Blinders of Innovative African Art

By PETER STEPAN

The ideology of tribalism is not alone responsible for the denigration of the achievement of African artists. The concept of tradition has been used as additional ammunition in the attack to diminish their art. Since it is assumed that African artists simply follow traditional patterns and styles, their creative ingenuity has been less valued from the onset. Where innovation and originality are evidently unimportant, even undesired, one must surely question whether one is dealing with art at all. No debate in the arts during the past decades has been as superfluous and tedious as this, and in a number of countries it has been pursed with particular tenacity.
One cannot overlook that the speed of innovation, the challenge to produce ever-new inventions, indeed the hysteria association with advancement -typical aspects of the industrial society -have imperceptibly been projected onto aesthetic values. The dizzying carousel of “ism” in the art of the 19th and 20th centuries is paralleled in the accelerated pace of progress in technology. To expect the same of the other cultures, with a different sense of time and a different aesthetic evolution, and to judge their art against the yardstick of western drive for innovation is to overlook their unique characteristic. It has been observed time and again that African sculptors were expected to improve upon and “update” their approach. The supposedly prescribe patterns would not be so full of life were they mere repetition. Alone the speed at which such innovations occur reflects a different concept of time.
Here, too, Africa was an ideal foil. The African carver is stylised into the antithesis of the Western artist. While the former is said to remain anonymous and content with repeating patterns that are only too well known and dictated to him by his own tradition, the European artist dazzles by virtue of his originality and inventiveness. Since the Renaissance, a favourite of Apollo and muses, the European has long since transcended mere artisanship.
Another legacy of the Western philosophical and sociological preoccupation with art plays major role in this context: the overstraining of the notion of art. But the more recent European distinction between high art and low art, between “fine art” and “applied art”, has little relevance in Africa. In Italy, the 16th century discussion on disegno was the starting point for separating the fine arts from association of trades (artes), leading to a gradual liberation of the creative idea from its execution. French academicism, German idealism and the romantic notion of the genius were way stations on the artist's path toward autonomy that set him apart from the rest of society, culminating in the privileged outsider role, which evolved in the 19th and 20th centuries. In European and American cultural circles, art begins where purpose ends. In Africa, by contrast, art and craft were never divorced, but remaining one. “Independence of purpose” is not considered a category that endows an activity with greater value or accords it special status.
The purpose of classifying Africa art into groups based on stylistic criteria and ascribing them to different masters began some time ago. The “Master of Buli” is the first invented name given to an unknown artist, to whom some 20 figures and caryatid stool have been attributed. Only recently has it been suggested that his oeuvre was actually the work of three artists, the most important of which is called the “Master of Kateba”. Similar research efforts have established a close link between previously unconnected works. This method represents an important step for both art ethnology and art history: it hones the eye for individual characteristics, where a numinous uniformity of style was previously presumed to prevail. Bernard de Grunne compiled an impressive index comprising 300 names of African sculptors largely already known, not including those anonymous artists who were given invented named: a veritable manifesto on African individualism.
Africa and Europe as unequal brothers: this is how Europeans view themselves and their neighbouring continent to the south. Mechanisms of collective psychology are at work here. Perfectly happy to grant their own artists the freedom to indulge in a veritable cult of their person, European have in the past denied artist status to Africans whose body of work was simply labelled “tribal art” Boasting of themselves as the great avant-garde, they viewed their “brothers” as rooted in tradition. One could stretch to cast a positive light on this contrast: as tradition dissolves in the West, Africa purportedly a continent of farmers, hunters and gatherers becomes a Garden of Eden that offers a nostalgic journey into the past. Ever since technology and industrialisation have followed the relentless road to progress, beginning in the last third of 19th century, the European eye has sought respite in the picturesque of African artisanship.
This essay is an excerpt taken from Peter Stepan's book titled “WORLD ART: AFRICA”. Stepan shares the sentiments of unbiased African historians and ethnologists that Africa is one of the most important art regions in the world. The book is an informative survey of African art, shown through a selection of its outstanding achievements.