What Art History Should Be

Mostly this is an entry to post you to a fascinating blog post from the British Museum: The Spirit of Sierra Leone in London, written by Paul Basu.

Sowei Mask, Collection of the British Museum, Af1886,1126.1

 

 

 

What happened: A Sowei mask from Sierra Leone was "named" by elders from the Sande Society and received by the British Museum


Why this interests me: The mask was originally brought into the collection by Thomas Aldridge as part of the colonial art holdings of the British Museum.  It was described in the minimal literature that accompanied it as "‘one of the most prominent Fetishes worshipped in [the region]’."  The British Museum, displaying it for the very first time since its 1886 acquisition, is acknowledging that this is NOT what it was.  As the Sande Society was an all female group responsible for the moral upbringing of girls as they transitioned to adulthood, the mask was worn as part of that ceremony.  These masks had SPECIFIC names and identities.

The Sande Society came to perform a name acceptance ceremony--to give the mask back its lost identity.  There's a great photo of the Museum staff member, in appropriate Sande attire, receiving the object.  The work reclaims the context that made it significant in the first place.  There is a sense in which this ceremony makes the work more right, if you see my point; we understand it better for letting this happen.

It is wonderfully suitable that the name of the mask is (now) Gbavo, meaning ‘crowd-puller’ or ‘to attract people’s attention’.

What also pleases me is the catalog entry (in part): At the time this mask was collected at the end of the nineteenth century imported items of Western clothing were used by members of the Sierra Leonean elite as symbols of status and power. At the same time Europeans eagerly collected African masks and displayed them in museums as examples of exotic ‘otherness’. This two-way interpretation of a single object questions the impact of the cultural contact between colonised and coloniser.

We NEED, especially in an era of globalization, to go back to our history and see it for the moments of global connection.  To recognize that we do not exist alone, that we do not act alone, and that we influence each other (for good and for ill).  We NEED to undo a colonial attitude in art history that sees what we imagine to be the case in the art of the Other, to restore balance by teaching.