The New York Times - Read at nytimes.com
By Holland Cotter
December 10, 2004

PHILADELPHIA - Leontyne Price singing Bach is what I thought of when I saw the Yoruba carving of a seated woman, a child on her back and a big bowl in her hands, in "African Art, African Voices" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With her tensed stance and closed eyes, she projects the throbbing gravity of that sound.

Then I thought, Why, with all the election-year jabber about values, aren't Americans crowding into galleries of African art all over the country to see such truly adult models of goodness embodied, of moral poise in a slip-sliding world? One reason is that we don't know what we're looking at when we look at African art. We're still seeing what the Museum of Modern Art saw in its 1984 "Primitivism and Modern Art" exhibition: things "monstrous and ominous, such as Conrad's Kurtz discovered in 'The Heart of Darkness"' as one of the curators wrote. That was hogwash, of course, but tenacious hogwash. We're far from being clean of it.

Aesthetic conventions are also a problem. Traditional African art and traditional Western art museums make a bad fit. Museums are cultural deep freezes. Their purpose is to stop objects from moving and changing, keep them stationary, retard their decay, arrest their history. In this sort of protective custody, art is a passive phenomenon. It is viewed; it is studied; it is enjoyed.

A lot of modern Western art is conceived as passive, tailor-made for a museum life. But objects originally meant to be functionally active have to relinquish their function, and with it part of their meaning, to qualify as art in an institutional setting.

Traditional African art -- much of it, anyway -- is functional almost by definition. Its value lies as much in what it does as in how it looks, and doing things requires mobility. Objects move from here to there, interact with other objects and with people. Art goes into the field to ensure that crops come up. It entertains through dances, gymnastics, storytelling. By reporting gossip and satirizing local politics, it keeps a community up on the news.

It also serves as a social regulator and a moral agent, a cool instrument for handling hot situations like judging crime, settling disputes and confronting evil. It offers instructions in deportment and shapes self-definition. It promotes physical and psychological health. At once conservative and progressive, art's goal is to maintain social order in the face of chronically threatened disorder, even if doing so requires changing society itself.

If, during an arduous, hands-on career, art suffers wear and tear, becomes a beat-up version of its original, spiffy self, that's all right. As long as it is in active use, it is alive and valuable. When it becomes permanently inactive, it becomes something else. And something else is what we see in art museums.

Is it possible to restore this vivacity, or some sense of it, to African art in a mainstream museum setting? Many exhibitions have attempted to do so over the past two decades, and "African Art, African Voices" is among the more recent. The show originated at the Seattle Art Museum with an effort by the resident curator of African art, Pamela McClusky, to rethink the permanent African display along the lines of a few basic propositions.

One, African art is a dynamic, multimedia, multisensory experience; sight, sound, smell and touch all play a part. Two, Africans are the original and expert curators of their own art. Three, far from being an artifact of the past, African art is still vital and in every way -- intellectually, aesthetically, politically -- pertinent to the present.

Applying these ideas to the Seattle collection, Ms. McClusky produced a solid, personable book, "Art From Africa: Long Steps Never Broke a Back" (Princeton University Press), and the exhibition, coordinated at the Philadelphia Museum by John Zarobell, an assistant curator.

It opens with a sculpture and a moving picture, a Benin bronze head set in front of a panoramic film of contemporary African cities. Benin bronzes can date back as early as the 12th century, yet in them past and present fuse. Their semirealist style makes them a comfortable entry point to African art for contemporary Western audiences. And although a Benin head would seem to have no connection to the jostling streets and noisy markets in the film, it may well have been produced in just such an urban culture.

From this point on, the show divides into thematic sections shaped by several curatorial advisers, all but one of them African. Their contributions put Ms. McClusky's idea of filtering African art through African eyes into play, with particularly striking results in the selection of Maasia objects from Kenya.

They were acquired for the collection by Kakuta Hamisi, a Maasai scholar and a former intern at the Seattle Art Museum. He arranged for the museum to send money to his home village to build a school. In return, villagers gave the museum personal objects of their own choice, from ordinary household items to handsome beadwork ornaments, for the collection, in the process shaping the picture that a Western audience would have of their culture.

An absorbing documentary film of the villagers presenting their donations to Mr. Hamisi is on view in the gallery. In fact, in general film is given unusual prominence in this show as a means of establishing an atmospheric context for objects. And on the whole it does exactly what it's supposed to do, enhance and expand the art experience.

It's thrilling to see Asante gold jewelry up close in a museum vitrine, where its symbolism can be scrutinized and its craftsmanship admired. But to see the same jewelry worn by a king and his entourage during open-air enthronement festivities, as we do in a film here, is instantly to comprehend art's role as a component of social theater, a tool of political persuasion.

Films of masquerades in Nigeria and Sierra Leone give a comparable sense of immediacy to displays of Gelede and Sowei masks, objects that are now usually seen in isolation were once part of elaborate, kinetic ensembles. At the same time, however, many individual pieces in the show, even without audiovisual enhancement, generate tremendous energy.

A standing male Kongo figure is certainly one, with his combative wrestler's stance, his torso bristling with nails and his eyes covered with mirrors. A type of Dan mask called Ga Wree Wree, snaggle-toothed and wearing an elegant hairpin-and-cowry-shell hat, is another. And then, looming over everything, there is the eight-foot-tall image of the spirit named Basinjom, from Cameroon, composed of a feather-crowned alligator mask and a midnight-blue caftan that trails on the ground.

Monstrous and ominous? Well, awesome for sure and for a reason. The Kongo figure, once packed with potent medicines, was meant to face down evil and protect innocence. His mirrored eyes reflected the heaven. The Dan mask, at once sinister and soigné, was a supernatural judiciary agent who settled personal and communal arguments that might have lead to bloodshed and whose verdicts had the weight of law.

As to the towering Basinjom -- the name means "god's medicine" -- he was a combination of avenging angel and detective, a hunter of witches and other malign beings. He is said to have been particularly active during the colonial period, when African communities, and the moral paradigms they represented, were being shattered.

The Basinjom costume was once actually worn in a religious initiation by one of the show's curatorial advisers, the art historian Robert Farris Thompson. This protean scholar has done more than any other to advance the concept of African art as interactive drama. He has also been assiduous in tracing that dynamic from the past into the present. And "African Art, African Voices" follows his lead in a concluding selection of contemporary work.

Several of the artists -- Malike Sidibe, Zwelethu Mthethwa, William Kentridge, Yinka Shonibare -- are well known internationally. Most work in media that are foreign to pre-modern Africa. Almost all make objects for museum display. Yet in every piece chosen, the traditional moral weight -- the sense of art as a complex system of lived, in-the-now values -- is sustained. That's why, when I saw Mr. Sidibe's 1986 photograph taken in Bamana, Mali, of two solemn women in vibrant striped dresses flanking a third woman with a baby on her lap, I thought of the Yoruba mother and child. And I heard the music again, but a little changed. Maybe Lutheran soul with an Afro-pop beat.

"African Art, African Voices" remains at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street, (215)684-7500, through Jan. 2.