In the context-free exhibit of Africana, viewers make their own subconscious connections with a roomful of strange and beautiful imagery.
Sometime between 1904 and 1907, Pablo Picasso “discovered” African art for himself. It could have been a mask owned by a fellow artist. Or a visit to a Paris museum, the Trocadero, where “primitive” carvings and fetishes from exotic African cultures had recently begun to impart what historian Eckart von Sydow called their “emotional mystic content” on a society on the cusp of Modernism.
Soon after, the young painter would reveal his shocking and controversial “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” launching both Picasso’s “African Period” and the first big wave of Primitivism in Europe. Visitors to MoMA in New York can still meet the painting’s confrontational gaze. Warm pink bodies turn you on; cold, vacant eyes turn you off. Their own “emotional mystic content” remains inscrutable, or perhaps safeguarded, behind their mask-like faces.
Scholars have tried to locate the African masks that may have inspired the faces of the women on the right.
Imagine what those masks would fetch at auction! They could easily become some of the most expensive pieces of Africana outside Egypt’s solid-gold antiquities. Their value to western art collectors, however, would always and forever be linked to Picasso himself. Not on the merits of the artists who made them.
That Philistine question – “What is African art worth?” – was (I confess) one of the first inquiries that slipped from my tongue on a recent visit to the Art Museum at the University of Memphis (AMUM).
The answer is complicated, says museum director Dr. Leslie Luebbers.
“These things, to us, have a completely different kind of value,” she said, acknowledging that dollar estimates are helpful for, say, the Fogelman family who donated a large chunk of the university’s African art collection for a hefty tax write-off.
“They have value for their pedagogical purposes,” she said. “For the teaching and learning that happens in museums.”
Through Sept. 14, AMUM is displaying its entire collection of African art, partly a result of gallery renovations. There are masks, textiles, sculptures, architectural and furniture pieces and woven baskets. Dr. Luebbers says it’s currently the largest African art collection in the region. This is a rare chance to see the whole thing.
Notably (for a university museum), the works are unlabeled; there’s no historical context. The dark ebony, mahogany and teak carvings have simply been arranged in a large white room, with paper ID tags dangling off some of them as if they were on consignment. If you go seeking information, you may find this exhibit dismaying.
But then, I have my own bad habit of doing more reading than looking whenever I enter a gallery of African art. More often, I breeze straight to adjacent galleries where the paintings have famous names written on them. This is not possible at AMUM. It’s just you, the art, and your western brain wired for contextualizations. What tribe? How old? What does it signify? Unless someone is telling us what’s important, we too often walk right past.
We’ve been walking past these objects for generations.
In the opening pages of his book “Civilization,” British historian Kenneth Clark merely gestures to the African mask, representative of “a world of fear and darkness,” en route to the Olympus of Western art – beautiful Greek marbles, representing a “world of light and confidence, in which the gods are like ourselves, only more beautiful…”
But I think it’s no coincidence that on the heels of Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams,” the Cubists, Fauvists and Surrealists would make more intuitive connections between the subconscious mind and objects crafted in the service of ancient rites, fears, and beliefs.
There’s a certain arrogance in juxtaposing these objects with so-called visual art — as if these artisans, as imaginative and creative as they are, are on the wall for the same reason as Picasso. We also err, like the Parisians of 1904, thinking these “barbarous fetishes” — often made for ceremonies and rituals, but just as often to decorate homes — represent mankind’s pre-enlightened state, a kind of anthropological time capsule.
Consider a mask long enough and its real relationship to modern life — or modern art — may become more alluring. The DNA of ancient tribal customs can be found in commedia dell’arte, or in Halloween costumes or in Stanley Kubrick films like “Eyes Wide Shut” or “Clockwork Orange” where masks create terrifying anonymity for participants of esoteric rites and ritualistic violence. From clown faces to axe murderers like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers, frightening or lifeless masks still trigger primal fight or flight responses connected to survival instincts.
Maybe another reason we distrust African art as serious art is because it sends us scary signals from our subconscious. The stuff of dreams, or nightmares.
Dr. Luebbers and I were standing in front of a carved figure with large breasts and a penis, talking about how notions of gender identity (or fluidity) seem like such a contemporary western problem when I noticed the sound of primal drumbeats in the air.
Different rhythmic patterns came and went. I thought I recognized the “talking drums” of West Africa, which might have been an apropos soundtrack for the exhibit.
Except it wasn’t a soundtrack.
Members of the U of M marching band were practicing a drumline in the lobby just outside the museum. After rolling my eyes at yet another assumption about African culture, I realized it actually had been a good lesson. Cultural reinforcement, maybe. Civilization – and its art – has come a long way. But our ancient roots remain ever with us, stirring our emotions through many different forms.
You really can’t put a price tag on that. ✒ C.B.
“All of Africa” at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis continues through Sept. 14. The exhibit is free, and open from 9-5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
