural exchanges will definitely be springing up in the future.

   

   

  FOOTNOTES

   

  ^[1]              China in the 13^th-19^th centuries was only a Far East country geographically along with India, Southeast Asia, South Korea and Japan

  ^[2]              Due to the limited space, the export-purpose Chinese porcelain in this paper refers specifically to the exported ones to Europe.

  ^[3]              Lin Lin's, Research on Porcelain Trade of Dutch East India Company in the 17^th-18^th Centuries, pp 31-34.

  ^[4]              Its name probably originated from Portugal Caraack, meaning “giant merchant ship”.

   

   

  REFERENCES
  

   

  • WangYong, A History of Art Exchange between China and Abroad, Beijing， 2013
  • Shanggang, A new compilation of the history of Chinese arts and crafts, Higher Education Press , 2007
  • Etiemble, L’Europe Chinoise. The Commercial Press, Beijing, 2013
  • Liwei, Through the silk Road, Beijing, 2018
  • Hugh Honour，Chinoiserie: The vision of Cathay, Peking University Press, 2017

   

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• 

  Rosa Pfluger

   

  The Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Sydney Opera House, the Empire State Building in New York – it is not uncommon for innovative and striking buildings to become symbols of the cities they were built in. Architectural landmarks turn into trademarks of their cities. They shape the city’s silhouette and make it recognizeable.

   

  In Munich, a big city in the South of Germany and provincial capital of Bavaria, one of the most striking buildings is the Frauenkirche, which loosely translates to “Church of Our Lady”. It is dedicated to Virgin Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ, who plays a big role in Munich as she is said to be the patroness of Bavaria. Its 99 meter (324 ft) high twin towers with the characteristic cupola roofs rise high over the inner city (as it is still prohibited to build any higher than them within the inner city). It is - by all means - not the biggest or even most beautiful church of its kind. Neither is its location in the city center, on plane ground and narrowly surrounded by pubs, shops and historic residential houses, spectacular.

   

   Up to this day, the Frauenkirche is the tallest building in Munich's inner city. View from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich ©the author

   

  Still: The citizens of Munich have great sympathy with the brick building and identify strongly with it. There are several reasons for that: First of all, about 30% of the people living in Munich identify as roman catholic Christians and therefore have a religious connection to the 500-year-old church that is still in use for almost daily services. But the number of Catholics decreased drastically since 1925, when more than 80% identified as Catholic. In conclusion, there must be other reasons why this church is so important for Munich.

   

   

  A people’s church

  What makes this church indeed quite unique is the way it came to be: Munich didn’t lack any churches at all. In 1468, when the construction of the Frauenkirche was started, only 13,000 people resided there and there already was (and still is) a cathedral in the city center: Saint Peter’s church, or simply: Alter Peter (Old Peter). The Frauenkirche was enormously large compared to the city’s size and can house 20,000 standing people. It was built within only 20 years, which is faster than any other church in Europe at that time. The construction was probably initiated by the citizens – and can therefore be seen as a sign of confidence and emancipation of the common people in regard to the ruling class. (Which makes it all the more tragic that the towers were abused early on as platforms for cannons during the Landshuter Erbfolgekrieg at the beginning of 16^th century, a war between two aristocratic families contending for heritage.) As a side note, Germany’s supposedly very first photography, taken in 1839, shows the twin towers of the Munich church.

   

   

  Muslim towers on a German church?

  The two cupola roofs made of oxidized copper give the cathedral its unique and unmistakeable shape. Originally, it was meant to be topped by gothic pinnacles (comparable to those of the cathedral in Cologne, Germany). But at the beginning of 16^th century, architectural (and overall artistic) style changed drastically with the advent of the Italian renaissance. Pointed church spires suddenly seemed old-fashioned. And so, for more than 30 years, the two towers of the Frauenkirche remained “headless”.

   

  

  Bernhard von Breydenbach, Peregrinatio in terram sanctam, 1486, woodcut (Creative Commons); The Temple area, 1920, Library of Congress; Blick auf die Türme der Frauenkirche vom Odeonsplatz aus. 2017, D. Fuchsberger (Creative Commons)

   

  Lukas Rottaler, who was assigned with the construction of the roofs, was long thought to be inspired by Venetian churches, precisely the cathedral Madonna dell’Orto. Indeed, the 14^th century Italian church has a high brick tower with a cupola roof that might look a little like the Frauenkirche, if you turn a blind eye. But the origins of the onion-like shape are assumed to reach way back and way farther: Rottaler probably saw a woodcut of Jerusalem, which shows the Dome of the Rock. This dome, erected in the 7^th century and therefore the oldest edifice of the Islamic world, marks a place that is equally important for Muslims, Christians and Jews – the dome itself though is Muslim. That didn’t keep Rottaler from taking inspiration from the Dome of the Rock for his building project at a Catholic church in Munich. Hence, the Frauenkirche is shaped by originally “oriental” roof tops.

   

  Moreover, many churches in the rural outskirts of Munich, which were built in the following centuries, are oftentimes crowned by bulbous cupola roofs. This drop shape, which contrasts the villages’ common saddle roofs, now naturally is a part of the landscape as well as of the baroque style.

   

  The devil, a Munich sense of humor, kitsch, tourism and modern lifestyle

  One more reason why the Frauenkirche is so important for the Munich identity are the many legends surrounding it, which are an inherent part of many children's upbringings. The story of the bet between the devil and the constructor of the church, master bricklayer Jörg Ganghofer is widely known among Munich citizens. Ganghofer bet his soul that in this church there would be no windows. As soon as the church was complete, the devil entered the back of the church through the main portal and looked around. Indeed – there were no windows visible! Of course, the church has big windows which let an even stream of light enter the gigantic room. Ganghofer skillfully placed the massive pillars framing the middle section of the nave so that they cover all windows from a certain point of view – and thus won the bet! The devil was outraged and stomped his foot on the ground. This footprint is still visible in floor tiles (image below). In his temper, lucifer left in a rush, which caused a chilly gust of wind that up to this day blows around the church. 

   

  

  The "Devil's footprint" ©the author

   

  There are many more legends like these surrounding the historical center of Munich. The fact that they are not forgotten but very much part of social life shows how much the people of Munich value their ancient traditions and customs. Also, these legends – and the legend about Jörg Ganghofer is a prime example for that – often showcase a certain sense of humor, mischievousness and boldness. Possibly typically Munich qualities.

   

  

  The unique twin towers as logo: A design for a Munich tourism agency ©Georg Schatz, schatzdesign.de

   

  Today corporate logos, kitschy souvenirs but also everyday products reference the Frauenkirche’s silhouette. The Munich tourism agency „München Tourismus“ markets the city with the slogan “simply Munich”: approachable, hospitable, relaxed. It’s all about “Genusskultur, Kulturgenuss”, which translates to „culture of enjoyment, enjoyment of culture”. According to the agency, tranquility, love for old things and the so called “Bavarian cosiness” are trademarks of the Munich way of life. Compared to the daringness of Lukas Rottaler and Jörg Ganghofer, the constructors of Munich’s biggest cathedral, these qualities seem rather tame.

   

  References:

  • Forschungsgruppe Weltanschauungen in Deutschland: „München: Religionszugehörigkeiten 1925-2018“, https://fowid.de/meldung/muenchen-religionszugehoerigkeiten-1925-2018
  • E. Wagner, S. Wimmer, L. Sedghi: Isar-Arabesken – Spuren des Orients in München, München (Alitera), 2013
  • https://stadtfuehrung.info/stadtfuehrungen/zeitreise_muenchen_anhand_alter_fotos_und_bilder
  • https://www.muenchen.travel/artikel/ueber-uns/die-marke-muenchen
  • https://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/Lexikon/Frauenkirche,_M%C3%BCnchen#Der_Neubau_im_15._Jahrhundert 
  • https://www.venediginformationen.eu/kirchen/kirchen-in-venedig-teil-3/madonna-dellorto/madonna-dellorto.htm 
  • https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempelberg#Islamische_Bebauung:_al-Masdschid_al-Aqsa
  • https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frauenkirche_(M%C3%BCnchen)#Bau_der_sp%C3%A4tgotischen_Kirche

   

   

  published November 2020

Read more …

• 

  Natalie Göltenboth

   

  Sir David Adjaye puts his hands on the ochre-coloured earth walls of the pavilion while speaking into the microphone: “We have brought that earth here. This is West Africa, this is Ghanaian soil that was applied by Venetian plasterers." ¹
  

   

  Sir David Adjaye, the renowned British architect with Ghanaian roots, based the design of the Ghana Pavilion on the traditional earth buildings of the Gurunsi from Eastern Ghana. The organically merging ochre room sequences evoke a rural Ghana in which the works of the six artists are presented. All of them have Ghanaian roots, but some live and work in England. In an interview, he describes his understanding of architecture as follows: “Art and Architecture create powerful narratives about our lives. Architecture is a story, it’s a way of marking and talking about our aspirations and hopes. So, in what I do, the methodology to every project I make, is to find a narrative [...].”²

   

  This raises the question of the possible interpretations of the pavilion. Out of a multitude of possible architectural quotations and structures that could represent Ghana, it is rural Ghana that was chosen as the structure and backdrop for the artworks. But it is precisely the Gurunsi and their country that were worn down by the European colonial powers in the course of the conquest of West Africa and were finally divided in two at the end of the 19th century by their geographical affiliation to the French and British administrative districts. In this respect, a connection can be drawn to the all-encompassing motto of the exhibition – dealing with the colonial period that ends with the final cry of triumph “Ghana Freedom”.

   

  In addition to this critical, post-colonial discourse, the pavilion also invites an interpretation in which “Africa” is staged as an earthy, dark and rural-tribal space: as much as you feel comfortable inside, the bright light makes you blink when you step out. The odour design by Ibrahim Mahama from the first honeycomb of the pavilion offers a further sensory component to this impression.

  While the conscious use of white cube gallery spaces was a struggle for contemporaneity and belonging to the global art discourse,³ Adjaye has decided on a placemaking, in which “Ghanaian identity” is presented as an imaginary picture of origin and authenticity or a rural cut-out reality. In addition, the multiple experiences of London-based artists, such as Akomfrah and Yiadom Boakye, are, thus, transferred back to their native Ghanaian earthworks.

   

  This raises the question of how much of Ghana’s aesthetic construction is to be seen as a concession to the expectations that the global art world places on the artists of African countries. Just as Edward Said has described this for the Orient⁴, it remains to be examined whether an imagined “Africa” has not just been created in the global art world, whose multiple requirements put artists from the African continent under pressure to master the balancing act between postmodern, conceptual approaches and African side-specificity or even ethnicity in the form of an aesthetic Africa-specific local flavour. Here in the national pavilion of Ghana, the artists are released from this pressure insofar as the pavilion already provides the aesthetic headline or frame which harmonises all the works exhibited there under the imaginary of Ghana/Africa.

   

  While experiencing the pavilion, it becomes clear how difficult it might be for artists from an African country and its diaspora to position themselves within the global art discourse without falling into one of the numerous traps that lurk there, starting with the simplest chain of associations of clichéd fantasies. Close your eyes for a moment and tell me how you imagine the national pavilion of a West African country: earth, elephants, desert, migrants, sunsets, recycling art and a strong smell of spoiled fish?

   

  That the expectancy of local flavour can also be handled quite differently becomes evident if we consider a young generation of Cuban artists, such as Alejandro Campins, who ask provocatively: “Cuban art, what’s that?”⁵

   

  Expectations can also be met with confrontation in other respects. As a response to the demand for the adjustment to concepts of art influenced by Europe and North America, the artist collective Atis Rezistans from Haiti launched their own biennial with the programmatic title: "What happens when first world art rubs up against third world art? Does it bleed?"⁶ With this idea of a clash of art cultures, they are more radical in asserting their own (bloody) concept of art. However, this kind of confrontation is not for everyone. (Link)

   

  Enwezor sums up these expectations clearly when he says that artists of African origin, whose contemporaneity he appreciates, must, in any case, comply “to be deeply located within conceptual and postmodernist matrices”.⁷ As understandable as this may seem from the perspective of Euro-American contemporary art concepts, it is, nevertheless, clear that it is precisely these “matrices” mentioned by Enwezor that exclude other ways of making and understanding art. That they are able to do so is due to their position of power.

   

  The social anthropologist Thomas Fillitz speaks of the contemporary global art world as a world culture, ultimately a global transnational culture, only to conclude that “this global art world continues to be determined by the discourses of Occidental art history and its affiliated ordering systems of classification”.⁸ We should ask to what extent the concept of art is one of the last (so far only weakly attacked) bastions of an Eurocentric view of the definition of contemporary art and, thus, a kind of colonial survival. The increasing networking of individual art worlds does not necessarily bring about an equal reciprocal exchange.

   

  In this respect, the Venice Biennale could be understood as the palace of this concept of art – a place where its “Urmeter” (standard) of the art is measured and conveyed in a constantly redefined way by mostly European-North American curators and art theorists.

   

  Now the question is how exactly at this place, the Venice Biennale, as a classical place of westernness and whiteness in Ghana’s National Pavilion (even if it comes along in the manner of the buildings of the Gurunsi corrupted by the colonial system), can a confrontation with Ghana’s colonial past succeed, which in the end would have to be continued as a confrontation with existing power structures. But this does not seem to be the intention. It is too much of a joy to finally get the desired recognition from exactly this system and yet, there remains the stale taste of a paternalistic hierarchy in which Ghana is proud to finally present itself to the art world represented in Venice.

   

  Nevertheless, the debut of the Ghana Pavilion is still a real success story, especially when one considers the representation of other African countries at the Biennale di Venezia. Only four countries of the African continent were represented with a national pavilion in the main exhibitions at the 58th Biennial, the others had to be sought out in sometimes often arduous exploratory walks in the urban area. This shows that participation and the positioning at the Biennial is linked to the political structures in the country, with contacts to European decision makers with financial resources but also with clear goals.

   

  From the outset, Ghana’s national pavilion had a clearly defined mission, which, in turn, is inextricably linked to the nation state and its representation. Taiye Selasi⁹ in his article “Who is afraid of a National Pavilion?”, after critically reviewing the structure of the Venice Biennial, asks: “Is there any good reason […] to exhibit theses six wildly different artists as Ghanaian?” “Yes there is”, we hear the tourism manager Barbara Oteng Gyasi, the curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim, the Ghanaian Ministry of Tourism Art and Culture and the architect David Adjaye calling. They are all working together on the script of a “bigger book” – the positioning of Ghana on the global stage as one of the African countries that can promote itself with its art and culture,¹⁰ in short, as a country to be proud of. And so we are not claiming too much when we state that one of the greatest successes of the Ghana Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale was that it became a place of pride and identification for its many visitors with African decent.

   

  

  Sergio Linhares, student at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, LMU Munich while conducting research on the perception of the Ghana Pavillon at the Venice Biennale, June 2019. Foto: Natalie Göltenboth

   

  Read more on the Ghana pavilion from a different perspective: "In Praise of 'Ghana Freedom'" by Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh

  See Selasi Awusi Sosu's contribution to the pavilion

   

   

  Footnotes

   

  1            Sir David Adjaye in an Interview with Al Jazeera Journalist Charlie Angela (www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PM5e8NhGFk)

  2            Sir David Adjaye – Building Transformative Narratives www.thehourglass.com/video/david-adjaye/

  3            “For Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou, the gallery walls remain white and the art works are evenly spaced and lit – as is customary in exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. By sticking to type we sought to minimize the distance between Kafou and more mainstream contemporary art, hoping to create the conditions for fresh encounters between the two” (Farquharson 2013: 10).

  4            See Edward Said, Deconstruction of Orientalism.

  5            Alejandro Campins in an interview with Natalie Göltenboth in Havana 2018, stressed that he doesn’t want to be seen as a Cuban artist, but as a contemporary artist.  

