"Three Ways to Display African Art," New York City Tribune, Oct. 5, 1990, p. 16.

Three Museums, Three Approaches to African Art

by Jason Edward Kaufman

Is there a correct way to exhibit African tribal arts? The "science museum" employs its African specimens to construct a comprehensive model of the culture that created them; the "art museum" parades the objects like precious, exotic trophies, reserving ethnological data for the scholarly catalogue; and the "African art museum," while insisting that the original context and meaning of the works is fundamental to our understanding them, at the same time gently ushers the products into the Western artworld. Three shows, currently on view in Manhattan, exemplify these three approaches, enabling an evaluation of their respective advantages and drawbacks.

At The American Museum of Natural History, "African Reflections: Art from Northeastern Zaire" assembles more than 450 artifacts from the Museum's Lang-Chapin Expedition of 1909-15.

At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Art of Central Africa: Masterpieces from The Berlin Museum fur Volkerkunde" displays 61 rarely exhibited works from Central Africa on loan for the first time to the U.S. from Berlin's Anthropology Museum.

And, at The Center for African Art, "Closeup: Lessons in the Art of Seeing African Sculpture" presents more than 100 objects from the private collections of Udo Horstmann of Switzerland, and of an American who wishes to remain anonymous.

"Closeup," the exhibition at The Center for African Art, is the result of a good idea poorly implemented. Having observed that most museum visitors engage African sculpture in brief, cursory encounters, Dr. Susan Vogel, the Center's Director, decided to teach Western viewers to enlarge their appreciation of the works. To that end, she has enlisted the photographer Jerry L. Thompson to write a photo-illustrated essay about looking at African sculpture.

In the prose part of his catalogue text, Mr. Thompson declares we must go beyond our preconceived schema for interpreting African sculpture. "Western aesthetics is a good place to start making contact with African sculpture. It is a terrible place to stop," he cautions, noting the epistemological gulf that exists between Western secularism and the pan-African belief in "larger-than-personal realities."

Though he concludes that we ultimately cannot know these works, Mr. Thompson recommends longer, more intense looking. The pictures he has created to accompany his essay, some of which are displayed within the exhibition, efficiently emphasize the physical and abstract sculptural aspects that are the theme of the show.

Dr. Vogel's essay seeks to distinguish a morphology of African sculpture, citing its characteristic "plasticity," "density," "active inner volume," "fullness," "aggressiveness," and "active voids ingeniously used." She refers to abrupt changes of sculptural language within a work, to deliberately asymmetrical execution of symmetrical compositions, to the absence of principal views, and to the non-narrative, non-illusionistic nature of the works.

She reminds us that most African sculptures were designed not for a niche or special setting, but "to inhabit human space." Despite Dr. Vogel's disconcertingly rapturous tone, such observations are substantially legitimate and can serve to enhance the reader's enjoyment of the works.

In the galleries, Dr. Vogel has arranged the unlabeled figurines, furniture, and masks not according to their original function, subject matter, medium, style, or place of manufacture. (Visitors can avail themselves of hand-held placards reproducing short catalogue entries for the pieces.) Instead, she has grouped the works in sections titled "Voids," "Volumes," "Rhythm and Design," "Size and Scale," etc..

The notion of directing the viewer's experience through aesthetic lenses is made literal in the exhibition by means of eyepieces, affixed to vertical poles, through which the spectator is invited to obtain a pre-selected view of some of the works. A bit clumsily effected, this intriguing idea proves unsuccessful in actuality.

While the objects within each gathering ostensibly emphasize their section's titular attribute (the use of voids, volume, etc.), the groupings are necessarily artificial, as the objects in each are interchangeable with those in any other. Such visual criteria apply equally to every object, and it is precisely their multifariousness, rather than a single aspect, that should be stressed in order to enrich the viewer's experience.

One would have preferred an introductory section in which an individual object were analyzed in terms of the aesthetic properties under consideration; or one object selected to represent each. The rest of the exhibition might then have incorporated contextual information for the pieces, and an attempt might have been made to examine how the specific features of the design relate to the function and purpose of the works.

Despite its sketchy organization, the exhibition is saved by the integrity of the idea behind it -- to instill an awareness of sculptural form -- and by the extremely high quality of the distinctive Central, Eastern, and Southern African objects from the Horstmann and anonymous American collections. The riveting gaze of the Fang reliquary guardian, the shy expression of the carved east-African girl, the Luba neckrest figure with a zig-zag hairdo by the artist dubbed the "Master of the Cascade Coiffure" -- such masterworks epitomize the stylistic diversity loosely united in the present exhibition.

To judge from the dearth of collateral material provided in The Metropolitan's "Masterpieces" show, the curators must believe that the Museum visitor is interested solely in aesthetic delectation. In any event, it is evident that the focus is on visual as opposed to ethnographic elucidation.

