Call me naive, but I've never thought of documentaries as paid acting jobs. "Reality" and "documentary" have always been near synonyms in my vocabulary. But in the galleries of the "Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought" exhibit, the Christian Science Monitor film crew, armed with lights, reflectors and cameras, was busy making reality just a little more real.
While waiting for the upcoming "crowd" scenes, curators and museum personnel were standing around outside camera range, dodging moving cords and making sure nothing got broken. A photographer on a dolly was oohing and ahing as he angled in on a life-size bronze head from the 11th Century, framing the piece in three-quarter profile for the perfect shot.
The Monitor's careful staging didn't seem out of place. In fact, it was a perfect metaphor for this exhibit.
The Yoruba show at the Phoenix Art Museum is a sham. It is cultural exploitation posing as aesthetic exploration. It's a collection of minor facts masquerading as meaningful history. The Yoruba show isn't about African art and African thought. It's about Western myth and Western dominance.
Under its mask of political correctness, the exhibit is this year's version of Little Black Sambo. Pandering to the current rage for multiculturalism, the Yoruba exhibit, on loan from the Center for African Art in New York, ends up reinforcing stereotypes. It casts Africa in the impossible roles of both exotic heart of darkness and land of social perfection.
"Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought" is Africa as fantasy. It's a feel-good exhibit, showing and saying what a lot of people want to see and hear. But it doesn't give us the real Africa--or the real history of African art. No, this is the polite emasculation of a culture in the name of art.
The process starts at the front entrance. A preliminary wall text proclaims vague generalizations about Yoruban art coming from a background that emphasizes both "oneness" and "shared tradition" as well as "originality and diversity of individual experience." The text concludes, "This simultaneous respect for tradition and admiration for originality imbues Yoruban culture with an energy that is both dynamic and creative."
And so, from the start, a mood is established. We're entering the Peaceable Kingdom, the Primitive Idyll. Yorubaland is Africa's answer to Disneyland: harmony, love, equality and peace forever abound.
And that's just the text. After reading, we move into the first gallery, a room full of heads done in bronze and terra cotta. All of the heads date from the 11th to the 15th Centuries. And, most amazingly, they are in a variety of dramatically different and distinct styles.
One small terra cotta head, for example, with idealized features and lightly incised lines demarcating, like tattoos, the surface of its face, is a study in perfect serenity--a sort of African Buddha. Another head, about the same size and also made of terra cotta, is highly abstract. With its multifaceted crown, it looks like the rook in a chess set, with two small dots for eyes and a line for a mouth added on. A third terra cotta head, just a few feet away and a little larger than the other two, is exaggeratedly naturalistic. Its pudgy, distorted face, locked in a muted but mouth-open grunt, looks like a cross between a crying baby and a death groan.
All the heads are exquisitely rendered. Some rank with the finest sculpture in the world. But after walking around the gallery, you can't help but wonder where all this stuff came from and what culture could produce such masterpieces. And, more importantly, you end up asking why each head in the room looks so different from the others.
Don't look to this exhibit for answers. These heads, for all we know, are just isolated archaeological treasures. As far as the organizers of the exhibit are concerned, Yoruban art has been and is being done in a historical and cultural vacuum. Nowhere in the exhibit is Yoruban art put in a broader context than the local community and regional religion. Don't think Yoruban art has anything to do with Islamic art, Greek art, Egyptian art or even other African art. Yorubaland and its art, it seems, sprang forth in some ex nihilo act of genius to occupy the African coast. In this exhibit, not only are we denied a history of this people's art, we're denied a history of this people. Yorubaland, now part of present-day Nigeria, is--and has been for more than 1,000 years--a highly urban collection of city-states. For centuries, the Yorubas have traded not only with the people around them, but also with Europe and the West.
Yorubaland, too, lies at a major political and religious crossroads. Islam dominates the cultures to the north, and it is a major religious influence in the region occupied by the Yorubas. And Yorubaland has been in the middle of several military and political conflicts throughout the centuries, including the upheavals and atrocities of the slave trade.
These things, you would think, must in some way have affected the Yorubas, and found their way, however subtly, into their art--and into this exhibit. But you'd be wrong. The historical complexities and realities of history have no place here.
This historical amnesia, however, is one of the minor crimes of the exhibit. The most disturbing and offensive parts of the show are yet to come.
In the largest gallery in the exhibit, below a large bronze figure with pointed breasts and a two-pronged cap, a small placard reads, "Because they unite all Oshigho society members, past, present, and future, onile possess enormous accumulated power. They are kept in the sealed and guarded inner sanctum of the . . . meeting house."