  6            Leah Gordon. 2017. Ghetto Biennale – Geto Byenal 2009-2015. Port au Prince.  See also: www.ghettobiennale.org

  7            Enwezor 1998: 34

  8            Flillitz 2007: 116

  9            Selasi 2019:40

  10          See Nana Oforiatta Ayim’s statement during the opening of the Ghana Pavilion  www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PM5e8NhGFk

   

   

   

  References

   

  • D. Building Transformative Narratives.
  • Retreived 15.10.2020 https://www.thehourglass.com/video/david-adjaye/
  • C. (2019). Ghana makes Pavilion debut at 2019 Venice Biennale Art Show. Al Jazeera. Retreived 22.7.2020 from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PM5e8NhGFk
  • Enwezor, O. (1998). Between Localism and Wordliness. Art Journal. Vol 57, No 4. Liminalities: Discussions on the Global and the Local. Pp 32-36.
  • Farquharson, A. (Ed.). (2013). Kafou – At the Crossroads. IN: Kafou. Hait, Art and Vodou, pp 8-19. Nottingham Contemporary (catalogue).
  • Flillitz, T. (2007). Contemporary Art in Africa. Coevalness in the Global World. IN: Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Eds.) The Gobal Art World. Audiences, Markets and Museums. Ostfildern. Hatje Cantz. Pp 116-134
  • Gordon,L. (2017). Ghetto Biennale – Geto Byenal 2009-2015. (catalogue). No Eraser Publishing
  • Said, E. (1978/2003). Orientalism. New York: Penguin Books
  • Selasi, T. (2019). Who is afraid of a National Pavilion? IN: Ayim. N.O. (Ed.) Ghana Freedom: Ghana Pavilion at the 58^th Biennale di Venezia 2019 (catalogue). Koenig Books. Pp:38-43.

   

   

  published November 2020

Read more …

• 

  Ebenezer Kwabena Acquah

  Historical link between the Ga and the Yoruba

  It is believed that the Ga-Adangbe came from Ile Ife at Yorubaland in Nigeria through Seme, a settlement on the border between Nigeria and Republic of Benin of today. According to popular oral traditions, the groups migrated together crossing the Mono River but scattered after crossing the Volta River (Nortey, 2012). They settled on the Accra plains within the south eastern corner of Ghana (Kilson, 1974). Their initial administrative capital was Ayawaso but was later moved to Accra, as Ghana gained its independence in 1957 and Accra became the capital city of Ghana.

   

  Indigenous belief system among the Ga and Yoruba

  The Ga, like other ethnic groups in Ghana and Nigeria, believe in life after death. They demonstrate this belief through comprehensive funeral rites. The type of occupation the deceased engaged in on earth while alive is believed to continue in the next world and as such a coffin is carved to depict the work of the deceased for their burial. The Ga, just like the Yoruba people, belong to Islam, to Christian faith or to traditional religious beliefs (Leroy, Olaleye-Oruene, Koeppen-Schomerus, & Byrant, 2002). They believe in the immortality of the soul and on its re-birth, which are both essential to the Ibeji twin belief.

   

  The Ibeji sculptural figures in perspective and their aesthetic considerations

  The Ibeji figures among the Yoruba provide an insight into the recognition of twins within the Yoruba society. The visual sculptural form presents the viewer with a glimpse of what the Yoruba society cherishes through the lens of visual culture. The two figures are presented in semi-abstract forms showing a male and a female (based on genital characteristics). It also shows the relevance of beads in body adornment as found in their usage in the form of necklace, wrist-bands, and waist-bands. On the heads of the figures are scarifications (marks on the body) and both figures are holding a string of cowries.

   

  Cowries were extensively used during pre-colonial times in Africa as symbol of wealth and used as currency and medium of exchange, for symbolic messages, as objects of divination, as jewelry and as a religious accessory, as well as a powerful force that represents the eye of the gods and the womb of the goddess (Yiridoe, 1995; Wayne, 2010; Odunbaku, 2012). Also, the projection of the breasts of one figure is an indication of a female with youthful exuberance.

   

  The pronounced shapes in the figures are curves with minor angular forms in feet and ears. Both figures also show projecting and rounded forehead which are basic characteristics of many African figures. The head-gear is cylindrical and this is similar to that of the Dipo initiates among the Krobo of Ghana who are related to the Dangme.

   

  Though the basics of African aesthetic differ across cultures, the common ones would include symbolism, togeth­erness, luminosity, craftsmanship, self-composure, and youthfulness (Molokwane, 2010; Vogel 1986). In the Ibeji figures, it is envisaged that a culture of teamwork was involved in the production process, from the felling of the tree through carving to the finishing of the statuettes, building a sense of communal unity. The craftsmen usually work with a master-craftsman. In terms of craftsmanship, the figures are sculpted intricately, with exquisite details, body adornment, and to excellent finish that has made them stand the test of time.

   

  Symbolism is embedded into traditionally African made objects and the Ibeji figures are no exception. They have elegant glossy finishes that portray purity and well-being/good health. The author considers the statuettes (reference to the Ibeji figures) as being young: vibrant, healthy, and a source of strength.

   

  Recognition of twins in Yoruba and Ga societies

  In many traditional African societies, twins are considered of supernatural origin and raised emotional reactions ranging from fear and dislike to hope and joy (Leroy, 1995). It is believed that twins are able to grant happiness, health and prosperity upon their family. As such, their nurture is far more venerated than that of other children (Stoll & Stoll, 1980).

   

  Another similarity in terms of belief and practice between the Ga and the Yoruba is that twins share the same combined soul, and it is envisaged that when a new-born twin dies, the life of the other is exposed because the balance of his soul has become disturbed. To forestall any danger, a special ritual is carried out. Though the Yoruba carve a small wooden figure as a symbolic substitute for the soul of the deceased twin, the Ga only perform the ritual. If both twins have died, two of these figures are made among the Yoruba. These statuettes are called Ere ibeji (from ‘ibi’, meaning born and ‘eji’, two; ere means sacred image).

   

  The Ga believe that the twins are special messengers from the Supreme god and therefore highly revered. They also believe that they could bring either a good or bad omen to the society based on the way they are treated. The Yam Festival which falls on the Friday of the Ga Homowo festival celebrated in August, presents a special occasion for twins in the Ga community who are presented with special feast in a form of sumptuous meal and mashed yam with eggs. It is honouring the twins in the traditional families (Nortey, 2012).

   

  During the Homowo festival celebration on Friday, twins carry herbal mixture (leafy concoction) called “baa woo” that is prepared in metal containers and they move through the township in a frenzied manner amid singing and chants. The special concussion is believed to induce fertility and as such people bath themselves with it with the hope of bearing twins.

   

   

   

  Unknown artist. Ibeji Twin Figures of the Yoruba. Presentation in the museum. First half of the 20th century. Wood, red chalk, cowries, glass. Height 27,5 cm. Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich. © Museum Fünf Kontinente

  Conclusion

  The belief in reincarnation and life after death are linked to the Ga and Yoruba ancestor belief. As part of the veneration of twin in families, the Yoruba carve Ibeji figures that has symbolic and spiritual relevance among the people. Among the Ga and the Yoruba, twins are revered and honoured. Furthermore, the two societies believe that every human soul has a chance to return to earth as a new-born, mostly within the same family. The wellbeing of any family is dependent on that of its ancestors and twins. Therefore, periodic prayers/rites are said and sacrificial gifts are presented to ancestral deities, including the Ibeji figures.

   

   

  References

  • Kilson, M. (1974). African Urban Kinsmen, The Ga of Central Accra. London: C. Hurst and Co. Ltd.
  • Leroy, F. (1995). Les jumeaux dans tous leurs états. Louvain –la - Neuve [Twins in every state], Belgium: DeboeckUniversité.
  • Leroy, F., Olaleye-Oruene, T., Koeppen-Schomerus, G., & Bryan, E. (2002).  Yoruba Customs and Beliefs Pertaining to Twins. Twin Research, 5(2),132-136
  • Molokwane, S., & Shorn, B. (2002). The African aesthetic as it informs the product form. In:Computer-Based Design. Proceedings of the Engineering Design Conference, King’s College, London, 9 -11 July 2002.
  • Nortey, S. (2012). Artistic Evolutions of the Ga Mashie Twins Yam Festival and Its Cultural Implications. Arts and Design Studies, Vol. 2, 2012.
  • Odunbaku, B. J. (2012). Importance of Cowrie Shells in Pre-Colonial Yoruba land SouthWestern Nigeria : Orile- Keesi as a Case Study. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2(18), 234-241.
  • Vogel, S. M. (1986). African Aesthetics. New York: Center for African Art.
  • Yiridoe, E. (1995). Economic and Sociocultural Aspects of Cowrie Currency of the Dagaaba of Northwestern Ghana Aspects. Nordic Journal of African Studies, 4(2), 17-32.

   

  This article is part of a gallery: Perspectives from Ghana on Museum Objects in Germany

  Published January 2021

Read more …

• 

  Zoe Schoofs

  The oriental carpet — in Europe it was once proof of the owner's long journeys or good trade relations, but in the regions of origin it was an everyday object used everywhere, often with a reference to paradise. With the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet troops, the aesthetic concept changed — instead of lively gardens and elaborate arabesque patterns, suddenly there were tanks and weapons — so-called war rugs were created. Not only, but also for European viewers, whose idea of carpets is decisively influenced by classical Persian appearances, these new conventions of representation represent a break with the familiar. Soldiers, diplomats and war correspondents brought such pieces with them from their stays in Afghanistan and made them known in Europe and the USA. Enthusiasts and museum staff were quickly found to create collections of these objects, including the collectors Hans Werner Mohm, Till Passow and Enrico Mascelloni, as well as the Museum für Völkerkunde in Freiburg and Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum in Munich.

   

  Carpets from the Orient were already popular at European courts in the 13th century, as they referred to the good trade relations with the Near and Middle East and served as prestigious items of the interior. Carpets were imported, but were also knotted directly in European court manufactories. With the enthusiasm for the Orient that emerged in the middle of the 19th century, the perception of carpets, whose origin had been relatively irrelevant until then, changed to a meticulous, scientific analysis, especially with regard to origin and iconography. World exhibitions and museums made them accessible to an ever wider public. While up to then carpets from courtly and urban manufactories had been the object of desire, over time those with a nomadic context became the centre of interest (Jansen 2001: 138). While this interest had already subsided on the part of the ruling dynasties in the 17th century, carpets for decorative use were produced for the bourgeoisie in the course of the industrial revolution. In 1861 William Morris founded his company Morris & Co. in Great Britain. "Over time, the carpet became part of an aesthetic 'spatial concept'. The technique and decorative motifs were first adopted from the Orient, but then adapted to Western tastes.“ (Bristot 2011: 32) They embodied "[...] the romantic ideal of the free and combative nomad in boundless expanse [...] the Turkmen carpet could be regarded as a sign of this independence sought among men.“ (Jansen 2001: 64) Thus the carpets found their way into male smoking rooms and libraries, also as blankets, cushions and seat covers when cut into pieces. The relocation of the production to factories brought with it simplifications of  the motifs and thus further changes. The luxury good was now accessible to a broad section of the population and was thus the object of everyday use.

   

  Carpets from these contexts, unlike woven textiles, are often knotted. They can be found in many different cultures all over the world. Basically, a distinction is made between courtly and urban works and works of the rural and nomadic environment, although there are of course blurred lines. While in the case of courtly and urban carpets all work processes were carried out by the respective specialists (spinning, dyeing, designing, knotting, etc.), all work processes for the carpets from the rural-nomadic environment were in one hand. These objects were primarily produced for the company's own needs and in some cases for the small local market. Courtly and urban carpets, on the other hand, were mostly commissioned works, intended for export or as envoy gifts and made in manufactories. The respective environment had a decisive influence on the appearance of the knotting work. In contrast to rugs made in manufactories, those produced in private homes or a rural community where meant for the local market.

   

  The objects that today are commonly known as classical oriental carpets mostly originated from the Persian Empire and are therefore also known as Persian carpets. At this point, however, it should be noted that a large number of ethnic groups which were united under Persian rule knotted those carpets and that therefore there a large number of different aesthetic concepts. Those from northwestern Persia are most likely to correspond to the European idea of a particularly valuable carpet. The basis for this was an enduring period of peace under Shah Ismael in the 16th and 17th centuries, which is why sufficient resources were available to create works with particularly elaborate motifs (Bristot 2011: 56). In addition to purely ornamental patterns, numerous representations of gardens were created; vases, flowers and trees of life often referred to paradise.

   

  On one hand, various textiles are ubiquitous in many societies: in tents and yurts, carpets have been hung on walls and lain on the floor as thermal insulation since ancient times and hung at the entrance as a substitute for doors. On the other hand, carpets were made in a (semi-)nomadic context in memory of the deceased. These carpets were placed on walls and, in addition to their insulating function, also had the function of commemorating the ancestors. The prayer rug was of central importance for the performance of religious practices. Thus, textile products shape the visual perception of craftsmen and users, and on the other hand, everyday things also find their way into the art of knotting (Frembgen/Mohm 2000: 15).

   

  When Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, war became part of everyday life for many people there; in the course of the years, a civil war broke out. “As early as 1981, the war took on genocidal dimensions. Young and old, men, women and children were affected by unspeakable atrocities.“ (Knauer 1994: 27) "The cultural policy of the [Prorussian] Afghan government was aimed at destroying the traditional ties of Afghan culture to the Islamic world and at adopting the Soviet ideology.“ (Knauer 1994: 28)

   

  As a reaction to these developments, women began to process these impressions into carpet art. The aim was not only to report on specific events, but also to motivate resistance against these conditions and the political system. The resulting carpets originated from the nomadic rural environment. In contrast to large manufactories, in which the knotting and design process was usually carried out by different people, these experiences could be directly converted.

  In Figure 1, three horned hexagons arranged one above the other in a light background dominate the main field, which is lined by a wide, sixfold border. In the inner field of the rhombuses representations of three to four prayer rugs, several stylised mosques and a centrally placed ZSU-23-4 tanks were arranged. Although the tank immediately catches the eye, the carpet looks very calm, there are no other war instruments depicted. This impression is reinforced by the many geometric borders and the structure of the main field, whose symmetrical arrangement is reinforced by the triangles placed on the sides. The similarities to Mushwani carpets from the west and Baluchi carpets from the south are striking (cf. MacDonald 2017: 77 / 78; Parsons 2016: 166/167). The carpet measures 160 x 88 cm and was probably knotted in Pakistan in the 1980s. Since the carpets were mostly in use before they came to the bazaar and to Europe through traders, only estimates can be made in this respect. Since it didn't take long for international buyers to become interested while there was also a market in Afghanistan and Pakistan, such carpets were soon produced in Pakistani refugee camps to generate income.

   

  In Figure 2, a border of BTR-60 tanks frames the midfield, on which two identical representations are arranged one above the other: A hand underneath hammer and sickle is directly related to the map of Afghanistan. Below is the inscription جهاد (Dschihád). This motif of map, hand and writing can be found twice in the carpet. On the right side two AK-47 rifles were placed. On the left side there are two representations of trucks each with a ZPU-4 rifle (heavy multi-bore anti-aircraft machine gun) and also a Mi-24A combat helicopter with glazed bow. The field is filled with pseudo-cyrillic writing.

  In addition to the motifs shown here, there are many other illustrations that can be found on such carpets. Some point out the changes in day-to-day business by depicting weapons, others illustrate specific attacks on cities. But what was the purpose of those carpets whose motifs depict violent everyday scenes? In this respect, too, only speculations can be made. Scientists around the world hold different views on this question. What is certain however, is that the aesthetic change from classical ornamentation to specific depictions was also accompanied by a change in function.

   

  Surely the desire to process the experience played an important role. According to Jürgen Frembgen, it can be ruled out however, that carpets depicting objects of war have found their way into the family space. Instead, he assumes that the carpets were used in the men's house, hujra, or in the reception room of a house reserved for male visitors, otaq — rooms in which conversations and discussions took place. "The use of space and spatial presence are [...] the expression of social interaction and include shared experience. Spaces thus become zones of identity building.“ (Issa 2009: 83) In such a place they could also serve as a call for resistance. The aesthetics of Object 2 resemble anti-Soviet leaflets that circulated in large numbers, often showing the head of state Babrak Karmal, appointed by the Russians, represented as an (Afghan) puppet whose strings were pulled by the Russian hand. In Carpet 2, only the hand and the Soviet symbol were taken from this illustration. A carpet that makes war the subject of discussion could stimulate conversation and strengthen the idea of community. In addition, the homeowner positions himself on the side of the mujahideen. Pursuing the same purpose, they have been presented "in the houses and tents of some mujahidin commanders (sic!) and wealthy people — as ornaments and probably also out of pride about victories won.“ (Frembgen/Mohm 2000: 46) Accordingly, the objects would have been bought and used as "art within resistance" (Frembgen/Mohm 2000: 46). With the resignation and presumably also a further deteriorating economic situation, the objects later came back onto the market and were then purchased by international buyers.

