But art forms of this kind, often made as tourist souvenirs as well as for local use were typically derided by ethnologists as adulterated
expressions of cultures
on the wane.”
There is another aspect to this which contains a significant paradox. On the one hand the anthropologist maintains an almost fundamentalist
fixation on traditional purity while on the other two things have happened. The first is that modern artists and modernism have been heavily influenced
by non-Western objects and First Nation artefacts - the list is almost endless - Gauguin,
Picasso, Matisse, Nolde, Klee, Jackson Pollock, Henry Moore. However, where in cultural production a mask or effigy gets its significance from, for
example, who uses it, when and where, or where it is physically placed, all of these criteria disappear when it is collected - even in those cases where
and attempt is made to place it in a cultural context. It is as if someone would make a collection of knights from chess sets on aesthetic criteria and
exhibit them without the relevant board, the rest of the chess set or the rules. These acts of appropriation disassociated from significant context,
this mining of non-Western objects by artists for inspiration and as an artistic strategy to solve particular formal problems is a one way street. The
artists are regarded as innovative, the appropriative act assessed as positive, their production viewed as highly-evolved, avant-garde aestheticism.
The reverse is not true - the African artist influenced by Europe is often regarded - by us - having become inauthentic, of having gone non-native and ‘spoiled’
by intellectual contamination. And not only by us. Léopold Senghor’s concept of negritude, the recommendation that African artists ‘should
draw on their inner Africanness,’ seems to have strong
tendencies in the same direction. |
 |
The other position would accept that artists must have the freedom to be influenced by whatever they want. Vogel summarises: “These
two arguments, eventually put forward by both Europeans and Africans, affected artists in different places at different rates, so that we do not find
simultaneous continent-wide art movements, but rather two
opposed ideological poles towards which artists have gravitated.” The arguments may have superficial similarities but they derive from different
histories and follow different trajectories. One represents the imposition of an imperative exhortation the other has to accept as (part of) his identity;
the other as provides a way of linking up with a devalued substantially negated, pre-colonial history and a history of the colonial period wherein
the ‘native’ does not appear as the subject but as subaltern. What remains to be debated is the relative positions of power and the function the such
arguments have within a socio-historical context.
The fluid change from the concept of authenticity as applied to objects and to authenticity applied to people can be seen from what
I have written. It is a characteristic an object may attain at its inception or later (by work method, maker, time etc.) and it is a characteristic which
people, but not objects, can lose. Put in another way, people can be divested of their authenticity by those who define it. But if it is such a mutable
quality then they can also elude it, outrun it, shake off or outstrip it. That is what non-Western artists do if they wish to participate in on-going
artistic discourses. This often means a transformation, a development, on a personal and artistic level; the acquisition of a (personal) discursive vocabulary
which leaves much of what we might perceive as characteristically “ethnic” behind or evident only as one of a number of references, influences or fields
of investigation. |
