5 - Black African Art?

Summary

The earliest artistic products must not have seemed “artistic” to the people of the time. We ourselves, if we were to see them, would scarcely recognize them as works of art. They would certainly be so similar to other products made for other practical purposes that we would not be in a position to draw a clear line between what was “not yet” and what was “already” artistic.

The white western demand for intentional production ties into white western ideas about aesthetics. The evaluation of non-western cultural objects by white westerners at the end of the 1800s included white western ideas about society and culture. Art was not something white westerners could imagine Black Africans producing because they lived in preindustrial conditions and had no history of art. White westerners significantly portrayed Black African objects as dark occult idols or insignificant decorations at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Art is in no sense the “mother tongue of humanity,” either in the sense of a primitive original ability which the romantics thought of as natural and instinctual, or in the sense of an eternal universal means of expression which preserves its essence and its value […] The language of art emerges slowly and with difficulty; neither does it fall into people’s laps from heaven, nor does it come to them naturally. There is nothing natural, necessary, or organic about it; everything is artificial, a cultural product, the results of experiments, changes and corrections.

The lack of knowledge about Black Africa and the hubris white westerners had, presuming they knew more about Black African culture than Black Africans. This led to the loss of critical information about Black African objects in the west. The white western lack of understanding is not only a result of white supremacist ideology but also because of the white western Enlightenment knowledge system of classification and ordering. The classical model of learning in the white western context leads to the specialisation of scholars who work in fragmented silos to study their chosen problem in isolation from other disciplines and methodologies than those of their ‘field’. This fragmentation of knowledge is the opposite of Black African ideas of knowledge and the reality of the world. For Black Africans, it is impossible to separate things, study them in isolation, and reach sound conclusions about the state of the objects of study.