Comparing Cultures

This week in class we talked about the importance of comparison.  We compared several different objects in class and tried to find the similarities and differences in each.  This week my blog is focusing on trying to find more comparisons and the importance of each object and what their functions are as a piece of art.  Some objects that I found interesting during my readings were the Standing Figure of the Mossi and the Pair of Figures of the Baule.  The reason I chose to compare these two objects was because of their simplicity and their similarities to each other, yet they are from completely different cultures.

Standing Figure

            The first image I chose was the Standing Figure.  The Mossi people of Burkina Faso make this piece of artwork.  Mossi arts are broke down into two types of art; one is owned and used ritually by nakomse rulers while the other are smaller representations of females that are owned by women or children.  The Standing Figure is a full figure that is meant to represent the secular political power of chiefs.  They are carved progressively in a simplified naturalistic way.  They are always carved in active poses.  This piece of art has bent legs, arms, and has dramatic hand gestures to represent the movements of dance.  Our textbook explains that the peoples of the Mossi believe that their ancestors are believed to reward proper behavior with human and agricultural fertility and productivity, or, alternatively, to punish transgressors with disease or misfortune.  The ownership of these figures affirms a king’s right to rule.  Some other characteristics of this image is the cylindrical body, prominent breasts (representing motherhood).

Pair Figures

The other image I chose was the Pair of Figures made by the Baule peoples.  These images are very similar, although one is male and one is female.  The faces of these two objects are very similar, almost to the point of not being able to tell which is which.  At one time these objects use was unknown, but with careful studying of the face some believe they have represented nature spirits or diviner’s spirits from the sacrificial libations.  Other beliefs of these objects are that they have some contact with the Other World.  The Baule peoples maintain contact with these spirits on a daily basis.  The Earth spirits are called the asie usu.  The asie usu can be associated with numerous things such as; sky or earth, water, sickness, infertility, crop failure and other misfortunes.  The Baule believe that all adults have a mate of the opposite sex living in the Other World and that his or her activities and thoughts affect the person of this world.  The diviner can be thought to be a “person of wood” and must be honored.  The image is consecrated through sacrifice and prayer and the owner must offer the image food and follow procedures to keep it happy.

The similarities between these two objects are that they are both carved for a specific meaning; although the meanings of the carvings are completely different they both serve a purpose.  The Standing Figure is made to assure rulers right to rule or for women and children to show how the body is supposed to be perceived during motherhood.  They are both carved simply, however giving detail or emphasis on the body parts that they are trying to send a message through.  The standing image has emphasis on the legs, breasts, and arms, while the pair of figures gives detail throughout the whole piece depending on what the spouse needs help with in their currant marriage or in their life such as fertility issues.

While comparing these two objects I noticed that they both seem to look similar and unless you learned about the different peoples that think highly of these objects they might be hard to distinguish the differences.  However, it made me wonder whose object has more of a realistic theme behind it to outsiders looking in on their culture.  To me, someone who has just learned a pinch about each of these cultures I think I would seem the purpose behind the Standing Figure more, only because of the reasoning to show women and children more about motherhood.  On the other side of the spectrum, I also think that if I was to be more engaged in the Baule cultures and learned more about their backgrounds and spiritual beliefs I could also see myself saying that their object seems more meaningful and significant.  This all goes to show the differences we all have in every culture.  One example we talked about in class a couple weeks ago was the beliefs that we, as Americans have in Halloween and the beliefs that Hispanics have in El dia de los muertos.  I realize this is a stretch for an example from the Mossi and the Baule’s objects, but it just goes to show that we all have different beliefs and interpretations.

            During our lectures this week we focused on two things; we watched a movie called African Arts as Theater and read an essay called The Mask, Masking, and Masquerade Arts in Africa- I am not myself.

