African Art: An Unusual Way of Looking at Life

Life is a messy junk heap of mixed facts, fantasies, wishes and realities. Our poor minds can’t make sense of it unless we sort things into piles of stuff that seem to be alike, rusty tin cans over here, bicycle handlebars there, discarded toys in the middle. This pigeon-holing is absolutely necessary to our function as human animals, and our ability to generalize is one of our saving talents. Unfortunately, it is also the way we arrive at stereotype and prejudice.

We see black people depicted as endlessly dancing and playing basketball and conclude they are a sexy athletic bunch with lots of rhythm, and Jimmy the Greek announces they were “bred” that way. We see Asians in an eternal ritual of bobbing little bows and scurrying about and decide they are distant, polite and industrious.

Maybe there are such things as national or racial characteristics, but if we settle for the gross outline of comforting cliche and dramatic myth, peoples are deprived of three-dimensional humanity, individuals are robbed of their right to be different, and we fail to put together an accurate picture of life in all its rich and sloppy stew of nuance and paradox.

That’s why it’s important to have exhibitions like “The River Shall Never Be at Rest.” The show is on view at UCLA’s Museum of Cultural History to April 3 and deals, as the subtitle says, with “Transitions in Yoruba Art.”

Hi, gladda see yuh. Where you been?

The Museum of Cultural History is in one of those enviable, aggravating periods of waiting while it finally gets its very own brand-spanking-new museum building after years of making do (and nicely at that) sharing the Wight Gallery with the art department. They did handsome revelatory shows there, but with their own digs--slated for completion late in ‘89--they can have permanent displays and do special shows when they are ready, instead of waiting in line for space. Splendid and capital. Meantime, this excellent outfit has been publicly muffled, confined to a small gallery in the basement of Haines Hall where you wouldn’t think a significant exhibition could be possible. Wrong again.

“Transitions”--originally put together by scholar Ray Silverman for UC Santa Cruz and then reworked for UCLA--presents objects of sobering aesthetic quality and an important insight that is refreshing, tolerant, hilariously risible and wryly deflatable of the Great Cliche of African Art.

Now, in case you’ve been devoted to shopping, aerobics, channeling or some other worthy dedication and thus failed to absorb this important distortion, it is this: African art consists of awesome dance masks, costumes and magic artifacts used in communal rituals intended to placate tribal ancestors and persuade them to use their clout in the spirit world to bring about everything from good crops to robust health to successful delivery of babies.

African art is not art in the Occidental sense. It is not valued for its beauty but for its spiritual effect. The idea of individual originality is foreign to it because it is made according to static forms and traditions passed down through the generations by anonymous artists. Picasso invented Cubism because he looked at an African mask.

As a lumpy generalization that is not bad, but this show is out to prove it too gross for comfort. There are 12 million Yoruba spread over southwestern Nigeria, one of the three largest ethnic groups in Africa south of the Sahara. They are mainly farmers but they distinctively live in cities and towns of up to to 100,000 souls. There is something urbane and populist about their art, especially compared to the traditional highly aristocratic styles of the neighboring Ife and Benin peoples.

Maybe their courtly influence shows in a big wooden drum carved for the Ogboni judicial society. Squat, hook-nosed, heavy-lidded figures suggest Benin, and the drum is stained with a green patina as if it longed to be of Ife bronze. And those narrow carved palace doors. Ah, how they reflect the ancient kingly hauteur with their dignified guardian figures and the nobleman riding his bicycle.

“Bicycle? What is a bicycle doing in the middle of this traditional, timeless, unchanging spiritual art? And what the deuce is going on in that panel where two chaps brandishing flintlock pistols are detaining a nude beauty?”

The uneasy suspicion that this is a Yoruban version of two cops busting a hooker on Hollywood Boulevard may be off the mark, but whatever is going on feels real and everyday.

“Who perpetrated this affront to awesome ritual magic?”

Arowogun.

“What do you mean Arowogun? Everybody knows African artists are anonymous. Arowogun who?”

