Legacies of the Dance

By ROBERT HUGHES

Motion? It is not the first word to come to mind when one looks at the ritual masks, figures and fetishes in the show called "African Art in Motion" now on display in Washington, D.C. Locked in the National Gallery's glass cases, chastely spotlighted, such objects are seen by the Western eye as immobile, like any other sculpture.

In a symbolic sense they have been frozen still more by Western art history, which has tended to interest itself in African art only to the extent that it was cannibalized by Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and other European artists, becoming a font of style for cubism and expressionism. This helped Europeans see it as "real" art, instead of mere curios or portable anthropological data. Still, the stereotype must be got rid of before African art can be understood in relation to its original audience.

All African visual art issues from cultures permeated by the dance. (Movement, one might say, is to tribal art what print is to Western art.) The mask one admires in the museum once had a dancer's head inside it; the carved figure embodies meanings that are entirely based on gesture and posture. Art Historian Robert Thompson, in showing these works drawn from the superb African collection owned by Katherine White in Los Angeles, demonstrates the canons of African motion across the diversity of regional cultures: Dan and Dogon, Yoruba and Ogoni, Luba and Ashanti, Benin and Ejagham.

Western ideas of form and psychological theories of "body language" are inadequate to deal with African imagery, though it has something to do with both. A European is apt to seek the meaning of a work like the modern Ashanti wood carving of a mother and child from Ghana in its harmony of shapes: the massive, fluid bulges of hair, the delicate formal rhyme between the points of nose, chin and conical breasts, and so forth. But when Thompson showed it to an African, his response to what seemed "universal" in the sculpture was quite different. "She is purely there. She gives milk to the child. She secures his body with the other hand. She is sitting well, like a person of character." And this quality of presence, of being "purely there," extends itself through a language of moral posture.

Just as sitting suggests permanence, calm and repose, so the act of balancing --as seen in the Yoruba "Gelede" masks with animals riding their heads and in the figures on houseposts or columns --indicates a harmonious equilibrium with the world and its spirit forces. Kneeling "conveys belief that life demands the beautiful giving of the self to persons of honor." A standing posture implicitly suggests power, life, fortitude, kingliness--as in (amid a host of other examples) the sacred fetishes of Zaire, wooden figures into which tribesmen ceremonially hammer nails as a proof of moral integrity; the fetish, they believe, will kill any evil-spirited person who adds a nail to it.

The White collection includes a superb variety of masks, from cumbrous affairs that need an athlete to lift them to a wooden Ogoni mask from Nigeria, with its curving protrusion of lips like a bird's beak, too small to fit a human head. Thompson has included films showing how these personifications of spirit and moral forces are used in communal dances: Gaa Wree-Wre, for instance, the Dan personification of "ideal justice," with its white-rimmed eyes, worn in a dance characterized by ponderous walking and sitting.

When the exhibition at the National Gallery closes on Aug. 18, Washingtonians will still be able to consult an important African collection: that of the Museum of African Art, housed in seven Victorian houses and now in its twelfth year, newly fortified by the collection and archives (almost 100,000 photographs) of the late Eliot Elisofon. No other photographer has ever covered Africa with more energy and knowledge than Elisofon, who contributed to LIFE for 35 years and was one of the first trustees of the Museum of African Art. Elisofon's collection of African art comprised more than 600 pieces, including some masterpieces: a delicately incised, ocher-painted Bobo mask from the Upper Volta, with its fantastically ramifying headgear (see color page); the imposing Senufo figure of a hornbill, with its swollen body and spread wings intended both as a carrier of souls and as a fertility symbol; and a magnificent Basonge mask from Zaire, the face and forehead incised in flowing parallel lines and then covered with white clay, the lips transformed into a jutting prism with a star-shaped hole in it--the very embodiment, one might suppose, of authoritative and ordered eloquence. Combined with the other resources of the Museum of African Art, Elisofon's legacy should be a lasting benefit to the capital.

sbRobert Hughes

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