Collection Publications: Life Objects: Rites of Passage in African Art

The organic and active interconnection between the living and the dead, between humans and spiritual entities, and the cyclical path linking the natural and metaphysical worlds characterized the worldviews of many indigenous African societies. Religious and ritual systems as well as social and political practices affirmed, reified, and sustained these complex relationshipsthat were so important to the concept and performance of personhood. African peoples imagined the individual person as an important agent within a closed cyclical cosmology, from birth to childhood, adulthood to death, and return-in due time-to the phenomenal world through the process of reincarnation. The humanity of a person was made complete only by participation in the social life of the community, but was equally dependent upon actions of deities and spiritual forces, as well as ancestors who must have lived full and successful lives during their sojourn on earth. [...] The term "life objects" is important in understanding the place of art in the intricate philosophical, religious, and ritual complexes with which this exhibition is concerned. Objects ordinarily describe concrete phenomena evacuated of any form of life-"object" and "life" usually connote two opposing concepts or things. When conjoined as here, however, they suggest two contexts of artistic production and practices in many African societies. First, the objects...are de facto sculptures. Yet their artistic value in their local context depended as much on their physical attributes as on the ritual processes through which they simultaneously became objets d'art and symbolic objects forms endowed with powerful symbolism through prescribed ritual action. Second, we are made aware of the vital connection between man-made objects and the life of the individual and community. The use of objects in rites of passage or in the affirmation of important stages in human life thus conferred on them roles as participants in the maintenance of the life of individuals and their communities. [This] raises an important question about the place within an art museum of objects whose aesthetic qualities are overwhelmed by their original ritual functions. It resurrects the ongoing and pertinent debate about the migration to the museum of art objects previously consigned to ethnographic inquiry and exotic fascination. To be sure, it is impossible to appreciate the full extent of the formal choices creators of these works made without considering, on the one hand, the sociocultural conditions in which the artists performed their artistic subjectivity and, on the other, how other aspects of the human experience determined and thus extended the scope of art in African societies. This presentation makes clear that in many African societies, art was indeed ineluctably connected w ith the affirmation of life, and that life-supported by ritual processes-endowed art with meaning more profound than the possibilities of its formal conditions. It makes us keenly aware of an important aspect of the artistic experience-its dependence on, rather than autonomy from, social life and human knowledge systems. Yet, even without deep knowledge of the ritual contexts of these objects, their formal eloquence and the stunning range of styles and media testify to the diversity of artistic traditions and individual creativity in indigenous African societies. It is the combination of intriguing and powerful formal qualities and a surplus of ritual symbolism in the "life objects" that this exhibition emphasizes.

-- Chika Okeke-Agulu

Assistant Professor, Princeton University

Department of Art and Archaeology, and the Center for African American Studies