Authenticity and African art - again

As I learn more about African art, I hope I'm appreciating it more and perhaps grasping a little better what some of the debates about it involve. I've posted about the question of authenticity before, especially here and here -- and here's what's struck me most recently. 

Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, in her “Coda” to the fascinating book she and Till Förster co-edited, African Art and Agency in the Workshop (2013), describes the functioning of “a Kamba women’s self-help group” making baskets in Nairobi, and writes that “[c]raft such as Kamba baskets … are sold to both local elites and expatriates, and traders supply the women with considerable feedback on aesthetic preferences from both groups of buyers…. The feedback has also influenced color choices, with a preference for so-called natural tones, and nonsynthetic materials, reminiscent of the influences on Navajo weaving early in the twentieth century by white collectors and gallery owners who wanted to keep it ‘traditional.’” (393) (For examples of Kamba sisal baskets, though not necessarily from the women's self-help group Kasfir discussed, click here.)

Part of Kasfir’s point is that wherever there are tourists and foreign markets, the local creators shape what they do in part with those buyers in mind. Today there are tourists everywhere – except in the places off the beaten track, whose residents dream of reaching the tourists buying elsewhere, as Kasfir indicates (390).

So is the art produced for these markets inauthentic? One answer would be that such art must be considered inauthentic because it was produced as a commodity. But that’s a hard position to defend, given that all or almost all art is at least in part a commodity. (Wasn’t the Sistine Chapel commissioned?) Even in African communities where art may have been made only for ritual purposes, and for only modest economic reimbursement, its producers surely received benefits of various sorts, such as “a certain importance and esteem in the community,” as Kasfir mentions in an earlier article reproduced in this volume, “Apprentices and Entrpreneurs: The Workshop and Style Uniformity in Sub-Saharan Africa” (367). Today, after Andy Warhol, it’s not surprising that, as Kasfir eloquently puts it, “commodification has become the norm in many [African art] workshops and has lost some of its stigma as it has become an acknowledged part of the broad sweep of changes introduced with modernity riding astride colonialism and political independence in African countries.” (386)

Another answer would be that art for the market is inauthentic because it doesn’t reflect the true impulses of the creators but rather the patrons’ or customers’ wishes. But this position is hard to defend too. The patrons’ wishes undoubtedly influence what the creator makes, as Kasfir emphasizes, but the creator’s views and achievements no doubt influence what the patrons wish for. The creator may well produce different things for different audiences, or even reserve some special works for his or her own personal enjoyment, but it doesn’t follow that any of these are inauthentic. To borrow from the world of etiquette: if we want to be courteous to others, using polite manners is an authentic expression of that desire. The different ways we engage with different other people may all be authentic expressions of ourselves, in those differing contexts. I don’t mean that everything people do is automatically authentic – just as the fact that there are social influences on what we do doesn’t make it all inauthentic either.

Still another answer would be that art for the market is inauthentic because it isn’t done with care. Kasfir, I think, would agree that much work for the market consists of “souvenirs or curios” (389), and it may well be that this work isn’t done with much care – though it may still be rightly fascinating to tourists who have not encountered it before (one shouldn’t be ashamed to be a tourist buying tourist art). Kasfir also seems unimpressed with “the perennial copies” that get produced – but it seems to me that a well-executed copy would in fact be authentic in the sense I’m considering now, precisely because it would have been done with care.

Yet another criticism might be that art done for the market isn’t authentic because it isn’t done with creativity – it lacks the spark of creation that marks authentic art. “Perennial copies” would be inauthentic in this sense, even if they are done with great care. But Kasfir makes clear that sometimes the impact of the market is to foster creativity, for example among the Dogon, where “it has increased competition among mask carvers and has also rewarded virtuoso masked dance performances that tourists strive to capture on video.” (389) (For one dealer's examples of Dogon masks, most evidently produced for the market, click here.)

There’s also another puzzle: is copying by definition not a form of artistic creativity? It might be that merely copying is not creative; recording the music for a CD is creative, but the process of producing a million copies is not. Even this proposition seems a bit uncertain: perhaps one might make one’s art consist of the process of mass production. But even if mechanical reproduction cannot be creative, copying by humans is not mechanical. In her earlier article, Kasfir observed that “even in cultures that hold style uniformity in high regard, the concept of drift has to be taken into account.” (371) Both parts of this observation are important. People don’t reproduce originals exactly, and so there is always some room for “drift” and with it for creative change. Just as important, some cultures value “style uniformity.” If style uniformity is a crucial aesthetic criterion, then artists will seek to achieve it; their artistic creation is the achievement of that uniformity.

