The brilliant Teju Cole, blogging for the New Inquiry on about iconoclasism, the power of images and the destruction of Sufi shrines in Timbuktu:
Images are powerful. They can bring people into such a pitch of discomfort that violence ensues, and iconoclasm carries within itself two paradoxical traits: thoroughness and fury…. iconoclastic movements is that they are never about theology alone. They include politics, struggles for power, the effort to humiliate an enemy, and a demonstration of iconoclasts’ own neuroses. Behind iconoclastic bravado is a terror of magic, a belief in dead saints no less than that of iconophiles and, crucially, a historical anxiety that, in the Timbuktu case, is about presenting the bona fides of Ansar Dine to its Wahhabi models in Saudi Arabia and to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
That which doesn’t speak dumbfounds. After all, who can tell what such objects are thinking? Best to destroy the inscrutable, the ancient, if one is to truly usher in a pure new world. So, the invaders continue their work in Timbuktu with enthusiasm and good cheer, smashing pots, breaking bricks, rattling at the doors of the mosque. It takes a lot of work to silence silent objects. But already it is clear that not only the people watching from behind the gate are consumed with fear.
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Save Timbuktu!
30 June 2012: UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova expressed her distress and dismay over the destruction of three sacred tombs that are part of a World Heritage site in Timbuktu, Mali. Ms Bokova called on the belligerents to cease the destruction immediately. “Reports that the Mausoleums of Sidi Mahmoud, Sidi Moctar and Alpha Moya have been destroyed is extremely distressing,” the Director-General said. “There is no justification for such wanton destruction and I call on all parties engaged in the conflict to stop these terrible and irreversible acts, to exercise their responsibility and protect this invaluable cultural heritage for future generations. The Director-General, has repeatedly urged international cooperation to protect the sites which bear witness to the golden age of Timbuktu in the 16th century and to a history that stretches even further back to the 5th century of the Hegira. Earlier today, the Chairperson of the Committee, Eleonora Mitrofanova (Russian Federation) described the destruction of the three tombs as “tragic news for us all and, even more so for the inhabitants of Timbuktu who have cherished and preserved this monument over more than seven centuries.” On Thursday, 28 June, the World Heritage Committee, meeting in St. Petersburg, accepted the request of the government of Mali to place Timbuktu and the Tomb of Askia on UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger.
I am very pessimistic that UNESCO or any other organisation will be able to convince the rebels that this ancient city should be cherished as if it were the last flower on earth.
>via: http://afroeurope.blogspot.com/2012/07/save-timbuktu.html
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In Mali,
Art as Real as Life Itself
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: April 16, 2012
BAMAKO, Mali — Political tumult in the last few weeks — a military coup, a Tuareg and Islamist takeover in the north — has all but eliminated tourism in this West African nation, which has long been a magnet for Western travelers in search of firsthand encounters with living art traditions.
But in calmer times the usual focus of such a quest is the landscape of cliffs and gorges in central Mali known as Dogon country. The classical tour includes two standard items: a Dogon masked dance performance and a view of a mural-size expanse of rock paintings, reputedly ancient, in the area.
Dances are arranged by appointment. You book one through a local hotel, pay upfront and hire a driver to ferry you out along cratered roads to a village. There, with the help of guides, you make your way up a cliffside to a shelflike clearing.
At a scheduled time two dozen or so young men, some on stilts, all with masks representing spirits and animals, silently emerge from behind high rocks. They circle the clearing at a measured pace, then, one after another, go into short, tightly choreographed solos danced to the driving rhythms of a drum orchestra.
Dust rises. The speed and intricacy of movement increases competitively as the musicians urge on the dancers. Then, in well under an hour, it’s over. The performers linger to pose for pictures and vanish as silently as they came.
Canned ethnography? For a Western art critic who tries to resist value-laden paradigms, like high versus low, traditional versus modern, and genuine versus fake, but who is still steeped in binary thinking, it was hard, on a recent visit, not to take the event as an artifact, a slice of globalist consumer art — at least at first. But Africa, once you start asking questions, tends to change how you see.
The dance, it turns out, is a radically condensed version of a funeral masquerade, a communal ritual intended to urge the reluctant dead into the afterlife, where they can assume useful roles as ancestors. A full-scale performance, honoring important elders, can go on for days. The one I saw under a hot winter sun was the CliffsNotes edition. But it was also an example of history in motion, cultural survival in progress.
The Dogon, a farming people said to have come to the region centuries ago to avoid conversion to Islam, have long since been claimed by that religion and by Christianity alike, and by the most seductive of faiths, secular materialism. And as the force of incursions has increased, age-old means of self-support have diminished. Climate shifts and the departure of young men to cities have made agriculture a constant and losing struggle.
In these circumstances tourism has been a godsend. The packaged dances have brought in cash and have given young men a reason to stay home. By packaging and selling their culture, the Dogon have been keeping it viable.
