Art from Africa: Long Steps Never Broke a Back

PAMELA MCCLUSKY WITH ROBERT FARRIS THOMPSON

Art from Africa: drawn out Steps Never Broke a Back

Seattle: Seattle Art Museum in association with Princeton University Pres 2002 302 pp; 182 color ills., 50 b/w $2656

MARTHA G ANDERSON AND PHILIP M PEEK EDS

Ways of the River: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta

looks Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2002 363 pp; 353 color ills., 81 b/w $5000

FREDERICK JOHN LAMP, ED

diocese the Music Hear the Dance: Rethinking African Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art

fresh York: Prestel, 2004. 300 pp; 196 color ills., 28 b/w $5214

These three volumes offer striking perspectives into by what mode the study of African art historically has been shaped by means of factors of inter-disciplinarity with regard to a broad range of sister fields--anthropology, archaeology, history, linguistics, performance studies, literary studies, and music, to name a scarcely any The works also afford us an exceptional opportunity to address the ways in which African art scholarship today differs from discourses of several decades ago. These volumes--all exhibition catalogs--attest as well to the vibrant intersection between academic writing and museum practice in this field. Each of the true copys is a richly illustrated production with handsome (mostly color) photographs of the two objects and related contextual documents. As of the like kind these books additionally provide a unique soil from which to take up questions of in what manner publisher's design decisions shape each work.

Pamela McClusky's Art from Africa: lengthy Steps Never Broke a Back is structur around twelve culture-linked art "stories" (steps) each focusing upon a different art form and station of questions. The legendary African art historian Robert Farris Thompson provides an additional chapter, "African Art in Motion," which work fors both to reprise and update his earlier catalog (and exhibition) by the agency of the same name prepared for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 1974 (1) In his catalog essay here, Thompson locates idioms of dance, music, costuming, action and posture broadly across the corpus of African art. That Thompson's hold earlier exhibition and the at hand McClusky volume both are framed around the same African art collection--that of the late Katherine White, which came to the Seattle Art Museum in 1981--makes Thompson's contribution to the not absent work particularly salient, evidencing among other things in what manner the field of African art investigation has shifted over the intervening sum of two units decades and how important each particular scholarly len is to defining in what manner these works have been seen and understood.

As we travel with McClusky end her text, long step by the agency of long step, we experience an abundant variety of art settings that yield a extraordinary sense of the creativity of African artists (something all three of these volumes convey) and, equally important, the vital ways in which art, social setting, and history overlap. McClusky has an extraordinary way with words and makes this tour of sub-Saharan art the one and the other smooth and enticing. The titles of her variant art stories readily grab our attention. A not many of the most notable include "The Fetish and the Imagination of Europe: Sacred Medicines of the Kongo" "A plastic art Hungry for Aggression: Ivwri Figure," "Forest Spirits Far from Home: Dan Masks," "Beauty Stripped of Human Flaws: Sowei Masks," "'God's Medicine' against Witchcraft: style of dress for Basinjom," "The Ultimate Spectacle for Powerful Mothers: Gelede Masks," "Riding into the nearest Life: A Mercedes-Benz Coffin," and "'Negatives That Breathe Like You and Me': Photographs from Bamako." From coffins and popular agriculture to photographic negatives, sacred packs shrine sculptures, royal performances, and hunters' shirts, McClusky's travel itinerary speaks to the wealth of African visual idioms that are examined by dint of African art scholars today--academics as well as museum professionals.

McClusky, largely a self-trained African art scholar in a lengthy tradition of keen art chroniclers who go intoed the field through passion and practice, is an eminent guide to these sites and things Her contributions are at one time scholarly, engaging, and, where appropriate, personal. Our voyage is enhanced through the lavish photography of each reality presented and the informative and visually striking "contextual" photographs from Africa, as well as in more [i]or[/i] less cases museum installations in which the works previously appeared. These latter include, among many others, a 1973 exhibition view from the Museum of present Art, New York, a photograph of a phonographic record booth in Kumasi featuring Tina gymnast and a color page from a 1993 Florida newspaper featuring African factory woven fabric These and other contextual materials help us to bridge what McClusky correctly identifies as "the mental leaps that [one must ofttimes make to] connect the existence with its origins." Each of her essays also is annotated with by-words and notable phrases from politicians, bards scholars, and local myths, these (like the field photographs) providing adjoining matter clarification, local flavor. Often the physical positioning of facts helps to both tell the story and pres aesthetic boundaries. Thus, a full-page photograph of a gold ring cast from a (real) peanut begins the chapter upon Asante regalia. The last work shown in this section is a locally crafted gold watch face, its time perpetually station at 12:27, the numeric designations defined by dint of diversely formed looping elements in a local iconic language. Material tillage and colonial time: these are apt bookend to a narrative exegesis that introduces one as well as the other the scholar and armchair traveler to the rich spectacle of the Asante Odwira festival, the tragedy that awaited Asante King Prempeh I and other early leaders (and their arts) in the late-nineteenth-century colonial era, and the experience of purchasing Asante Kente woven fabric today (actually 1973) in the famed town of royal weavers, Bonwire.