That notion may seem to miss the point of creativity. But there are quite a few contexts in which Western art is very much concerned with uniformity. When classical orchestras perform, they interpret the score – but the score remains set. So, too, when actors perform Shakespeare (at least most of the time), or, I think, when dancers carry out the directions of a choreographer. The uniform basis is the foundation for the interpretive creativity. So, too, the mask carver’s ability to fully implement the rules of his style may precisely be his creativity.

There is, at last, one way in which art for the market may be inauthentic – namely that it is not a full copy. If work made for the market is visually identical to work made for ritual purposes, but was made without the religious rituals that would have been required to make the resulting piece carry religious power, then the work does not embody the same social practices as an authentic original would have. This is true. My impression, however, is that not every mask made in earlier times in fact carried such religious significance or was made in such a ritual fashion; people in Africa, as elsewhere, have been operating in the world of commerce and exchange for a long time. Nevertheless, some masks were made with ritual care, and the knowledge of those rituals is fading, as is Africans’ belief in them. So there may soon be no new masks which are authentic in this sense.

But even that won’t mean that the masks lack human authenticity. The artist who seeks to honor his or her forebears’ cultural practices by faithfully reproducing the objects they made is expressing an authentic human purpose. The artist who seeks an income from works that honor his or her forebears’ cultural practices is also expressing an authentic human purpose. And so is the artist who seeks his or her income with works that draw inspiration from, but are not identical to, those that came earlier, and that instead reflect new insights and achieve new results.

I think the net result of these arguments would be that there are so many forms of authenticity that the concept itself should be put to one side. One advantage of doing so is that those who admire African art could cease to worry about whether any given piece is authentic in yet another sense, namely that it is what its seller claims it is. That doesn’t matter, nor do the other senses of authenticity, if the only real question should be, after all, whether you (or I) like the work.

Creativity and Individuality

In “Navigating Nairobi: Artists in a Workshop System,” another of the chapters of African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Jessica Gerschultz describes the entire Nairobi art scene as, in effect, a permanent floating workshop. In this system, she writes, “[a]n artist builds his or her career through contacts with other artists—who provide leads within the system and share materials, expertise, and space…. It is the reliance on this social network, and the skills gained therein, that outweighs dependency on any one institution or individual.” (221)

At first blush, all this is surprising. Aren’t artists thought to be engaged in deeply solitary exploration of their own creative resources? If that picture of creativity is accurate, then the artist’s skillful maneuvering through the many levels of the Nairobi workshop seems more likely to interfere with his or her art than to enhance it.

But I’m realizing that the idea of the artist as deeply solitary is at best misleading. The artist may indeed be drawing on deep interior sources, but that’s not all he or she draws on. If it were, we wouldn’t all recognize, indeed take for granted, the existence of artistic schools and eras. Those shared esthetics don’t arise by accident; they’re the result of artists’ encountering each other’s work, and each other. As Till Förster, another contributor (and co-editor) of this volume says, a workshop “is often the place where artists become familiar with the aesthetic perceptions and normative expectations of others—be they fellow artists, teachers, or critics.” (“Work and Workshop: The Iteration of Style and Genre in Two Workshop Settings, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon,” at 326). In the world of twentieth-century English literature, my father, Richard Ellmann, once wrote a book, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (1967), about the ways great writers engage with each other, which begins (at 3): "'Influence' is a term which conceals and mitigates the guilty acquisitiveness of talent." 

But there can be too much of a good thing, or rather too much social communication for the fostering of creative variation. As a general proposition, it seems safe to say that the more all-encompassing one’s social environment, the more one will conform to it. So in an Egba Yoruba family workshop, described by the anthropologist Norma H. Wolff in another chapter of this volume, “the imagination that fueled creativity imposed boundaries on innovation so that iteration of the family style was predictable.” (“‘A Matter of Must’: Continuities and Change in the Adugbologe Woodcarving Workshop in Abeokuta, Nigeria,” at 310). Förster also reports, by the way, that among the Senufo of northern Côte d’Ivoire, the carvers’ community is so significantly culturally differentiated from the larger group as to reasonably be described as a “tiny ethnic group living among the farming majority.” (Förster at 330.)

In that light, the Nairobi floating workshop begins to look like a very good way to foster fresh invention. Artists there, as everywhere, exist in a social situation – but in Nairobi there may be so many groupings and subgroupings, and so much freedom to move among them, that the artist is free, in fact obliged, to find the subgrouping of his or her choice. And even then the Brownian motion of the many component parts of this scene may guarantee that change is constant.

In today’s world, “what fosters change” is almost equivalent to “what is good.” It is worth remembering, though, that the striking works of African traditional art often seem to have been the product of cultures where much of what was to be admired was the faithful reproduction of the models handed down from the past. In the world in which that art was made, creativity was not absent; perhaps it flowed more slowly from generation to generation and yet very deeply.

