Senses in understandings of art

African Arts, Summer, 2005 by Henry John Drewal

In 2004 I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on a project that has intrigued me for a long time--the role of the senses in understandings of African / African Diaspora art, and art in general. I am preparing a book on the subject. (1) My earliest encounter with this topic, though I did not know it at the time, dates to my very first attempt at African art "research"--my apprenticeship to the Yoruba artist Sanusi of the Adugbologe Workshop in Abeokuta, Nigeria in 1965, while I was a Peace Corps secondary school teacher. I did a second, mask-making apprenticeship with Ogundipe of Ilaro in 1978 when the head of the Gelede society challenged me to make one for the impending festival. I did, and believe that work still dances in Gelede performances (Fig. 1; Okediji 2003:182). What I learned from those apprenticeships was that

   the actions of artists teach us as much
   about style and aesthetics as their
   words. I began to gain insights into
   Yoruba artistic concepts, not only in
   discussing them with artists and observing
   them as they emerged from the creative
   process, but also in attempting to
   achieve them in my own carving under
   the tutelage of Yoruba artists (Drewal
   1980:7).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

In other words, my own bodily, multi sensorial experience was crucial to a more profound understanding of Yoruba art and the culture and history that shape it. This process of watching, listening, carving, making mistakes, being corrected by example, and trying again was a transformative experience for me. Slowly my body learned to carve as my adze-strokes became more precise and effective and the image in my mind took shape through the actions of my body. Yorubas understand this kind of experience and explain it with a sensory metaphor: "the outsider or uninitiated usually sees through the nose" (imu ni alejo fi i riran; Abiodun 1990:75). This saying has two different yet complementary connotations: that an outsider understands little because he/she confuses sensing organs; and, at the same time, that understanding requires multiple senses (Roland Abiodun, personal communication, 2005; Abayomi Ola, personal communication, 2005).

A similar orientation, a fascination with arts (both visual and performance) and their impact on audiences, led me to Efe/Gelede masquerades as the subject of my PhD field research in 1970-71. I chose Efe/Gelede because it epitomizes for Yoruba people a deeply moving, multi-sensorial, multimedia spectacle of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and movements captured in the praise "the eyes that have seen Gelede, have seen the ultimate spectacle" (oju to ba ri Gelede, ti de opin iran).

These were examples of what I might call "body-rabid work" and what Paul Stoller (1997) evocatively calls "sensuous scholarship." Here one no longer aspires to achieve an impossible "distanced objectivity" of a so-called participant-observer (which historically emphasizes observation). Rather, one works as a sensorially engaged participant, opening many paths to knowledge and understanding.

This is the practice I advocate. But then, as academics and wordsmiths we always come back to either spoken or written words to convey what we experience deeply. In order to come closer to such sensory experiences, affective, evocative words are needed, a style of expression that approaches poetry. I hope to work toward this goal more and more in my writing, teaching, and speaking/performing.

This initial expansion of my Guggenheim proposal outlines my theoretical perspective, proposes a specific methodology, and calls for assistance from colleagues with similar experiences and ideas that I hope to incorporate in the book I am preparing. My objective is to demonstrate how African artists and audiences use the senses (sight, taste, hearing, speaking, touch, motion, and extra-sensory perception) to create and respond to the affective and aesthetic qualities of art. As you see, I intend to consider the standard five senses, plus two others I believe are distinct and equally important: motion and "extra"-sensory perception. Motion has to do with our relation to gravitational forces and our sense of balance. As it turns out, a sense of balance (agbagbadodo), when a child first learns to rise up on two feet and not fall over, is for Anlo-Ewe speaking people "an essential part of what it means to be human" (Geurts 2002:49-50). (2) I would enlarge the notion of balance/spatial orientation to encompass motion, with its sensing organ, the labyrinth of the inner ear.

The seventh sense, what some often call "the sixth sense," has to do with "extra'-sensory perception (ESP) or intuition. I would suggest that when we try to understand the concept of trance or altered states of consciousness--a phenomenon that is certainly widespread in the artistic and religious traditions we study in Africa and the Diaspora (and probably a universal human experience)--we are dealing with issues of ESP, the supplement. This seventh sense is in a way related to synesthesia--he simultaneous body-mind interplay of multiple senses that has a profound effect on how we experience things in this world, and what we imagine might be beyond--wonderfully captured in the words of A. M. Opoku of the Ghana Dance Ensemble that inspired Frederick Lamp's title: "see the music, hear the dance" (Lamp 2004:15).