            While watching the movie I was very interested in learning about the different animals and peoples that were made to reflect the different important images or objects in the Bwa culture.  Some of the masks that caught my eye were the crazy man and the chameleon because of there interesting significance.  The crazy man is always angry and he incorporates the audience in his dance by lashing out at the members in the audience.  The crazy man is danced in a way that makes him seem anti social.  Besides the fact that he was anti social and what seemed to be rude I thought it was interesting that he was followed by his wife in the dance.  I questioned why she danced with him at first and it made me wonder if it had anything to do with some of the information I read about in Cole’s essay about the history of women and men behind the masks?

            Cole’s essay talked about how it is thought that men were inferior to woman because of their feminine power by forming secret associations and taking control of cults.  Cole mentioned that this background may have influenced the take over of the masking by men.  The article also talks about the myths that women made mistakes in the dancing of masks and men took over because of that reason.  In theory making men more dominate over women.

            With this knowledge I learned from this essay it made me really question why the crazy man's wife was incorporated in his dance.  The video explained that the wife followed the crazy man to calm him down.  This made me think back to previous lectures where we learned that men are thought to be more powerful than women, but it also makes me think that if the woman had to follow the man around to keep him calm, then who in fact is more “powerful.”

Spreading the Culture

The ongoing question for this week was do you think the paintings are “ambassadors of cross-cultural pollination”? How? What other arts have we looked at that also seem to fit this label?  Before I could answer these questions I first had to understand what cross-cultural pollination was.  The best way I can describe it is, cross-cultural pollination deals with comparing or dealing with two or more different cultures and making these different cultures known to others by spreading them around in various ways.  The Ghanaian artists who made these pieces of artwork are helping us develop our own thoughts and ideas that come from studying these pieces of art.  For example, when I first glanced at Isaac Azey’s piece Power House 08’ all I saw was a funny depiction of President Obama with an older woman behind him on a Motorcycle with someone chasing him on a horse.  However, after taking several moments to examine the piece there is much more to it than just a funny picture.  The meaning behind each depiction is simply stunning.  President Obama is in fact riding a motorcycle with a lady on the back, but what you don’t notice is that it is his African grandmother embracing him with a joyous grin.  Inscribed on the motorcycle is “Change We Can Believe In”. Following behind him is John McCain riding a brown horse saddle flaps reading P.O.W. and “Nation first”.  The significance of the writings and readings dealing with Obama and McCain are clearly their campaign slogans or what they were known for.  The image is depicting them in a race to the white house.

To me this image is saying much more.  During the election for President Obama and McCain seemed to be in close running, that is until the results were in when Obama nearly double McCain’s votes, which I think is what the “race is trying to represent.  The horse and the motorcycle I think represents the more modern way of doing things and the horse represents the old fashioned way of doing things or older “traditional” ideas.  Having the first black President was a major milestone not only in America, but also in Africa as well.  As Cosentino mentioned in his article Ernie flew to Ghana to celebrate Barack’s inauguration with the masterminds behind these extreme canvases.  Peoples from all over the county came to Accra to bond over this memorable event.  He explained the cheering and hollering once they started to watch this event on TV.  This goes to show that as important as it was in our country to have the first black President that it is equally as important in other cultures too.

At first glance who wouldn’t find these images funny, but once you connect to the meaning behind it all it becomes much more than a funny picture.  It shows uniqueness, thoughtfulness, creativity, and most of all passion.  The article talks about how the artists paint because they can’t help it.  It’s therapy.  It’s what they were born to do.  They think a lot about their images before they paint them.  Especially those who paint out of the depth of their religious beliefs.

To address the question of do I think the paintings are “ambassadors of cross-cultural pollination”? My answer is yes.  For me when I looked at this image, as I said above, I didn’t connect to the meaning.  However, what piece of artwork do you really understand just by your first glance? It takes time to study the piece and to connect with it.  I think that is what the artists are trying to accomplish.  They want to make something that is pleasing and catches the modern-day viewer’s attention and put it into a perspective that we can relate to and understand, but yet get the word out at the same time.  They want to spread their ideas or thoughts through these pieces of artworks, and I believe that they nailed it.  The connection between the Caucasians and the Africans are trying to compare the different outlooks that we have, but showing them together helps explain that we all have different outlooks on the ways of doing things, it just takes a great leader to get things moving in the right direction. 

