African Dream Machines

Anitra Nettleton

Description

African Dream Machines takes African headrests out of the category of functional objects and into the more rarefied category of ‘art’ objects. Styles in African headrests are usually defined in terms of western art and archaeological discourses, but this book interrogates these definitions of style and demonstrates the shortcomings of defining a single formal style model as exclusive to a single ethnic group.
Among the artefacts made by southern African peoples, headrests were the best known. Anitra Nettleton’s study of the uses and forms of headrests opened up a number of art-historical methodologies in the attempt to gain an understanding of form, style and content in African art objects. Her drawings of each and every headrest encountered become a major part of the project.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Use of African Ethnic Names and Country and Place Names
References to illustrations in the Text and Notes on Illustrations
Chapter 1 Headrests and Art
Chapter 2 A Matter of Style, or Why Style Matters
Chapter 3 Methodology, Position and Limitations
Chapter 4 The Geographical and Chronological Distribution of the Contribution of the Columned Headrest
Chapter 5 Authenticity and History
Chapter 6 East African Headrests: Identity, Form and Aesthetics
Chapter 7 Tracing Histories: Central and Southern African Connections
Chapter 8 Not just a Curious Beauty: The Anatomy of Meaning in Useful Objects
Notes to Chapters
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des arts visuels
• ART
• History
• General
• Anthropology
• General officer
• History of art

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781868146123
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 26 Mo