   

  At first glance, it may seem surprising to be processing everyday life in a carpet. Since  particularly Persian pieces are often seen as an investment, timeless patterns or representations of traditional legends are more common. These representations of realities of life therefore mark an aesthetic idea of Modernism in which "the textile is already understood as a pictorial surface in the sense of narrative, sometimes even realistic iconography.“ (Baumhauer 2016: 156)

   

  Since their creation carpets with war motifs have served various purposes: to contribute to financial survival, to express political messages, to represent a medium of processing war. At a time when issues concerning refugee policy in Germany make up a large part of the political debate and there is disagreement about how to deal with migration of all kinds, the carpets have not lost any of their actuality. They are contemporary witnesses of the beginnings of a war that is hardly remembered today. Globalized relationships have made it possible for them to be known to experts around the world. Using various narrative concepts, the carpets with their „pictures against oblivion“ are meant to serve as a reminder of the conditions in the country for the following generation" (Frembgen/Mohm 2000: 45) – thus another purpose can be added, not only in Afghanistan, but all over the world. Although they were not explicitly created for this specific purpose, they could gain it through their display in museum spaces.

   

  References

  • Baumhauer, Till Ansgar: Kunst und Krieg in Langzeitkonflikten. Visuelle Kulturen im Dreißigjährigen Krieg und im heutigen Afghanistan, Berlin 2016.
  • Bristot, Monique Di Prima: Bildlexikon Teppiche, Berlin 2011.
  • Frembgen, Jürgen Wasim / Mohm, Hans Werner: Lebensbaum und Kalaschnikow: Krieg und Frieden im Spiegel afghanischer Bildteppiche, Blieskastel 2000.
  • Issa, Christine:  Baukultur als Symbol nationaler Identität: Das Beispiel Kabul, Afghanistan, Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Dr. rer.nat im Fachbereich Geographie, Gießen 2009, https://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2010/7483/pdf/IssaChristine_2009_12_08.pdf [15.12.2018], S. 83.
  • Jansen, Simone: Von der Jurte ins Herrenzimmer. Reisen von orientalischen und zentralasiatischen Teppichen, in: Dietrich, Andrea / Herbstreuth, Peter / Mannstein, David (Hrsg.): Orientale 1. Recherchen, Expeditionen, Handlungsreisen (Kat. Ausst. ACC Galerie, Weimar 2001), Weimar 2001, S. 58–71.
  • Knauer, Karin: Afghanistan. Krieg und Alltag (Kat. Ausst. Museum für Völkerkunde, Freiburg 1994), Waldkirch 1994.
  • MacDonald, Brian: Tribal Rugs. Treasures of the Black Tent, Woodbridge 2017.
  • Mascelloni Enrico: War Icons, in: Mascelloni, Enrico / Sawkins, Annemarie (Hrsg.): Afghan War Rugs. The Modern Art of Central Asia (Kat. Ausst. Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester 2016), https://mag.rochester.edu/exhibitions/afghan-war-rugs/ [19.11.2018], S. 15–20.
  • Parsons, Richard: The Carpets of Afghanistan, Woodbridge 2016.
  • Passow, Till / Wild, Thomas: Geknüpftes Gedächtnis. Krieg in afghanischer Teppichkunst (Kat. Ausst. WILD Teppich- und  Textilkunst, Berlin 2015), Berlin 2015.
  • Schlammiger, Karl / Wilson, Peter L.: Persische Bildteppiche. Geknüpfte Mythen, München 1980.

   

   

  published February 2020

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  ELVIS NKOME NGOME

  The selection of informants was randomly done as we were only interested in identifying the most relevant resource persons within the research areas like members of defunct and existing regulatory societies, traditional rulers, herbalists, and other village notables with measurable experience in material culture and their symbolisms which is the interest of the author in this paper. The paper consists of three parts: an introduction, the background issues or the historical antecedence, and the core, which deals with interpretation of the motifs on the objects, significance and ends with a summary.

   

  African arts and cultures predates the colonial and missionary encounter in Africa. Some of the works provide useful information about indigenous craft industries such as pottery, carvings, iron metallurgy, weaving and much more. This article made use of works of earlier scholars who discussed aspects linked to the current paper. I also exploited some archival records, for example, file No. E.P.4929, entitled “Assessment Report [on] Bali, Bamenda Division- Cameroon Province (1925) by W.E.Hunt, District Officer, National Archives Buea, NAB. The works are framed into three broad thematic: objects made out of clay; objects made out of iron, and those produced out of wood and forest fiber materials.

   

  Wooden Carvings and Clay Objects

  Traditionally, the Bamenda grass fields and the Western Grassland regions of Cameroon are known for their mastery in the production and commercialization of various art works. In this region, craftsmanship is believed to be handed down from one generation to the next; from father to son. Grassland traditional architecture, objects, and symbols were unique from the point of view of their aesthetics, decorations and uses. In the 19^th Century, a German Military Officer, Hans Glauning’s Official Report of 1906 on the Pre-colonial Nso (Banso) described grasslands houses in the following words:

  The Banso houses, some 5-6 meters high to the roof, are [were] roomy and neatly built in Grassland style. The floors are paved with small pebbles. Each village has at least one meeting and drinking hall with carved door posts. Both frontages of the meeting house in Kumba were hung with about 900 skulls of Bamum and Nsungle warriors…^[1]

   

  The above extract clearly describes the pre-existing cultural and social institutions the European came across in the Bamenda grassland in early phase of the 19^th century. The people were talented carvers, weavers and painters. The most remarkable designs were and are still royal stools, bangles, and door / window frames on houses that helped to show various layers or classes in society. On the door or window frames for example, were carefully carved motifs of animals and other selected creatures. The motifs were interpreted and symbolized cultural and political differenceswhich the society was aptly stratified. 

   

  According to Knopfli (1995a, 2000b) the carved posts were sometimes awards from the Fon, Kwifo as gifts to some notables, cult members, or other great men. These sculptures on wooden frames sometimes depicted great societal achievements of fons and great men and women in society. Also, in royal circles, such sculptures bore symbolic representations of warriors, heroes, and royal animals such as buffalo, lion, python, elephant and leopard appeared conspicuously carved on the chosen object. Other creatures like lizards, tortoise, and scorpions were widely engraved on Grass field arts. Besides, inanimate objects like iron gongs and cowries were represented on objects.
   

  The zoomorphic and anthropomorphic Ethno-historical Dimensions of Cameroonian Carvings

  To better appreciate the origins and meaning of some of the animal motifs on artistic objects, it would be important to understand the cultural and philosophical dynamics of some of the zoomorphic motifs on the objects and what they represent. There are different animals reproduced in aesthetic designs by the carvers like lion, scorpions, tigers, toads, various species of lizards and a host of other non-living things. However, for the purpose of this paper, we shall focus more on the lizards depicted on the wooden board (the ‘Blue Rider Post’). As far as lizards are concern, Hans Knopfli (1990), studied various kinds of lizards which were/are common in the Western Grasslands of Cameroon. The stylistic motif of lizard is one of the most common designs in wood sculpture in the region, but also in many forest areas of Cameroon such as in Kribi in the South Region, amongst the Ejagham group in Manyu and Meme Divisions in the South-West Region of Cameroon. Generally, lizard motifs, or appear on various works of arts such as royal stools, masks, doorframes, drums, clay pots, title cups, and on embroidered robes and caps.^[2]

   

  However, the actual meaning of the lizard symbol is not quite clear. Knopfli noted that lizards are treated with maximum respect in the grassland. The belief about lizards include the idea that twins, chiefs and ancestors can transform themselves into lizards and that lizards have the spiritual ability to drive away witches. These however, does not close the page on their relevance in the cultural settings of different communities. In Africa, different groups perceive lizards differently according to their customs and traditions which have of course redefined their outlook as a people.  There are three main types of lizards common to the grassland groups: the rainbow lizard (known in Bafut as kwifongu).^[3] Another type of lizard is called the majuku lizard in Bafut language. This lizard is used by witch doctors to send and direct lightning in cases of theft, adultery, land stealing etc. Apart from the majuku, there is also the kukub (Mungaka language) lizard. This is a smooth skinned lizard with a long tail and it is very swift running lizard.

   

  In Mungaka language it is called kukub, in Bafut language it is called akongse and in the Babanki language it is called fekeke, while Bakossi called it ebote-ngule. Worthy to note is the fact that most of the grassland sculptures carried this and other kinds of lizard motifs on door and window frames as well as traditional stools. Such insignia symbolized authority and deity, and life (Knopfli, 1990:58) In recognition of the above notion, one is tempted to argue alongside Knopfli that lizards therefore symbolizes life. He further states that any design of two or three rows of lizards round a stool with interlocking fore and back legs expresses the fullness of life.

   

  Interpretation of the Motifs on the ‘Blue Rider Post’: New Perspectives

  The information that follows herein is a fair, reliable and verifiable opinions of our informants who after careful examination of the photographed images gave their interpretations of the motifs on the ‘Blue Rider Post’ in its entirety. It is important to point out that the motifs are zoomorphic (animal), anthropomorphic (human-made) and inanimate gestures in the form of dots and circular/square indications.

   

  The object has two sides which are embellished with similar motifs. The motifs include: dark patches, white dots, red marks, two human-like heads at the top, lizards, squared shape, circular shape in the middle of the object, and at the bottom, two human figures or deities. It is important to look closely at the object in order to have a clear interpretation of its motifs. According to recently collected data, the various marks like red, white and black confer or indicate various meanings according to the customs of the resource persons and sampled communities in Anglophone Cameroon. In this connection, the white colours stands for purification, membership, fertility, peace, prosperity, life, and an ‘eye’ like in the liengu female society.

   

  Similarly, informants in Buea hold that the red colour represents danger, defence, and blood of sacrificed animals, authority and bravery. While, the black colour on the other hand, also represent prestige, authority, danger, and power. All these colours are still used by members of some cult agencies and cultural dance associations in most parts of South-Western Cameroon and the Cameroon-Nigeria Cross River Region. The red colour was extracted from either clay or camwood, while the white dot came from certain milky plants in forest. Existing cultural associations in Meme, Manyu and Kupe Muanenguba make use of these colours. The use of these colours as painting or decorations by associations like the Monikem and Oroko dances depicts closer similarities of the embellished colours used by the originators of the so-called ‘Blaue Reiter Pfosten’.

   

  The upper/top layer with heads represents ancestors who watched over or protected the chief or king on the throne. Lizards on the carved object too represents many aspects or dimensions of community life as messengers, bravery, fertility, protection, and courageousness. On the hand, the square ark and the circular parts depict various things. While the square ark symbolizes the village’s sacred house such as etana, njeb, mbwog, the circle on the contrary represents the village, environment or community. The environment or the village is governed by the king or chief, who derived his authority and spiritual wisdom from the environment which was guided by ancestors.

   

  Lastly, at the bottom side of the object there is a human-like figure, which assumes the status of a village ‘god’ or deity. The two figures at the bottom of the other side are depicted to pay allegiance to their superior king or the hegemonic ruler and played the role of mediator between the spiritual (dead) and the living in society. This is what the two little human-like at the bottom represent. They also played the role of messengers, mediators, seers, defenders, source of fertility and councillors to the reigning kings.

   

  In terms of name, the object was recognized by various informants in areas where the tradition of either its use or production was common like amongst the Bakundu, and Ejaghams of Anglophone – South-West Cameroon. As a spiritual object, some informants called it ndo’obe while others called it nsibiri. According to Ayuk Divine Ndifon and Ernest Effim Lahluh, the object was likely the cult object of the Epke society in Ejagham, and the carvings on its represent a cult writing called nsibiri which could only be read and interpreted by those initiated into the inner core of the secret agency.  The nsibiri depiction is used by members of the Epke cult, who opined that the object was probably dismantled from its original structure in a violent context.

  By situating the object within the forest regions of Cameroon especially amongst the Ngolo, Bakundu of Ndian and Meme Division, and also the fact that there is cultural legacies that identifies with certain features of the so-called Blaue Reiter Pfosten, convinces the researcher to claim this region and its constituent villages as the likely source communities of the object whose biodata lacks comprehensive information to reconstruct its origins and provenance in recent years in spite of its popularity in the global North than in the Global South where it came from.

   

  Summary

  The paper has attempted to deconstruct the so-called Blaue Reiter Pfosten by tracing its seemingly obscured origin, its possible source societies and the meanings attached to its assorted motifs and much more. Based on current data it seems probable that the object was a religious medium of one of the cult agencies or a ritual symbol of some cultural associations or cult that flourished in villages that straddle the Cameroon-Nigerian Cross-River Region, including Ejagham, and Ekoi ethnicities in Manyu and Ndian Divisions of Cameroon. Other possible source villages of origin include Ngolo, Ikiliwindi, Bombe-Bakundu and Ngolo-Bolo. One of the likely reasons for arguing in favour of this assertion is because the above named villages share the same traditional religious, political and cultural beliefs that made used of similar posts for their initiation, divination, protection and other important rituals. It is believed that such an imposing object with impressive characteristics and diverse colorations: red, white and black dots had other uses which only core members of the cult agencies could analyse. This is because the secrets of any cult are kept jealously by its members and non-members are not allowed to know its real meaning. This is another difficulty realized in deconstructing the object.

   

  As earlier mentioned, the object depicts the life of a true traditional African society where there is an inseparable bond between the dead and the living on the one hand, the community leader and his courtiers and deities on the other. However, because of lack sufficient information about this object because failing memories our informants, it seems difficult to ascertain the exact period when the object was made. It is however, true in my humble view that the object was customarily used by the peoples of the originating villages prior to the arrival of European missionaries and German colonial authorities in Cameroon by 1884. 

   

  References

  Chem-Langhee, Bongfen and Fanso, V.G., eds, “Nso and the Germans: The First Encounters in Contemporary Documents and in Oral Tradition”, 1996,

  H, Knopfli. Sculpture and Symbolism. Limbe: Presbook Publication, 1998.

  Ngitir,V.B. “Bamenda Grassfields royal collections and museums from ancient times to the beginning of the 21^st century: The symbolisms and Conservation of Palace Art,” Yaoundé: thesis, Department of History, Yaoundé I, 2014.

  Interviews

  Name of Informants	Profession	Age	Date & Place	Language	Interviewer (s)	Ethnic Group
  Prince Remigius L. Endeley*	Teaching/Museum manager	47 years old	27/07/2020, Buea.	English	Ngome Elvis N.	Bakweri (SW)
  Dr.Venantius Ngwoh Kum	University Lecturer	55 years old	5/08/2020, Buea.	English	Ngome Elvis N.	Esu (Wum) – (SW)
  Ekema M. Ahone	Teaching	65 years old	Tombel, 25/07/2020	English Language	Ngome Elvis N.	Bakossi (SW)
  Michael Emeh	Retired state Agent	84 years old	17/07/2020, Ngob-Baseng, Tombel	English Language	Ngome Elvis N.	Bakossi (SW)
  Prince Nzum’etoe	Researcher/Farming	45 years old	Bakweri-Town-Buea,17/07/2020	English Language	Ngome Elvis N.	Bakossi (SW)
  Richard Tarkang	Retired State-Agent	64 years old	Kumba, 1/08/2020	English Lang.	J.B. Ebune	Banyang (Mamfe) –(SW)
  Mosses Ebollo	Retired state-agent	84 years old	27/07/2020, at Kumba	English Lang.	J.B. Ebune	Bakundu –Ibemi (SW)
  Pa Esseme	Retired farmer	84 years old	Kumba, 13/07/2020	English Lang.	J.B. Ebune	Kokobuma-Bafaw (SW)
  Moka Williams M.	Farming	40 years old	06/07/2020, Wolikawo-Small Soppo, Buea	English Lang	Ngome Elvis N.	Bakweri (SW)
  Prince Kombe David Monono*	Farming/security guard	46 years old	13 October, 2020, Great-Soppo-Buea	English Lang.	Ngome Elvis N.	Bakweri (SW)
  Ikome Kingue	Traditional healer	70+ years old	Bonduma, Buea, October 28, 2020	English Lang.	Ngome Elvis N.	Bakweri (SW)
  Mathias Nyoki	Retired soldier	55 years old	Great-Soppo, Buea, 2020	English Lang.	Ngome Elvis N.	Bakweri (SW)
  Nteh Roland	Teaching	46 years old	28/09/2020, Limbe	English Lang.	Ngome Elvis N.	Bakossi (SW)
  Joss Clinton	Security Guard	46 years old	Limbe, 13/09/2020	English Lang./Pidgin	Ngome Elvis N.	Menchum (NW)
  Chief Ekumbe Thomson*	Traditional Ruler	74 years old	Bakweri-Town Buea, 16/10/2020	English Lang.	Ngome Elvis N.	Mbonge-Bakundu (SW)
  Tita Oliver T.*	Teaching	54 years old	22/09/2020, Limbe	English Lang.	Ngome Elvis N.	Misaje-(Dongamantong) –NW.
  Paul Mukete	Retired state-agent	80+	Great-Soppo-Buea, 23/10/2020	English Lang.	Ngome Elvis N.	Bakossi (SW)
  Simon Buma*	Church Worker/PCC	61 years old	Great Soppo, 17/10/2020	English Lang.	Ngome Elvis N.	Bali-Nyonga (NW)
  Allen Maimbo B.	Building	58 years old	15/09/2020, Limbe	English Lang.	Ngome Elvis N.	Basum- (NW)

   

   Footnotes

  ^[1] “Nso and the Germans: The First Encounters in contemporary Documents and in Oral Tradition” in Chem-Langhee, Bongfen and V.G.Fanso (eds.), 1996, 123. Quoted in Ngitir (2013): 169. See the entrance to the second Courtyard of the Fon’s Palace, Bali-Nyonga in 1907.