And there is much to delight the eye in this assortment of sculptures, masks, and furnishings from an area that today comprises Zaire and parts of Angola and Peoples Republic of Congo: a Yombe mother and child, a southern Kuba initiation ritual mask, yet another headrest by the Master of the Cascade Coiffure.

Carved wooden "power figures" bristle with nails, mirror shards, feathers, blades, seed packets, cloth strips, and other media applied by a priest to endow the figures with special spiritual properties. One fully loaded example with an abstract, geometric face has its tongue hanging out and its eyes opened wide in a look of revelation.

There are confused and conflicting signals emanating from this exhibition. Although the main concern of the Museum is with the works' artistic features, the exhibit is given a compact, one-room installation that does not enable full visual access to many of the sculptures. The tendency toward frontality which the "Closeup" show seeks to enlarge upon would seem to be the rule at The Met; most of the works are in cases against a wall and can be viewed only frontally.

Even more paradoxically, nowhere are the aesthetic properties of the works analyzed in either native-African or Western terms. The introductory catalogue essay, written by Dr. Hans-Joachim Koloss, Director of the Africa Department at the Berlin Museum, offers only the briefest introduction to the region and a summary of the 117-year history of the German Museum's collections. The entries for each object are far more valuable, deciphering iconographical details and explaining the original context and meaning of the pieces. If the objects merit this sort of treatment in the catalogue, why are they accorded an antithetical one in the gallery presentation?

The largest and most sure-footed of the three current exhibitions is "Reflections," at The American Museum of Natural History. Organized by Enid Schildkrout, curator in the Department of Anthropology, and Curtis A. Keim, professor of history at Moravian College and a research associate at the American Museum, the exhibit draws mainly upon the wealth of ethnographic material brought back by Herbert Lang, a mammalogist and photographer, accompanied by James Chapin, an ornithologist and artist, on an expedition (1909-15) into the region of the Nile and Congo Rivers, modern-day Zaire.

Beyond accomplishing its primary mission to find specimens of rare mammals, the team returned with scientific records of plant and animal life, and with photographs, paintings, drawings, and 4,000 objects of the Mangbetu tribe and their neighbors. It is with these various documents, sculptures, musical instruments, pieces of furniture, articles of clothing, jewelry, weapons, tools, and pottery that the exhibition reconstructs the culture of a people who, until the late nineteenth century, had no contact with European civilization.

Among the items are superb symbols of Mangbetu royal power, such as the elaborately carved ivory horns, and stools supported with caryatid figures; hide-covered harps with anthropomorphic fretboards; Mangbetu ceramic jars whose necks are shaped into female heads; feather-studded hats of woven fibers; and multi-lobed, iron throwing knives whose surfaces are adorned with delicately incised decorative motifs.

In the interest of science, the curators have arranged the artifacts in categories that deal with such themes as courtly splendor, the royal orchestra, pottery, basketry, weaponry, etc. The catalogue examines native history, politics, domestic arts, music, philosophy, and art, yielding a comprehensive survey of the peoples of Northeastern Zaire.

But, the curators acknowledge that the artifacts can be examined both sociologically, and aesthetically. In the interest of art, most of the sculpted pieces are displayed "in-the-round," in a manner wholly conducive to untroubled examination. The catalogue provides an art historical overview explaining the evolution of Mangbetu art in relation to surrounding tribes and the colonial encounter.

Several remarkable passages quoted from Lang's notebooks serve to demystify the art of the primitives, revealing their penchant for a peculiarly Western conception of "art por l'art". For example, the expedition leader records carved figures "not used as idols, but ... simply produced in a spirit of imitating a human figure" or "made simply for ornamentation and the pleasure to look at."

The American Museum's approach to exhibiting African art is at once the least pretentious and the most sophisticated. The visual experience of the objects in no way suffers from their display according to ethnographic or sociological parameters. Indeed, an understanding of context heightens an appreciation of their beauty and craft. Knowing how the objects fit into the tribal way of life helps one to imagine how the native experienced them. Without such knowledge, Western viewers cannot begin to answer the incessant question: What do these works mean?

"African Reflections: Art from Northeastern Zaire" continues at The American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, through January 6, 1991. The exhibition is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New York State Council on the Arts. After New York, the show will travel to Washington, D.C., Denver, Atlanta, and San Diego. In conjunction with the exhibition, The AMNH is conducting a two-day symposium (October 12-13). For further information call (212) 769-5305.

"Closeup: Lessons in the Art of Seeing African Sculpture" continues at The Center for African Art, 54 East 68th Street, through March 24, 1991. For further information call (212) 861-1200.

"Art of Central Africa: Masterpieces from The Berlin Museum fur Volkerkunde" continues at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, through November 4. A free film and lecture program related to Central African art will take place at the Museum on October 21. For further information call (212) 8789-5500.

Jason Edward Kaufman ©