Going Beyond Western Notions of What Art Is : Culture: In a symposium at the Bowers, experts discuss values such as secrecy and ambiguity that inform creative expressions.

Traditionally, institutions such as the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art that exhibit art and artifacts from other cultures try to serve as a window into other societies. By explaining why certain objects are made and how they are used, they aim to let viewers understand how they are different, and how they are similar, to the Earth’s other inhabitants.

But in some respects, that goal may be a conceit of a Western mind that believes all things relating to human behavior are knowable if we just study long enough and ask the right questions.

In a talk Saturday at Bowers, the senior curator of the Museum for African Art in New York City pointed up how certain cultures strive to keep key information about their way of life private--even from other members of those same societies.

In her hourlong lecture, Mary H. Nooter drew heavily from her own doctoral research with the Luba people of southeastern Zaire, which led to “Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals,” an exhibition now at the Museum for African Art. Nooter was one of three speakers featured in a daylong symposium entitled “Conversations on African Art and Its Context.”

(Joining Nooter on the program were Henry Drewal of the University of Wisconsin--Madison, one of the top U.S. experts on the Yoruba culture in Nigeria, who spoke on Yoruba works in the Tishman collection now on display at the Bowers. Barbara Blackmun of San Diego Mesa College gave a detailed historical context for a single work in the Bowers exhibition, a carved altar tusk from the Kingdom of Benin, also in Nigeria.)

Obscurity and ambiguity are difficult concepts for Western museums that display objects from other cultures. There is a hard-to-resist urge to describe an object in a few authoritative sentences, and to encapsulate form, use and meaning in a single wall label.

In the “Secrecy” exhibition, the Museum for African Art chose instead to embrace ambiguity and explore its use as a means of both preserving and protecting knowledge. The provocative exhibit opened the new SoHo location for the renamed museum (it was previously the Center for African Art).

Nooter studied among the Luba from 1987 to 1989, just before the Central African nation of Zaire began its slide into virtual anarchy. Despite exhaustive interviews and even an initiation into Luba society, Nooter said she came away from her research with an overriding conclusion: “I wasn’t meant to know everything, and many people in Luba society weren’t either.”

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Art objects associated with Luba royalty and chiefship, and with divination and other aspects of Luba culture, preserve and transmit information through their design. Secrecy is a “mechanism for the maintenance and protection of knowledge” in a society without a written language, she said.

Only certain segments of the society are meant to receive this knowledge; in Luba society, as in any group, knowledge is power.

Much of Nooter’s doctoral dissertation was concerned with secrecy and its function in the art of the Luba. In later discussions with Susan Vogel (executive director of the Museum for African Art) and others, the idea began to emerge for a museum exhibition on secrecy in the art of a broad range of African societies.

The illuminating exhibition that resulted draws much of its power from its unusual tack: instead of concentrating on the content of particular works, it focuses on how that content is expressed, and to whom it is revealed.

“Secrecy” is the kind of show that can color all subsequent viewings of African art--an exhibit with an activist curatorial viewpoint that has, appropriately, drawn kudos (Nooter is working on a second show--on the subject of memory--to open next spring, and hopes to complete the trilogy with an exhibit on dreams).

It is possible to appreciate the beauty, craftsmanship and sheer power of much African art without context. The first boom in collecting African art, early in this century, was a significant influence on some major Western artists, particularly the Cubists.

The current Bowers exhibit of African art is largely in this tradition, a display of many of the best in the Paul and Ruth Tishman Collection, owned by the Walt Disney Collection. Understandably, it serves primarily as an introduction to the collection, which has been mostly in storage for decades.

The “Secrecy” exhibit, however, serves as an example to the Bowers and other ethnic-art museums of how to go beyond merely displaying such masterworks.

Nooter stressed that “secrecy” in the context of her exhibition should not be confused with the enigma and mystery implicit in antiquated European notions of the “Dark Continent.” That concept was born not only of ignorance, but also was a carefully crafted precept for the “enlightenment” of the continent by Christian missionaries.

Secrecy, she said, is universal: Think of military or patent secrets, or even a child’s whisper. In traditional African societies, it can play an essential role in the delineation of power and authority, and in the perpetuation of rites and rituals that have in some cases continued for centuries.

Many of the artworks Nooter focused on in her talk advertise the presence of secret knowledge, but the exact nature of that knowledge is revealed only to an initiated few. As Nooter explained by relating a proverb from Africa: “Power is not how it is expressed, but how it is concealed.”

She showed a slide of one powerful piece from the “Secrecy” exhibit, a boli from Bamana, Mali. The earthen sculpture resembles an animal but is a reservoir of knowledge that is said to represent the Bamana conception of the universe. According to Nooter, the Bamana people say: “It is made to look like an animal, but it is not an animal. It is a secret.”

In one elaborate wooden sculpture, the true function is hidden by its design. Inside a plugged hollow space in the sculpture is a resin that is said to hold the breath of a deceased ancestor.

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In the Museum for African Art exhibition, secrecy is explored both in how it functions within African societies and how it colors Western perception of the works.

European and American audiences, whose notion of art is markedly different from those of African and other non-Western traditional cultures, often focus on elements of the works that have little to do with their intended function.

Luba sculptures were prized by early collectors for their expressive carvings of female figures, Nooter said, but the information was actually imparted in the carvings along the edges. Collectors long believed these carvings to be merely decorative.

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Even anthropologists and art historians who spend their professional lives attempting to decode art objects often come away frustrated. Nooter said a common mistake is to assume that there is a one-to-one correlation between design elements and a specific meaning, whereas meaning even to the initiated is subject to interpretations.

“One shouldn’t assume that everyone knows the same thing about a work of art,” Nooter said. “Much of African art is a language,” but that language can remain elusive to researchers.

The Dogon culture of Mali was used by Nooter as an example, both in her lecture and in the “Secrecy” exhibit. Despite being one of the most closely studied of African societies, there is little agreement regarding the interpretation of Dogon art.

Beyond the difficulties inherent in such research, Nooter said, there is an ethical question: “What is the extent to which we have a right to know?”