Inscriptions and fantasies in the invention of Shona sculpture [1]

In this short critique of the creation of meaning in a modern yet "tribal" form of African art, Shona sculpture, I question the ways in which a certain authenticity has been constructed. In order to do so I consider the ascriptions of meanings to a limited number of some of the early Shona sculptures exhibited at the Musée Rodin in Paris in 1971. In the catalog which accompanied this essentially inaugural exhibition for this tradition, Frank McEwen, the director of the National Gallery of Rhodesia and instigator of the movement, attributed meanings to sculptures through publishing descriptive texts alongside photographs of the works. These meanings have been reproduced as key symbols in the literature on Shona sculpture ever since (cf. Kennedy 1992, Ponter 1992). Through the re-presentation and analysis of a limited sample of these original inscriptions I ask to what extent are they selected from any verifiable ethnographic reality? and in what degree are they inventions emanating from European fantasies of Africa?

Through discussing the following inscriptions, given as explanations to sculptures in one of the first and most prestigious presentations of Shona sculpture to the international art world, I ask whether they might not be accurate descriptions, but rather highly motivated mystifications. Despite this, most reviewers (and patrons) have accepted these meanings and re-inscribed them, in effect creating a tradition heavily based in fantasy. Such a discourse is particularly revealing as an example of the way in which African art has been invented by the West (cf. Mudimbe 1989). I will argue that this is an unusually useful case for the study of the relationship between the construction of the Other and the authentic.

Skeleton-Antelope-Men and Skeleton Gods: Shona symbols

I have chosen to focus here on one of the original Shona themes inscribed in the catalog for the exhibition at the Musee Rodin in 1971, namely the Skeleton Being. Although this theme (and its variants) was one of the key Shona symbols (McEwen 1972), it is no longer in use, and, as Marion Arnold has noted, there is no supporting evidence for these claims (1981:107,129).

Before discussing these Shona symbols, it is important to note that many of the Shona artists themselves have insistently furthered this discourse which asserts that Shona sculpture is the revival of an ancient Shona tradition which involves revealing spirits and culture in stone (cf. Kuhn 1978, Winter-Irving 1991). I do not pursue the problems with this discourse here except to reassert, as I have argued elsewhere (Zilberg 1988, 1993), that this is a hegemonic discourse compromising historical truth for the sake of a specific authenticity. Suffice it to say that despite the rhetoric in this art world, the idea of a Shona identity is a very recent construct and not a primordial entity (cf. Comaroff 1987, Ranger 1989). In addition, almost half of the sculptors exhibited at the exhibition held at the Musée Rodin in 1971 were from diverse Central African cultural backgrounds. Yet the marketing (and idea) of Shona sculpture as a revival of an ancient Shona tradition and a culturally embedded practice grows stronger with every exhibition and text which re-inscribes the myth and magic of the Shona people (cf. Povey 1991).

The first Shona skeleton sculpture was by Sylvester Mubayi who made Skeleton Antelope Man, a highly unusual sculpture that was to stimulate other artists such as John Takawira to produce a series of works based on the skeleton theme (cf. Froger Butler 1982). This original work combined human and animal forms in a way which has come to be described as quintessentially Shona. The idea here is that by sculpting part animal, human, and skeletal forms, the sculptors are conveying their beliefs in the metamorphosis of man into animal, and in the communication between the living and the spirit world (Arnold 1981). On this level it can be seen that there is a certain basis for these "Shona" symbols, but the problem in the inscription of meaning, the entextualization of these sculptures, is in the extremity of the manipulation of this possibility. The myths of Skeleton Gods, upon which these symbols are based, simply do not exist—they are not to be found in the extensive literature on Shona religion. Consequently, analysis of these inscriptions reveals a fascinating case of the invention and imagining of Africa and of contemporary African art.

While facets of Shona myth and ritual—such as the belief in the spirit world and possession—have been selected, they have been deployed here in such a fantastic manner that one has to work hard to find and disentangle possible origins for these themes—the actual cultural beliefs upon which this authenticity has been built.

For example, in the Workshop catalog, Skeleton Antelope Man is described as follows:

Similarly, in the catalog for the exhibition at the Rodin museum, there are three interesting descriptions given to some of these works. "Vie Squelettique" is described as an example which reveals the motifs of the skeleton myth:

Similarly, Man-God Skeleton is described like this:

Here the Man-God Skeleton is made through rites in which blood sacrifices provide for the communication between living and spirit beings.

