O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Tight Budget Doesn’t Mar Beauty of ‘African Legacy’

Picture, if you please, an upside-down flag waving in this space. This is an art review with an SOS attached.

Orange Coast College Art Gallery is the improbable site of an extensive exhibit of African sculptures and textiles from private Orange County collections. Installed with flair and care, and accompanied by a budget-conscious illustrated catalogue, “An African Legacy” is a testament to the dedication of gallery director Irini Vallera-Rickerson, who teaches exhibition design at the college, and co-curator Gene Isaacson, an art history instructor.

On view through March 23, the exhibit is the gallery’s second showing of African art from local collections.

In the early ‘70s, when Isaacson assembled the first exhibit, he was obliged to look further afield in greater Southern California. This time, he tapped nearly a dozen private Orange County collections, although he singles out only four (his own, begun in 1970, and those of Richard Monsein, Gayle Fisher, and Jo and Esther Dendel) as “significant.”

Most of the works in the show have been “published”--that is, experts have validated them in books or journals--and most can be traced back to the collections of missionaries and colonizers in Europe.

According to Isaacson’s catalogue essay, this fact helps to ensure that the pieces were actually made by Africans for their own ceremonial use, rather than (as has been increasingly the case) for the tourist trade.

The exhibit consists of an array of Central African and West African pieces primarily from Nigeria, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Zaire and Gabon. They include ancestor figures (sculptures embodying the vital forces of the dead, which could be tapped by the living), fetishes with special good or evil powers, personifications of spirits and objects used in divination.

Musical instruments (drums, stringed instruments and the “thumb pianos” known as sanza or mbira) and many prosaic objects--vessels, knives, hair combs, heddle pulleys (used in weaving) and startlingly large-scale currency--are also included in the show.

Because of the utilitarian focus of the Monsein collection, in particular, the show combines show-stopping pieces with more humble (but generally no less intriguing) objects. Of course--unlike Western art meant purely for contemplation--everything in the exhibit has a specific function, whether it relates to the momentous events of birth, puberty, marriage and death, or to the everyday business of eating, grooming, weaving and trading.

Some objects pay homage to ancestors; others are used as educational tools for the young, as status symbols, as ways of enhancing fertility, as aids in foretelling the future, or as intercessors with the spirits of the universe.

To a Western viewer familiar with the African influence on modernist artists of the early 20th Century, many of the pieces are striking in a purely formal way. Masks with elegantly attenuated noses or horns, sweeping eyebrows and dramatic silhouettes easily capture the fancies of viewers who may know nothing of the use or significance of these pieces.

A Fang mask, shaped like an elongated egg, has a slender, exquisitely tapered nose and tiny eye slits recalling the tactile purity of a Brancusi sculpture. The elements we see in purely stylistic terms--like the exaggeratedly long nose--were probably intended by the sculptor to mirror the emphatic seriousness of the spirit world the mask represents.

This mask and other white-face examples from Gabon were used in ritual performances--at funerals or initiation ceremonies for young males--and meant to broadcast their powers across great distances.

A heart-shaped mask employed by the Kwelle people to promote group solidarity radiates a demure calm; a Vuvi mask with shelf-like forehead, prominent painted nostrils and a platypus-like snout looks sternly forbidding.

The continuity of life--between prior generations and the present, the present and those yet unborn--is a central feature of African religions, and therefore of African art. That may explain why a perky female figure from the Tiv culture of Nigeria has a noticeably protruding belly button.

The art also involves harnessing the positive “life-forces” of animals. The Senufo people of the Ivory Coast fashioned a towering headdress in the shape of a bird with a hugely pregnant stomach. The Senufo use the piece to invoke the watchful parenting of the hornbill, which lays its eggs in a hollow tree sealed up by the male until the kids are old enough to fly.

