The error is that Westerners look at African religious artifacts as works of Art

3 Réponses vers “AFRICA ART , anthropologie, ethnologie, tribal art,”

Dr Viban Viban Ngo a dit :

The error is that Westerners look at African religious artifacts and call them works of art. They were not art works at all as Westerners perceive them until tourist curios surfaced in the 1960s. They were not supposed to be displayed. They were sacred replicas of real people, family heads, elders, or souls of dead people. In some tribes they were supposed to be fed, oiled and given liquid refreshment as if they were thirsty and famished persons. If you did this before going to the market you had luck and sold all your articles of trade with a super profit. The ancestors supposed to be lodged in the fetishes you oiled were the ones that gave you luck. If you were sick, you prayed to the ancestral spirits that were lodged in one of these fetishes. If they represented your dead elders, they had to be kept in a sacred shrine and not displayed or handled by anyone who was not initiated. It was the work of the consecrated priests or priestesses.

Now the problem is someone who had seen western art and tries to look as these fetishes or even displaying masks that were not meant to be appreciated as Western art works have different interpretations. He, as many other is inclined to call them "primitive" because they were not as polished as Chinese, Japanese or European 3d or 2d works of art. I read this in Ladislas Segy’s work African Sculpture Speak and many more. I think traditional African set up has no artistic elements as Western or Chinese sort of art. They are just unique and should not even be called art works but praying artifacts as one would talk of a Bible and Rosary in the Catholic Church.

In the same vein, that is from the African perspective, Christ represented on the cross is not a true form of art. May be to the Westerner, but to the Africans, it is not. The African may attribute that with the soul of Christ that may not even be displayed to remind man of the brutality of man in the past. To an untouched African, a Christ's crucifix contains the soul of Christ and may not be touched or even seen by a person who is not initiated; in this case a consecrated priest or priestess.

African art works that are remotely like those of European started in earnest in the 1950s when missionaries and some colonial teachers started teaching Africans to draw two-dimensionally and to carve as was the case in Zimbabwe with soap stones, the Congo with wood works, and West Africa in the 1950s. The 1950s will be when African started having what Europeans will call real art and those would not have excited Picasso who popularized them and made a fortune from imitating them. In this case Picasso was no original but a copyist who exaggerated what he had copied from Africans.

You will be surprised to know that some of the African religious fetishes or masks are only seen when taken out of Africa as they are taboo objects for reasons aforementioned. For example, some may not be touched by women or children or the non-initiated back in Africa.