In the fi rst issue of African Arts devoted to ephemeral art (vol. 42, no. 3, 2009), articles by Aimee Bessire, Dominique Malaquais, David Doris, and Stephanie Hornbeck demonstrated the creative depth and range of the ephemeral as a technique for exploring the intersections between the temporal, material, and epistemological dimensions of aesthetic practice in Africa. Whether manifested in metaphor, as a physical attribute of an object, or in the very real experience of transience and loss, these authors revealed how ephemeral art was variously implicated in acts of coping, cautioning, protection and self-determination. Th e present set of articles is, again, wildly diverse in approach, and yet equally compelling in their ability to bring new thinking to bear on material with which these authors have become intimately familiar. Interestingly, each study conveys a sense of something “on the verge”—Kuba boys who are almost men; a vodun shrine that is always only almost “fi nished” and on its way to becoming something else; a reliquary fi gure that is present only in the imaginary of its former owners. In these papers, we fi nd transition, transformation, absence, and fl ux to be the constitutive aspects of the artworks at hand. In her paper “Ephemeral Fang Reliquaries: A Post-History,” Jessica Martinez uses the idea of the ephemeral as way to consider what happened in Africa aft er these powerful, iconic fi gures were vilifi ed, destroyed, hidden, or otherwise absconded with en masse over a relatively short period of Gabon’s colonial history. As the author argues, this veritable emptying out of a tradition left “palpable” traces in the lives and imaginations of Libreville residents. In their absence, a politics of the imaginary engendered stories of occult power and mystery, galvanized ethnic and national pride and, most recently, has inspired a heritage campaign that has culminated in the collection of virtual reliquary fi gures. Th us, while Fang reliquary fi gures became ephemeral due to a confl uence of destructive historical forces, despite their absence, their effi cacy has endured. A major contribution of Martinez’s study of these Fang reliquary fi gures is that she turns our attention from their anointed place in museums and private collections to the people and situations they left behind, showing that the ephemeral can be an enabler of both fantasy and violence. Pulling together material from both the past and the immediate present, Martinez brings us to a new place for thinking about the life histories of these famed guardian fi gures. In “Southern Kuba Initiation Rites: Th e Ephemeral Face of Power and Secrecy,” author (and initiate) David Binkley more than describes this pivotal Kuba rite of passage from boyhood to adulthood. His exploration of how ephemerality plays into the symbolic, spatial, and material dimensions of art-making and performance opens us up to how art “works” at the intersection of language, knowledge, and visuality. One of the most signifi cant contrasts in the Kuba aesthetic hierarchy exists between the ownership of the prestigious and exquisitely craft ed arts of leadership, and the disposability of the roughly made, transient arts of the initiation camp. As Binkley points out, metaphors abound in the highly stratifi ed world of the Kuba that promote distinctions between the civilized world from that of the wild, the permanent from the temporary, the fi ne from the coarse, the mature from the young. However, it is in the very space of the ephemeral—the liminal, the threshold—where mingling is permitted, where secrets are revealed, and where it is knowledge and not art that constitutes the “permanent” measure of value and prestige. Here, knowledge takes priority over objects, though objects are implicated in the knowledge purveyed. Paradoxically, it is with ephemeral materials that the longevity of the institution of initiation is promoted.
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Open Access
Sep 28, 2010
Nicola Cetorelli + 1
