DISCUSSION 5 ARTS

enabea nyinaa n e. 11/I dwelling places are not alike.)

ante proverb

Why Africa? Why Art? Kwame Anthony ppiah

I learned about art growing up in my hometown, Kum a i the capital of ante, an old kingdom at the heart of the new republic of Ghana. There were paintings and drawings on our wall ; there wer culptures and pot in wood and ivory and earthenware and bra ·

and there were art books in the bookca e . But above all my mother ollected Asante goldweight : mall figure or geometrical hape ,

cas t in bras from wax original , that had been u ed for weighing gold du t when it wa (a it was well into thi century) our urrency. The figurative goldweigh t are wonderfully expre ive· the depict people and animals plant and tools, weapon and cl me ti utensil , often in arrangement that will remind an an te who looks at them of a familiar proverb.

011ite often fo r example, you will find a weight that repre ent two crocodiles with a hared toma h, which will evoke the proverb: Funtun-ifimafu ne Denkyemfimafu baanu ya.fimu ye yafimkoro · nanso woredidi a nn woreko no, na .firi atwimenemude ntira. It mean roughly: tomach mixed up, crocodile ' tomachs mixed up they both have one tornach but when they eat the , fight be au e of the sweetne of the wallowing. The idea of the proverb-whi h expres e one of the dilemmas of family Life-i that while the acquisition of each family member benefit the whole fa mil (there i only one t mach), the pleasure of enjoyment i an indi idual thing (the food has to get into the tomach through one of the mouths).

Even the ab tract geometrical weight with their urface de orated with pattern , often use the adinkra ymbols which are foun d a well on kan tools and funeral cloth , each ofwhi h ha a name-Gye J yame fo r example-and a meaning-in thi a e, the power of God. But quite often, also you will find that one of these elegant weight so obviou ly crafted with great kill and care, ha a lump of unworked metal stuffed into a crevi e in a way that completely de troy it ae thetic uni ty, or ometime a well-made figure has a limb crudely hacked off. The e amputation and ex re cence are there becau c, after all a weight i a weight; if ir doe not weigh the ri ht amount, it annot erve ir fun ti n. If a goldweight however finely rafted, ha the wrong ma then omething needs to be added or ch pped off to brin it to it proper JZe.

There i , thus, an e tremcly elaborate ultural code e pre ed in the e miniature ulpture , and-with the patina that ome fr m age and human handling and the cxqu i ire de tail pr du din the

Goldweight. Asante, 18th-19th century. Private coUection.

lost-wax process that made them-many of them have an obvious aesthetic appeal. It does not take long to recognize that the goldweights ofAsante differ from those ofother Akan societies: Fante or Baule, say. or is it hard to recognize stylistic change over the centuries. There are histories of taste written in these objects, if only we could read them. Goldweights, in sum, have many of the features that we expect ofworks of art. In Ashanti itself, they were appreciated for their appeal to the eye or for the proverbial traditions they engaged. But in the end, as I say, they were weight , and their job was to tell you the value of the gold dust in the weighing pan.

The best of the Asante goldweights are among the splendors of African creativity. But they were not the product of a culture that valued these objects as art.Their decorative elegance was something prized and aimed for, of cour e, but it was an ornament, an embellishment, on an object that served a utilitarian function. It is clear that some people-chiefs among them, but also the richest commoners-made particularly fine collections ofweight , and that, in using them in trade, they advertised their wealth at the same time, by displaying the superior craftsmanship of their po sessions. Perhaps once, when the weights were still being used, people knew the names of those who made them best, but no one now knows the names of the great casters ofgoldweights from the past. Still, to insist upon my point, in appreciating and collecting the e weights a art we are doing something new with them, something that their makers, and the men and women who paid them, did not do.

The goldweight tradition is also very particular. The u e of figurative and abstract weights, made in brass by the lost-wax proce s, is not widespread in western Africa, let alone Africa more generally. O utside the Akan region of Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, th~re are, so far as I am aware, no traditions that have produced ob1ects that could be mistaken for Akan goldweights. Akan goldweights are African, because the Akan cultures are in western Africa, but these traditions are local, and while they reflect the complex cultural and economic exchanges-between, say, Asante

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

and the I lamic traders of the ahel, or Baule ulture and the European trade of the coa t (and thu refle t urrent o~life' ider than those of the societies in which they were made)-1n oul b a mistake to see them as capturing the es en e of the va t amut f African creativity.

