135 FIG. 4 (right): Military fi gure. Igbo, Nigeria. Wood. H: 64 cm. Photo: Alberto Ricci. FIG. 5 (left): Detail of the same object by Nicolas Bruant. embraced, became the norm, even though those objects actually form a limited corpus. As time passed, fi rst the dealers and then collectors and museum curators nourished the idea that Fang, Kota, and Dan represented what African art is. That principle was deemed immutable, as was the idea that African secret societies and village ceremonial performances consistently used the same types of masks or fetishes throughout time. This perception of African art is completely erroneous. When Europeans began to settle on the continent in the nineteenth century, Africans used two coping mechanisms that they had always possessed: their sense of humor and, as Susan Vogel has demonstrated, their particular faculty to incorporate anything and everything new into their artistic representations. Even at that early time, an evolution in the subject matter of African sculptors was apparent. Europeans found it effi cacious to offer top hats, bicorn hats, or sparkling tunics to chiefs to convince them to sign FIG. 6 (below): Figure of a woman sewing. Akan, Ghana. Low-grade gold. H: 13 cm. Photo: Alberto Ricci. treaties. As should be expected, altars quickly began to include carved fi gures wearing top hats or pith helmets, which had become symbols of power. When colonials and missionaries settled in new places, they became represented by localized masks or fetishes that were placed on the altars and danced in village ceremonies. When bicycles appeared, African sculptors naturally integrated them into their work as well. To deny this evolution would be like wanting to restrict Western art to the profi le representations produced by the Egyptians—in other words, absurd. Despite this obvious reality, this limited conception of “art nègre” (a term less pejorative in the fi nal analysis than “primitive”) perfectly suited those who had created the market. Their lack of curiosity and their racist condescension were obvious. Even though it would have been possible to do so, who at the time ever thought of going to Africa or even trying to identify major sculptors by name?
•TribalPaginaIntera.indd
To see the actual publication please follow the link above