Africa is where it’s at!

I gather that African art is the thing which you should be taking an interest these days. Several big museums and sale-rooms have big exhibitions on this theme at the moment. The Barbican in London, I discover, will be mounting a major show during January, of the work of Toyin Ojih Adutola, from Nigeria (who also happens to be Apollo magazine’s artist of the year for 2020.) This certainly set me thinking. How things have changed!

I first became aware of African art as a student. Then after graduation I moved to Canada for my MA degree, where I discovered Inuit art, and the traditions of the indigenous peoples of the north-west coast. In those days these were labelled as “primitive art”. Even at that stage I began to question the term “primitive”. My interest was given a great boost when I returned to Leicester as a tutorial assistant. At that time Norbert Elias was there.* He had taught the introductory sociology course in my first year, and it was this encounter that persuaded me to abandon economics for sociology. In 1964 he was back in Leicester after spending two years in Ghana, where he had acquired an impressive collection of African art. I got to know him quite well during the two years before I moved to Bradford, and he used to loan pieces of his collection to me.

I was puzzled at the time as to how Norbert came by some of these pieces, suspecting that it was possibly better that I knew nothing, so I never enquired. In retrospect, however, I now find it interesting that none of them were attributed to any individual artist. This was commonplace in the study of “primitive art”, and it was only in Canada, where the art of native peoples was being encouraged as a deliberate policy, and featured as a resource for tourists as well as a subject for ethnographic museums, that individual artists were coming to be credited.

The reason for this is, in retrospect, interesting. The whole notion of “primitiveness” identified art objects with tradition, rather than with art. The former was the property of a community and an expression of a collective way of life, and not the product of personal creative vision and endeavour. Nobody from the economically developed states of the West even thought to enquire about provenance, beyond the information about which “tribe” had produced these things.

All this appears now to be changing, and the art of Africa is beginning to take on the interest in Europe and North America that Japanese art had in the period between 1875 and the Great War. I find this to be an extremely interesting development, and probably will be returning to the theme again.

*If you are not a sociologist you probably don’t know that Elias was one of the major figures in the development of 20th. century sociology. It really was a privilege to know him. He gave me a north African leather cushion. During my time as a teacher I permitted favoured students to sit on “The Norbert Elias Cushion”, which was my equivalent of the “Holloway Handshake”, for those of you who follow Bake-off. After it became too delicate to be sat upon any more I had the cover framed being glass, and today it hangs on the studio wall.