Some other examples of cross-pollination art that go along with this theme are the fancy-wax prints or portrait prints.  They are made in Great Britain and Holland but are brought into Africa.  These peoples make these cloths with the images of important influential leaders to show respect, but I also think that they are made to “get the point across” to others about what they believe in and what they think is important.   These cloths seem like a minor thing, but make a big statement.  The fact that they think so highly of a person and what that person believes in to wear them on their clothing says a lot about how much that person truly means to them.

It was very interesting to see how different these two examples are, but yet they are in a way the same.  One is done in a less formal way, yet the other is done in a more proper way.  They both seem to get the point across about the importance of influential leaders and their place in our culture and in other cultures around the world.

Learning the Ghana ways through Nani

Today in class we had the opportunity to learn the process of Batik.  Nani Agbeli explained how the process worked and what some of the symbols meant.  I thought Nani was a great teacher, instead of just standing at the front of the class lecturing about the process and us taking notes on what he talked about we actually got to do the Batik process.  The first thing we did was choose a stamp and Nani expressed how important it was to understand the meaning of our stamp and to choose something that represented us as a person.  The next process was to sketch a design for our cloth.  Then we needed to put the stamp on our cloth my dipping our wooden stamp into hot wax.  Nani shared with us that it helps make the shake the excess wax off of the stamp and then press it on the cloth immediately.  If you wait to decide where your stamp is going to go the wax will dry on the stamp and you will have to repeat the process again.  That is why it is important to have an idea of the design that you are trying to achieve before you start dipping your stamp into the wax. 

            After we were done stamping our cloth we then folded the cloth whichever way we wanted, we then got the choice of dying our cloth in red, blue, or purple.  The next process is removing the wax.  First we have to let the cloth dry from the dye. We then rinsed the cloth in very hot water to remove the wax and then scrub the wax off of the fabric. The next process is laying a piece of cloth on the table then laying a piece of newspaper on top of that and then laying the wax cloth on top of the newspaper and then another newspaper on top of that.  The purpose of the newspaper is to soak up the wax from the cloth that we designed.  I’m really happy with how my design turned out.

On Thursday September 8, 2011 I attended  the Nani Agbeli Drum and Dance Performance in Maucker Union.  At first I thought we were just going to listen to a lecture about Ghana drumming and dance, however I was highly mistaken.  Nani began by giving a short performance on the drums.  While he was drumming I noticed the rhythm and his reactions to the rhythm.  Nani seemed to be “feeling the rhythm.”  Throughout his performance Nani showed many different emotions while he was drumming.  At one point I noticed happiness then the next I noticed anger in his face.  He made different facial expressions and did different movement with his head and his arms.  The drumming started out slow but then the rhythm picked up.  After his drumming performance Nani performed a dance for us that lasted almost ten minutes.  The dance included many different techniques involving your whole body.  Some specific movements I remember were actions that looked like he was praying to a god by kneeling to the floor and on the opposite end of the spectrum he did a toe touch a few times throughout the dance.  He incorporated the audience by going around and speaking to them in his native language, however we were not sure what he was saying he tried using hand motions and actions to get us to understand.

            We got a chance to learn the dance that he showed us.  At first I thought I was going to be really uncomfortable, but Nani made it really fun.  He taught us that the word dance is often associated with feeling uncomfortable so if you call them movements people will feel less uncomfortable.  The dance was a lot harder than I was expecting.  It incorporates all the muscles in your body.  I had a lot of fun learning this ways of the dance.

