African communal artwork was also resonant with moral values. For the Yoruba, artwork ought to exhibit character (iwa). Salient among prized virtues of character was “coolness,” defined and practiced as seriousness, grace under fire, practical wisdom, magnanimity in a moment of triumph, finely calibrated and modulated habitus. The formal articulation of coolness occurred in sculptures, carvings and paintings that emphasized symmetry, balance, and a regal posture. Yoruba artists also often represented coolness in the form of carvings and sculptures that presented the face with a serious mien, with sealed lips and composed features. The colors blue, indigo, and green were also seen as the salient formal features of coolness. Other manifestations of character in Yoruba art emphasized purity (which is represented by the color white).
African communal artwork also often – though not always – served a distinct role in social practice. African art historians have pointed to the Asante gold-weights as particularly illustrative of the multiple functions of African art in a social context. The gold-weights not only served as a means of measuring gold dust currency, but were also deeply prized in their own right for their elegance and beauty. The embeddedness of artistic work in social practices has the implication that communal artistic practices cut against presuppositions that carve a sharp binary between aesthetic contemplation and functional purposes. Perhaps it is important to make clear – against the grain of much functionalist anthropology – that social practices such as funeral rituals are not themselves reducible to the functional. But more precisely, the embeddedness of artistic work in social forms does not make the artistic work itself vulgarly utilitarian. That is in part because the role of the artistic work in the social practice is overdetermined. Songs sung at funerals are responsive to the grief of mourners and are sung in memory of deceased, but precisely because the form of the song – its metrical organization, rhythmic texture – is constitutive and performative, it is not just a conduit for the transmission of an a priori emotion. Similarly, the gold-weights served a function, but were also valued for their own sake.
Formal virtuosity and superior artistic craftsmanship counted deeply in the realization of communal artwork. Because audiences were attuned participants and trained listeners, form was evaluated in ways that were much more demanding than contemplative engagement involved. African communal artworks often traversed genres and were often deeply resistant to aesthetic notions of unity and integrity. What was emphasized, for example, was antiphony or polyrhythm that struck a discordant note against exquisitely harmonious beats or tunes; incompleteness, protuberation or grotesquerie erupting from breathtakingly beautiful sculptures; jagged scarifications inscribed on superlatively supple and glowing bodies. Agawu offers an invaluable articulation of this complexity in drawing out the rhythmic features of the Southern Ewe dance Gahu: “Gahu’s fully activated texture features four or five contrasting rhythmic layers unfolding within a polyrhythmic matrix. The bell provides a referential pulse for the whole ensemble within its own distinctive pattern. A rattle reinforces this pattern as well as the pattern of hand-clapping that invariably accompanies ensemble musics that involve dancing, singing, and drumming. Smaller drums respond to and contrast with the bell, trade motifs with the lead drummer, or articulate a consistent off-beat pattern that never migrates to the beat. Stylistic choices such as the preference for asymmetric time lines, the assumption of a downbeat rather than its external articulation, and the preference for musical patterns that seem to originate and terminate within metrical units rather than at their beginnings or endings.”
Communal artwork straddled a tension between secrecy and openness, simplicity and complexity. Ajume Wingo refers to African communal artwork as the realization of an aesthetics of “hiding and revealing.” This is insofar as an irreducible layer of African aesthetics often performatively represented interventions and conversation within an artistic guild. The inscriptions on Asante gold-weights, for example, resonated with allusions to proverbs heavy with the significance of the artistic tradition. In many communities in precolonial Africa, the complex patterns on masks often conveyed a secret discourse within particular guilds, cults or societies. Ajume Wingo notes that the abstract patterns and arabesque motifs on the masks of the Nso of Cameroon constituted a language of cohesion, participation, solidarity, continuity, tolerance, and mutual respect. But if one layer of African communal aesthetics was secret and complex, another layer was open and simple. This is because the context of performance of African artwork was participatory and invitational.
The upshot then of African communal art is open-textured. The hermeticism of the context of invention and the free-wheeling, improvisatory texture of the context of performance are held in exquisite tension in the realization of artistic performance. The elitism of the context of invention is in tension with the democracy of artistic criticism. The rigors of genre are stretched almost beyond breaking point by the permeability and free-flowing dance of spontaneity. According to Agawu, “African conceptions of music are more holistic than modern European notions, closer perhaps to those of ancient Greece.” Thus, for example, “In Ewe, as in a number of African languages, there is no single word for ‘music.’ There is, in other words, no word that would enable us to describe a funeral dirge, a children’s play song, and a recreational dance as forms of music…. The distinction between vocal and instrumental music does not register in Ewe discourse.”
African communal aesthetic praxis offers a far more complex and richer account of aesthetic praxis than that offered by dominant North Atlantic aesthetic theories. Nevertheless, the limitations of communal aesthetic practices are not insignificant. The attribution of artistic abilities as endowment from the gods is not that different from North Atlantic discourses of artists as geniuses. Moreover, for all the diversity that African communal aesthetic practice fosters and encourages, the most dominant discourses conceive of discordance and dissent as falling under the umbrella of an overarching metaphysical harmony. In other words, African communal aesthetic practice allows for a great deal of difference and disunity, but these dissent is tolerated in the understanding that there is an ultimate metaphysical unity or harmony that subsumes or absorbs the manifest disunity. The upshot is that African communal art is a fairly robust political aesthetic praxis with a sophisticated apparatus for exploring knowledge, but its existential horizons remain constricted.
(excerpted from chapter 4)
