Contemporary Vodun arts of Ouidah, Benin

African Arts, Winter, 2001 by Dana Rush

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Pots of the pungent herb vervaine, its little purple flowers always in bloom, sit among the sculptures. Vervaine protects a house or an establishment from bad spirits. Its placement at the entrance to this Vodun-filled museum is a testament to contemporary Vodun art---even when that art was produced to attract foreign attention--as valid and efficacious receptacles for the spirits. This important convergence of the commercial and the spiritual undermines notions of contemporary art made for the tourist market as inauthentic, fake, or degraded.

Inside the entrance is a large Dakpogan rendering of the famous Gu sword from Abomey (Verger 1957:163, fig. 91). The first floor displays more than one hundred sculptures, paintings, appliques, and masks by such artists as Calixte and Theodore Dakpogan, Dominique Kouas, Romuald Hazoume, Yves Apollinaire Pede, and Oke-Ola Fabel. The artworks represent different aspects of Vodun culture and daily life in Benin. The contemporary arts are complemented by a dozen brightly painted Gelede masks surmounted by carved chameleons, turtles, lions, roosters, and combinations of animals representing Yoruba and Fon proverbs.

The second floor is dedicated to Vodou arts from Haiti. The top of the stairs features a variety of sequined flags, some representing the lwa (spirits). An entire room contains paintings depicting the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the grandson of a Dahomean king from Allada. His father was sold at the slave market in Ouidah, and L'Ouverture, born in Santa Domingo around 1743, lived as a slave for forty years. He taught himself to read, and was ultimately, in his free adult life, recognized as a military and administrative genius in the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. Now he is honored through portraiture in the land of his ancestors--Benin (Fig. 9). Black-and-white photographs of Vodun objects and ceremonies taken in Benin and Nigeria by Pierre Verger and A. Cocheteux cover the hallway walls.

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The garden behind the museum displays numerous sculptures by the Dakpogan brothers. Among them is a larger-than-life rendering of a Kulito (Egungun) masquerade, characteristically made of scrap metal and recycled car and motorcycle parts (Fig. 10). (16) This particular Kulito is known to be combative, high spirited, and dangerous, spinning violently and chasing anyone in its path. The brothers have effectively communicated its especially aggressive nature; the twisting stance captures anticipated action, as if the spirit were ready to take off, or as if it were caught, as in a snapshot, eternally in motion. Kulito of this type often stop in a crowd and remain perfectly still until the onlookers least suspect it to tear into motion. Instead of the usual facepiece made of mesh and covered with cowry shells, this one is made from a radiator grid and covered with sparkplugs. Curved metal pipes represent large animal horns, and bicycle chains replace hanging strips of layered cloth. Kulito representations are also found at the end of the third main Ouidah 92 site: the Slave Route.