Sealed and guarded, huh? All that's guarding this onile is a flimsy box made of Plexiglas. If this onile is a private and sacred relic meant to be seen by only a few, what's it doing being flaunted in public?
It's amazing how gawking at the sacred relics of other cultures in the name of art has become such an institutionalized and well-accepted Western tradition. If instead of the onile figure this were an American flag on the floor, every right-winger from here to Chicago would be having a self-righteous fit. If it were consecrated wafers spread out for inspection, millions of Catholics would rightly be offended. But from the looks of it, no one is making a fuss here.
Maybe that's because in the Yoruba exhibit the onile has been divested of its sacred role. It's on display not because it has power, but because it is aesthetically pleasing. It has fine lines, a well-worn patina, a primitive folk majesty. In short, it's been reduced to its outward visual appearance.
But though it may be beautiful, that's not why the onile was made. This sculpture is a sacred receptacle, and it should be respected as such. As it is, it's a prostituted shell, stripped of its original meaning. It's just another star in fine art's equivalent of the freak show.
The entire Yoruba exhibit is, in fact, an aesthetic freak show. Nothing really matters here but how things look, and the more exotic and bizarre they look the better. Isolated on pedestals and walls, protected by plastic and patrolled by guards, this exhibit doesn't look any different from any other recent show at the museum. Put Picasso, Matisse, Rubens and Rembrandt up instead and the effect of the show would be the same. Nothing about the structure or presentation of the Yoruba exhibit draws us into any consideration of this art beyond its appearance. We're here to appreciate at a distance. We're here to gawk.
Art, however, is not only about gawking. It's about how philosophy, economics, politics and social order affect aesthetics. It's about how things are used, and the meanings they're given. It's about actions and beliefs. It's about how cultures relate to the world around them.
Art is part and parcel of history. It shouldn't just stand on its own. But in the Yoruba exhibit, most of these objects are just stage props. They do very little in helping us to understand the narrative of Yoruban art and life.
In the end, you have to wonder what so many of these objects are doing in Western art collections, given their sacred natures and community purposes. One placard in the main gallery, a case in point, tells us that the stone sculpture above it belonged to one Leo Frobenius, an esteemed scholar of the Yorubas. After his studies, he took the sculpture back to Europe. It seems a strange thing to comment on. Are we supposed to feel glad that he robbed the Yorubas?
But then again, the Yoruba exhibit offers a valuable lesson in the pervasiveness of Western imperialism. Judging from the provenance of most of the pieces in this exhibit, the Yorubas have been plundered, and this is a show mounted in celebration. You realize that Western nations at the height of their empire building not only dominated nations politically and economically, but also systematically drained those places of their cultural and artistic resources.
The Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London are monuments to that pillaging. True, without Western intervention a lot of great art might have been lost to history. But does that valid concern merit taking a people's history in order to make it our own? These museums' incredibly vast collections of non-European art are testaments to the idea that either other cultures aren't worthy of their past or are incapable of safeguarding them. Sadly, the Yoruba show perpetuates that myth.
When will a Western museum give African art its due? Africa is a continent with a myriad of cultures, religions, languages, peoples and philosophies. And like any other part of the world, it's a bundle of contradictions, flaws and attributes. The Yoruba exhibit deals Africa a double blow.
On the one hand, it idealizes the Yorubas, but in the most demeaning and patronizing of ways. It makes them out to be a culture of innocents, of good people living in perfect unity with the Earth and with each other, free from the realities of wars, conflicts, economics, and political and religious struggles.
On the other hand, it exploits their art and their heritage. It takes the sacred and makes it mundane. It perpetuates the idea that Africa and the rest of the world are there for our taking.
Such attitudes are insulting. They're a form of imperialism in the guise of cultural exchange. The Yorubas, and the modern political state of Nigeria that contains them, are part of the world community. Let's let their history and their art reflect that. Let's not turn them into another television documentary.
The Yoruba show at the Phoenix Art Museum is a sham. It's a collection of minor facts masquerading as meaningful history.
We're entering the Peaceable Kingdom, the Primitive Idyll. Yorubaland is Africa's answer to Disneyland.
If this is a private and sacred relic meant to be seen by only a few, what's it doing being flaunted in public?
The Yorubas have been plundered, and this is a show mounted in celebration.
SUED BY THE STONES THE CANDY SKINS GET N... v9-11-91
