hmm [Music] [Applause] [Music] for centuries africa has occupied a vivid place in the western imagination its sheer size diversity and the wildness of its landscapes have made it the object of fantasy the result has been an image of africa that has often been less concerned with what africa really is than what others want it to be the same has certainly been true of perceptions of africa's art you can't look at african art just in europe african art is made in africa it has a deep complicated meaning it has a history it has a context that's integral to it itself [Music] we're never able to fully look at anything on its own terms because all of our acts of understanding are acts of interpretation i think that all of us have had to learn new ways of appreciating beauty new ways of seeing [Music] this film is an attempt to journey beyond our preconceptions and look at the art of africa through the eyes of africans [Music] this is a village of the bamana people in mali north west africa the entire region is especially rich in traditional art forms these carvers are working on what is known here as a chihuahua a kind of antelope or ibex whose image has been carved by the bamina people for hundreds of years to the western eye the piece looks like a sculpture in fact it's a headdress designed to be part of a ceremony consisting of a costume music and dance [Music] the chiwara is a mythical creature which according to legend taught the bamina for a farming community to till the soil [Music] our forefathers in this village were farmers farming is the only thing we know how to do and the chiwara represents the two pronged plow [Music] it follows us to the fields and gives us the strength to cultivate the land the chihuahua gives the young men the power to plow the fields quickly there's a large oral tradition surrounding the chihuahuara which the bamana take for granted as part of the fabric of their culture and history what for them is something which has a defined social function we might regard simply as a work of art [Music] [Music] in the west we take works from africa and display them in art galleries and museums here they're carefully lit and scrutinized as art but however beautifully displayed they're far removed from the cultures that produced them when you see the mask without the rest of the costume and things in a museum for the first time or whatever that is rather peculiar coming from nigeria i'm looking at it from a different perspective i'm not seeing these objects in museums as art objects it's very very important that you know the context that it should be in people that don't care about the context of african art and losing an awful lot i was an artist um my people are very important to me i was very much attracted to these geladae masks because they had wonderful passive faces and absolute chaos on their heads and as a child um i i had seen europa ogungu dances and i knew that these dancers had wonderful costumes supposedly these are masqueraders come out to sort of appease the gods and to talk to the town about what was good or bad about um the politics and the social situation and um this thing had to be appeased and had to do a dance and had supposed the secret charms and things in its pockets this is theater and very very exciting and it's what i consider african art to be the problem is that a lot of these objects have many different functions in africa some of them are worn some of them are used as currency they all have a function and um putting them um in a gallery they lose all of that um and become art objects yes in western eyes but from an africans point of view they've become useless nevertheless many western artists have for years collected and used african art to provide ideas and inspiration they've found meanings of their own in objects from africa [Music] i don't collect to have a collection you know i am not a collector in this sense that i like to have pieces no they are part of me and part of my work because for me is what i call the thinking my eye takes it in my eye does the thinking for me they mean to me what visually they mean not what anthropologically they mean what european artists funds are attractive in african art is precisely this freedom that they could put breasts where anatomically they don't belong and at the same time by the oversize of it gave a new power to the whole thing and this what european artists began to learn you know we learned from them that you needn't be correct as the 19th century wanted us to be as the greek roman tradition wanted us to be you needn't you can do with the peace of the body whatever you want you can treat it wherever you want and at the same time keep it real nobody could mistake this for anything but a woman [Music] it was at the paris world exhibition of 1900 that western artists and the population in general initially encountered art from africa this was the first large-scale exhibition of african art in europe but this was the colonial era and the objects were the beauty of conquest interesting curios of distant people but not art in the event though objects like these were to inspire paris's artistic community in a way that no one foresaw [Music] one of the artists who came into contact with african art early on was pablo picasso his relationship with art from africa not only acted as a catalyst for the development of cubism but changed the whole course of art in the 20th century the story begins with what is now regarded as picasso seminal painting the demoiselle d'avignon in the spring of 1907 picasso was working on a major picture of female nudes it was going to be a tremendous powerful statement he wanted it to be aggressive it was perhaps one of the most studied pictures he ever made picasso had begun to devise ways of simplifying the rendering of the body and in early summer he went on a visit to the museum of ethnography at the trocadero there he saw the tribal sculpture in the galleries returning from this experience with a new courage to defy the conventions of representation he repainted many of the figures in the picture this head seems to have a kind of scarification pattern and this so-called pie wedge or wedge of cheese nose which seems to relate directly to african masks and then the strangest and most deformed head on the seated prostitute in the lower right has a twisted nose scarification patterns disruption and a flattened radical quality which again suggests an african mask it gave him a new way to see first of all