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P. T.: Is painting a vocation for you? And writing and teaching? G. M.: I like to paint and I like to write. Those are the things I know how to do. I set my own course and I have no one else tellings me how to do things. Teaching has saved me from having to sell out, and no one forces me to enter into any discourse other than the one that my own life has taught me. The central part of my studies revolves around the traditional arts of Sub- Saharan Africa and Asia. My more personal writings address them in relation to modern and contemporary art. They discuss the teaching of art and examine art made by women, children, and other marginalized creators, such as the mentally handicapped. I also have offered critiques of contemporaries. I am interested in works that affi rm the link between animal and becoming human, above and beyond the language gap that separates us, as well as the relationship between nature and culture. A work can exist in the silence of the poetic action of space, although when that is absent, I nonetheless appreciate the effort, especially since I am attached to authentic experiences. I express the workings of what I see. Writing relaxes me, relieves me of the effort to paint, and makes me think. My opinion has enriched those who sought it, insofar as my books present the vision of an artist. I am especially interested in the emergence of active artworks —rare in relation to the number of inert works—that are produced most notably by cultures in which everyone creates. My detractors subscribe to the contemporary belief that renounces the distinction between artwork and simple artifact. This belief, in which meaning is the raison d’être for art, is characteristic of an epoch that creates little and will leave almost nothing behind. Sub- Saharan African art opened me up to a new aesthetic, a scientifi c one, the analysis of which takes place on two 130 FIG. 10 (above): Spoon. Boa, Ubangi region, DR Congo. Wood. H: 30 cm. Ex Serge Schoffel. Photo: Bernard De Keyzer. FIG. 11 (below left): Zoomorphic fi gure. Neolithic Saharan, Azawak Valley, Niger. 5000–4000 BC. Flint. H: 12 cm. Photo: Bernard De Keyzer. levels, that of forms and that of meanings, within the context of the forces responsible for the formation of the various factors that make up the artifact. P. T.: This means that the context, the use, the signifi cance of cultural practices are central to the understanding of artworks in general, particularly those that come from cultures once called “primitive”? G. M.: Those factors are essential for the anthropologist, the sociologist, and the art critic, but not for the afi cionado or the aesthete. Experience and feeling come fi rst, followed later by knowledge, if desired. The African sculptor is required to produce an effi cient work, the functionality of which the person who commissioned it can believe in. Its creator succeeds by drawing upon his own aptitudes, and not just the skills obviously required for the job. Necessary as these may be, they do not constitute the motivation for the work’s existence. That which traditional society recognizes as the power to infl uence people is precisely the quality that allows me to distinguish art from artifact. Whether an object is grafted with some sense of magic, or religious meaning, or something else, it doesn’t matter what as long as it is present. Humanity creates objects endowed with power, and they are the ones it keeps. The artist is like something inside us, our organs, for example. Our nerves are connected to a network whose sensitivity sends us a binary message—yes or no, acceptance or refusal—when confronted with a natural landscape, for example, which on its own is simply what it is —neither beautiful nor ugly. The intellect then rationalizes this message as a function of our experience with everything that has similar connotations and the lessons learned from those experiences. Our reaction is bio-psychic—bio because of the positive or negative response that our nervous infrastructure elicits, and psychic because of the explanation of the same reaction that our intellect applies to it. * Notably: Shoowa Design: African Textiles from the Kingdom of Kuba. Thames & Hudson, London/New York, 1986, 1987, 1995; Abstractions aux Royaumes des Kuba, Paris: Fondation Dapper, 1987; Shoowa Abstraktionen. Textilkunst aus dem afrikanischen Königreich Kuba. Stuttgart: Hansjörg Mayer Edition, 1988. Traumzeichen: Raphiagewebe des Königsreichs Bakuba, Introduction by Angelika Tunis. Munich: Verlag Fred Jahn/Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 1989. TRIBAL people


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