            Nani explained to us that there are two performances one is used to prepare for war and the other is just for tourists.  Out of the two experiences that I was a part of this week I think my favorite would have to be textile workshop because it was such a hands on activity.  Learning about the different textiles in class was helpful with the background information before Nani’s arrival but I think the workshop really helped me grasp the whole idea of it.  I learned how important it is to the peoples in the Ghana area and why they take it so seriously.  Making these textiles takes a lot of time and effort.  Many of the people make these textiles for a living.  By learning the dance, the drumming and the textiles I think it helped me see how the peoples of Ghana live and that learning about the little things that go along with these examples help you understand their lifestyle a little bit better.

            I’m a firm believer in everything has a purpose and I think that the purpose of the textiles and the performances is to show other peoples how the peoples of Ghana represent themselves.

Intriguing Information about the Dogon

Coming into the class of Arts of Africa I didn’t know much about Africa in general, let alone about anything to do with Art in Africa.  During the first week of class we learned about a group of peoples called the Dogon.  With this being the first topic of discussion in class I quickly became captivated in the topic.  Information that stood out to me in the classroom lecture and the required reading for the week seemed to be based around three things­­– sculpture, architecture, and masks.

Sculpture:

The piece of sculpture that stood out to me the most was the Seated Couple that was made sometime between the 16^th and the 19^th century.  It was made of wood and metal.  The most obvious thing I noticed right away was clearly the two figures sitting beside each other, but after studying the image I noticed this sculpture had much more to it than that.  The two figures are almost identical to one other besides the fact of one being male and one being female.  The male is seated on the right side of the woman with his arm around the woman’s neck.  One thing I learned from the reading was the purpose of having the man’s hand placed on his privates is to connect the thoughts of procreative powers or fertility, while the woman has a child on her back to show her role as a nurturing mother.  The man also carries a quiver, which is a portable case for holding arrows to show his role as a hunter or a warrior.  Another noticeable feature of this sculpture is the geometric shapes carried throughout this piece the cylindrical neck, legs, arms, and body and elongated oval faces all connect together to make this artwork.  The stool the couple is sitting on went unnoticed until our lecture in class when I learned the importance of the stool.   The stool represents the “tree of life” and also refers to the support of the couple’s ancestors.

Architecture:

The Granary Door is the piece of architecture that I thought was the most mesmerizing, not that all Dogon architecture isn’t interesting but I thought that this work had much more details that told the story of the Dogon better than the others.  This is a matter of my opinion of course.  At first, I had no idea what a granary was until in class we discussed that the purpose of a granary was to store goods, money, food and other important objects in them.  Another thing I learned about the granaries is that they are separated into male and female granaries.  The male granaries are usually used to store grain, while the women granaries are used to store jewelry or cotton.  Artwork on the door include lizards, birds, human figures, breasts, and geometric motifs.  The reason the granary doors interested me was because each door is different; no two doors are the same.

Masks:

Out of the three main topics of the Dogan, masks are by far the most interesting to me.   There are many different masks such as; Awa “The Great Mask”, the Sirige, and the Kanaga just to name a few.  The mask that I thought was the most interesting was the Sirige.  All of these masks are used to preform dances to remember those who passed away in their families.  The Sirige is the visual representative of the Great Mask.  It is painted in grid-like motifs with crossroads, which is said to represent the crossroad between life and death.  The painted rectangles on the Sirige is said to represent the different generations of a family.  The mask is several meters in length, during the dance the dancers jump and make rotating movements with the head forwards, backwards, and sideways making it very difficult that require a physical strength that not all dancers possess.  One of the most interesting things I learned about the masks, besides the make-up of them and the background information on them is that in the present day they have two different performaces.  One is normally for the tourists, while the other is the actual symbolic dance preformed in private or secluded with the Dogon.

The three of these key factors tied in to show me a little bit more about the Dogon and gave me a little bit better of an understanding on a small part of African culture and African Art.  The textbook allowed me learn some basic knowledge on the Dogon and did a good job at explaining the key words, however I did look other background information on the Dogon beyond what the textbook described.