  ^[2] Knopfli (1990), 55.

  ^[3] The word is a combination of the kwifon, the name of the much feared secret society and ngu fowl. Kwifongu then means ‘danger to fowls’.

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  Mahmoud Malik Saako

  The Qur'an is typical for the time and the West African region in general. The idea originated in North Africa such as Morocco and Algeria. But the writing was later, influenced by the Hausa and Mande scholars in West Africa. The texts in this Qur'an are the same as the original from Arabia. But there are differences in the kind of calligraphy found in these Qur'ans and those found in Arabia. One important aspect of these Qur'ans is the calligraphy that comes after the beginning of a new chapter or Surah. Again, the use of red, gold and black colour in writing the Qur'an makes them unique.

   

  Artistic features of the Qur'an

  • The leather cover used to protect the Qur'an was designed with some relief using black ink. It shows that leather workers were very important in society. Similar covers are made but in a form of a bag for the Qur'an while others are wooden covers with a leather thong used to hold the wooden covers together with the Quran.
  • The Holy Qur’an has Ayahs (words or verses) and Surahs (chapters). There is Bismillah before each Surah. The Qur'an has 114 Surahs or chapters.
  • Calligraphy works in some portions of the Qur'an. Calligraphy as the art of beautiful, decorative writing has existed in Islam since the word of God, the Qur'an, began to be written. In West Africa which was known to the Muslim world as Bilad-al-Sudan (land of the blacks), Islamic calligraphy naturally came with Islam. They are just symbolic to honour the holy text.
  • The use of three colours in writing such as gold, red and black: This shows how versatile the person was in giving an artistic impression of the Qur'an based on the Kanemi
  • A large decorated sign known as shurafah (ennoblement) is written at the end of every fifteen hizb (that is the division of the Qur’an into parts and portions). This is done as a means of honouring the holy text. (See images below.)

   

  

  The shurafah or ennoblement at the beginning or end of a chapter (surah) is indicated in the two images. The gold, red and black colours are used to give it a splendid look. (Qur’an. 16th-17th century. Mossi in Togo. Museum Fünf Kontinente Munich. Courtesy Museum Fünf Kontinente. Nr. 20-3-1. https://onlinedatenbank-museum-fuenf-kontinente.de/detail/collection/b77d064f-c603-493c-af03-fc167f739586. [Stand: 08.08.24]. Photo: Nicolai Kaestner)

   

  Material used for the Qur'an

  The paper used is brown and a bit hard as compared to today’s paper used for printing. The ink is mixed in a variety of colours. There is jet-black ink that shines. Then there is a colour of black mixed with red and another colour which is neither black nor red. The ink is obtained through the following method. The roots of the desert date tree are collected and burnt into charcoal. This charcoal is then scraped into fine powder. The powder is filtered through a light piece of cloth. Water and gum Arabic are then added and the whole mixture is left to warm up in the sun. The mixture once prepared in this way gives out a very nice smell and its taste is very sweet.

   

  Another method employed to produce the calligrapher's ink is to obtain the chaff of bulrush-millet (Pennisetum Spicotum), chips of the gum-yielding acacia (sieberiono), pods of the plant Egyptian mimosa (Acacia Arobico), slag from smithy and some bits of iron. All these items are then mixed with water. The mixture is filtered and boiled and once it is cooled it becomes ink. If the calligrapher wants a reddish colour or magenta colour imported dye of green or magenta colour is added. This type of ink is meant for the writing of the alphabet only and is always done in pure black. The ink is usually stored in small clay ink pots or small round gourds. The recent time, the ink is kept in small bottles.

   

  What are the general specifics of these early Qur’ans?

  The Qur'an is the holy text of the Islamic religion. In Islam, the Qur'an is believed to be the book of God’s words. The holy text remains sacred and unchanged since the beginning of time. The Qur'an is known as the most powerful text in Islam. Islam is a monotheistic faith and people of the religion take great pride in believing in pure monotheism. As followers of the Qur'an, Muslims must believe there is no one else besides Allah because Allah is the only one we worship sincerely, thus he is seen as the most powerful figure in the religion of Islam.

   

  The Arabic text of the holy Qur'an in a book is known as the mus-haf (literally "the pages"). There are special rules that Muslims follow when handling, touching, or reading from the mus-haf. The Quran itself states that only those who are clean and pure should touch the sacred text. It is indeed a Holy Quran, a book well-guarded, which none shall touch but those who are clean... (56:77-79). The Arabic word translated here as "clean" is mutahiroon, a word that is also sometimes translated as "purified."

   

  It was only Muslim believers who are physically cleaned through formal ablutions should touch or handle the pages of the Quran. Again, the Qur'an should be closed and stored in a clean or respectable place. Nothing should be placed on top of it, nor should it ever be placed on the floor or in a bathroom. Furthermore, when copying the Qur'an by hand, it should be legible with good handwriting. If you are reciting it you need to use a clear and beautiful voice. A worn-out copy of the Quran, with broken binding or missing pages, should not be disposed of as ordinary household trash.

   

  Acceptable ways of disposing of a damaged copy of the Quran include wrapping it in cloth and burying it in a deep hole, placing it in flowing water so the ink dissolves, or, as a last resort, burning it so that it is completely consumed. But the translated Qur'an according to some scholars can be handled either by Muslims or non-Muslims.

   

  Uses of the Qur'an

  The Qur'an is meant for reading or recitation known in Arabic as taliwa. The recitation of the Qur'an is a highly honoured performance in Islam in which Allah blesses both the reciter and the listener. A person who memorizes the whole Qur'an is given the honorary title of a Hafiz (memorizer of the Qur'an). Again, the reproduction of the written Qur'an is as important as oral recitation. Two early calligraphic styles evolved in the writing of the Qur'an, Kufic (the more boxy, angular, heavy, and formal script) and Naskhi (the more elongated, rounded, cursive script).

   

  The words in the Qur'an are regarded as the words of Allah and, therefore, handled with respect. Muslims also hold the view that some of the words contain mystical properties and as a result, Muslim religious scholars are sometimes consulted by people who have spiritual or psychological problems. They write verses from the Qur'an to ward off such evil spirits or for protection. The Qur'anic verses are often accompanied by diagrams drawn on a board and then washed off and given to the client to drink. As a result, these boards have high values based on the extent they have been used. It is believed that the older the board the more efficient it would be and vice versa.

   

  At the Museum, there is one of the Qur'anic writing wooden boards that have verses from the Quaran on one side and diagrams on the other side. This board is brown and round at the base with a handle in a form of an animal beak. The surface is smooth while some old writing has remained and can be seen (see image below).

   

  

  Board (Courtesy Museum Fünf Kontinente. Nr. 9-48. Photo: Nicolai Kaestner)

   

  Where is the Qur’an kept?

  Old Qur'ans were usually placed in two wooden covers before the use of leather cases or bags. It was easy to carry it once it was placed either in the wooden covers or in the leather bag. This is very important not to mess up the loose papers of the Qur'an. The two wooden covers after the Qur'an is placed and bound with a thong. There are two holes in the middle edge of the covers where the thong is passed through to bind the two wooden covers with the Qur'an. This method of bounding the Qur'an with wooden covers was practised during the early Abbasid period. Many of the early Abbasid manuscripts were copied into several volumes based on the Kufic script which was fairly heavy and not very dense. The Qur'ans of this early period were bound in wooden covers, structured like a box enclosed on all sides with a movable upper cover that was fastened to the rest of the structure with thongs. In this period, the Quran was arranged into 20 Juz or parts instead of the original 30 Juz during the Umayyad period. These wooden covers can be found at the Museum Fünf Kontinente (Inventar Nr 15-17-148).

   

  

  Wooden cover of a Qur'an. Museum Fünf Kontinente. (Courtesy Museum Fünf Kontinente. Nr. 15-17-148. Photo: Nicolai Kaestner)

   

  Appendix

  When is it read and how?

  It is read during the five daily worship by Muslims, at leisure times, during periods of hardship, during important occasions etc. However, in West Africa, it is read even at funeral celebrations. In many instances, the whole Qur'an is shared among those who can read, or the 30 Juz are shared among 30 people who recite or read it.

   

  Islam in West Africa

  Islam as a religion was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed in the 6^th century in the Arabian Peninsula. Africa was the first continent into which Islam spread, from the Arabian Peninsula in the early 7th century. By the 10th century, the Berbers of West Africa were converted to Islam by their North African counterparts. It was the Berber Muslims who began to spread Islam into Western Sudan by the end of the 10th century through their trading activities. The Berbers of West Africa also converted some of the Manding-speaking traders to Islam, and they also began spreading it alongside their commercial activities. It was the Mande traders who began to spread Islam into many parts of West Africa through trading activities. The nature of Islam made it easy for the indigenous people to accept it as adherents were able to tolerate, to some extent, some of the local beliefs.

   

  Later, the Hausa from northern Nigeria were also involved in the Kola-nut trade in the mid-15th century. The rulers of many of the Western Sudanese States encouraged the trans-Saharan trade and extended hospitality to both traders and visiting Muslim clerics. The most crucial factor in the diffusion of Islam into many parts of West Africa was the conversion of some of the rulers to Islam. Between the 14th and 16th centuries, many rulers of the Mali and Songhai empires were Muslims and performed the annual Islamic pilgrimages to Mecca to establish trade relationships with the Muslim world. It was during the era of European colonization of West Africa that led to the spread of Christianity among the locals. 

   

   

Read more …

• 

  Yaw Sekyi-Baidoo

   

  The Akan linguist¹ staff icon represents various aspects of the philosophy, values and symbolism of clan, town or ethnicity. The elephant icon, like other symbols of the Asante empire, is used in fabric and stool designs as well as the finial of the staff (Sarpong (1971:24), which is an important group formal identity symbol. Users of the staff include storytellers, clan linguists, and, most characteristically state linguists. Yankah has this to say about the state linguist staff:

   

  “Every Akan chief or king has two or more staffs. The higher a chief’s status the wider the range of staffs, since and important chief deals with a greater variety of social and political situations and has to match various situations with relevant messages (1995: 33).”

   

  The meaning and artistic significance of the finial of the linguist staff may be seen by considering the choice and artistic design of the finial, the identity of the user, and finally, the context in which the staff is used. The identity of the user, in this context, is the linguist of the King of Ashanti, a very powerful Akan monarch, whose influence and control is acknowledged over centuries and across different parts of Ghana.

   

  The paper examines the motivations for the choice and representation of the Elephant-Calf symbol, and the overall cultural and social significance of the use of this symbol.

   

   

  The Symbol in Context

  Two aspects of the image might are important for our current discussion: the finial itself, and the upper shaft on which sits the base carrying the finial. The upper shaft consists of two veiny lines which with a wisdom knot in their middle. The next is the finial – Mother Elephant with its Calf Standing on it.

   

  The choice of the elephant is based on the preeminence of the elephant as an animal. The elephant is universally used as a royal symbol of power and strength, and among the Akan of Ghana, Kwarteng (2006) reports that the paramount chiefs of Denkyira, Eguafo, Abura, Ajumako, Abeaze, Offinso, Wassa Amenfi have elephants as their royal symbol. The elephant is called ‘sono’ in Akan, and the morphological connection between the name and the Akan expression for immensity ‘so’ seems to emphasize the natural immensity of the elephant, which is also be expressed in the following:

   

  ‘Ɔson akyi nni aboa.’

  (There is no animal beyond the elephant).

   

  The leadership and protection associated with the elephant is represented in the saying:

  'Wodi esono akyi a hasuo nya wo. '

   (When you follow the elephant you are safe from the early morning dew of the bush)

   

  The Akan see the immensity of the elephant from the social, political and spiritual perspective also. Socially, the flesh of the elephant is socially significant as it, unlike all other animals, provides meat for the whole community for an extended period. Politically, its parts, skin, ears and tusks are crucial aspects of the insignia of royalty. Again, spiritually, among animals, the elephant is seen to have the greatest ‘sasa’, a kind of spiritual force normally associated with humans. The ‘sasa’ is a spirit which protects its possessor through life and which assails its killers after its death. Sekyi-Baidoo (1994) reports of extensive activities for preventing the ‘sasa’ of the elephant from escaping from the carcass to assail its killer. Overall, the elephant stands for physical, spiritual and social preeminence among the Akan.

   

   

  The Representation

   

  The Upper Shaft

  According some traditional consultants, the veiny lines, as seen above, represent the demands of the governance of the empire, which are controlled by the knot, symbolising the cohesion, control and direction of the Asantehene.

   

  The Parent Elephant

  The finial representation captures the side view of the elephant, showing major aspects of its immensity and power - the body, which showcases its immense size, the heavy legs, showing its matchless stability, strength and force; the trunk, with which it breathes, smells, grasps and lifts objects and produces sound; and the tusk, with which it digs, lifts, gathers, attacks and defends itself.  The limbs and the trunk are presented in neutral posture: both feet firm on the ground and the trunk lowered – not picking anything nor blurting - suggesting placidity. On the other hand, the tusks, bigger than natural, are lifted, pointing to an ever-readiness - not to attack, but to defend. It is on this placid but defence-ready image of the elephant that the dependant calf is placed - for optimal comfort and security. It is explained that this image symbolizes the prosperous relationship between the Asantehene and the people over whom he rules - not intimidating them with his supreme power and authority, but ensuring their peace and security.

   

  The Calf

  Interestingly, unlike the elephant, the calf is presented panoramically - without the details of ears, tusk and trunk - its source of perception, control, nourishment and defence, for which it would depend on the mother. This is understood to symbolise the governance relationship in the Ashanti Kingdom where the subjects look to the Asantehene for intelligence, protection and support.

  According to traditional informants, the elephant-calf image is sometimes interpreted as symbolizing the permanence of the supremacy of the Ashanti Empire - from 1701 to present – perhaps, unlike others powers which rise and fall.

   

  

   

  Significance

  As intimated above, beyond its art and royal attraction, the elephant-calf image of the Ashanti royalty reflects ethnic and universal ideals of effective leadership, which is for cohesion and protection and, rather than for oppression.  This is evident in the symbol of the wisdom knot and the image of the elephant carrying the calf.  This education on the effective use of power is relevant to majority/minority and local as well as international rich/poor contexts. On the reverse, it also points to the Akan and universal idea of responsible followership - submission and trust, and is easily utilised for the education of children. The image, thus, represents an effective blend of governance, culture and education.

   

   

   

   

  References

  • Kwarteng, K. O. (2006). The elephant in pre-colonial Ghana: Cultural and economic use values. Journal of Philosophy and Culture, Vol. 3 (2) June 2006: 1 -32.
  • Sarpong, P. (1971). The sacred stools of the Akan. Accra: Ghana Publishing.
  • Sekyi-Baidoo, J. Y. (1994) The Aesthetic and cosmological features of the Akan hunters’ song. MPhil Dissertation, Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon
  • Yankah, K. (1995). Speaking for the chief: Ȯkyeame and the politics of Akan royal oratory. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

   

   

   

  Footnote:

   

  1) The term „linguist“ has been adopted in Ghana for the Akan designation  „Okyeame“ in an attempt to find an English equivalent for the role of the chief´s or king´s diplomacy attendant. This may have arisen out of the acknowledgement of the linguistic capabilities displayed by the attendants, whose main resource was language.

