Commerce and Authenticity

Is what’s produced for commerce with outsiders inauthentic? That’s one way to describe the fundamental intuition that makes Westerners look for African art produced by Africans for religious ritual and traditional dance – and to draw back from what’s made for trade.

There is, undoubtedly, work done for trade that has little intrinsic meaning and value. We buy it all the time, in fast food and fast merchandise. But the basic idea that commerce and meaning are opposed is obviously false: artists have to eat, and many of them profoundly desire commerce in the sense that they want to speak to their fellow men and women. 

This basic opposition is certainly false some of the time in Africa. You can see this in the account by Brenda Schmahmann in “Stitched-up Women, Pinned-down Men: Gender Politics in Weya and Mapula Needlework, Zimbabwe and South Africa.” (This article is chapter 5 in Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Förster, eds., African Art and Agency in the Workshop (2013) – which those of you who’ve seen my recent posts will know I’ve been reading along in.) Schmahmann describes the history and the products of two projects in which African women, with the assistance of outside professionals, used sewing skills to produce things of beauty and to earn income.

I’ll focus most on the embroidered cloth created by South African women near Pretoria, in a project called the Mapula Embroidery Project. Initiated, it seems, by the Pretoria Council of Churches, and catalyzed by a member of the UNISA (University of South Africa) art and fine art department and colleagues of hers, this project was seeded in the black community of Winterveld and took root there. It took root only with difficulty: local group leaders’ deaths and disappointed hopes undercut it but it survived. You can see some examples of the Mapula work – which strikes me as beautiful and stylistically innocent at the same time – here. (And for examples of the Zimbabwean Weya project’s appliqués, see this link.)

But the work turns out to be deeply political. As Brenda Schmahmann explains, the women embroiderers respond to the tremendous sexual oppression of their lives by creating images of a just world. The Weya appliqué makers are sometimes blunter, but they too tended to the portrayal of the world they wished for. (The Weya project as such ended when funding ran out, though Schmhmann reports that "works in a Weya style continue to be made" (131).) 

Thus an artist named Thandi Sondlo creates a piece called “Nelson Mandela and Graca Machel,” in which Machel says to Mandela, “I like your shirt” and Mandela responds, “And me too I like your dress” – while a child sits between them and below them is an image of “Mr Mbeki [South Africa’s second president] developing the world.” Schmahmann says, “In her representation of Mandela and Machel, Sondlo remedies the lack of reciprocal affirmation that usually characterizes relationships between men and women in her community.” (Text accompanying plate 5 in the book.) It's noteworthy also that Sondlo did not invent the dialogue she presents; rather, she borrowed it and transmuted it from a South African joke in which the first speaker was not Graça Machel but rather Archbishop Desmond Tutu (141). This work is clever as well as moving.

These pieces, understood against the backdrop of the makers’ lives, become both sweet and sad. As to the supposed opposition between commerce and authenticity: the idea seems almost absurd as one thinks about these works, whose authenticity, whose expression of pain and hope, is so immediate and overpowering. 

African masks and the costs of authenticity

Having admired and in a small way collected African masks for years, I've recently begun to study them. Isn't this a bit late? Well, no: I've followed the advice a wise friend gave me long ago -- that I should just buy what I liked. But now I find I want to know more about these things that I like.

Unfortunately a lot of what I'm learning is unsettling. For instance, the question of authenticity: is an authentic mask one that was carved for use in ritual practices embedded in African custom? If that definition is right, then two things would follow. (I say this based slightly on my own experiences looking for masks, but more on what I’ve been learning from reading, particularly in the fascinating book by Christopher B. Steiner, African Art in Transit (1994), which studies the African art trade in Côte d’Ivoire.)

First, it's very unlikely that many of the masks for sale in African markets today are authentic in this sense. The traditional practices of which the masks were a part are fading – though I doubt that these practices are entirely gone – and so presumably fewer and fewer masks are being made for actual use in ritual. Moreover, there are a lot of masks for sale, so many that there probably just aren't enough villages to support the commerce from their own ritual stock. Most masks, instead, are probably being made right now, and mainly for the tourist trade. They may look old, but that’s because they’re specially treated to appear that way.

Second, if a mask actually is authentic, how did it make its way from ritual to commerce? Steiner offers this description of bargaining “[a]t the village level of the art trade”: “[M]uch art is obtained during times of personal or regional crisis…. Bargaining here is less concerned with price as it is with the negotiation of a sale – i.e., convincing someone to sell something.” (64) On the same page, Steiner quotes an African art trader on this process:

When buying in villages, you have to be very careful about what you say. You have to be gentle and polite. You have to explain to the elders that these objects are things which people want to learn about. “Your children,” you must tell them, “won’t be able to appreciate or understand these things unless we take them and preserve them in museums and in books.”

I recently heard Michael Sandel speak about his current work on the intrusion of market thinking into areas of life that used to be regulated, at least on the surface, by other forces. (For example: government programs that pay children for reading books during summer vacation.) He was worried about the moral corrosion that might be caused by market values' "crowding out" of other human impulses, and that's an important concern. But the moment when an authentic mask is pulled from the world of its creation into the world of art and commerce seems worse -- an act of cultural destruction rather than mere corrosion.

Paradoxically, almost all masks that are really old (say, a century or more) seem to be in Western museums. There they have been preserved against climate and pests, which are not kind to wooden masks. There too, it seems, they get treated as objects for preservation rather than for use and in due course replacement.

But now, today, it seems right to say that those Westerners who simply like African masks should not seek masks that fit the definition of authenticity I started this post with, because if they succeed they will be contributing to the disintegration of a culture. Instead, they – we – should embrace masks made today, for trade, as today's expression of this traditional art. And we should buy what we like.