In the West we have a particular definition of authenticity and a mania for it as a standard for art, especially art that we envision as elemental, unmodern, unspoiled. We gauge genuineness in terms of age, rarity, uniqueness, history of use, motives for creation. But in Africa, as often as not, authentic is simply what works, socially and spiritually: for example, the way each Dogon tourist dance keeps a larger dance, and Dogon identity, alive.
Once this idea sank in, Africa blossomed for me, knocked me off balance and kept me that way.
Songho, a Dogon village and the other regulation tour stop, is famous for a cliff face covered with rock paintings that mark the site of a male circumcision camp. Although the village is now Muslim, Dogon initiation still takes place every three years, with boys coming from the surrounding countryside.
The paintings, done in black, white and brick-red pigment, are of floating shapes, some recognizable as humanlike figures, others looking uncannily like cartoon versions of recent communications hardware: televisions or computers or iPhones complete with small screens and keypads.
No one has yet cracked the symbolic codes here.
They may relate to local family histories or to elaborate Dogon oral epics of ethnic origin and destiny. What’s striking, though, and initially disconcerting is how vivid, even garish, the images are, despite a vaunted antiquity.
For this there’s an explanation. Every three years the wall is selectively repainted. Certain symbols are freshened up, while others are left to fade. And occasionally, it seems, new things are added. Although we tend to think of rock paintings as a time-mellowed medium, a lot of what’s here looks as bold as just-bombed graffiti tags.
But as with the masquerade, just because something doesn’t look old doesn’t mean it’s not. And anyway, I found myself thinking, “What’s the big deal about old art, of the kind locked up in Western museums?” Art, like life, is about growing and recharging, keeping on the move. Change is realness. Africa, present-minded and unsentimental, seems to keep saying this.
Or at least I kept hearing it, as I did on a visit to the ironworkers collective, the Coopérative des Forgerons, back in Bamako, Mali’s capital. Embedded deep in the city’s Great Market, the cooperative is an artisan village unto itself, a tangle of dirt lanes and alleys lined with lean-to sheds.
In each, one or two men stand or squat in front of an open forge and heat pieces of castoff metal — car body scraps, plumbing parts, strips of roof sheeting — to an orange glow before hammering them into new things: plows, hoes, cooking bowls, tools and machetes.
In West Africa blacksmiths have always been feared as magicians because of their freakish, godly ability to smelt iron from ore, and turn solid to liquid and liquid to solid again. At the same time, they are revered for their technological prowess. Without them and what they make, crops could not be cultivated, wars waged, homes protected, rituals performed.
In their ovenlike sheds, intent on their hazardous work, paying no mind to tourists angling for shots, they embody the much-told story of Africa as a culture of recycling. And on a continent where art can often be defined as things or actions employed as a means of managing power, they illustrate the force of African agency, of using power — call it art — to create new forms.
A few days later my thoughts turned back to Grand Market as I walked through the permanent textile display at the National Museum of Mali. There’s some fine old material here: fragments, kept under glass, of 12th-century weaving by pre-Dogon Tellem people who used caves, some near the cliff where I’d seen the masquerade, for burials.
But most fabrics in the gallery are of far more recent date, from the 1970s through the 1990s, and of types still for sale in the city today. As if to point up the gallery-to-street connection, lengths of various new cloths hang free in bannerlike rows from the gallery ceiling and are draped over barrel-like metal stands.
For anyone used to the sanctified, conservation-minded environment of Western museums, such casual flair delivers a jolt. I scanned the room, checked some dates, thought confused thoughts about art versus product and was prepared to make my stay short when one item caught me eye.
It was a cotton hand-weave with jazzy, Matisse-ish patterns worked out in gradations of indigo. Fabulous. Date: around 1982. And hadn’t I seen something very like it before? I had. The weave was virtually identical to that in the Tellem pieces nearby, and the indigo pattern closely resembled one I’d admired as it sat, half finished, on a Dogon-country loom.
If the museum’s strategy was to bring past, present and an encompassing concept of preciousness together, it worked. To see it working, and to be entranced by the sight, required for me an on-the-spot shift in perceptual habit.
Taste is habit, a form of learned behavior. And habit is what we rely on to make us feel at home and comfortable in the world. So judgment based primarily on taste, like most art criticism, is inherently conservative, predictable, fixed.
Africa is a habit breaker. It teaches that the ideal of unalterable tradition is an illusion, that change itself is a tradition, maybe the great modern one. It teaches that now is as authentic as then, and already is then. If, on an African visit, such thoughts kick in at all, chances are they’ll grow larger and realer. As you gradually — confusedly, delightedly — come to realize, the basic experience of being here is learning how much you don’t know.
>via: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/arts/design/in-mali-finding-art-as-authenti...