   

   

  published January 2021

   

   

   

  This article is part of a gallery: Perspectives from Ghana on Museum Objects in Germany

Read more …

• 

  Ernst Wagner

  The English Garden perceived as harmonious, lovely, picturesque or graceful to visitors in our present day, is charged with political resistance, struggle for power, projection of social utopias or flight into resignation. Like many interesting creations, these gardens are microcosms full of contradictions – particularly during the time they were created in the early 18th century: utopia and idyll, a mirror of society and its antithesis, dream and melancholy, imitation of nature and going beyond nature.

  
  Stowe House Park, less than 70 miles northwest of London, is considered to be the first and most definitive site of an ‘English Garden’ – Lancelot Brown (1716 – 1783) who was employed there was the first person whose life-long occupation was that of a landscape gardener. The Stowe gardens embodied the ‘English Garden’ paradigm like no other and Benton Seeley’s guidebook (1742), the first garden guidebook to be published in the world, helped to spread Stowe’s influence throughout the 18th century as the model for the ideal English garden.

  As a country estate of the Temple family, it was – many decades before the redesign – first committed to Baroque, i.e. French models: symmetrically laid out, geometrized nature, combined with the pompous splendor of the manor building. The early model was abandoned and the new complex design of 26 hectares followed more innovative principles, for good reason; however, it still remained a status symbol of the wealthy family.

   

  Thus the many buildings that were built in the park are demonstratively not Baroque. After all, Baroque embodied absolutism, which was despised. Instead, they were inspired by Renaissance, Gothic, antiquity, or Chinese architecture, pre-baroque styles or styles found geographically outside the borders of England. Each style tries to evoke its own mood: Gothic stood (and stands) for the morbid, the unearthly, China for the exotic, antiquity for the free citizenry.

   

  In this sense, the names of the garden parts can be understood as allegories: Temple of Concord and Victory, Grecian Valley, Stauen von Saxon Deities (Germanic Deities) or Homer and Socrates, Gothic Temple, Elysian Fields and many others refer to cultural regions that represent a different, supposedly better social order. It is about an alternative concept to the absolutist principles, about freedom. The dedication inscription on the Gothic Temple makes this very clear: “To the liberties of our Ancestors”.

   

  This directly decipherable political iconography is complemented by a differentiated iconology of forms. For example, the grass around the Temple of Ancient Virtue is subtly maintained as a lawn, while the grass around the ruins of ‘contemporary virtue’ grew wild until the ruins disappeared completely. The outdoors devours the contemporary, decadent, (neo-) absolutist tendencies. Thus nature was liberated from geometrizing corsets just as society was liberated from absolutism. As in free nature outside the garden with its unbridled forms, the garden becomes a free landscape in which free people move freely.

  This conception of how such a landscape garden should look was influenced by three main sources: from the personal memories of nature that English nobility brought back with them from their Grand Tours through Europe; various descriptions of exotic Asian gardens; and, finally, from the classical landscape paintings by Ruisdael, Lorrain or Poussin.

   

  Areas in the garden were designed for such three-dimensional pictorial stagings, which in Stowe featured over 90 selected scenes (or one might call them intriguing or harmonious compositions) that could be experienced from certain spots or areas in the garden. The visitor had to and has to set out to walk in order to experience all the spaces and perspectives along the way. Winding paths, which repeatedly open up to surprising glimpses of the unexpected, lift the visitor from everyday life and put him in a special mood. Hence, the course of the path is the central means of the landscape designer to develop his own dramaturgy. He steers the visitor and controls what he sees and when. What the visitor doesn’t see are typical walls. Instead the use of ha-has, a recess in the landscape similar to a sunken ditch, creates a vertical barrier while preserving an uninterrupted view of the landscape. The fine line between art and nature disappears.

   

  The ever-changing weather, light and appearance of the plants, and the multifold of views along the way, allow the visitor to immerse himself again and again in an entirely new visual experience. This sensual experience should have a purpose. In the five-volume Theory of Garden Art by Hirschfeld, published 1779-85 in Leipzig, the aims are clearly outlined: On the one hand, the education of the observer through the enjoyment of art (“inner true cheering up of the soul, enrichment of the imagination, refinement of feelings”) and on the other hand, the “beautification of an earth which is our home for a time”. The aim is thus the refinement of nature by man as well as the refinement of man by nature.

   

  The Temple family had initially acquired its immense wealth through sheep farming, and on the basis of its economic success it provided members of the English parliament for generations, including four prime ministers. English politics in the 18th and 19th centuries would be inconceivable without its influence. Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Cobham (1675 – 1749), who was a key figure in the founding of the park at Stowe, was initially a successful army commander in the War of Spanish Succession against France. In the early 18th century, however, as a supporter of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ (1688/89), which had led to the abolition of absolutism in England, he was marginalized by internal adversaries, which made the development of his garden so important for him.

   

  In search of an aesthetic alternative to the ideologically rejected French garden (as the embodiment of absolutism), Chinese or Japanese gardens offered a central source of inspiration. William Temple had already published a book on Asian gardens in 1690. These gardens were above all a counter-model to the symmetrical arrangement of geometrically limited flowerbeds, the prototype of which was the park of Versailles. The irregular, free composition of trees, plants, stones, and water in Asian gardens was the model for a natural appearance that was as natural as possible and, in turn, created with the highest degree of craftsmanship, that is, artificially. In 1738, this enthusiasm for Asian gardens led to the construction of a Chinese house in Stowe – the first in garden history – an innovation that found its successors in many gardens throughout Europe.

   

   

  Reference

  Sibylle Hoimann, Garten; in: Fleckner U., Warnke M., Ziegler H. (eds.), Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie, Vol. I, München 2011 (Beck), pp. 388.

   

   

  published January 2020

   

  

  Prudence Lau

  At the moment, I find it fascinating that such English and Chinese or Asian cultural exchange upon the built environment started so early on in the 18th century. It reminds me of the Chinese garden that focuses also on landscape, and an emphasis for reflection and escape from the outside world.

   

   

  published January 2020

Read more …

• 

  Ngugi Waweru

   

  Preparation in Nairobi

  The Wakujuu collective (link) was invited to Documenta in 2022. The process that started from there has been long, not only to make the art work to be presented in Kassel, but also to become part of Lumbung, the concept the curators proposed. We went through a long process coming up with ideas, collecting materials, shaping it, discussing among ourselves as artists and also with the artistic team from the Lumbung Network. In addition, we decided, before we take our exhibition to Germany, we do it here in Nairobi to share it with our community, fellow artists and other people. Thus, we started local workshops with different people, artists, photographers, musicians and community members. These workshops led to a huge festival in the community in 2021 which was part of our offsite project for documenta, together with the exhibition we did in Nairobi. The idea was to share with our community what we bring to Kassel.

   

  

  Workshop in Nairobi (Courtesy the artist)

   

  It’s important to mention that in our collective, all individual artists have their own ideas. So, we started to look at the objective for the whole collective. We discussed and then we decided that every individual artist does his own artwork, but we discussed as a collective, supporting each other, giving ideas, criticizing.

   

  Preparation in Kassel

  When we came to Kassel, we brought some material with us and we found other material there. At the Documenta we were supported by a team. It was challenging, but still most enjoyable and it created a lot of learning.

   

  For instance, we were excited to work together with Instar from Cuba, Britto-Arts Trust from Bangladesh and Wakali Wood from Uganda, as we were sharing the same spaces. The idea of Lumbung is sharing. And it doesn't matter what you're sharing: stories, food, materials or tools. We got to sit together and discuss also with Jatiwangi Art Factory. We lived like a family. And this is the most memorable thing that I will take with me forever, not only with the Lumbung members, but with the Kassel community. It's a thing you wish to repeat over and over.

   

  When we were invited to come to Germany the first time in 2021, there were incidents of racism. And I started feeling I don't want to go to Europe. But this time it was different, apart from the antisemitism accusations that seemed to halt the whole event.  Even with the German people with whom we worked at Documenta halle we just connected immediately; we just became family.

   

  Our art works at documenta

  The different artworks we made for Kassel had different themes, but all tackling what is happening in the world, not only in Mukuru slum (where we are based in Nairobi^[1]). The world is one big village and we all have the same challenges that are affecting us as humans, like climate change, war, economic hardship, failed systems, pandemics and so on. When you look at the world, it's fragile, it's dangerous, and it’s not livable. Everything is tough. But there are also good stories.

   

  

  Construction of the tunnel in Kassel (Courtesy the artist)

   

  The tunnel

  For the entrance to Documenta Halle, where we exhibited our works, we used the corrugated iron sheets that the houses are made from in Mukuru. Our installation started with a tunnel, built by Kimathi Kaaria and Lazarus Tumbuti from our collective. You enter the tunnel and hear a sound. You go inside and you don't see anything. There is just darkness, and you hear this sound, recorded randomly in the streets in Mukuru.

   

  The title of the installation is “Wakija Kwetu… ”. It is a Swahili name that means: “When they come to our home they get to know us better.” The sound is bringing you to Mukuru. The idea is to move you from Kassel to Mukuru and give the impression how it feels like to be in the streets there. And when you go inside, you see the corrugated iron sheets, you see the walls of our houses. You have this feeling of being in Mukuru.

   

  Inside you are welcomed by three installations, ‘misingi wa nyumani’ by Joseph ‘Weche’ Waweru, ‘wrapped reality’ by Shabu Mwangi and ‘kahio kugi gatemaga o mwene’ done by Ngugi Waweru.

   

  

  Inside the tunnel (Courtesy the artist)

   

  Ngugi Waweru. Kahio kugi gatemaga o mwene. Used knives, motorbike chains, corrugated iron sheets. 2022

  The situation of the world is the theme of my work “kahio kugi gatemaga o mwene”, in which I used old knives. I heard from many people, that the world is beautiful and brutal at the same time, it's scary. And I said to them: “Exactly, it's scary now to be in the world.” There was COVID, there is war, there is hunger - it's scary. It's like you are surrounded with death or illness.

   

  Ngugi Waweru. kahio kugi gatemaga o mwene. Used knives, motorbike chains, corrugated iron sheets. 2022 (Courtesy the artist. Photo Avi Sooful)

   

  My artistic process always starts in the brain and how I feel when observing the surrounding. For my Documenta work, I was studying those people who come to the community in Nairobi to sharpen knives for the butchers. I realized that they sharpen the knives over and over again until they are worn out. That led me to knives and I started collecting them long time ago. I didn't know what I will do with them. But, when we started talking in our collective about the exhibition, I came across a proverb: Kahio kuhiga muno gatemaga o mwene. It is a Kikuyu proverb that means “When a knife is too sharp, it cuts the owner.” I remembered that I had these sharp knives. This is how I came up with this idea of my art work for documenta fifteen.

   

  In the older days before we were colonized proverbs were used to educate or warn people. In this case I used the proverb to warn people. This Kikuyu proverb warns against the possibility of being harmed by one’s own decisions. The human quest for advancement in various spheres­­ (technology, education, religion, economies, or colonizing other planets, etc.) is also marked by a growing distance between people and the qualities that makes us human beings – our capacity for love, kindness, care, understanding, sharing, community. Just as a knife is eroded as it is sharpened repeatedly, so are we made less and less human by the actions we take to adapt and survive within our present society.

   

  

  Ngugi Waweru. kahio kugi gatemaga o mwene. Used knives, motorbike chains, corrugated iron sheets. 2022 (Courtesy the artist. Photo G. Tenter)

   

  Background

  But we have also good stories, the Wajukuu story, our story, e.g.. This story is creating hope where there is no hope. Building community and togetherness. Sharing is what we are doing to solve our issues, as artists, as a community. The world can learn from us. It doesn't matter where you come from, it doesn't matter what you have or what you don't have: We all have challenges. We have to come together and find solutions.

   

  Before the white man came to Africa, art was part of our life. When a child was born there was a ritual, a dance and a song to welcome the child into the family/community. In other traditions there was painting of the house. When the white man came, all of this was demonized. They forced us to start living their life. Even in school, we learn about Picasso or Leonardo da Vinci, but there were African artists whom we never heard from. They were masters, and the elders taught the young. Since we went through the white man’s education, art is defined according to the name. Now it's art, before it was our lifestyle.

   

  When the colonizers came, they took away three most important things, our land, our freedom and our religion. When they left they gave back our land and some part of our freedom but they never gave back our altars. What the white man also left is capitalism. But, with capitalism there is no way to connect with our Gods and our planet. Capitalism creates appetite for profits. With this appetite we destroy our home, our earth in the quest for riches. The capitalism system all over the world is suppressing our spirituality, our creativity, and our being human. It's making people to be workers, not free people or free thinkers. It took millions of colonizers’ soldiers, hundreds of years to disconnect us from our true being and our true Gods. What we are doing as Wajukuu Artists is like a tear drop in the ocean, but we are able to ignite a spark that will connect us to our roots. Our role in the community is to ignite a spark of change and alternative way of thinking.

   

  When we started to make art in Mukuru, the kids came where we were worked. At first we chased them away. But they would come again and again, because kids are attracted to the good things and art attracted them. After a few unsuccessful attempts to chase them away we decided to take them in. We realized if we don’t take and train them they will grow with the same vices we grew up with. For us, it's not about teaching them to be artists, but to create a platform for the kids to express themselves and give them an alternative education. We intend to find land to start practicing agriculture, teaching kids how to take care of the soil, to take care of the plants, the trees, and the environment, and also to reconnect with our spirituality, with our roots. This means, we teach kids our traditions. We also incorporate traditional dancers and traditional instruments in order for us to go back to our ways, not necessarily exactly, but to have a connection with our past.

   

  published February 2025

   

  ^[1]           (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukuru_slums)

  

  Johannes Kirschenmann

  Documenta

  For over half a century, documenta in Kassel was considered the most important exhibition of contemporary art in Europe and beyond. It marked the respective current state of the art discourse in and for the Global North. The documenta in 2002, curated by the Nigerian-American Okwui Enwezor, corrected the existing narrow focus on art mainly from America and Europe for the first time.

   

  Twenty years later, in 2022, documenta was curated (again for the first time) from the Global South and additionally by a collective: ruangrupa from Jakarta. ruangrupa organized this documenta under the theme “lumbung”, the Indonesian name for a shared rice barn. Applying the lumbung ideal to the art world means that artists and collectives should work together sharing knowledge, resources and ideas. Instead of the purely market-oriented art business, the exhibition should focus on social, ecological and economic sustainability. Thus, the curators did not only ask the artists to present artworks, but offered support for their collective work in the public space. This is one of the reasons why, in addition to the existing museum spaces, numerous other places such as old factories or churches in Kassel were included as shared spaces.

   

  An outstanding example of the implementation of the Lumbung concept was the Wajukuu Art Project working in the slums of Nairobi. (Wajukuu is Kiswahili for grandchildren, or other relations of the second generation.) Wajukuu's installations at Documenta drew on used materials, furniture and everyday objects from the slums. In this way, they offered an aesthetic as well as socio-political examination of questions of identity:

   

  

  Entrance to the Documenta Halle through Wajukuu's tunnel (Courtesy the artist)

   

  Anyone who wanted to visit the documenta-Halle in Kassel, a modern hall with a glass façade built in 1992, first had to pass through an installation by Wajukuu: a tunnel-like, dark corridor made of corrugated iron, rusty Mabati, a building material commonly used in the Mukuru slum. “In reference to the vernacular architecture of Maasai housing, the meandering tunnel that contained the installations was covered by thin dark-brown reeds.” (https://www.textezurkunst.de/de/articles/eric-otieno-sumba-documenta-sell-the-vision/) The contrast between this noisy, dark scrapyard atmosphere and the light-flooded modernity and transparent rationality of the documenta hall could hardly be starker. In the tunnel, you could hear dogs barking, engines rattling and sirens wailing.