and secondly it gave him a way to break away from his own european antecedents the late 19th century tradition of painting if you look at the drawings of ley damasel before he visited the chocodero and then after he visited the chocodero you'll realize that modernism and primitivism are flip sides of the same coin that the face of modernism in europe is a black face that buried within all this high modernism is the presence of the african in the decades that followed the direction of european art was radically changed shapes became non-naturalistic stylized aggressive and exaggerated abstraction began to develop [Music] there was a new power to the forms which was emotional rather than intellectual [Music] picasso who finally admitted in 1942 that african art had been a pivotal influence upon him describes it in terms that are so similar to the way that freud describes the encounter with the uncanny everybody talks about the influences that the negroes had on me what can i do we all of us love fetishes van gogh once said japanese art we all have that in common for us it's the negroes when i went to the old trocadero it was disgusting the smell i was alone i wanted to get away but i didn't leave i stayed i stayed i understood that it was very important something was happening to me [Music] the mask weren't just like any other pieces of sculpture not at all they were magic things [Music] african art was regarded as something that was produced outside of training outside of academic discipline something that didn't obey the rules they had been taught it didn't seem to have the smothering blanket of a civilized tradition on top of it instead it seemed to be an upsurge of natural emotion and a more immediate seizing of the world and so they found that it was more true and more direct to the wellsprings of basic creativity in the human spirit [Music] the power of the primitive was an echo of the popular and less benign image of africa as a place of savagery and barbarism a continent in need of control it was an image of primitivism shamelessly promoted with missionary zeal and often with ludicrous success by the colonial powers who sought to justify their own claims to be civilizing africa for different reasons artists too embraced the idea of the dark continent africa was perceived as best we can judge by early modern artists in terms of a set of cliches which might center on the term darkness and the dark continent they saw the idea of mystery of magic of savagery as being located in an area of africa beyond traditional civilized contact and this sense led them to believe that by exploring african art and by touching into what african art could bring them they would also get back to something deeper and purer in their own spirits [Music] these were the fanciful ideas that underpinned early western interpretations of african art objects which in their own culture were associated with healing and positive powers in europe were called fetishes a word which has become laden with disturbing connotations and which tells us more about the western psyche regarding africa than africa itself the true purpose of such objects didn't concern the modernists picasso was even quoted as saying all i need to know about africa is in that mask [Music] they were acknowledging the degree to which there was a vitality and a vibrancy in african culture that they did not find in their own cultures like any set of human beings they bring with them their own baggage their own set of presuppositions and prejudgments and prejudices and the disservice that they did of course was the cast off african culture african artworks and art objects as exotic as primitive even barbaric today african art is being reinterpreted partly what's under scrutiny is the modernist influence on the way african art is regarded but what's also being reappraised is how the art is looked at in the light of africa's recent troubled history african art cannot be divorced from the fact that it's made by black people it's made by people with a fraught history it's been exhibited in museums and the wealthiest cities in the world it comes from some of the poorest nations in the world today none of that is very far beneath the surface it's intimately tied up with the history of colonialism racism slavery the whole nine yards it's a very complicated history and no one looks at a piece of african art with that history completely submerged a crucial turning point came in 1985 not in africa but in america the catalyst was an exhibition at the museum of modern art in new york which set out to show how the art of the 20th century had been influenced by so-called primitive works in the delicate racial climate of the usa the exhibition provoked a roar of protest by its implicit assumption of the superiority of western art it was a show about the west positioning itself to interpret another culture and not interpret it appropriately i think more than anything else and deciding which point of view was more important at that time and that show really um just seemed to have been the critical point the critical juncture at which at which of which our our attitudes our misconceptions our ways of presenting african art or representing african art it seemed to have been the critical point for discourse it has to do in part with the level of sensitivity it has to do with understanding that these objects cannot just purely be decontextualized that um we have been doing that historically for a long time in the west demands that african art should be seen in its own context and not in inferior relation to western art tradition have been particularly strident among african-american academics today the emphasis has shifted from a purely aesthetic appreciation of the art to one which takes into account an object's purpose and meaning there are times when the artwork just exists purely as a way of seeing as a way of embodying form as an expression and it's not important primarily to know who did it even where it was done when it was done or why it was done there are other times when that's enormously important if one's establishing the depth of a tradition the relationship of one tradition to another tradition or the corpus of an individual artist or if one is is considering larger philosophical questions questions of belief systems questions of comparative metaphysics questions of comparative aesthetics context then is of absolute importance in some ways it's very similar to attempts to understand art doing