Study Guide Units 11 - 14

+ GLOBALIZATION ESSAY

11. AFRICAN ART Powerpoint

● Theme: spirituality - awe and mysticism of the spirits in nature
- Role of ancestors + elders
- Fertility of women and the land

● Artistic Life
- Artists worked on commission, lived with patrons until the commission was completed.
- African objects are unsigned and undated.
- Apprenticeship: the standard artists’ training
● Sculpture
- Art is mostly portable - very few large sculptures.
- Wood: Trees were honored and symbolically repaid for the branches.
- Ivory: a sign of rank or prestige.
- Metal: strength and royalty
- Terracotta: Nok Culture (500 B.C.–200 A.D.)
- Natural resources: shells, reed, mud, stone, ….. (Stone is extremely rare.)

Nok Culture: *Evidence of the oldest known figurative sculpture south of the Sahara. Most Nok
sculpture is made by the coil-built technic like pottery.

Yoruba Style: “The blend of realism and idealism”

+ cast- metal portrait heads and figures by the lost- wax method of casting figures.
+ Material: Bronze (composed of copper and tin) / Brass (copper and zinc)

Dogon Couple - 18th - 19th century, Wood + Metal

- the black color comes from the fact that it’s been given offerings/sacrifices
- Oil, milk, maybe blood
- Possibly one of the Nommo pairs - 4 pairs of primordial beings from oral mythology

African masks are worn in three ways:

- Vertically covering the face
- Helmets, encasing the entire head
- a crest, resting upon the head
African Influences in Modern Art
Modern art was transformed by the influence of non-Western
art. In the early 20th century the primary source was African tribal sculpture.

Primitivism​ - even into the mid 20th century, after the European art scene had accepted Asian
art as art rather than as an exotic curiosity, African art was considered crafts or artifacts and
called primitive
+ Primitif ​- 19th century French art historical term that referenced late Medieval, early
Renaissance, Italian and Flemish painters
+ Canonized in 1920’s /30’s (Primitive Art, Primitivism in Modern Art)

Now associated with a lack of understanding for the intellectual complexities of the art and
related rituals → has colonialist, racist undertones that imply the African arts and societies were
underdeveloped
Oceania (Australia)
The World Heritage Kakadu National Park includes more than five thousand rock art sites.

Indigenous Australians: Survived as hunters and observers.

NatvarBhavsar (1934 - )

El Anatsui (1944 - )

Key points to understand the artists:

1. What are the unique characteristics of the artist's work?

2. There are two ways to find the answer.; Form and Contextual approaches.
Xu Bing (1955 - )

Xu Bing was born in China and was heavily impacted by the Cultural Revolution in 1966. He is
given woodblock printmaking tools as an act of kindness

Book from the Sky, ca. 1987-91

Xu Bing designed a 'vocabulary' of 4,000 characters which appear, in terms of their graphic form
and structure, to be Chinese.

The amount of devotion and work that went into the carving of these wood blocks and inventing
four thousand meaningless Chinese characters.

- Xu Bing, Art for the People, 2011, water-based ink on paper

- Created characters combine English text and Chinese character style/format
- Perhaps reflecting An a Chinese American heritage

Ai Weiwei (1957- )

Born in China. From 1981 to 1993, he lived in the United States.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese Contemporary artist and activist.

1993: Returning from the U.S. to China, Ai returned to China after his father became ill.

- He helped establish the experimental artists' Beijing East Village.

- The artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics.

Weiwei said “Creativity is the power to reject the past, change the status quo, and to
seek new potential.” This philosophy is reflected in all of his works, as well as in his
activism. One particularly radical work from 1995, ​Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn i​ s a
symbolic rejection of China’s past and it’s artistic and historic legacy. Historic Chinese
pottery is a status symbol, an icon of affluence, and a link to a rich culture. With one
single action, captured by photograph - Weiwei creates new subversive art from the old,
challenging the status quo of the perceived worth and due reverence to the artefacts.

In another, he uses the symbol of Sunflower seeds as a political and cultural symbol -
spearheading the creation of over one hundred million hand crafted, porcelain seeds - each
unique. It comments upon the relationship between the individual and the masses. It
references China’s export of Imperial porcelain, propaganda of Mao Se Tung, who appeared
among Sunflowers representing China’s populace all facing towards him, and reminder of the
snack of sunflower seeds shared among friends during time of poverty