A collection of art works currently on sale offers a good opportunity to take another look at the African art debate Yvette Gresl With all the African art works flooding flea markets, roadside stalls and curio shops, regular mortals who’d like to collect such objects often wonder how one begins to distinguish between fakes and authentic, valuable commodities.
A recent collection of African art, currently on sale at Totem Galleries, gives one a good opportunity to sum up the numerous debates dominating the field. The exhibition includes objects like a Dogon house door and ancestral figure, both from Mali. They are perfect items to use in the “But is it art?” debate. Consider a Dogon ancestral figure, part of the collection of Vittorino Meneghelli, the highly regarded collector of African art and owner of Totem Galleries. Its maker has concentrated on the female figure’s breasts, stomach and buttocks, evoking the Dogon conception of what constitutes a fertile woman. Conventional logic would label this figure “artefact” as opposed to “art”. It was created by an anonymous African craftsman and, like other works of its kind, may in the past have been banished to a museum, an object of anthropological curiosity. But curators or collectors, who would question the Dogon figure’s status as artefact, might marvel at its the aesthetic effect, likening it to the European or American art of the 20th century. And so it might be removed from its original context and sold in a commercial gallery. And it would probably sell fast, because it conforms to a European conception of beauty. The academic debate that forever rages around traditional African art has accelerated with the growth in the exportation and sale of so-called authentic pieces. In the light of Africa’s history there are those who ask, “should the art of Africa be returned to the continent?” Meneghelli’s rather provocative response to this issue is: “When they return La Gioconda [Mona Lisa] to Italy I will stop collecting African art.” Predictably, the more popular traditional African art becomes the more those involved in the commerce of it will satisfy ever-increasing demands. Today, pieces that could previously only be viewed outside Africa in museums and specialist galleries are now swamping the consumption spaces of tourists. Traders from numerous parts of Africa have capitalised on the popularity of African art and have set up permanent stalls at venues such as the Rosebank fleamarket. These traders will often also have an established clientele of serious collectors. In response to the outside buyer’s need for information regading the value of the many objects for sale at venues such as fleamarkets, collectors have established certain criteria to distinguish between the authentic pieces and fakes.
Collectors such as Meneghelli differentiate the good pieces from the fakes in terms of the age of the object. The piece would also have had to be used for the specific function for which it was made and would have to conform to certain stylistic traditions, in order to be considered “valuable”. According to these criteria a brand new mask sold at the Rosebank fleamarket would have absolutely no value to the serious collector even if it conformed to certain stylistic traditions.
Of course, Meneghelli is working within the European tradition of connoisseurship where value is measured in terms of age and exclusivity. Taking me through his collection, Meneghelli gave me some pointers for distinguishing between the real thing as opposed to a fake. For example, while a fake Dogon door sold at a fleamarket, roadside stall or curio shop tends to be highly decorative, an authentic one is characterised by simplicity. This criterion also applies to the wooden granary shutters of the Dogon. Meneghelli tells an amusing anecdote about the acquisition of such a shutter. Visiting the Dogon district of Mali in the early 1970s he was struck by what he describes as a particularly lovely shutter on a Dogon granary. After much negotiation with the owner a deal was concluded. “The window got removed from its frame of dry mud and we carried our purchase with great pride to our landrover where our driver was waiting. “When he saw our purchase, a sardonic smile appeared on his face. We learned from him that practically every tourist he brought there, got his sculpted window, so that sometimes the mud of the frame was still wet,” he says. “Indeed, since then, in the 30 years of my travels in Mali, I saw many windows more or less identical to the one bought on that trip.” As this anecdote suggests, there are instances where even the most experienced of collectors are baffled. The collections are on show at Totem Galleries in The Firs, Rosebank, Tel: (011) 4471409 and Sandton City, Tel: 8846300