ART REVIEW : ‘Elephant,’ ‘Sleeping Beauties’: African Riches at UCLA

UCLA’s Museum of Cultural History has long been among the town’s most important artistic and ethnographic resources. Now, as the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, it has its own building. That’s space to spread its riches and show what it can really do as an institution of national and international significance.

Anyone who hasn’t seen its two ongoing African exhibitions should give themselves a break. “Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture” offers more than 250 mesmerizing objects. It’s the most ambitious organizational effort ever concocted by this museum and one of the most moving.

“Elephant” is like a three-dimensional PBS nature special acted out in everything from objects that suggest the creature’s ancient origins to exquisitely carved tusks and soap boxes selling “elephant power.” It joins a larger cultural rumination on the nature of the human animal. The ensemble seems to ask again, “How can humankind be so endlessly energetic and inventive and, at the same instant, so obliviously destructive?”

Maybe it has something to do with the Homo sapiens ego. Elephants are the planet’s largest land animal. Their actual and symbolic power is awesome. Tamed, they help man with the force of a four-ton bulldozer. Their great size and longevity betoken wisdom and endurance. Their tails serve African leaders as whisks that signal the power to solve all problems. Kids the world over love elephants’ peanut-nibbling serpentine trunks and floppy ears, even if only from seeing “Dumbo.”

Yet when human and elephant are depicted together in these magical objects the mortal is always hugely larger--witness an elegant “Female Elephant Rider” from the Mende people of Sierra Leone. At bottom, this failure to keep things in proportion has led to the near extinction of a glorious beast.

Exhibition literature is at pains to point out that African peoples and the elephant lived together in harmony for centuries. The animal was hunted with ritual respect and all parts of its body put to important practical or ceremonial use.

Among the Ngbandi people, for example, the elephant was central to their creation myth. An impressive group of dance masks shows a range of empathic interpretation. An elephant mask from the Bamum captures the animal’s flexibility in distilled abstract form. The Idoma show the same subject under tension, and it looks like a three-barreled machine gun.

Elephant tusks are the perfect shape for horns and trumpets. There are few more impressive objects here than these carved ivories. They began as musical instruments or ritual treasures. Examples from the Benin and others have the solemn nobility of the European Middle Ages.

After the arrival of European explorers and traders, ivory served to make objets de luxe for wealthy Anglos, who brought along their usual voracious appetite for things and their briskly efficient guns. It was gunpowder that tipped the ecological balance between man and elephant. We do seem to have a penchant for annihilating anything bigger than us.

And trivializing it. The show winds up with a Victorian living room decorated with ivory nick-knacks, piano keys, umbrella handles, fans, shoe horns. . . .

It ends with a tuskless elephant’s skull and photos of their butchered bodies.

*

The museum’s deputy director Dornan H. Ross organized “Elephant” and edited the 400 pachyderm pages of its catalogue. He co-organized the other current exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties,” with University of Iowa art history Professor William Dewey.

It centers around a collection of headrests, but is really a show celebrating the gift of the Jerome L. Joss collection to the museum. Joss--a former Chicago ad man who coined the term Posturepedic --retired to Los Angeles and tailored his acquisitions to fill gaps in the museum’s holdings.

The range of the collection is extensive, running from the more traditional artistic forms to a group of furnishings and architectural ornament from the urban and Islamic Swahili of East Africa. Quality is impressive. Sculpture of full figures runs from a large Nigerian mystical male holding snakes to a small Malawi female who has the rapt innocence of a maiden. Masks bracket emotional eloquence. A concave, buck-toothed face from Liberia is sensual and introspective. Another example from the area is made of everything from horn to wood and rope and has the ferocity of an African Minotaur. With rare exceptions, Western artists still haven’t figured out how to make this kind of combination of the felt and the formal.

There is something both bemusing and amusing about the headrest collection. The impressive part is the way these little objects of use--most often in wood--can be so aesthetically gratifying. Generically they consist of a slightly bowed cross-piece held horizontally on a more or less elaborate base.

Mainly African in origin, the group also includes examples from Egypt where they’ve been in use since at least 2600 BC. One nifty Japanese number is a hollow jade green ceramic with a space for burning incense while you doze. China provides a black and gold lacquered noggin reposer that also acts as a strongbox, allowing you to keep your mind on your money while resting.

African examples have an astonishing range. One from the Tellem people of Mali is as simple as a Brancusi. Examples from Zimbabwe remind us that a headrest is a kind of stool for the reclining noggin. Some actually double as stools, others act as ceremonial, funereal and symbolic objects--like examples where two are held together with wooden chains.

The most imaginatively engaging hard pillows tend to come from Zairian peoples--the Expressionists of Africa. In one type the head is held aloft by a four-legged female caryatid and is clearly for the use of a VIP. In a variation on this theme, a rather befuddled little chap in European garb sits on a chimerical animal. Such works are said to induce dreams of ways to gain wealth.

Western viewers are liable to be amused by the idea of using solid structures such as these where we softies use nice pillows of feathers, down or latex. The museum has provided a couple of beds for viewers to test. Some are hopelessly uncomfortable, others surprisingly buoyant and soothing.

The more basic risibility here, however, is the way the exhibition points up a fundamental human flaw: Humans still think they are pretty hot stuff. Truth is our bodies were not designed to lay down flat. Supine, there is no sensible place to comfortably put our heads. Headrests are a kind of orthopedic crutch to compensate for this weakness in the species--and they make us Posturepedic.

* Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA, (310) 825-4361. Closed Monday and Tuesday. “Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture” through May 16, “Sleeping Beauties” through Dec. 12.

Beginning Tuesday, William Wilson will be on leave to write a book. He will return Sept. 1.

. . . and a headrest from the Yaka people in Zaire, above, can be seen in two UCLA museum exhibitions.