Just Arowogun. He lived from 1880 to 1956. He carved this door around 1940. It seems that lots of African artists have names and are revered figures. Somehow early on, European ethnologists just had this nice cliche that African artists were anonymous. Maybe they wanted to believe it because they were fed up with the egotism of Occidental art and they just didn’t ask the Africans for their names. Turns out there are numerous names floating about.

“All right. Names. But none of that nasty personal originality stuff.”

Glom on to that carving called “District Commissioner in a Canoe.” It is by Thomas Ona and dates around 1940.

“District what?”

The British colonialist riding in front with his pith helmet and pipe and huge spectacles, the very model of cool white efficency. The four black oarsmen seem to be wearing cricket caps and expressions of heavy-lidded detachment like Doonesbury characters.

“Just a fluke. Something he did once as a breather from carving awesome ritual objects.”

Wrong again. Three cases full of figures by Thomas Ona depict genre types from a British golfer to a couple walking a dog that looks like a badger, to an impassive Yoruba counselor to a missionary and a solicitor looking well-meaning but naive. They mark Ona as a distinctive sensibility and sharp observer right down to the down-slanting eyes of the Caucasians that tell us something about ourselves we hadn’t noticed.

They have some of the vulgar energy of Hummel figures or those satirical ceramic parodies on hillbillies and doctors you see in the windows of schlock gewgaw stores for tourists here in the States. But Ona was a far subtler artist. He could have influenced our sophisticated caricaturists of the 1920s, but there is too much empathy here for mere satire. Ona adapted traditional Yoruba forms to looking at life around the British colony, and the results are hilariously telling without a nasty bone in them.

Nobody knows how many centuries the Yoruba have lived in Nigeria, but for as long as there is any evidence, they have tolerantly absorbed influences into their art and culture with amazing resiliency. A pair of shrine figures demonstrate the underlying formal excellence of this art with its refined balance of curves and volumes. Everything on the surface of this art shows the easy flexibility we associate with urban pop culture.

Place for everybody here. Traditional Yoruba belief includes many gods, so when Islam and Christianity turned up Allah and Jesus, they were welcomed into the pantheon. Arabic script slashes across a wooden prayer board, and a carved-in-Yoruba-style figure of a missionary embraces a cross. When iron came along, it was welcomed and celebrated with a group of blacksmiths placed atop a spectacular dance-mask headdress.

It’s an art that seems perpetually fascinated by the possibilities of the new and ceaselessly amused by it. When sewing machines came along, they were used to make fancy embroidery once done by hand. Looks good, saves a lot of work. A pair of beaded royal slippers have the bright patterns of a comic strip and a pair of eyes on the toes. You can imagine the king looking down and smiling.

Yoruba love good grooming and say that unkempt hair may be the first sign of lunacy. Cartoon drawings show choices of hair style at the barber. Men may choose styles like “Modern Kennedy,” “Beatles” and “Baby Round.” Women can make tiny braids into open woven cages like “Remo Carpet Style.” Hair styles can give important social information about marital status or religion. They can also be pure fad.

You worry. Are the Yoruba going to adjust themselves into cultural extinction? It’s upsetting to see great carvings replaced by politi-kitsch posters of heads of state. It’s worrisome to find the Yoruba preferring to express their fascination with twin children using glaring plastic Betty Boop dolls instead of their traditional figures.

But then there is that wonderful carving of Queen Victoria. She only has one big pouter-pigeon breast and one hand. They say the carver did it that way because he worked from a photo where that was all that showed. Was that naivete or some canny critique of the limits of photography?

Well, if there is an acid test of a culture going to seed, it’s the tourist art. Pity the sophisticated traveler who thinks he’s too smart to pick up a few pieces like those shown here--miniature genre scenes showing a spectrum of Yoruba life from wandering musicians to religious study to men playing checkers. Keenly and quickly carved, they are vividly accurate and good natured.

The Yoruba know the difference between fad and trad. They say, “What is sensible today may be madness at another time.”