Magazines - Tribal Art Spring 2009

By Constantin Petridis

Introduction
On September 26, 2008, the exhibition Art and Power in the Central African Savanna, organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, opened its doors at the Menil Collection in Houston, the first venue on the show’s three-city itinerary. After being on view in Cleveland from March 1 to May 31, 2009, it will be hosted by the de Young Museum in San Francisco, where it will close on October 11, 2009.
Art and Power presents fifty-nine varied works from the Songye, Luba, Luluwa, and Chokwe peoples, mainly figurative carvings in wood loaned from twenty-eight private and public institutions in the United States and Belgium. Many of the objects in the exhibition have never been displayed in public and some have never before been published, including a magnificent Luba staff of office (fig. 4). Even more numerous are works that have never been exhibited in the United States, such as the extraordinary Luluwa figure that was last publicly displayed in Tentoonstelling van Kongokunst, the landmark exhibition of Congolese art in Antwerp in 1937–38 (fig. 5).
The exhibition and its accompanying 160-page book, which was copublished by the Cleveland Museum of Art and Mercatorfonds of Brussels, seek to illuminate the political dimensions of works of art that in the West have traditionally been labeled as “power figures”—a neologism that replaces the once commonly used “fetishes,” both typically referring to figurative containers or receptacles for magical and/or medicinal substances of plant, animal, human, and mineral origin. Conversely, the exhibition and its publication also attempt to demonstrate that some works usually viewed solely as political also have spiritual associations and supernatural references, and thus constitute some kind of “power object” as well. Indeed, while much Luba and Chokwe art has been understood in the context of these peoples’ political history and organization, here attention is turned to the religious dimensions of their arts.