Anyone who has looked at collection of ma k from v e ter~ and central Africa will tell you that you an o n learn t re o nize roughly where most of them come from. The traditi n f ea h society in ma king, even those that have influen ed and b en influenced by neighboring tradition , are till quite re gnizabl ' distinct, as are the roles masks pla in the different fi rm f . performance where they have their fulle t life. The P?int here 1 ~e same: Africa's creative traditions are variou and part, ular. ou \ ill no more capture the essence of rica' art in a inul tra iti n than you can grasp the meaning of European rt b examin.in Tu n painting of the fifteenth century. nd what goc f, r art e , ev n more, for life. Africa's form of li.fi are t div r to apture in a ingle ideal type. An understanding of our old, eight require that

you know something not of ri an but of kan Life; the generalities about African life are b and lar e human eneraliti

So we might a well face up to the ob iou roblem: neither Africa nor art-the two animating prin iple f thi exhibiti n­ played a role as ideas in the reation of the obje t in thi pe ta ular show.

Africa Take, fir t, "Africa."Through the lon age of hum n ultura1 life in the continent, and more particularl in the half-cl z n r millennia since the con truction of the fir t great ar hire rural monument of the ile Valle m t peopl in the ntin nt have lived in ocieties that defined b th elf and other b tie r power. It would never have o urred t m t f the Afri an in thi long history to think that the belon d t a Jar r hum n r up defined by a shared relation hip t the ri an onrinent· a hundred years ago, it would not have o urred to an one in m h met \ n. Only recently has the idea of ri a ome t figure imp rtantly in the thinking of many Afri an and tho e that took up thi idea ot it, by and large, from European ulrure.

The European wh coloniz d ri a thou ht of ub- aharan Africa as a ingle place, in larg part be au e the thou hr of it a the home of a single- egro-ra e. (That i \, h ,, h n, e peak f Afri ans, black pe ple ome to

ab Berber mind de pite th fa t that li hter­

skinned northern Africans- unequivo ally inhabitant of imagination, the culture and 1et1e f ub- aharan i a formed a single continuum refle ting an underl in ra · al uni • which expre edit elf in the" a age rh hm f th "sensuality ofAfri an clan e th mask from what wa ailed th ' D ark

'primiti e vi

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in tell tual in ri a came to think of themselves for the fir t time a member of a . egro race-and a African ~they drew not onl on hi g neral We tern framework, but also on the ideas of

n an crican inrelle tual -Nexander Crummell, E.W. Blyden , . E . B. Du Boi -who had been taught to understand the_m el e. a . e ro in the on text of the ew World system of ra ial d m inat1 n, rhe framework left by slavery. In the 1 ew World, where many dark- kinn d people had been brought together r 11? . ri a and. de rived f the pecific cultural knowledge and

tradmon f their an e tor , the omm n experience of the iddle Pa a e, n of en la ement b nded together people whose an e t r had l.i ed er diver e tyle of life, hundred , sometimes th u and of kil me ter apart. In the ew World-in Brazil, for xample r uba r th nited tate -people of diver e African

an e trie , b und t ether in ea h pla e b a hared language, might end up e pcri en in th em el es a a unity.

Bur in I the great di er ity ofsocieties and cultural fi rm , a n m enized by the lave trade. Over the last mi llenniu m a I lam pread aero northern Africa and into western

ri a and 0\ n th e ea tern ri an littoral; over the last few enru ric a hri iani ame (with it multiple inflection ) in the

fi t rep f Eur pea n trade and colonization; over the la t century, a I nial empire und ri an ocieties increa ingly tightly into hen ' W I bal e nom ic . tern and into the modern order of

· and er the la t de ades, as the global spread of radio and televi i n and th re ord and film indu trie has reached its ten ta · illage and town all over Africa; there have, of

rm u fo r e bringing the experiences ofAfrican 1et1e er. But de pite all these force , the central

uln1r n li fe in rn_, judgement, remains not the amene ulture but their enormous diver ity. Since

thi exhibition antedate some or all of these n r 1e rp ra tion, their origin are more diverse yet.

