African masks had an enormous influence on the development of Modern art, as luminaries like Picasso, Matisse and Giacometti appropriated and interpreted their startling forms and materials. But what about modern artists of African descent? Do they have a distinct relationship of their own to that history?
That’s a question raised, if not definitively answered, by “Disguise: Masks and Global African Art,” an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
The show features pieces by 25 African artists and artists of African descent, whose works all relate in some way to masks and masquerade while involving neon lights, video projections, found objects, photography or other typical devices of the global avant-garde.
Distributed among these new works is a selection of traditional African masks drawn from the esteemed collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Seattle Art Museum.
The historical objects are not the focus of the show, but are here to reflect sources of inspiration for the living artists. Yet the most compelling contemporary works reveal complicated relations to historical African art.
Saya Woolfalk generates a fantasy universe. Her spectacular installation, “ChimaTEK: Virtual Chimeric Space,” incorporates video projections, fields of colored dots painted on walls and floors, and mannequins dressed in sumptuous costumes of her own creation. Three of the five figures have sculptural heads based on Sowei masks made by the Mende people of Sierra Leone and worn by women. A beautiful Sowei mask is displayed near Woolfalk’s installation. The tableau suggests a religious ceremony of a highly spiritually evolved race of beings.
“ChimaTEK: Virtual Chimeric Space,” by Saya Woolfalk. Photo: Santiago Mejia/New York Times
This archetypal arrangement certainly has antecedents in African tribal rituals but also recalls precedents in Islamic, Hindu and other cultures. Woolfalk seems less interested in an identity rooted strictly in ancestry than in bringing into play a kind of super-expanded consciousness for the future.
The historical relationship between African artists and Western colonizers, collectors and tourists comes up in an installation by Brendan Fernandes. It consists of a herd of lifesize plastic deer wearing cheap white copies of a tribal mask. Fernandes thus satirizes the popular fantasy of African art as a symbol of primitive authenticity.
Since at least as far back as the 1950s, maskmaking in Africa has been a big industry in which craftsmen produce artificially aged new masks for a worldwide market. African art has given rise to its own form of kitsch, a décor for the masses.
But the production of masks for popular consumption began long before that, when European colonizers began collecting tribal artifacts in the 19th century, and, in response, African craftsmen began to make works for the market that were separate from those created for their tribal ceremonies.
Then, largely thanks to Picasso’s electrifying encounter with African masks around 1907 and the colleagues who followed, Europeanized African aesthetics became integral to Modern art. That development is skewered here by William Villalongo’s neatly made collages. In several, an African mask cut from a photograph has been glued over a woman’s head in a reproduction of a painting by a European or an American, from a zaftig nude by Renoir to a pinup by the Pop artist Mel
Ramos.
Mask making in Africa
Mask making in Africa has not entirely succumbed to market forces. In 1980s Nigeria, a new form of masquerade called Ogele emerged, in which men wore top-heavy tiered wooden masks carved and painted to represent both real people and
imaginary beings.
One of the show’s most abstractly evocative works is a Minimalist video loop called “Double Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera,” by Sondra K. Perry. It shows a person wildly dancing in an empty studio, but most of the body — all but the hair, arms and feet — is digitally blurred almost to invisibility, turning the figure into a hyperactive ghost. Here, you might imagine, is the mercurial spirit of the masquerade itself.
“Disguise: Masks and Global African Art” runs through Sept. 18 at the Brooklyn Museum.