renaissance and italy they had their own context we had to understand the history we had to understand the culture we have to understand the society we had to engage in a lot of historical work to be able to reconstruct the very ways in which these art objects are produced produced for what for whom under what circumstances what are their roles and functions in regard to ritual in regard to ceremony all these are historical and anthropological questions and they must be part of our complex response to art within these contexts think about looking at a painting of a madonna and child if you don't realize who that lady is with the baby you haven't you haven't begun to grasp what the artist is trying to do and you have missed part of the pleasure part of the very pleasure of the thing comes from knowing who that is what it means what the artist what he meant to the artist even if it doesn't mean anything to you the madonna and child is one of an infinite number of cultural references and symbols we take for granted how possible is it to step into another culture and to discover and understand the meanings within their works of art in other words to see in their objects what africans see [Music] here in mali for example the first thing you discover is that one of the largest of many indigenous cultures the bamina don't even have a word for art foreign in this village the production of traditional art mostly masks and sculptures has evolved out of a rigid order it's made by members of a certain cast to a prescribed design we became covers because our father was a cover we started when we were very young it's what we do for a living as children we used to go into the workshop we watched them at work and practiced with small pieces of wood until we got it right if a person wanted to carve in their own particular style there would be nothing to stop them but this type of carving forms part of our heritage and should be maintained absolutely on the idea of the artist as an individual and creator and in some sense that has to be seen against the backdrop of an industrial society where most things are made by machine we look upon that as almost the immortal aspect of the artist that's not necessarily the case elsewhere uh i once worked with a lot of cameroonian potters uh who are very keen that their objects their their pots should be of known types if you made a new sort of pot i mean this wasn't innovation you just got it wrong yet these same women uh decorated their their millet barns with all sorts of beautiful patterns and everyone was different and everyone was new and excited all this so i mean to me that was art so i went and i asked them about these patterns on their right and they they just laughed at me no no no they said no that's just play that's not important um if it were important everyone would do it the same the vamana artist's purpose is to continue a tradition not to strive for originality in order to secure his work a place in history however beautiful objects are made to serve a function so if the bamina don't recognize the term art i'll be right to keep calling it that i think not calling it art is to denigrate it is to ignore the fact that enormous aesthetic competence and artistic skill and invention went into the creation of these objects i think it's to divorce it from what we call the history of art what we call the sort of mainstream of human creativity i think it's to wrong it deeply we're fairly muddled about what we mean by art even in the west it's no longer a well-defined category it seems that a pile of bricks or a dead sheep can be art it's a way of looking at things so the question about african art i suppose is really whether it's helpful to look at african objects from the point of western art i don't think it tells us a lot about what those objects meant in their original context how they were used the social processes they entered into how they were seen and how they were interpreted i mean in a sense design is a much closer european concept to to to apply to traditional african art because there's always that tension between form and function at one point these objects were considered curio at another point they were considered the stimulus for the modernists at another point they were artifacts that were displayed within natural history museums and now they are art but again it's who has been doing all of this talking whose perspective are we focused on it is speaking from the west looking at a history of engagement with a culture that has been essentially from our perspective our position of strength and from our um desire to define others within the context of our own experience and we can't i don't think we could get away from that [Music] [Music] [Music] this is dogon country nowhere are the pitfalls of defining another culture from within the frames of reference of one's own more evident than here one of the most famous of africa's cultures it has attracted an avalanche of anthropological research but far from illuminating the art of the doggone it actually helped obscure it [Music] sculptures are rooted in a complex cosmological belief system one of the oldest in africa used in their original context they represent ancestors and divinities through whom the dogon worship amma the creator of life and the ultimate force in the universe this rural community can provide no historical records or written scholarship to help us to understand dog on art today we rely on work carried out by western anthropologists their long-standing claim that a highly elaborate mythic structure underpins all aspects of dog on life is what has drawn outside interest to the doggone but this theory is not one that's now accepted in mali um this is a ceremony to ask for rain when you look at one culture through the eyes of another particularly it seems with africa there's an irresistible tendency to impose your own perceptions but this ritual is doubtless no more mysterious to the dogger than singing hymns or taking communionies to us wow it's thought that early doggone contacts told scholars what they thought they wanted to hear and so layers of meaning were projected onto objects which were never actually intended in the study about in especially art objects that move from one culture to another there are always two grave dangers one is sort of gross exoticism where you say well the people over there are so different from us that they can have nothing in common with us and their objects have to be treated as