Ancient Terracottas
Before the Symplegades Gateway

Roderick J. McIntosh
In. African Arts. 22(2)(1989): 74-83, 103-104

The culturally-aware public might be forgiven a degree of surprise when informed by headlines in the New York Times that "Clashing views reshape art history; When art historians put the picture in a social frame" (Glueck 1987:1-2). Those who read on are promised a palace revolt of a new generation of Revisionists determined to sweep away the "traditional insularity of art history".
Behind the provocative headlines is a drive to study Art as something beyond a purely aesthetic phenomenon, to inform the study of an object through the history, social practices and strategies of authority behind its creation and recognition as Art. Analogous revisionist movements have grown within kindred disciplines, such as Egyptology and Classical Archaeology, each with origins in the great traditions of the Italian Renaissance virtuosi collectors, Enlightenment grand tours for the dilettanti, and Kunst- und Wunderkammern . Change inures. We are no longer shocked when a distinguished classical archaeologists with impeccable disciplinary credentials in philology and art appreciation, such as A.M.Snodgrass, is impelled to ask "if the assemblage of data and the tidy ordering of material are activities that epitomize the sterility of the traditional archaeology, then what branch of it can offer a mass so large and so thoroughly ordered as Classical Archaeology? If the aim is mere description..., then what branch of it has accepted that aim with more complacency than Classical Archaeology?" (1985:32; see Cartledge 1986). One senses that things will never be quite the same.

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To end on a lighter note, the final obligation is to avoid the second rock of the Symplegades. Einheitkultur is code for that monolithic, Idealist conception of an "Age" -- each age with a discrete "spirit", each age integral over deep-time (Weber 1978:1013-1014). In an original Hegelian aesthetics, Art is the purest expression possible in the world of the senses of the metaphysical truths of each age, a unique window upon the genius of an era. Even one so grounded in the historical as Vansina can make statements of pregnant paradox: "The greatest masterpiece is timeless only because it captures the evanescent spirit of it own time" (1984: viii, see pp. 132-33, 211-13). Vansina's Art History in Africa is a celebration of how icons, symbols and art create change by crystallizing ideas and mobilizing support for ever permutating social realities. Others, however, have not resolved the paradox; witness the monolithic aesthetics integral over hundreds or thousands of years of Leroi-Gourhan for palaeolithic society (1964 & 1965) or Marija Gimbutas for the European Bronze Age (1974). Have all our africanists colleagues resisted the seduction of Einheitkultur, a love that blinds one to the potential of objects to change the world? But that is a story for another day[4].

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BIOGRAPHICAL

Roderick J. McIntosh is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University and has completed seven season of archaeological research in Ghana and Mali. Future work will be divided between the Senegalese tumuli and a return to Jenne-jeno and its satellite settlements.

NOTES [1] This is a critical ppint to which we turn briefly at the conclusion. Art and transcendentalism has been debated since Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics (1820-29); eg., Vansina 1984: viii, 109, 211-13 [2] Preziosi asserts that the role of the "made world" as agent of the social construction of reality is as "a scaffold for the erection of the individual and collective self...it is equally not merely a container which transfers thought from one brain to another" (1983:268). For the general argument that all knowledge, all realities are a social construct, see Rorty 1979 and Brufee 1986 [3] By cross-cultural processes, I do not mean the subsuming of all prehistoric change under western models, in the manner of Clifford's "affinity" between 'primitive' and Modern Art; "The modern and the primitive converse across the centuries and continents". (Clifford 1985:165) [4] Explored in R. & S.McIntosh "Mande meta-message and the seduction of the timeless", presented at the panel 'Form and Mande Art', 1988 annual meeting of the African Studies Association, Chicago; planned for publication in a future issue of African Arts .