   

  During the creation process two other worlds collided: “In a ‘Post Documenta Artist Talk’ (Link) on October 13, 2022, two members of the collective reported that it took some negotiation to obtain clearance to build the tunnel without professional architectural guidance. The artists convinced the two firms that had been commissioned for construction to allow the structure to be built outside of construction norms and standards.” https://www.textezurkunst.de/de/articles/eric-otieno-sumba-documenta-sell-the-vision/#id4

   

  

  Inside the tunnel (Courtesy the artist)

   

  At the far end of this tunnel, visitors (with their predominantly Western-influenced view) stood in front of enigmatic sculptures. These were again made from used materials from the slum. Together with videos on screens, they encouraged visitors to reflect on life in the slum and prompted speculation about their possible use and meaning. Soft materials, for example, formed a resting place in the size of a typical one-room dwelling (Joseph Waweru Wangui). Next to it was another installation by Shabu Mwangi: a mirror set in a bed of sand, with a cloud floating above it, a wickerwork of bent woods, with two human figures. Behind them emerged two half-arches, formed from used sharp knives: the work of Ngugi Waweru “Kahiu kogi gatemaga mwene” (“If a knife is too sharp, it will hurt the owner”).
  
  

  

  Ngugi Waweru. kahio kugi gatemaga o mwene. Used knives, motorbike chains, corrugated iron sheets. 2022 (Courtesy the artist. Photo Avi Sooful)

   

  This work of art, which is not quite two meters high, stands in a basin filled with reddish, sandy earth - the edge of the basin is covered with motorcycle chains. On this "pedestal" is a construction made again of corrugated iron, which is covered with more motorcycle chains and, above all, sharp meat knives. In two large fields at the front, which are at a slight angle to each other, 'streams' of knives each frame a large opening in which the rusty corrugated metal construction is visible. For the viewer, it is above all the knives that make an impression. (They can also be found - less ornamentally arranged - on the back of the sculpture). This effect is certainly due to the fact that - as with El Anatsui e.g. - their ornamentation and the glitter of the flashing blades unfold their splendor from a reduced colorfulness. A splendor, however, which - with the narrow, long blades - is quickly associated with violence and destruction, torture and death, threat and power.

   

  

  Ngugi Waweru. kahio kugi gatemaga o mwene. Backside (Courtesy the artist. Photo Ernst Wagner)

   

  In respect to these associations, images from European cultural memory come to mind, from Caravaggio's Beheading of Holofernes by Judith to Arman's "accumulations" with knives or Marina Abramović's performances. Immediate impact and these associations play together to steer a perception between beauty and threat - in the given context obviously a symbolic expression of the slum experience. This specific form of aestheticization has also been questioned by art critics: is the work about the authenticity of the real experience or does it not rather serve a certain cliché of African slums? (https://www.textezurkunst.de/de/articles/eric-otieno-sumba-documenta-sell-the-vision/)

   

  However one decides, the impression of the work that it leaves behind remains, for which its artistic quality (according to the standards of the Global North) is decisive: it is visually striking, formally consistent and coherent, it draws on familiar aesthetics while at the same time is innovating, and it remains open for interpretation, the viewer is invited to. This artistic quality was certainly also decisive in Wajukuu being awarded the Arnold Bode Prize in 2022, a prize that is awarded every two years by the city of Kassel to outstanding contemporary artists. The concept of creation, the relationship between the work and its anchoring in the social process in the slum was certainly a decisive factor as well. Thua, the jury of the Bode Prize has also honored an important social project and acknowledged the work to improve living conditions in the slum.

   

  

  Award ceremony in Kassel 2022 (Courtesy the artist)

   

  With the awarding of the prize, all the voices that did not see "l'art pour l'art" thinking in the Wajukuu Project, but rather the will to change something in the reality of life with the help of art, were heard once again. "The Art Project uses art to create a future that shapes and improves the path for the next generation. Art forms the core of Wajukuu, not just as a practice, but as a way of life with tangible implications in the lives of its community." (Ann Mbuti: From beginnings. Laudation for the award of the Arnold Bode Prize 2022; source of the text: Cultural Office of the City of Kassel)

  
  Finally, the city of Kassel purchased this particular work by Ngugi Waweru, "Kahiu kogi gatemaga mwene", for its collection in the Neue Galerie (https://www.kassel.de/buerger/kunst_und_kultur/documenta/index.php). Now, it is isolated as a single work by a single artist, which was originally a contribution to a group presentation of a collective and which (together with the corrugated iron tunnel) was perceived as a unit. The transfer of the sculpture to the museum thus raises questions about the loss of context and the resulting transformation of meaning: Collective art practice and social commitment become (another) work of art in a museum, which at best still documents the Lumbung approach of 2022. Without context, without informative videos about the artists' work, without the other sculptures by the Wajukuu artists, we are confronted with an aesthetic object that continues to fascinate, but has lost an important dimension, its context.

  
  Accordingly, the interpretations of Waweru's now solitary sculpture were strangely sparse. The title of his work was interpreted in all publications as a warning to people in a meritocratic and consumer society, according to Ann Mbuti in her tribute at the award ceremony. Not a word about the sculpture itself, its materials, its atmosphere and effect. Not the question of what we see and feel. Arnold Bode, the ingenious stager of modern art, would also have awarded the prize to Wajukuu, but he would have strongly objected to the isolated presentation of Waweru's sculpture after the documenta.

   

  Published February 2025

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  Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh

   

  The Ghana National Pavilion at last year’s 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia served to augment the fervent energy of contemporary art already simmering in its locality. The Pavilion staged a stellar intergenerational selection of six “multi-local”¹ artists from Ghana— Felicia Ansah Abban, El Anatsui, John Akomfrah, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Selasi Awusi Sosu and Ibrahim Mahama— whose works range between photography, painting, film, video, and installation. Stationed in the Artiglierie within the Arsenale, the Pavilion displayed the artists' works in continuous cylindrical enclosures designed by architect David Adjaye, and executed with laterite soil couriered from Ghana. The nation’s debut outing at the Biennale, titled Ghana Freedom, summoned the “boundlessness” and euphoria in the spirit of self-determination promised in its mid-century Independence moment and epitomised in such cultural events as the World Festival of Black Arts— the first being Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (FESMAN) which took place in 1966 in Dakar, Senegal, and then the Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) which happened in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1977. “There is no longer any need to look back in the same way as an act of reclamation or reaction”, writes the curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim, since “these pathways remain with us and evolve”(Ayim, 2019, pp. 31).

   

  The emancipatory ideal summarised in the titular of the exhibition is a poignant basis for this evolution given the colonial mediation of Ghana’s formal education in general, and art education in particular (seid’ou, 2014; seid’ou, 2016). In this regard, Ghana Freedom could be said to have countenanced an approach to the practice of art that is unconstrained by the de-contextualised imposition of the beaux-arts tradition which became ingrained through colonial instruction in the Gold Coast (pre-independence Ghana) from the late-19th century to the late-1950s, and which prevailed in the postcolonial mediation from then till the first decade of the 21st century. Exhibitions of this dispensation predominantly lacked curatorial direction. Indeed, the Ghana Pavilion, however obliquely, can also be said to have announced the inventiveness of emergent exhibition practices in the country. For example, Ibrahim Mahama’s early site-oriented and itinerant exhibitions in public places is a pragmatic and critical response to the derelict infrastructural conditions an art practitioner in the country has to contend with. Mahama’s attitude to this systemic neglect is traceable to the interventionist ethic and affirmative politics of blaxTARLINES KUMASI.²

   

  It goes without saying that  the spectacular occasion of the Pavilion accumulates cultural capital for the nation in asserting a compelling place and reputation as far as the global mainstream of art is concerned— more especially for a nation which has been treated as a footnote in literature on the history of art in Africa. It is therefore our task to, so to speak, “brush history against the grain” (Benjamin, 1969, pp. 257) by practically intervening in it through such exhibition making ventures. In this vein, the success of the Pavilion highlights two major points for discussion.

   

  The first is a dialectical situation. At a time when cultural institutions and producers are enduring famishing conditions as far as state support or infrastructural systems are concerned, the state has demonstrated that it is possible to alter this fate— seeing as the Ministries of Finance and that of Tourism, Arts, and Culture, respectively supported and commissioned the Pavilion. But now that the impossible has happened, one would have thought that prioritising a National Pavilion would pave the way to launch serious longterm cultural policies ensuring continued presence in Venice itself, and also to invest in and build the necessary economic and cultural support structures for those local practitioners who are in dire need of it. As this is yet to happen, it will be crucial for Ghana to sustain the legacy of the Pavilion beyond the rhetoric of representation, even if it turns out to be a one-time affair.

   

  Secondly, turning our attention to local relevance, the intention of the organisers to, later that year,  bring the exhibition to the National Museum of Ghana to be able to show it to local audiences and to generate new knowledge has yet to materialise, for whatever reasons.³ This is unfortunate given the curator’s unequivocal concern for institution building and the “possibilities of artistic development in Ghana itself” (Ayim, 2019, pp. 140). If we keep in mind, apropos Borges, that every exhibition, at any given moment, based on its arguments or claims, “creates its own precursors” and therefore holds the potential to alter our conceptions of both past and future within that genealogy,⁴ then it presently counts as a missed opportunity not to have optimised Ghana Freedom in terms of creating history rather than solely staging one. What I mean is that the exhibition could have served as an epistemic site through which to actively produce and update the history of contemporary art in Ghana. For example, by citing⁵ or acknowledging the timeliness in the return of the exhibition to the National Museum falling on the 20th anniversary of South Meets West⁶ — the seldom talked-about contemporary art exhibition of African artists based on the continent and in the diaspora which also took place at the National Museum in 1999 with an artist lineup including Atta Kwami, Tracey Rose, and Yinka Shonibare— in addition to such “precursors” as FESMAN, FESPAC and “Authentic/Ex-centric".⁷

   

  Such an instance would have contributed to the intellectual legacy of Ghana Freedom in fulfilling the task of theorising the newly emergent curatorial and artistic paradigms in Ghana, all the while establishing the critical connections, differences, and evolutions between postcolonial and transnational antedatings of such political attitudes to exhibition making. This is especially important when we take the emancipatory promise of contemporary art seriously by considering the exhibition as a system that is not only meant for [re]producing spectacular displays, while taking the commodification of art for granted, but as one which deploys the convergence of symbolic and material consequences enveloped in the immanent tensions of history and power. Particularly when we acknowledge that the National Pavilion structure of the Venice Biennale impedes the institution from turning towards the non-imperialist substance of contemporary art.⁸

   

  It remains to be seen how far representation of culture as the sole basis of participating in such blue-chip events as the Venice Biennale can get us⁹ (or any nation with egalitarian aspirations for that matter). Let us also not forget that biennales have not always existed, nor should they necessarily always exist in the future.¹⁰ Accepting this, at least, cautions us not to take its existence as well as what it promises for granted. If we succeed in the latter it breeds conformism which can be opposite to true freedom. To boot, the present COVID-19 pandemic has gone a long way to expose the fragility of existing exhibition conventions as it threatens to revolutionize our economic, socio-cultural, health and political sectors on a planetary scale. The institutions by which we traditionally associate the production, circulation and experience of art— i.e. galleries, museums, the art market, etc.— have all suddenly ground to a halt and are facing the challenge to structurally rethink their modus operandi. Therefore the future of exhibition making, as we know it, is what is currently at stake. We are confronted with the task, now, as in previous times in history, to be more inventive with the exhibition form. Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, artistic director of Sonsbeek (2020-2024), articulates this grammar of contingency well enough in the epigraph.

   

  Where Ghana goes from here in verifying art as an egalitarian universality and creating particular models to suit its locality is entirely up to us, its protagonists. And so the question becomes, when such real threats and crises have paled the superficiality of representation (in other words, when all the pomp and pageantry of Ghana Freedom has disappeared), what will its historical substance be posthumously based on?

   

   

  Read more on the Ghana pavilion from a different perspective: "Red Ghanaian Soil" by Natalie Göltenboth

  About Selasi Awusi Sosu's presentation at the pavilion see: Link

  About Ibrahim Mahama's "Savannah Center for Contemporary Art" in Tamale see: Link

   

   

  Footnotes

  ¹Taiye Selasi uses this term in her essay Who is Afraid of a National Pavilion? in Ayim (2019 pp.38-44).

  ²Both Mahama and Selasi Sosu are alumni of KNUST and active protagonists of blaxTARLINES who espouse these transformations. This internationally networked collective has been functioning as the contemporary art incubator in the Department of Painting & Sculpture in Ghana’s foremost Art College at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology (KNUST) since 2015, and has radically upended the hegemony of salon style display formats erstwhile ubiquitous in commercial galleries, hotel lobbies, and other spaces which had contrived the realisation of artistic potential primarily for the patronage of tourists.

  ³Nana Oforiatta Ayim confirmed in her lecture in ibid. (in June) after its opening on May 11th that the show would be at the National Museum of Ghana later that year.

  ⁴I appropriate this thought from Jorge Luis Borges in his essay Kafka and his Precursors (1951).

  ⁵By citing, I do not mean merely mentioning (since the curator succeeded in mentioning FESMAN, FESPAC and “Authentic/Ex-centric” as precursors), but through curatorial research, and coming to terms with their historical, theoretical, and aesthetic substance and formulating an argument that deals critically with the claims and implications of these events through an analysis of their significance to our own epoch. 

  ⁶South Meets West is an exhibition organized by Kunsthalle Bern and Historical Museum of Bern in collaboration with the National Museum of Ghana which happened in Accra in 1999 and travelled to Bern in 2000. The exhibition curators are Dr. Bernhard Fibicher (Kunsthalle Bern, assisted by Eszter Gyarmathy), Dr Yacouba Konaté (Université d’Abidjan-Cocody, Côte d’Ivoire), Dr. Yvonne Vera (National Gallery Bulawayo, Zimbabwe). Participating artists are Jane Alexander, Fernando Alvim, Meshac Gaba, Kendell Geers, Tapfuma Gutsa, Atta Kwami, Goddy Leye, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Tracey Rose, Yinka Shonibare, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Yacouba Touré, Minnette Vári, and Dominique Zinkpe. The catalogue included texts by Oladélé A. Bamgboyé, Dr. Bernard Fibicher, Kendell Geers, Clive Kellner, Dr. Yacouba Konaté, Atta Kwami, Simon Njami, Prof. Joe Nkrumah, Tonie Okpe and Sarah Zürcher. See South Meets West (2000).

  ⁷Oforiatta Ayim acknowledged her debt to Salah Hassan’s and Olu Oguibe’s curated exhibition at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, Authentic/Ex-centric: Africa In and Out of Africa. See Ayim (2019. pp. 140).

  ⁸Oforiatta Ayim commented on the problematics of this in our public conversation in op. cit. @thestudioaccra. (2019). Taiye Selasi also points at this issue in her catalog essay.

  ⁹The curator of the Pavilion, Nana Oforiatta Ayim, states her motivations for realising the Pavilion as such: “One of my driving forces [for being in Venice] is this idea of representation— of voice, of narrative— of who gets to speak the narrative.” She made this statement in a public conversation I had with her at @thestudioaccra. (2019, June 27). Ghana Pavilion Venice Biennale: Conversation with Nana Oforiatta Ayim. [Facebook post]. https://web.facebook.com/accrastudio/photos/a.1118364178194088/2491384694225356/?type=3&theater. Audio of lecture is in author’s archives, courtesy @thestudioaccra. 

  ¹⁰I appropriate this thought from Walter Benjamin who, in a similar spirit of contingency, was speaking particularly of the novel form in literature. See Benjamin (1998. pp. 89).

   

   

   

  References

   

  • Ayim, N. O. (Ed.). (2019). Ghana Freedom: Ghana Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia [catalogue]. Koenig Books.
  • Benjamin, W. (1969). Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Hannah Arendt (Ed.) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Schocken Books.
  • Benjamin, W. (1998). The Author as Producer. In Understanding Brecht: Walter Benjamin. Verso.
  • Mitter, S. (2020). Art Biennials Were Testing Grounds. Now They Are Being Tested. 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/arts/design/art-fairs-biennials-virus.html. Accessed 6th May, 2020.
  • seid’ou k. (2006). Theoretical Foundations of the KNUST Painting Programme: A Philosophical inquiry and its contextual relevance in Ghanaian Culture [Unpublished PhD Thesis]. Kumasi: KNUST.
  • seid’ou, k. (2014). Gold Coast Hand and Eye Work: A Genealogical History. Global Advanced Research Journal of History. Political Science and International Relations ISSN: 2315-506X Vol. 3(1). pp. 008-016.
  • South Meets West exhibition catalogue. 2000. Kunsthalle Bern, NÀWÁO. ISBN 3-85780-124-7.