Extrait

AFRICAN
DREAM
MACHINES
ANITRA NETTLETON
AFRICAN
DREAM
MACHINES
Style, Identity and Meaning of African Headrests
Published in South Africa by
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
http://witspress.wits.ac.za
© Anitra Nettleton 2007
First printed 2007
ISBN 978-1-86814-458-7 ISBN 978-1-86814-612-3 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-77614-291-0 (MOBI)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
Edited by Alex Potter
Indexed by Marina Pearson
Cover and book design by Lisa Platt, Hothouse South Africa
Printed and bound by Paarl Print
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Use of African Ethnic Names and Country and Place Names
References to Illustrations in the Text and Notes on Illustrations
CHAPTER 1 : Headrests and Art
Figures 1–3
CHAPTER 2 : A Matter of Style, or, Why Style Matters
Figures 4–26
CHAPTER 3 : Methodology, Position and Limitations
CHAPTER 4 : The Geographical and Chronological Distribution of the Columned Headrest
Figures 27–108
CHAPTER 5 : Authenticity and History
Figures 109–179
CHAPTER 6 : East African Headrests: Identity, Form and Aesthetics
Figures 180–261
CHAPTER 7 : Tracing Histories: Central and Southern African Connections
Figures 262–432
CHAPTER 8 : Not Just a Curious Beauty: The Anatomy of Meaning in Useful Objects
Figures 433–465
Notes to Chapters
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index
Preface
This book has been in the making for a total of fifteen years. The research started with my PhD on the traditional woodcarving of the Shona- and Venda-speaking peoples of Zimbabwe and South Africa (Nettleton 1985). Among the artefacts made by Southern African peoples, headrests were the best known, and they formed the centre of what I was to write about the art of the Shona. I spent a year in Europe in 1975-1976 researching all forms of woodcarving among Southern African peoples and discovered museum stores full of unacknowledged ‘masterpieces’ made by speakers of numerous Southern African languages. Many of these were headrests. In investigating headrests closely, I became aware of contexts of use and distributions of form which allowed me to use headrests to investigate a number of problems that face anyone who wishes to use art-historical methodologies to understand form, style and content in African art objects. A Council Fellowship from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1990 to 1991 enabled me to hunt down more headrests from across the African continent held in museum collections across Europe, and to develop an archive in the form of notes on, and photographs and sketches of each headrest I encountered. Where I was permitted, I also consulted museum registers for histories of these objects and made notes on that material in order to establish a particular context for each.
Armed with this research I returned home to begin its compilation, and began the process of drawing every headrest which I intended to illustrate in the book. Some of the drawings were made between 1980 and 1983, as illustrations for my PhD thesis, but the vast majority were executed between 1992 and 2005.Many examples from South African collections were added at this time, expanding the field vastly. Initially I started the drawings because I was obstructed from taking photographs in two museums, once in Zimbabwe in 1981, and once in Belgium in 1991. However, I soon discovered that drawings enabled me to present information that would have been completely impossible with single views of each object such as those offered by the conventional face-view photograph. The process of drawing then became a tool of analysis as much as it was a means of presenting visual information. So, while the drawings started out as mere accompaniments to a text whose research dimension was vast, they have become a major part of the project in their own right.
The text in this book examines objects whose functional utility might, in the past, have prevented them from being taken seriously as forms of art. The book therefore starts with a chapter which examines the processes whereby such objects have been incorporated into a discourse of aesthetics and meaning and thus of ‘art’. That is followed by a chapter in which the notion of ‘style’ is interrogated in relation to a single, albeit contested, ‘ethnic’ group, the Tellem. Chapter three is a short explanation of methodological issues underlying the research and the use of the drawings. In the next two chapters I track the distribution of a single form of headrest, those which use single or multiple columns as supports, across the continent and across time on the continent, and in the process I trace similarities among widely dispersed forms. This distribution study is also used to challenge notions of ‘authenticity’. I then turn to discussing headrests in regional categories, starting with East Africa, looking mostly at forms made by people speaking Cushitic and Nilotic languages. The following chapter looks at headrest forms made by Bantu speakers, which are quite different from those made by the East African groups and which are tracked here in relation to histories of collection and marketing. These two chapters also look at the ways in which identity has been assigned to particular headrests. In the final chapter I discuss the making, use and meanings of African headrests on a number of different levels, using examples from across the continent, and contextual material. In this chapter a number of photographs are used to provide the reader with a visual context into which to place the drawings and textual exegesis.
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the generous support I have received over the years from the University of the Witwatersrand, including not only a publication grant from the University Research Committee in 2006, but also, earlier, a University Council Research Fellowship that enabled me to spend 12 months in Europe in 1990–91 researching this material, and a smaller research grant in 2005 that enabled me to wrap up research at some other museums. The book also draws on research that was funded by the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust in 1975–77.
In my research, I was dependent on the goodwill of many staff members at a variety of museums, and I thank them for their help and generosity in allowing me into their stores and making their archives available to me. Among these were staff at the following institutions: the British Museum Department of Ethnography, London, where I was given free reign in the African stores as a curatorial assistant; the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; the World Museum, Liverpool; the Powell-Cotton Museum, Birchington on Sea; the Manchester University Museum, Manchester; the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh; the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Central, Tervuren; the Staatlisches Museum für Völkerkunde, Munich; the Museum für Völkerkunde, Frankfurt am Main; the Museum für Völkerkunde, Hamburg; the Musèe de Ville, Neuchâtel; the Musée d’Ethnographie, Geneva; the Museum Rietberg, Zurich; the Koninklijke Museum voor Volkerkunde, Leiden; the Johannesburg Art Gallery; MuseumAfrika, Johannesburg; the Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town; and the National Culture History Museum, Tshwane (Pretoria).
Some of the people who have consistently maintained an interest in my work and whom I would like to thank for this are (in no particular order): John Mack and John Picton, whom I first met in 1975 at what was then the Museum of Mankind, and who saw me through the initial research on Shona headrests that formed a substantial part of my PhD and of this project; Sandra Klopper, whose work on Zulu art has contributed to this study, as has that of Rayda Becker; Allen Roberts, who read a draft of the final chapter and made invaluable comments via an extended e-mail correspondence; Jane Taylor, who responded to a version of the final chapter in a seminar at the Wits School of Arts with great enthusiasm and insight; Elizabeth Rankin, who was a mentor of note through the first 8 of the 17 years consumed by this project; Julia Charlton and Fiona Rankin-Smith, whose patience with my colonisation of facilities in the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries and my use of the collection was boundless; and David Hammond-Tooke, who introduced me to anthropological ways of thinking.
Finally I have to thank my family, Paul, Luke, Natalie and Matthew, who have shared so much of their lives with this project.
Notes on the Use of African Ethnic Names and Country and Place Names
AFRICAN ETHNIC NAMES
This study of African headrests includes pieces made by or attributed to members of a large number of different ethnic groups across the continent. Identifying these groups in an English-language text forms a major challenge. This text does not use complex forms of orthographic marking, but uses the simplest recognisable name for each ethnic group. Because French and English have been the main languages in which studies of African peoples have been published, there remain a number of differences in spelling of names of some groups. I have decided to use English forms wherever that makes most sense.
In some instances, ethnic names indicate small groups that are in turn classified as belonging to larger groups; two examples are as follows:
1 . The Tiati Pokot are a sub-group of the Pokot (sometimes spelt Pakot), who, in turn, have been classified as Suk, and as part of a larger group called Kalenjin.
2 . The Gwamba and Ronga are sub-groups of the Tsonga (sometimes spelt Tonga/Thonga).
In old European practice, ethnic groups among the speakers of the Bantu languages were identified by a form of their names that indicates ‘persons of’ (Ba/Ma). This form of identificat