African Art in the Classroom

National Art Education Association

African Art in the ClassroomAuthor(s): John F. PoveySource: Art Education, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Apr., 1969), pp. 13-15+26Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3191342 .

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African Art in the Classroom BY JOHN F. POVEY. Art education is far broader in its implications than the development of any potential for individual creativity. It must surely include training in perception, a guidance towards an understanding of that which is visual in the student's world. Though it might be considered regrettable, this is more likely to be the element from art classes retained throughout life, long after personal attempts to be artistically creative have been forgotten and the individual becomes locked into the need to earn a living or the busy routines of the housewife. Training in visual perception continues its valuable work in every aspect of contemporary life, dictating taste and responsiveness to many elements of environment.

It seems to me that, without in any way destroying its true academic aims, art education could be used to attack a very serious social pr6blem-the problem of race, of minority cultures in this country. We are disturbed on every side by the challenging demands of militant blacks, by the resentment of Mexican-Americans, and by the increasingly angry American Indian. If the griev- ances of the two latter groups may appear as distant long-term social problems, which I doubt personally, at least no one would question the urgent need of our schools to broach the searing problems of racial prejudice in this country. I believe this can be attacked in a double way through the introduction into the art classroom of the evidence of the range and richness of the artistic traditions to which our ethnic minorities are heirs.

For example, Africa's great treasury has been ignored too long, primarily for two reasons. First, missionaries have managed to indicate a general inhumanity in Africa, implying that the culture consisted of "heathen" practices. In distant days, one recalls, this was the ostensible justification for European intervention and conquest. The underlying attitude thus created has conditioned us against judging African art in aesthetic terms. Second, the cause of our ignorance was that our limited knowledge of African art was invariably filtered to us through the attitudes of anthropologists who first had access to this new art. They viewed it in terms of their own disci- plinary concerns rather than through the eye of the artist or by the aesthetic response that the work generated. African art was therefore "explained" by the anthropologist in terms of its function, described as mere decoration, and reduced to artifact rather than art. This view imposed itself into wider attitudes towards African culture, and only recent studies by Fagg and Willett have opened our eyes to the fine qualities of the art. It is true that the art of Africa, woven as it is into the fabric of daily culture, is usually less "decorative" in intention than the art of Europe; but many studies have shown that the African is perfectly capable of judging this art as "good" or "bad" from the viewpoint of a critic, regardless of his evaluation of the appropriateness of the piece to its ritual or utilitarian function. We have too often presumed a naivet6 in the African because of our failure to look fully at his art.

And so Africa has been left cautiously aside in the classroom. Teachers often willing to experiment with demonstrations of the fine ink shapes of the Japariese styles or the careful linear flow in the drawings from China, accept this amount of internationalism in art, yet avoid Africa as too difficult, perhaps even as irrelevant

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Page 13, Dan Mask, wood with metal teeth and braided fiber hair. 10" high. Ivory Coast. Reproduction courtesy the Museum of Ethnic Arts, University of California, Los Angeles. This page, above, Bronze Head, Benin, Nigeria.

Reproduction courtesy the Museum of Ethnic Arts, University of California.



to the full tradition of art. The revolution of American blacks demanding an

acknowledgment and recognition of their heritage, comes at just that time when scholars can begin to supply genuine evidence of the whole realm of African arts. In the last five years there have been several major exhibitions which have proclaimed to viewers that there is a glory of Africa to set against those well-known glories and grandeurs of familiar Greece and Rome.

But even when this rehabilitation of Africa into world ar studies is accepted as a principle, even when it is admitted that the reestablishing of the culture of Africa as an impressive heritage could do so much to fill the cultural void inherited by American blacks who find too little connection with the basically Anglo culture around them, there is still the need for guidance and background for the teacher in the comparatively unknown art field of the African continent. I suspect that the announced need for large scale retraining of art teachers can be greatly exaggerated. After all, we do move across cultures in making other art judgments. Although we recognize that art is very deeply enmeshed in a specific national or racial culture, we can assume at least that we may extract the elements which are amenable to our understanding. To deny this is to take a very anthro- pological view of art. Art is the great achievement of all mankind, one of the essential things, like speech, which basically and totally divides men from animals. It, therefore, has some degree of universality. Just as we can extract our own visions across time and claim to appreciate, say, an Etruscan statue embedded in a very distant historic culture, so we can equally admire across geographic distance a Japanese woodcut or a Chinese vase. In a similar manner we can approach Africa, except that to come at the art of this vast continent we have to cut through a jungle of false presuppositions and inaccurate prejudgments of what to expect, since we have been taught to approach African art with our knowledge of human materialist activity rather than of human artistic creation.

The first step is to dismiss the preconceptions and start as nearly as possible with a fresh and open vision. Let African art make a visual impact from the first. Avoid that question "What is it used for?", which may be a valid one in some contexts, but which is the source of so much misunderstanding in relation to this art. I suggest that a teacher might start by displaying the art (Continued on page 26)

Above, top, Bakota Reliquary Figure, wood overlaid with brass, 283/1" high. Gabon. Reproduction courtesy the Museum of Ethnic Arts, University of California, Los Angeles. Below, "The Bird," detail of a drawing by Ibrahim el Salahi, modern artist of Sudan. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Gerry Hale.