There is no evidence, as far as I know, that the Shona believe in the incarnation of skeletons, and certainly no documentation that they pour blood over their ancestors' skeletons in order to animate them and communicate with the dead. Yet these "facts" were established in this catalog as "true" and "immanent" and have been recycled ever since. These particular descriptions that I have considered here are gross misrepresentations and manipulations of funerary and post-mortuary Shona rituals and general beliefs about communication with and possession by animal and ancestral spirits (for descriptions of Shona ritual see Aschwanden 1989, Bourdillon 1976). In terms of untangling the possible origins of these explanations, the closest ethnographic material which I have been able to discern as a source from which the idea of blood sacrifice and incarnation may have been derived is this:

Another potential source for a similar theme is the Kurova Guva ceremony; I suspect this to be the derivation because one of these "spirit sculptures" was labelled "Guwa." A year after a person's death (one who had been married and had children), the Kurova Guva ceremony is held in which the spirit is brought back to the homestead from the wild through the sacrifice of a goat or a bull. In addition to this type of selection in the inscription process, it is indeed true that the "Shona" peoples believe in the omnipresence of the spirits and their influence on one's life (and of the possibility of them communicating their wishes and dissatisfactions with their descendants through spirit mediums), but again it is critical to note this is by no means specific to the "Shona." To select from these general cultural practices and transform them into blood sacrifices over ancestor skeletons, animating them so as to allow them to communicate with the living, and then to propose that stone sculptures are not only representative of this but incarnate of that experience is an extraordinary form of inscription in the construction of authenticity. In fairness to Frank McEwen, however, this should be foregrounded by the fact that Joseph Ndandarika, one of the original Shona sculptors, used to love telling such tales. Do these inscriptions not tell us more about European perceptions of Africa as a savage and magical Other than of anything else? Does this form of representation not speak more to the history of ideological relations between Africa and the West than to the factual basis for these inscriptions themselves?

Conclusion: Shona sculpture as a commodity fetish

The above description of specific examples of inscriptions through which Shona sculpture has been imagined (invented) by attaching highly inventive and selective texts to works of art could be seen to raise critical problems for ideas of authenticity and value based in such representations. Do the artists really believe that there are spirits in these stones and that they reveal them through a magically creative process? Rather, is this not a way of speaking for gullible Europeans who think, as Hodza (1982) says, that anything made by an African is magical?

In this type of construction of an authenticity, a primacy is given to meaning which I argue speaks to the creative encounter between the European imagination of Africa and the African's perception of that vision. This case study is useful for understanding processes of objectification and the commodity fetish, specifically for examining how such fictionsealities are perpetuated through authenticating discourses which select particular forms of representation in order to satisfy Western perceptions of authenticity. These necessarily fetishise this commodity to give it a cultural and therefore economic value.

The point I am advancing here is that audience expectation is the driving force in this art world, not a "Shona" zeitgeist (for similar critiques see Bernardi 1988, Cousins 1992, Roberts 1982). The cycle of symbolic exchange that Jules-Rosette (1984:19) develops is not so much a process in which the artists project symbolic meanings into the market and then modify their production according to what is sold; it is a calculated selection, and they have McEwen's original expectations as well as the consumer's expectations in mind from the very start.

This accounts for the common critique of the aesthetic integrity of Shona sculpture today, and can be seen as a process of reflection in which the artists create what they imagine the consumer perceives as Shona and finds aesthetically pleasing (cf. Steiner 1990 for a similar case in the West African art market).

These inscribed meanings would seem to bear out Marx's observations on the fetishisation of human labor in the market: this is a case of "the fantastic objectification of commodities" (their fetishisation) and "an illusion of a relation between things" taking "the place of a social relation" (cf. Stewart 1984:165 for a similar process occurring with representation of a Bambara mask). Similarly, Daniel Miller, in The Myth of Primitivism (1991), using Said's concept of Orientalism as an "operation of ideology" in explaining British textiles made in the "oriental style," writes this about the fetishistic assumption of the Occident (exoticised Other) as a reality rather than as a constructed fiction:

Consequently, perhaps it helps to think of the inscriptions considered in this paper as representational strategies speaking directly to the imagining of Africa and the manipulation of culture for the sake of a certain authenticity and therefore of a specific form of value.

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the opportunity to have pursued this research while a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities at Northwestern, as well as the support for this research by grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Departments of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In particular, I thank Dr. Edward Bruner, Dr. Anita Glaze, Dr. Alma Gottlieb, Viviene Jedeiken, Veronica Kann, Dr. Janet Stanley, Patricia Sandler, Dr. Terence Ranger, Dr. Thomas Turino, Dr. Norman Whitten, Celia Winter-Irving, Richard Wolf, my family, and the late Joseph Ndandarika.

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1. For a more balanced overview of "Shona" sculpture than that found in the extant American literature on contemporary African art, see Williams (1991) and Walker (1991). Shona sculpture emerged in the early 1960s through the first of the contemporary African Workshop experiments (cf. Wahlman 1989). It is important to note here that Frank McEwen created the idea of a Shona sculpture at the same time as coining the explicitly derogatory and antipodal term "airport art" (cf. McEwen 1966). The invention of Shona sculpture necessarily denied the diverse ethnicities of the artists and relied on a primordialist rather than emergent notion of ethnic identity. It also notably involved the omission of the fact that a number of the first and leading artists were introduced to art through mission art experiments such as those run by Canon Edward Patterson at Cyrene Mission in the 1930s and 1940s, and in Salisbury from the 1950s-70s, as well as through Father Groeber's instruction at Serima Mission in the 1960s (cf. Plangger 1974). Consequently, a number of key Shona artists said to have emerged spontanteously at the Workshop school had already been introduced to art through these schools, through experimentation in the tourist curio trade, or through relatives or acquaintances who had variously become members of the loose association of artists comprising the Workshop school.

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