Creativity and condescension in the rebirth of Zimbabwean sculpture

Back in the world of African art, I’ve just read another fascinating chapter from African Art andAgency in the Workshop (Sidney Littlefield Kasfir & Till Förstereds., Indiana University Press 2013). This one is by Elizabeth Morton, an art curator and art historian, and is a study of “Frank McEwen and Joram Mariga: Patron and Artist in the Rhodesian Workshop School Setting, Zimbabwe.”

There’s a lot to the story she tells, and I’ll only focus on one part of it. But the broad narrative is that Frank McEwen left Europe in the 1950s because he was “disillusioned with newer trends in Western art, such as abstraction” (275), and came to Zimbabwe – Rhodesia at the time – where he sought to train artists who were more in touch with the collective unconscious than the over-schooled artists of Europe had become.

McEwen’s notions today seem only a step away from other Western fantasies of the noble savage. But in Rhodesia at that time, the opportunity he offered to African artists was evidently unique and attractive, and for offering it McEwen was reviled by most Rhodesian whites. Moreover, McEwen was apparently a tremendously effective operator in the international art world. And he fostered Zimbabwean art. It seems fair to say that there was no extant tradition of Zimbabwean sculpture when McEwen arrived. McEwen played a crucial role in helping African artists (among them, Joram Mariga, the other person named in the title of Morton’s chapter, and the person who actually rediscovered Rhodesia’s deposits of soapstone, which became a primary medium for the new sculptors) to invent this tradition. Within 15 years of his arrival in Rhodesia, McEwen had “mount[ed] … triumphal sculpture-only exhibitions at MoMA (1968), the Musée d’art modern in Paris (1970), and the Rodin Museum (1971).” (282-83)

Morton writes that “[i]n his catalogs and publicity for these successful shows McEwen asserted that the sculpture dealt largely with the supernatural and that it could be explained primarily in Jungian terms.” (283) One might think, at this point, that McEwen’s notions amounted to a harmless overlay on a creative movement that proceeded freely because of his help and despite his characterizations. But that isn’t true, particularly in one very important respect. McEwen, who had worked closely with the sculptor Joram Mariga, betrayed him (the word “betray” is Morton’s, and appears just). Morton thinks the fundamental reason was that Mariga, who was both a Christian and the child of a traditional healer, was “a didactic, forceful intellectual” who could have “disrupt[ed] the flow of the supernatural and mystical carvings that were becoming increasingly lucrative.” (287) Mariga’s career was blighted for almost two decades, though happily it eventually recovered, and he ultimately forgave McEwen as well.

Given how seriously McEwen pursued his notions of African art, we might now think that McEwen would have blighted careers in another way – by denying admission to his world (and, more specifically, admission to the Workshop School at McEwen’s Rhodesian National Gallery, though as a site of regular classes the Workshop only lasted till 1964) to those who had the taint of formal art training. In fact he tried to do exactly that. Morton writes: “His preference was for illiterate, pagan Africans untainted by exposure to Western schooling or religion and who were potentially capable of expressing the collective unconscious. As a result, he tried hard to keep trained artists out of his workshop.” (276)

But he failed. The African artist whom McEwen “entrusted … to act as the workshop’s gatekeeper,” a man named Thomas Mukarobgwa, had himself “been taught to paint by a local missionary.” (276) With Mukarobgwa playing this role, “[t]he end result … was not the exclusion of mission-trained artists from McEwen’s workshop. Instead, they simply hid the facts from him.” (276-77) So McEwen’s fantasies were undercut by the very person he relied upon to implement them.

One can’t help but feel that justice was served – both in Mariga’s eventual return to international art success and in Mukarobgwa’s subversion of McEwen’s patronizing admission rules. But it seems, at the same time, that McEwen was a tremendously powerful and positive force in the development of what’s now Zimbabwean sculpture. The artists and the patron were interconnected in ways that aren’t easily summed up as all good or all bad, all agency or all domination.

Perhaps the clearest lesson is that people given the chance to work creatively will do so, despite whatever obstacles or presuppositions may still constrain them.