Unfortunately, the catalogue offers no information about one of the most extraordinary pieces in the show, a tusk from Zaire’s Loango Coast, carved with tiny lifelike figures clutching umbrellas and staffs. Seemingly ignoring a fallen man lying on his back, the figures struggle up a ramp spiraling around the curved piece of ivory. Perched on top, a serene-looking seated couple apparently have conquered the odds and found a lasting peace.

Sculptural qualities are also invoked by such utilitarian objects as small tools and currency.

An adz is an ax-like tool with a curved blade, wielded with extraordinary precision by African carvers. In Zaire, the blade has been transformed into a fantastically long tongue that curls from the mouth of a compact little figure carved into the handle. The tongue/blade is thought to “speak” to the wood, conveying the carver’s traditions and beliefs.

Carved combs from West and Central Africa display familiar mask faces and scenes from community life (weddings, meetings with Europeans). Some of the wooden flutes from Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) take on a figurative quality with the addition of a pair of bent “arms.”

Most unusual to a non-specialist are the examples of forged iron currency from Zaire, Gabon, the Cameroons and French Equatorial Africa, which are variously shaped like anchors, lances, snake tails, Xs or doughnuts. The largest of these pieces were used to purchase young women as brides.

As late as 1909, according to a label in the exhibit, three of the X-shaped pieces from the Luba culture of Southern Zaire would buy a goat, five would purchase a male slave, 10 a female slave. But the label doesn’t explain whether the slave purchases refer to colonial trade in human flesh--quite a different context from the ritual purchase of one’s future spouse.

Naturally, an exhibit like this--pieced together from separate collections assembled for any number of personal reasons--is not the equivalent of a museum show curated to develop a specific cultural theme. It’s hard to get a handle on the art and beliefs of any particular area of Africa by looking at these diverse objects.

Additionally, the show has its awkward aspects (labels are sometimes hard to match to objects, especially when several are clustered together) and curious omissions, the most glaring of which is the lack of a map locating the different regions represented.

The catalogue, while obviously a labor of love, offers scattershot information and no dates to speak of (are these pieces mainly from the 20th Century?).

The lack of identifying numbers alongside the photographs in the catalogue also makes the business of matching up the images with the checklist in the back of the catalogue unnecessarily laborious.

It’s a pity there are no interviews with the collectors, pinpointing the reasons they began collecting African art in general, and these pieces in particular.

But the beauty of “An African Legacy”--which has been handsomely installed even on a shoestring--is twofold. It gives viewers a taste of the compelling forms and deep-rooted meanings found in African art, and it suggests that collecting art is a continuous process of falling in love with objects, learning about their background and attempting to divine their secrets.

And now, the SOS.

For the 1992-93 school year, the gallery received a paltry $1,200 from the college Art Department’s “discretionary funds.” In a burst of magnanimity, the Associated Students decided to kick in an unprecedented $15,000 last May.

But the gallery can’t count on the student body’s donations, which vary greatly from year to year and are not determined until late May--too late to do serious programming for the fall and winter terms.

With the addition of a $500 grant from the Orange Coast College Foundation, the grand total this year is only $16,700. Ted Baker, dean of the arts division, estimates that the gallery really needs at least $20,000 to $25,000 to maintain its current level of operations.

Even that level of funding is a matter of barely scraping by. As things stand, Vallera-Rickerson receives no pay for her gallery duties and is not permitted to teach fewer classes in exchange for her services--a truly shocking state of affairs.

There is also no money to pay the student attendants. And there is also no money to keep the gallery open on weekends, when most off-campus viewers are likely to want to visit.

To help remedy this situation, Friends of the Gallery, a nonprofit support group, was founded last year with about 60 members from throughout Orange County.

In return for donations, members get invitations to openings, a tax deduction and the pleasure of supporting an institution whose director doesn’t allow severe financial straits to serve as an excuse for poverty-stricken exhibits. Information: (714) 432-5039.

“An African Legacy” remains through March 23 at the Orange Coast College Art Gallery, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Hours are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday through Thursday; also 7 to 8:30 p.m. on March 9, 15 and 23. Free. (714) 432-5039.