Thi hould no t be urpri ing. We are speaking ofa continent, of hu ndred of millio n of people. But the fact i that the legacy of the old ur pean , ay of thinking, in which what unites Africa i tha it i the home of the egro, makes it natural for u , here in the

e t to expect there to be a hared African e ence and that tradi tion make u equally likely to expect that thi essence will how it elf in the unicy of ri can art. In this older way of thinking,

afte r all all the art e erywhere expre ed the common geniu of a people. (T hi i one rea on wh o man of the objects collected by European in ri a in the la t nvo en curie are labeled not with the name ofa mak r but with the name of a "tribe," an ethni group who e hared oncep tion the e mask or bronze or shrine figures were thought o expre .) But a you will ee a you travel through he " ork n di lay here, it w uld take an eye completely

in en . itivc o he parti ular to redu e chi magnifi ent mi cellany to he expre sion of the pirit o a ingular oherent ri can nature.

1.WA:-1l /\ , TIIO ·y /\PPl,\H

What unites these objects as African, in short, is not a shared nature, not th~ shared character of the cultures from which they came, but our ideas ofAfrica, ideas that have now come to be important for many Africans, and thus are now Afri an ideas too.

Art It is tim now to explore, for a moment, the second side of the difficulty I have been adumbrating: the fact that what unites these objects as art is our concept as well. There is no old word in mo t of the thousand or so languages still spoken in Africa that well translates the word "art." This too is not surprising once you think about it; there is, after all, no word in seventeenth-century English (or, no doubt, in seventeenth-century Cantonese or Sanskrit) that carries exactly that burden of meaning either. The ways of thinking of"art" with which we live now in the West (and the many places in the world where people have taken up thjs Western idea) began to take something like their modern shape in the European Enlightenment. And it is no longer helpfi.Ll to try and explain what art ha come to be for us by offering a definition; in an age in which, a John Wisdom liked to say, "every day, in every way, we are getting meta and meta," the art world has denizens whose work i to challenge every definitjon of art, to push us beyond every boundary, to stand outside and move beyond every attempt to fix art's meaning. Any definition ofart now is a provocation, and it is likely to meet the response: "Here, I have made (or found) this thing that does not meet your definition and I dare you to say it i not art."

Still, we have received ideas about art and about artists, and my point is that most of these ideas were not part of the cultural baggage of the people who made the objects in thi exhibition. For example, since the nineteenth century especially, we have had an important distinction between the fine and the decorative art , and we have come increasingly to think of fine art as "art for art ' sake.'' We have come, that is, increasingly to see art as something we must assess by criteria that are intrinsic to the arts, by what we caU aesthetic standards. We know art can serve a political or a moral or even a commercial purpose, but to see something as art is to evaluate it in ways that go beyond asking whether it serves the e "extrin ic" purposes. Many of the objects in this exhibition, on the other hand, had primary functions that were, by our standards, nonaesthetic, and would have been assessed, first and foremost, by their ability to achieve those ends. Something about our attitude to art is captured by the incomprehension we would feel for someone who looked at a painting and said: "It' profoundly evocative, but what is it for?"

A Response IfAfri an art was not made by people who thought of themselve as Africans; if it was not made as art; if it reflects, coUectively, no unitary African aesthetic vi ion; can we not still profit from this as emblage of remarkable object ?

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What, after aU, doe it matter that this pair of concepts-Africa, art-was not u ed by tho e who made thee objects?They are still African; they a re still work of art. Maybe what unite them as African is our deci ion to see them together, as the products of a single continent. aybe it i we, and not their maker , who have chosen to treat the e diver e objects a art. But it is also our how-it ha been constructed for u now, in the We tern world. It might be anything from mildly amusing to rigorou ly instructive to speculate what the creators of the obje t celebrated here would make ofour assemblage. ( onsider: some of the e works had religious meaning for their makers, were onceivcd of a bearers of invisible powers; some, on the other hand, were in u e in everyday life.) But our first task, a re ponsible exhibitiongoer , is to decide what we will do with these things, how we are to think of them.