   

   

  published May 2020

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  Bea Lundt

  The picture of Christine de Pizan and our knowledge about her life show that this is not true. Christine de Pizan (1364 – c. 1429), born as Cristina da Pizzano in Venice, was a poet and author at the court of King Charles VI of France. Christine produced a large number of vernacular works, in both prose and verse. Her works include political treatises, mirrors for princes, epistles, and poetry.

  This very famous miniature is an illustration from a book, handwritten in the years between 1410 and 1414 and preserved at the British Library in London (Harley MS 4431, Vol. 1, fol. 4 r). This manuscript contains texts by Christine de Pizan and is called The Book of the Queen, as it had been produced on behalf of and dedicated to Isabeau of Bavaria, wife of King Charles VI of France. There is another miniature showing Christine on her knees dedicating the book to the French queen. Christine can be identified by her facial features and style of dress.

  

  Detail of: Master of the Cité des Dames and workshop, 1413 - 1414, parchment, 36,5 cm x 28,5 cm, British Library, London. © British Library, London. Photo: the author

   

  In the centre of the aforementioned picture, a woman is shown sitting at a table and writing into a voluminous book. With her left hand, she is erasing coloured letters with a knife and with her right hand correcting them. This dynamic gesture of self-correcting fills her working situation with life. On her head is a headdress typical for a widow, the guimpe/wimple. Around the desk, we see some fictive architecture with a broad symbolic meaning: it shows a room which is specifically tailored to an intellectual working woman but also opens to the outside, as there are windows, an arch, and entryways. The roof of another storey marks the building as a town house. Though the scene is an interior one, the colours on the woman are bright, and there are warm red colours around her. This is different from older pictures showing clerical female authors in the narrow, closed rooms of a cloister.

   

  ‘Je, Christine’: An independent author defining her role in society

  The picture shows a professional female author in an urban context in the process of writing a book and working for the public, where she is honoured as being part of the highest level of society. There are similar pictures with Christine sitting behind her desk with an open book and people coming and arguing with her in a lively manner. In one, a young man, who has been identified as her son, stands in front of her and speaks to her. Another one shows four men visiting her in her room and discussing her writings with her. Sitting Christine, standing men: the arrangement shows that the guests will leave soon. Such encounters are also atypical for a cloister, which is said to be the usual space for educated women.

   

   

   

  Detail of: Master of the Cité des Dames and workshop, 1413 - 1414, parchment, 36,5 cm x 28,5 cm, British Library, London. © British Library, London. Photo: the author

   

  As experts see it, it was Christine herself who ordered the illustrator to characterise her in this manner. Several autobiographical comments of hers document that she liked to show herself living this individualist intellectual lifestyle. Traditional scholars call this typical for the Renaissance, which began a bit after Christine’s lifetime. Very often in her books we find ‘Je, Christine’ (‘I, Christine’), at the beginning of a chapter.

   

  Christine’s life story

  Christine was born in Venice in 1364 as the daughter of a doctor of medicine and astrology. He was called to the French court in Paris. Christine married a royal secretary and had three children. But then her father, her husband, and the king who had supported the family died. Christine was 25 years old and had to care not only for her children but also for her old mother and younger relatives living with her. She decided not to marry again but to support her living by writing. Her oeuvre contains poems alongside utopian, philosophical, historian, didactical, allegorical, and autobiographical texts. Noble families ordered her books and paid her well. In her old age, she escaped from the civil war in Paris to a cloister nearby where she died around 1429.

   

  The first secular female author in Europe

  With her Italian-French background, Christine is an example for the migration of intellectuals in southern Europe in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. She was not herself noble but came from an academic family and remained near the court. She was privately educated, mostly by her father, and also educated herself using the offer of the erudition centre in France. Living within a totally Christian cosmos with a spiritual way of thinking, she was not a clerical but rather a secular woman. In her books, she fought for gender equality, especially in education, as well as for recognizing the extraordinary performances of women in the past and in her own time. She wanted this knowledge to be part of a new understanding of history. She sharply protested against texts which reduce women to sex objects. With her pugnacious notes, she provoked the first literary quarrel about femininity and masculinity in Europe, the ‘Querelle des Femmes’.

   

  The masculinisation of literacy and education in the modern era

  In premodern Europe, competencies in literacy were considered more or less ‘feminine’. Girls learned to read at least the Bible to their families; noblewomen were taught languages and literature to be able to marry into different countries. The ideal for masculinity was fighting strength; sitting with books seemed to be viewed as non-masculine. Many kings and noblemen were illiterate. This changed in modern times. Literacy became part of the public world and school education developed as a privilege of men.

  In the colonial period, Europeans attempted to impose this central European order on the African colonies: women were relegated to the private sphere, while men had the privilege of acting in public, which was more valued. The colonisers argued these gender roles were anthropologically fixed constancies, and they had the civilising mission of transferring this pattern to their colonies. But African scholars insist that in precolonial times, polar structures of different worlds for men and women did not exist, exactly as they had not in premodern Europe.

   

  Conclusion: Confirming non-dualistic, fluid gender concepts

  As we still need to fight against the discrimination of women and girls in educational systems worldwide, the message of the picture might be encouraging. This visual icon helps to deconstruct a common myth about Europe and to reject static ideas about continuities of bipolar gender structures. Even in the European Middle Ages, independent female authors were shown, combining inside and outside worlds. To see that it was different in history motivates us to see the hybridity of gender structures on both continents, which do not merely follow the dualistic scheme of men working in public professions and women working as housewives.

   

  References:

  • Christine de Pizan: Le Livre de la Cité des Dames. Stock 1986 (French).
  • Christine de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies (Penguin Classics) rev. 2000 (English).
  • Christine de Pizan: Das Buch von der Stadt der Frauen. Originally in Middle French. Translated and with commentary and an introduction by Margarete Zimmermann, Orlanda Buchverlag Berlin 1986, dtv 1999 (German).
  • Roberta L. Krueger: Towards Feminism: Christine de Pizan, Female Advocacy, and Women’s Textual Communities in the Late Middle Ages and Beyond. In: Judith M. Bennett, Ruth Mazo Karras (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe. Oxford University Press 2016, pp. 590-606.
  • Henry Kam Kah: The Sacred Forest. Gender and Matriliny in the Laimbwe History (Cameroon), c. 1750-2001. Berlin 2015.
  • Oyewumi, Oyeronké: Colonizing Bodies and Minds. Gender and Colonialism. In: ibid (ed.): Invention of Women. Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis, MN 1997, pp. 121-156.

   

   

  Edited by Kelly Thompson.

   

  published August 2020

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  Patrique deGraft-Yankson

   

  Fortunately, contemporary Ghanaian artists like Vincent Akwete Kofi and Kofi Antobam, who by their training, developed both the skills and the mindset to create and fully appreciate African arts have played major interventional roles. They, through rigorous production of masterpieces over the years, led the move to redirect the wavelength of Ghanaian artistic expressiveness along the paths of decolonization. A typical example of these arts is the Crucifix, the selected object for this discussion.

   

  The Artist – Vincent Akwete Kofi

  The Crucifix is a sculpture in the round, measuring 45x10x19 inches, and was created by Vincent Akwete Kofi, a Ghanaian artist who lived between 1923 and 1974. Characteristically, Vincent creates outstanding sculptures in humanistic forms. His sculptures speak to traditional African philosophies, ideals and beliefs (Grobel, 1970), and he through his works, seeks to reinforce the beauty, dynamism and complexities of African art. Indeed, Vincent’s artistic posture was largely informed by his training in the then Achimota College in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), an educational institution which sought to bridge the gap between European and African forms of knowledge (Woets, 2014).

   

  Description and interpretation

  The Crucifix was carved in tropical hard wood, one of Vincent Kofi’s preferred media, with the style and subject matter reminiscing his belief in the creative and objective fusion of lessons from the history of modernism in the arts by an immersion in his Ghanaian heritage. Like his earlier sculptures therefore, the choice of this Euro-Christian theme throws lights on his Pan-Africanism and decolonization intents. 

   

  The sculpture is a depiction of a free-standing human figure with features that conform with his earlier wood carvings, such as depiction of enlarged head and heavy feet which are more representational than naturalistic. Again, the entire form is seen as being directed by the limitations of the tree trunk deliberately chosen for the work. This, of course is one of Kofi’s traditional wood carving styling.

   

  The Crucifix is postured in a clasped forward-bent lower limb. Like the lower limbs, the upper limbs of the figure which are raised over the head and stretched backwards, are also clasped together, depicting the entire image in a rather discomforting posture. Further strengthening the feeling of distress and discomfort in the image is the dropped and lifeless face and facial features of the image. The long thick beard of the image with the tightly fitting cylindrical hat on the head, carved after one of those won by royals among some sections of Ghanaians, give the figure an elderly look.

   

  Other significant features of the image are the exaggerated clasped, forward-bent and wobbly elephantine feet, dropped face with shuttered eyes, flaccid body/skin/muscles (which is visible even in wood), and the heavy beard.

   

  In trying to understand the presentation of the Crucifix, it is important to note that Ghanaians have stories about characters who lived and suffered similar fates as that of the Christ. The Fante people (a section of the Akan ethnic group), for example have records on a man called Ahor, who offered himself as a sacrifice to the gods, when the life of a human being was demanded as an antidote to a calamity which befell the people. Up to today, Ahor is celebrated in a festival called Ahorbaa to commemorate his brave and sacrificial feat. Other ethnic groups in Ghana have similar stories which render the Passion of the Christ not just a familiar phenomenon, but a lived experience recorded in the history of the people.

   

  Also worthy of notice is the familiarity of the various themes which characterize the story of the Christ, such as his kingship, miraculous personality, sacrificial journey and his eventual torture and death. The Crucifix therefore, was Vincent Kofi attempt at depicting the passion of the Christ in a way that would make it familiar and relevant to the people.

   

  The image in Kofi’s Crucifix was therefore needed to be presented as a man with royal personality, as depicted in the cylindrically shaped cap, which is symbolic of some of the Ghanaian royal millinery that depict kingship and authority. This is reinforced by a heavy beard to portray wisdom. Wisdom which is reserved for kings and aged people.

   

  Analysing from the experiences of a people whose history was not devoid of unpleasant experiences, such as enslavement, brutal torture and execution, the image presented in the Euro-Christian Crucifix could not have been a complete representation of the Man of Sorrow described in the Christian holy book (Isaiah 53:3). Kofi therefore saw the need to present a figure which paints a real picture of a man who had gone through an extreme physical pain. Those strong and heavy, yet wobbly feet were a symbol of a man overburdened with sorrows and sins of the world.

   

  Indeed, the man on the Crucifix was dead, with no chance of maintaining a smooth and shiny skin as seen in the Euro-Christian crucifix. In Vincent Kofi’s Crucifix, therefore, he, even in wood, managed to present a flaccid body/skin and muscles which, with the closed eyelids, dropped and lifeless face gave an impression of an extremely tired dead body. Probably an artistic rendition that comes close is Mel Gibson’s crucified Christ in his movie, the Passion of the Christ.

   

  Conclusion

  Early missionaries introduced the Christian religion with its attendant icons, images, stories and language in 1400s. Semblance in religious icons, images, stories and their associated functions made the acceptance of Christianity easier among indigenous Africans/Ghanaians. Vincent Kofi’s Crucifix could therefore be considered as a great effort towards connecting foreign Christian belief systems to known religious experiences, thereby making Christianity much more relevant to the African than it has been.

   

  References

  • African Artists in America (1978). African Affairs, 11 (3), 84-85.
  • Frank, B. (1999). The Visual Arts of Africa: Gender, Power, and Life Cycle Rituals by Judith Perani and Fred T. Smith (A review).  African Affairs, 11 (3), 14-16.

  • Kwami, A. (2016). Kofi, Vincent Akwete (1923–1974). In the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.: Taylor and Francis. Retrieved 31 Dec. 2021, from https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/kofi-vincent-akwete-1923-1974. doi:10.4324/9781135000356-REM845-1

  • Moore, G. (1967). The Arts in the New Africa African Affairs, 66 (263), 140-148.

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  Osuanyi Quaicoo Essel

   

  Catching a glimpse of the feminine hairstyles (re)presentation in rows on a single support, brings to memory the barber salon promotional campaign artworks that served as visual displays to invite potential customers in parts of Africa in the past. Artists in the community were commissioned to create picturesque signages that display plethora of Afrocentric hairstyles on wooden boards and placed in front of hair salons or vantage points to attract potential clients. The artworks served as form of advertisements to the salon operators. Some itinerant hairstylists moved around with these signages in search of customers. The painted images have been replaced with printed catalogue of pictured hairstyles printed on large sheet of papers and flexy materials which are displayed in and outside salons in the communities. The picturesque hairstyles signage presented in this exhibition reminisces the artistic practice of creating these portraits as form of hair salon advertisement in Togo, Ghana, Nigeria and other West African countries. 

   

  

   Cutout from anonymous artist, second half of the 20th century, plywood, oilpaint, Image: Osuanyi Quaicoo Essel.

   

  Uniformly arranged on a support, the artist presents fifteen Afrocentric feminine flashy plaited coiffures in portrait orientation. Of the fifteen hairstyles, one occupies the epicentral position of the entire composition in frontality of pose, depicting her full facial details in simple flat tone of brownish colour with the hair stylization rendered in black. Her rigged neck, pronounced eyebrow and bejeweled ears depicts her feminine characteristics. In Togolese culture, wearing of earring is a preserve of females as in the case of Ghana and some West African countries. The artist’s treatment of this centrally placed figure gives hint of Togolese feminine beauty standards. Four of the hairstyles are shown in side view, facing the left. Similar to these four figures in profile are the type-form head, rigged neck details and varying earrings. The rigged neck features found on these four figures also appear on the centrally placed figure in the composition. With this treatment, the artist makes visual notation of feminine beauty culture standards that characterised some West African countries. Rigged neck feature is considered as a marker of beauty ideal, and commonly depicted in West African feminine sculptures. For example, Akuaba (wooden doll, predominantly used as fertility figure), of Ghana is often armoured with rigged neck characteristics. Understanding the beauty culture ideals of Africa depicted in this simple but interesting hairstyles composition offers viewers of African art a better understanding of the art.

   

  To reveal a great deal of the level of sophistication of the hair stylizations, the artist showed ten of the figures in back view posture, three each atop and down in horizontal placement, while four are arranged in a kite-shaped arrangement in the middle portions of the painting. The artist generates visual interest with the arrangement of the figures to create a sense of movement, variety and rhythm. For example, in the depiction of the clothing of the figures, shades of reds were used in a serpentine orderliness that forces the eyes to traverse gracefully upon a gaze from the topmost middle part to the down and vice versa. Similar colour treatment is achieved with shades of blue from the top left, moving in diagonal direction to far right of the middle portion of the painting, and orchestrating another diagonal turn towards the down left part. One striking feature that bedews the ten hairstyles in back view posture, is the skillful use of the negative and positive spatial relations that creates visual curiosity for deeper gaze of the hairstyles. With the exception of the blue-shirted figure on the last row of the composition, the remaining blue-shirted figures wear trumpet-shaped hairstyles with multi-sectional visual interests.

   

  All the hairstyles represented by the artist are a reflection of the Afrocentric standardized beauty ideologies and practices inherent in the social environment of practice. These hairstyles make use of no hair extensions and or wigs; and are also practised in Ghana and other neighbouring countries. Females usually cared for their hair to grow long and plait it with black twine to form long narrow stripes which are then arranged in a particular manner by way of styling. Based on the society that wear them, the hairstyles may be given names and have symbolic meanings. The hairstyles portrayed are usually worn by the youthful and middle-aged females.

   

  Colonialists’ invasion, slavery, Western religion, racial discrimination, amongst others, contributed to Black hair stereotyping which has caused some Black women to resort to hair beauty ideals of the colonialists. Historically, the discrimination resulted in some Black women who found themselves in foreign lands, hiding their hair by using coverings, especially, in public places. Some Black women use artificial chemicals to straighten their hairs to imitate the beauty ideals of the colonialists. Despite the counter-resistance to the stereotyping of Afrocentric hairstyling through civil right movements and visual (re)presentation by its practitioners and artists, many African women now wear extensions and wigs, a trend that raises the question of identity crisis and politics. The work of the artist in this context sheds light on the purely Afrocentric hairstyling culture of Togo and its neighbouring countries, and makes unapologetic statement of turning away from the colonial past.