A mimetic apprenticeship

Here is Silvia Forni’s description of an apprenticeship as a potter in Nsei, Cameroon (in her “Masters, Trend-makers, and Producers: The Village of Nsei, Cameroon, as a Multisited Pottery Workshop,” chapter 3 in Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Förster, eds., African Art and Agency in the Workshop (Indiana University Press 2013):

Initially, the master and apprentice work on the same kind of object, the young man carefully observing the master’s movements while trying to reproduce his gestures and postures. The training involves very little verbal exchange: if the apprentice does not follow the correct procedure, the master will stop working on his piece and will step in to demonstrate the correct way to complete the task. (Kindle location 2134 of 9227)

She goes on to emphasize:

the essentially mimetic character of apprenticeship, a relationship meant to “turn the neophyte’s initial mimicry of his master into unselfconscious movements that are masterful in their own right” (quoting an article by Nicolas Argenti, “People of the Chisel: Apprenticeship, Youth and Elites in Oku (Cameroon),” 29 American Ethnologist  493, 502 (2002)). (Kindle location 2143 of 9227)

One might imagine that this sort of training would lead to a professionalism that consisted solely of imitation. Perhaps it often does. But Forni also says that an “ability to cater to different markets and innovate, although not the norm, seems to characterize the attitude of many of the potters who influence trends in contemporary Nsei pottery.” (Kindle location 2163 of 9227)

Now all this is really quite startling. My impression is that a lot of current educational theory emphasizes the necessity for reflection by the learner, and the value of the teacher enabling or guiding the learner to engage in that kind of thought about what he or she is learning. Those propositions seem to be important elements of understanding adult learning. To be sure, it’s not entirely clear from Forni’s article how old the apprentices here are; at one point she refers to “young men” entering apprenticeship, at another she refers to “boys.” But even if the Nsei apprentices are all young enough not to qualify as adults, the seeming absence of opportunities for reflection appears quite unlike what contemporary American education even for younger students aspires to.

It may be that Nsei potters are reflecting while they practice imitating their masters’ physical movements, but that’s hardly clear. It is clear that the masters are not focused on eliciting any such reflection. To put the matter bluntly: this kind of education doesn’t appear to be reflective. If it is reflective, then any process of education is reflective, because people think about what they are doing, So they do  – but if that truth is enough to ensure the presence of reflection, then educational practice needn’t be shaped to add any further support to what is an inevitable process anyway.

The point of reflection is generally thought to be to give the learner a deeper understanding of what is being learned, so that he or she can go beyond merely reproducing past lessons to address new problems with the benefit of professional skill. But on Forni’s account, it seems that many graduates of this unreflective apprenticeship process achieve creativity nonetheless.

None of this disproves any tenet of American education. It may be that more Nsei potters would develop into creative professionals in a different educational system, even if some develop that way in the nonreflective system they in fact learn in. It may also be that potting, a physical art, requires a more physical, mimetic form of education than some other professions – law, for instance. But I think, nevertheless, that Nsei apprenticeship at least raises some question about how sure we should be about the educational tenets we currently embrace.  

Cannibalism and the teacher-student relationship

Nicolas Argenti, an anthropologist who apprenticed as a Cameroonian woodcarver, recently discussed a ritual by which such apprenticeships traditionally concluded. He does so in “Follow the Wood: Carving and Political Cosmology in Oku, Cameroon,” which is chapter two of African Art and Agency in the Workshop (Sidney Littlefield Kasfir and Till Förster eds.; Indiana University Press 2013). I would give a page reference but I’m reading the book on a Kindle; in Kindle terms, the discussion I’m referring to, and quoting from, occurs around “location 1781 of 9227.”

This ritual is no longer practiced, but evidently it’s still remembered. At the end of the apprentice’s training, the apprentice brings the master “a ritual offering of food and wine.” The master consumes the offering – all of which seems quite amicable, except that the name of the ritual is “eating the apprentice”!

That’s quite a name. Shall we say, putting the matter delicately, that it points to the possible ambivalences of the teacher-student relationship? Perhaps the meal marks the point at which the apprentice’s youthful individuality has been completely consumed by the master. Having been eaten up, the apprentice offers another meal in recognition of his consumption.

Or perhaps the point is almost the opposite – the apprentice has consumed the master’s knowledge and must now, inevitably, replace the master. Argenti says that “the threat posed to his master by the newly accomplished apprentice was neutralized by this ritual act of cannibalism.” A somewhat different reading would be that, by way of apology, and to avoid the master’s natural resentment of this prospect of replacement, the apprentice offers up a meal.

I’d rather think of the event’s overtones, however, as more amused than angry. The master has devoted years to teaching the apprentice, one hopes with the view, as a figure in Middlemarch puts it, that “the earth belongs to the young.” The master is not sad that the apprentice has achieved mastery. On the contrary, the master should be proud of the success of his (or her) teaching. The master also understands that the alternative – a real alternative, as the elders among the Baga or other groups whose ritual traditions are collapsing in the space of a generation or two have actually experienced – is that there will be no more masters, and their knowledge will simply vanish. So the master is not resentful.

Still the master may well be rueful, and less thrilled by the passage of time than is the apprentice now coming into possession of the world. The “eating of the apprentice” then is not sublimated revenge but an ironic, autumnal reflection on one way that we make the best of the fact that we don’t live forever – namely, by passing on what we know to the young.