In pre enting the e objects as art objects, the urator of thi exhibition invite you to look at them in a certain way, to evaluate them in the manner we call "ae theti ."This means, as you know, that you are invited to look at their form, their craftsmanship, the idea they ev ke, to attend to them in the way we have learned to attend in art museums. (It i hard to ay more exactly what is involved here-at lea t in a brief compa -but most adults who go regularly to exhibitions of painting and sculpture will have practiced a certain kind of attention and found it worthwhile; if they have not, it is hard to see why they hould keep going.) o what is important i not whether or not they are art or were art for their maker . What matters is that we are invited to treat them as art, and that the curator assure u that engaging our ae thetic attention will be rewarding.

We can also accept that they were selected on a continental ba is that guarantees nothing about what they will hare, nothing about how these objects will re pond to each other. Provided you do not exp~ct to d~sc~ver ~ these creations a reflection of an underlying African artl t1 u111ty, an engagement with the whole exhibition will be _more than the sum of the unrelated experiences ofea h separate obJect, or each separate group of objects from a common culture. How the e individual experien e add up will depend, of our e, as much as anything el e, on the viewer, which i as it hould be. But there are questions that might guide a reading of this sh w-it is part of the pleasure we an anticipate from it that there are so many-and, in closing, I would like to suggest a few of mine.

Let me st~t with a datum: thi exhibition decisively e tablishe that anyone with half an eye can honor the artistry ofAfrica a con~nent w_hose creativity has been denigrated by some and' sen~mentahzed by others, but rarely taken seriously. I have been arg~ng that to take these African artworks eriously doe not require us to take them as their makers took them. (If that were so we should, no doubt, be limited to religious evaluations ofW ester~ Europea~ art of the High Middle Ages.) And one other way to take them senously would be to reflect through them on how the

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH

enormou temporal and patial range of human reati i , exemplified in this exhibition h a been adapt din ur ultu r r the last few enturie to an int rpretati n of fri ·a a the h 111 ' of

people in apabJe of ivilizati n. What doe it teach u ab ut the pa t o ulture, that it

has had uch g reat diffi ulty learning to re p · t man ' the artwork in thi exh ibiti n be th ' ar Ari an? [any f thee

objects ome from Eur pean mbled a curio itie or as puzzle r a · ntifi · data· they \ 'r und ubredl ' appre iated-loved ev n- • n_ f th indi idu J , ho , rhered

them. But the have rarely Lived at the heart cons iousne s· and when the_ have, it ha ith astoni hing onde cen i n, a , h n Lad r ader f Nancy unard' egro (a , o rk publi hed in I f black creativity):' The egr e have b en, b because of their innate purity and primitiv an be a a prism, without an intenti nal I reo ·upat ed in rendering their vi ion with rrirude and\ irh ur, ny imp iti n of exterior motive.' It i part f the hi erh in._ that bears refle tion a e travel an tL a ·r - that half a entur ago rhi an y f peak.in up r African art.

What (more ho e rhap · IJ u · a ut ur ulruraJ

pre ent that we ha the fir:t rim , brough 1cr many, so marvelo . rifa rhn gr ara n r a mere urio iti for th pa, n · teen i n

we ac ord to art? in h rt, · rpr r n

it elf a p art of the hi tor) of ur lrure: a m m 'nt in rhc complex en ounter of Eur pc and nt ulrur· with Africa and it ?Thi i a qu ti n t wh vi i rhi exhibition i equipped t re · r dg u a

common sen e that w have we an re r that ommon en ea ain t t

The e, then are me q · ] h \ . Bur, like ea h ofyou, I will · m em pe uliar to my own hi tory ome

These artifa t will , hat the , ay will shaped by what ou are a ell a r th y are. Bu~ that they speak to you-a the gold, ei h te ke r my -h-p.

b h -om m t er- houl be a p te er th humru h .th h , .

s are w1 t e_ m n and w m n th , r made th m. As th y peak to you, they will dra , u int an · n f the \ rid f rho e who made them (thi i ah a, on era.I re art). What ou, ill di n that xpl rati n i n r o butman · hd. · , a n I n-but y n m xhau ted by-the parad f, nde 11 xtra rdi;. rye.