if they came from mars the other is pure ethnocentrism i'm saying you know well i've seen what these chaps do doing their ritual and to me it looks like the charleston therefore i've understood it we are now kind of going through a phase of re-examining even how the field work was done in africa and whether those who went to the continent bought with them all kinds of western baggage that were placed on the african and whether the language differences and how those barriers were breached and and whether what was shared from the african side with the scholars that visited and and the anthropologists that went to africa was interpreted correctly was understood correctly was translated correctly and it was brought back and presented appropriately the tourist industry in the doga reflects just how difficult it is to interpret definitively another culture today the dog on people tailor their mask dances according to different cultural tastes they use one set of masks for westerners and another for themselves it's early morning and the dancers are rehearsing there are no tourists as it's the rainy season first they perform wearing the older more traditional masks these are the ones they'll use for western audiences historically the mask dances or damas as they're called are performed at funerals and other religious occasions as in pantomime or masquerade the faces represent familiar characters this is womankind otherwise barred from belonging to the dance society or taking part another of several interpretations is that she represents the elder sister of the masks [Music] the kanaga mask is most often associated with dog on dances this one is a stalk whatever the original symbolism might have been has been lost there's a strong comic element to the masks this one depicts a woman of the fulani people they're tall and pale skinned the white cowrie shells are meant to represent her light complexion the hair is in classic fulani style but the images are left over from another age when the fulani were mocked and disliked because they were rulers in the region many of these characters no longer have much meaning within contemporary doggone society brought out especially for us are the newer masks masks that tourists don't get to see they don't appeal to western tastes and the doggone dancers know that they're made and used for local dances only they're less elaborate than the old masks and more brightly painted even garish they're all together more obviously comic more to the point they also present the viewer with a new gallery of characters this is the goiter a fairly common affliction in the doggone here's the mask of a traditional healer and this is a face that will doubtless be carved more in the future the white man this is a local dutch anthropologist and shows how contemporary material is constantly being incorporated into [Music] um [Music] the short life of art objects here is partly due to the fact that the rituals and dances they're used for are continually evolving [Music] artists in africa today tomorrow next week are making objects that are going to be used in ways that they have been used in the past and in new ways they're constantly inventing new forms and changing the received forms adding to them subtracting updating them they've always done that the route also brought wealth everywhere there are signs of artistry and patronage which have made the entire city of jenner a united nations designated world monument [Music] outside jenna are the ancient settlements that predate the coming of islam virtually no archaeological excavation has been done and little is known about how the people lived or the art they created although there's evidence of sophisticated civilization everywhere in the 1970s a number of terracotta figures were found on the site they're believed to have been made by a lost wax process which is no longer used in the region the meaning of the strange posture-like markings on the bodies of many is a mystery as is the significance of what appear to be snakes adorning the torsos we may never know the story behind works of art found here or their function in the society from which they came this pot was left behind by raiders who've taken the best and discarded what won't command the highest price come and give me a hand today the sites are constantly plundered for the international art market it's ironic that the wish by some people to own a jenner terracotta is the very reason they'll probably never understand its significance or what it meant to the people who once lived in this part of mali [Music] the problem with trying to define the context of art is that what you see is inevitably subjective the facts can be confused elusive and in the case of ancient jenner possibly lost forever there are simply too many variables the ultimate aim in trying to understand another culture's art is to see in the objects what the people who made them once saw but that's a fantasy approach even if we could shed our own cultural conditioning the search for the correct context of art objects would still be a fruitless endless journey we won't find the definitive answer what we can learn on the way is that there are values aesthetic disciplines and forms of beauty which are quite distinct from our own and it's that understanding that has to be the key to looking at art from other countries in the end though the search for the meaning of african art is a journey that will always take us back to our own culture there's no escaping the fact that africa and african art have been a touchstone and a lightning rod for lots of western feelings and political ambitions and fears and other emotions powerful emotions for a long long time and african art becomes almost a pawn in a larger debate um african art in the west becomes the subject around which we debate a lot of issues that have very little to do with africa today but have a lot to do with our own conflicts and our own past and our own desires to reconcile them i think that the debate about african art today is about europe itself and i think that it uncannily mirrors picasso's encounter with african art in the old trocadero you see picasso that day didn't discover africa picasso discovered himself but casa discovered europe picasso discovered a new way of representing a european sensibility through the prism of african art likewise the debate today is about how europeans are imagining themselves or representing themselves through the mirror or prison of the other you you