   

  The work brings into focus the need for fashion art educator and artists to join hands in contributing to institutional restructuring of teaching and learning of African fashion history including standardised beauty ideologies and ideals for reclamation of the past, and impenitent practice of Afrocentric beauty culture. Towards this end, teaching and learning should be focalised on the African cultural reorientation, concept of sankofaism (return to fetch the goodies of the past) and respect for one another irrespective of geography, skin colour, hair type or physique. Learners must be taught to build positive self-esteem and love for their culture, and demonstrate love for individual differences.

   

   

   

  This article is part of a gallery: Perspectives from Ghana on Museum Objects in Germany
  

   

  published January 2021

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  Ronnie Watt

   

  The discriminatory apartheid politics in twentieth-century South Africa were designed to advance the political, social and economic empowerment of the white citizenry; the  entrenchment of Western culture and values; to transform the black populace into a labour force and limit their education and training. Within that white supremacist dogma, black material culture’s only footing was its anthropological and ethnographic interest. The output of the pottery, weaving and print workshops of Rorke’s Drift came to stand in symbolic defiance of all of that.

   

  Rorke’s Drift grew from the missionary work of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal Province Under the initial management of Peder and Ulla Gowenius who were recruited from Sweden, the centre was conceptualised for the training of black members of the local community to produce art and crafts as a means of self-support. The pottery workshop at the centre was established in 1968 by the Danish potter Peter Tyberg.

   

  Whilst the Zulu culture is predominant in the province, it also accommodates other cultural groups. The majority of the initial group of women recruited for the pottery workshop belonged to the Sotho group and had the skills to produce utilitarian pottery for brewing, cooking and storage in traditional forms, decorated with applied motifs and incised elements (Fig 2).h The women were also familiar with traditional Zulu pottery forms in monochromatic colors (hues of black and brown) and  decorative motifs that included pinched surfaces, geometric designs and raised linear coils. These were and continue to be produced with hand-building techniques and pit-firing.

   

  

  Figure 2

  A traditional vessel (ukhamba) for the serving of beer in the Zulu culture, 1965, hand-built, burnished and decorated with applied raised designs (amasumpa), collected in Melmoth in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa, 24 x 29 cm, Collection of Iziko Museums of South Africa, Cape Town, ©Michael Hall

   

   

  

  Figure 3

  Traditional Zulu vessels collected in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa, c.1990 to 1996, various potters, hand-built, burnished and decorated with incised and raised designs, Collection of Ian Garrett, ©Ian Garrett

   

  The potters were introduced to Western production techniques, materials and kiln technology at the workshop. They were also shown books and magazines that exposed them to pottery forms outside of their culture and convention such as of Pueblo Indian and Nigerian pottery (Hosking, 2005, p. 33 and Gers, 2015, p. 268). It was the dictum of Rorke’s Drift to promote individual expression flowing from “an innate naivety and conceptualism” (Leeb-du Toit, 2012, p. 79) but the resulting works had to have appeal for Western consumers. In the pottery this culminated in a “composite globalised identity” (Hosking, 2005, p. 57) that married Scandinavian late-modernism and indigenous African knowledge systems. Freddie Motsamayi (2012, p. 24) described it bluntly as an example of an invented tradition in which new forms of African expression were produced for the benefit of Western patrons.

   

  Whilst staying for the most part within the parameters of traditional Sotho and Zulu forms, the women potters created their versions of Western forms of bowls and vases and also vessels that approached sculptural forms or were distinctly sculptural forms. The decorations which referenced indigenous culture usually covered most of the surface and were applied as incised or built features and painting in layers of slips. The works became progressively more intricate and composite with richly painted and texturally decorated surfaces (Hosking, 2005, p. 96).

  A new form that emerged in the workshop oeuvre was the “bird pot” introduced by Judith Mkhabela who worked in the studio during the 1970s. This was a pot with a pedestal base to which the head, wings and tail of a bird were added. Whether this form was Mkhabela’s own innovation is not a certain fact. It might have been modelled on the nineteenth century European hen-on-nest form (Maggs and Ward, 2011, pp. 155–156) that served as a container for fresh eggs. It is equally likely that the pot referenced two other indigenous cultural vessel forms, namely the bird-shaped earthenware vessels made by the South Sotho cultural group for possible use as water containers, water coolers or egg storage (Riep, 2011, p. 185) and the other being the totemic pig and elephant vessel forms made by the amaHlubi tribe associated with the Basotho cultural group (Garrett, 2020).Over the years this form was adapted by some of the other potters such as Elizabeth Mbatha (Fig 4).

   

  

  Figure 4

  Elizabeth Mbatha at work in the Rorke’s Drift pottery workshop in 2014, ©Ronnie Watt

   

  Rorke’s Drift pottery was first . Two years later, the gallery acquired hand-built and thrown works from the studio for its permanent collection. This was significant for being the first ceramic works by black South African artists to be acquired for inclusion in a public collection during the apartheid era. The best of the pottery was selected to be sold in overseas outlets with Sweden and Germany as prime destinations. The potters set a precedent amongst South African black potters by signing their works on the feet of the pottery and further adding the date and kiln data alongside the leaf logo of Rorke’s Drift (Fig 5). This practice copied Western potters who identified their works with potter’s marks, signatures or monograms.

   

  

  Figure 5

  The foot of the double bird vase bears the name of the potter Elizabeth Mbatha [sic], the kiln  data and the leaf-form logo of the Evangelical Lutheran Church Centre for Art and Craft at Rorke’s Drift, ©Ronnie Watt

   

  As a collective and as individuals, the potters defied tradition and convention, Western perceptions and expectations of traditional pottery. The potters preserved elements of  indigenous form and designs in their pots alongside the non-traditional features and sculptural appendages (Figs 6, 7). This illustrates the statement by the ceramics art historian Elizabeth Perrill (2008, [Sp]) that Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) of materials, methods, forms and values are not monolithic and permit an expansion of innovative aesthetics within and as a continuation of a culture.

   

  

  Figure 6

  Lephina Molefe, Stacked vessel, 1980, hand-built and glaze-decorated reduction-fired stoneware, 26 x 17 cm, Evangelical Lutheran Church Centre for Art and Craft at Rorke’s Drift, South Africa, private collection, ©Ronnie Watt

   

   

  

  Figure 7

  Euriel Mbatha, Figurative vase, 1984, hand-built and glaze-decorated reduction-fired stoneware, 21 x 13 cm, Evangelical Lutheran Church Centre for Art and Craft at Rorke’s Drift, South Africa, Collection Minette Zaaiman, ©Ronnie Watt

   

  The demand for Rorke’s Drift pottery started to wane in the 1990s for several reasons. Dealers and collectors broadened their interest to include the other indigenous potters who had since come to the fore. Problems with the management of the centre and financial constraints detracted from the promotion of the pottery and the recruitment of new potter talent. The quality of the pottery deteriorated after the introduction of commercial clay bodies and glazes and there was little variance in the forms and their decorations. The potters were no longer producing for the local and international collector market but had to produce works that met the expectations and budgets of tourists.

   

  As “tourist art”, the twenty-first century pottery of the ELC Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift reveals forms and decoration intended to meet buyers’ tastes and budgets. The purposeful re-orientation towards the tourist market to tap into that source of revenue, is not a slur on the history, aesthetics or ethos of the studio. As in the earlier works, the more recent works illustrate an entanglement of the maker and the made, relevant to a new context of time and circumstance.

   

   

   

  References

  • Garret, IW. (2020). Personal correspondence.
  • Gers, W. (2015). Scorched earth: 100 Years of Southern African pottery. Johannesburg: Jacana.
  • Hosking, S. (2005). “Tradition and innovation: Rorke's Drift ceramics in the collection of the Durban Art Gallery, KwaZulu-Natal.” Unpublished MA (Fine Arts) dissertation. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.
  • Leeb-du Toit, J. (2012). Rorke’s Drift ceramic traditions in context. In J. Stretton (Ed.), All Fired Up: Conversations between storerooms and classrooms (pp. 77-81). Durban: Durban Art Gallery.
  • Maggs, T. & Ward, V. (2011). Judith Mkhabela: An inspirational potter from KwaZulu-Natal. Southern African Humanities (23), September, 151–71.
  • Motsamayi, MF. (2012). “The Bernstein Collection of Rorke’s Drift ceramics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal: A catalogue raisonné.” Unpublished MA (Art History) dissertation. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.
  • Perrill, E. (2008). Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) & Zulu Ceramic Arts: Azolina MaMncube Ngema, One Woman’s Story. Interpreting Ceramics 10, [Sp]. Retrieved from www.interpretingceramics.com/issue010/articles/01.htm.
  • Riep, DMM. (2011). “House of the Crocodile: south Sotho art and history in southern Africa.” Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Iowa, Iowa City. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.0dzbhfvg.

   

   

  published November 2020

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  Elfriede Dreyer

  Matiyane depicts cities of the world in the form of large mixed-media panoramas, utilising a naïve style of schematic outlining and an almost unsophisticated usage of coloured pencils and crayons, not unlike the early travelogues of the Renaissance and colonial explorers. In his panoramas, the landscape is flattened out into a subjective urban picturesque adorned with the city’s commercially most well-known markers functioning as a concise overview of or introduction to its most important historical events and its icons. Although Matiyane generally presents wide panoramas of cities, thus ‘walking’ multi-viewpoint compositions, he often creates panopticon-like designs in which he functions as a kind of ‘watchman’ surveying the city from a single point of observation – his own. In the late eighteenth century, the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham coined the idea of the panopticon as a particular type of institutional building design that could allow surveillance by a single watchman in such a way that the entire institution could be surveyed from a single angle. The term ‘panopticon’ has been derived from Panoptes in Greek mythology that was a giant with a hundred eyes and known as a very efficient watchman. Bentham's architectural designs were very much aimed at the design of institutions such as prisons, for instance, or corporate environments, where inmates or workers could be surveyed without them realising it. Bentham’s ideas acted as precursor to twentieth-century technology such as closed-circuit television (CCTV). Having been territorialised under the apartheid regime of segregation and living in Attridgeville a township outside Pretoria, the country’s administrative capital, Matiyane embarks on a kind of symbolic remapping of these histories. Operating without sufficient transport and with minimal equipment and art materials places limitations on his mobility and professional practice; within the context of the strenuous context of his daily battles, the spectacularity of powerful world cities and their apparent glitz and glamour to him seem like places of pleasure and the world like a global utopia where poverty and agony can be forgotten. In his Panorama of Africa: Cape to Cairo, Matiyane expresses a particular sense of place and a human condition, echoed in Alice Ming Wai Jim‘s (2008:264)  description of Hong Kong in ‘Mediating place-identity: Notes on Mathias Woo’s A Very Good City’: Over the last decade, contemporary art in Hong Kong, informed by travel(ing) theory, the special administrative region’s ambiguous (post) colonial-national-global connections and its inimitable set of historical and cultural situations, has been preoccupied with the themes of mobility, transition, and location in its representations of the city. This fixation, or, rather, the urgency of its mediation in not only artistic but also cultural, economic, and political arenas is inextricably linked to an ongoing elaboration of a Hong Kong identity. But assertions of “who we are” are often intimately related to suppositions of “where we are,” and ideas captured in the environmental psychological concept of place-identity. Matiyane’s sense of identity and notion of ‘who he is’ is similarly tied to ‘where he is’, but virtually he can be anywhere. In every panorama, the artist traces the contemporary city’s ontology of mobility and transitivity in images of technology, airplanes, trains and boats. To him these images represent power, positive energy and dynamism, being tropes of transition and movement towards improvement, development and transformation. His utopian imagery can be interpreted as being populated by a multitude of heterotopic elements, such as powerful personae and images of transitivity represented by trains and boats that function autonomously but concurrently in close relation to their socio-cultural and geopolitical contexts; as liminal instruments connecting space and place; and as vigorous agents of change. In a work such as Panorama of Gauteng (2014), for instance, the artist included images as well as the life history of Nelson Mandela, interpreted as the as an iconic symbol of transformation and change, and in Panorama of Africa: Cape to Cairo, he once again presents Mandela as the most powerful legacy in Africa. It becomes a stratagem of power mediation to point out the country’s instruments of advantage within the global sphere of competition. His vision radiates optimism and hope and deconstructs the notion of the processes of historisation as categorically fixed, predetermined and non-negotiable. Through the act of being empowered to depict any place in the world, the artist constructs his identity in the domain of the global self that utopianistically interacts with perceived spectacular environments. By mostly depicting cities that he has never been to, Matiyane expresses a desire and a longing for the exotic Other, yet his relationship to place is transmutative in essence. He imagines places where the home of the place–identity involves a process in which the self and local become metamorphosed into the global world. The artist becomes a ‘nomad’, displaced and diasporic in his pursuit of fame, wealth and global stardom through the fusion with ‘famous’ and ‘successful’ cities in his depictions. Global psychogeography is created in which cultural disparities are flattened in renderings of cities and their surrounding landscapes, each endowed with air and ground transport, patterns of housing, own histories, a national flag and a city centre. Becoming ‘playful masquerading’, the artist’s presentation of panoramic landscapes imbued by factual information makes the real, perceived and imaginary differences between cities, cultures and worlds fall away. Surveyed through the panopticon framework of his panoramas, there are superficially neither perceivable binaries of have and have-not, poverty and wealth; nor anxieties, losses or racial discrimination. East meets West meets Africa in a global blueprint of urban patterning. By crossing the borders of the self and the local in his depiction of cities, Matiyane becomes a virtual flâneur of the cities of the world and a cartographer of imagined spaces.

  Reference Ming Wai Jim, A. Mediating place-identity: Notes on Mathias Woo’s A very good city, in Asselin, O, Lamoureux, J, Ross, C (eds). 2008. Precarious visualities: New perspectives on identification in contemporary art and visual culture. Montreal & Kingston/London/Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

  About the artist Major exhibitions since 2008 2018, Venice Architecture Biennale, Japan Pavillion 2018, Titus Matiyane’s Cities of the World, ZAM, The Hague 2014, Cool Capital Biennale, curated by Elfriede Dreyer and Adele Adendorff. Panorama of Pretoria: Mamelodi to Soweto 2014, Reserve Bank, Cool Capital Biennale exhibition. Panorama of Pretoria: Mamelodi to Soweto 2013, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Artesis University College, Antwerp. Group exhibition, Nomad bodies curated by Elfriede Dreyer 2012, Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg. Panorama of Polokwane to Sasolburg 2012, Fried Contemporary Art Gallery, Pretoria. Group exhibition, Me 3, curated by Elfriede Dreyer 2011, La Société générale, Casablanca, Morocco. Cities of the world exhibition and Panorama of Western Cape. Curated by Annemieke de Klerk 2010, Fried Contemporary Art Gallery, Pretoria. Group exhibition, Cities in transition, with Eric Duplan and Lucas Thobejane, curated by Elfriede Dreyer 2010, Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art. Panorama of Lille 2010, Big 5 Festival, Teater aan het Spuy, The Hague. Panoramas of Cape Town, Berlin, Tanzania, Mali, Dubai, Johannesburg, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu Natal. Curated by Annemieke de Klerk 2009, UJ Gallery. Cities of the world. Panoramaas of New York, Pretoria, London, Dubai, Kwazulu Natal, Pietersburg to Sasolburg 2008, Aedesland, Berlin. Cities of the world. Curated by Annemieke de Klerk 2008, National Museum Of Mali, Bamako. Cities of the world. Curated by Annemieke de Klerk 2008, Fried Contemporary Art Gallery, Pretoria. Group exhibition, On the globe, with Pieter Swanepoel and Diek Grobler, curated by Elfriede Dreyer 2008, Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture, Delft. Cities of the world. Curated by Annemieke de Klerk Publications Annemieke de Klerk, Melinda Silverman, Stephen Hobbs, Wytze Patijn, 2007. Catalogue for the exhibition, Titus Matiyane: Cities of the World. Afdeling Bouwkunde, Technische Hogeschool Delft. 010 Publishers. Published for the purposes of the Cities of the World travelling exhibition, 2007- 2008 and the manifestation "African Perspectives" held December 6-8,2007, both commissioned by the Faculty of Architecture of Delft University of Technology. Makorakora: Shaping wire into vehicles.  1985. SA Today. Article featuring photograph of model of spacecraft “Challenger” made by artist. Rankin, E. 1994. Images of metal: Post-war sculptures and Assemblages in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.     published February 2020