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(Continued from page 15) of Ife and Benin. The Benin bronzes are renowned enough-perhaps the most famous of all African art-that they are even available in plastic casts in this country. They make the best beginning, not only because they are "good", but because they destroy those instinctive false expectations which could be confirmed by an unusual mask, no matter how impressive it is considered to be by experts versed in African culture. The first response to the bronze busts of Benin is that they are not African, a view that occurred to the great German scholar of Africa, Frobenius, as he desperately sought for a Greek influence which could explain this work so demonstrably superior to anything that he believed an African could accomplish. Yet Frank Willett's recent study (The Art of Ife, 1968) has shown that the great tradition of these realistic heads goes back to terra cotta pieces more than a thousand years older. Even this single illustration may make the first crack in the preconceived attitudes of the student. Once receptivity without prejudgment is achieved, the art can be allowed to speak for itself. I would not attempt at first to be systematic in seeking styles and regional forms in an initial presentation. This is a complicated process and was attempted in William Fagg's monumental study, Nigerian Images, in which he uses the term "tribalism" or "tribality" to indicate the focus of differing art styles. But it is always difficult enough when the artist works within a rigorous traditional form to separate the individual masters, perhaps in the way in which the painter of a Byzantine icon worked within a tradition which limited the individuality of his presentation within minimal alterations from the expected commissioned form.

A teacher's concern in the classroom at present should not be a concern with the complex range of African art, but with a classroom innovation. A sufficiently valid first target is an attempt to require a student to recognize African works as art. After the Benin bronze heads, I would select pieces which link most obviously to European art. Not only does this lead the student into the field from that which he already knows (the conventional educational technique), but it is a healthy reminder to recognize how Africa influenced the art of Europe which established one kind of cultural hierarchy. Many of the significant revolutions of the last century stemmed from some first acquaintance with the "primitive", as was the case with Gauguin and his Poly- nesian art, with Picasso and with Modigliani. Set a serene stylized mask of the Dan tribe against a Modigliani drawing, and you will be able to indicate the obvious similarities. But the point of view is important. The fact should not be dismissed as a borrowing, as though the European result was the essential issue, but it should be made to suggest a revelation about a new way of looking at the human face, its curves, and unexpected planes. Or set a Picasso figure against these strangely stylized Bakota heads, oddly elongated on their little truncated stands. Display a Dogon figure, so austere and strong, and one sees at once the simplification which leads into modern sculptural forms. I want to stress that this should not be an exercise in cross-cultural comparison; that can and should be done, no doubt, in another context, but not at this point. What is needed first is to make a student look, and there are many insular layers of distortion that must be peeled away before the simple act of "seeing" can occur. To show the African aesthetic vision, it may be necessary initially to demon-

strate that the same spatial views can be found in Europe also. From this device, which under ideal conditions might be happily unnecessary, we can make a beginning from the students' own initial assumptions, as rectification of attitude will come at the same time as we open up a new world to the art student to whom the new African dimension may be as revealing as it was to Modigliani many years ago. Once the purely visual criteria have been established, the range can be widened, and the staggering profusion of African art can be brought to their attention, for the blinkers of fake expectation will have been removed. In the first instance, art requires being looked at. Once the previous inadequate attitudes have been cut away, African art can be exhibited, and it will receive its due admiration.

Materials on African art, once so rare and scarce, are now becoming available. The University of California at Berkeley has produced a series of slides from its fine collection, and UCLA has made it a significant activity of its African Studies Program to produce such teaching material, both from its own superb collection of ethnic art, and more widely through publication of contributions from world specialists in the lavish new journal, African Arts/Arts d'Afrique. This magazine is now two years old, and during its brief existence has offered in the finest color reproduction, illustrations of the art of Africa, ranging widely from the ancient cave paintings, which may well be prehistoric, to studies of art exhibitions held in contemporary Lagos, from studies of the decorations of ancient ruins such as Zimbabwe, to reproductions of paintings by modern artists in Tunisia and Sudan. This production is undertaken in conjunction with the preparation of a range of African materials for teachers: film strips and guides, records, and illustrations of major art pieces from across Africa. Here is a university recognizing its too often neglected essential function of making its fresh research and original knowledge into a form useful to teachers in the classroom, so that expertise may be shared in a joint experiment in art study.

In considering such an addition as this to the art program, one is simply advising a broader approach to art education to include areas which have been con- sistently and shamefully neglected. But granted present- day conditions in this country, one is in fact approaching an even more important theme. In demonstrating the caliber of the arts of Africa, one demonstrates, too, the caliber of the Negro race, because a nation and a race is judged ultimately not by its technology and its power, but by its art. Art is the supreme evidence of man's grandeur. When one learns that this grandeur is not the prerogative of any one racial group or any one continent, the universal humanism of mankind becomes very clear. When that identity is discovered, it becomes so much more difficult to persist in prejudice and arrogance. This is surely the major task that we shall have as teachers in the next decade. In this cause, the art teacher can play just as important a role as the social science teacher, for art needs no debate. It speaks directly to the viewer in its own triumphant language.

John F. Povey is an associate professor of English and assistant director of the African Studies Center, University of California at Los Angeles.



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African Art in the Classroom