African art and its effect on the western culture



African art and its effect on the western culture

African art used to refer in a self-evident manner to art produced by Africans. Since the 1960s this relative clarity has become muddled. Now, as never before, the meaning of the term African is under dispute and riddled with contradictions. And so is the term art. From the early nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, African art surveys typically opened with the British colonial period and barely touched on the artistic contributions of either Native Africans or the French, Dutch, and Spanish colonists. Likewise, Africans, Asians, and Europeans who came to African shores unwillingly as slaves, indentured workers, or refugees in transit were generally ruled out as producers of “African art,” their production of visual images and objects relegated instead to the status of folk crafts.

Needless to say, such acts of exclusion are ideological in nature. Who counts as an “African” and what counts as “art” are determinations that derive legitimacy from assessments ultimately having less to do with aesthetics than with politics. By and large, art was what was produced by members of culturally dominant groups in forms and media that had already been sanctioned, often for centuries, by elite European arbiters of taste.

That is, African art, with only an occasional exception, meant painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, and, later, photography modeled on dominant European aesthetic codes but produced in the United States by Anglo-american men. Furthermore, most of these were men who came from or worked in New England, New York, or in urban centers farther south along the eastern seaboard.

Such criteria of selection, though rarely put forth explicitly, excluded vast numbers of actual producers of visual art because they did not fit into the prescribed categories. Not only was the object-making of African, Asian African, and Native American artists left out of the mix, but so too was the visual-arts production of virtually all women, as well as that of working-class men. Indeed, the list of those makers of visual images not included under the rubric of “African artists” would appear to be practically endless: quilt-makers, cartoonists, comic strip artists, and graffiti spray-painters, commercial illustrators, set designers, fashion designers, costume designers, landscape architects, furniture makers, automobile stylists, and so forth.

In the late twentieth century, serious academic studies materialized on all of these object- or image-making professions and on the object- or image-making of a variety of socially or politically marginal groups, including preadolescent children, alienated teenagers, felons, and the mentally disabled. Tattooing, hair styling, fashion styling, body-piercing, motorcycle ornamentation, album-cover design, cyber-graphics, video-game construction, computer animation, and Hollywood special effects were now routinely talked about by their partisans as “ art forms” and were sanctioned in the marketplace of ideas by academic treatises and seminars, art gallery installations, and art museum retrospectives.

This apparent democratization of African art, or, more specifically, the expansion of definitions and categories as to what constitutes African art, would seem to be a direct outcome of ...