Date: Tuesday, May 7, 2013. 5:40 PM.
Location: Cummings Art Building, AR2
A handful of earth placed upon the ground next to some market goods, a burnt corn cob suspended on a wire in a garden, a rusted piece of metal dangling from a tree in a farm, an old shoe tied with a rag to a worn-out broom and a broken comb… As objects, these may not immediately confront the alien viewer as potent or intimidating. Yet in the making and reception of these objects—which in the Yoruba language of southwestern Nigeria are called ààlè—the ordinary is rendered extraordinary; broken and seemingly useless things are transformed into powerful machines for the establishment and protection of properties. As a genre of image, ààlè forms a complement to the visual praise-poems that have come to constitute the canon of Yoruba art. The objects deployed in ààlè are often stripped of surface, broken apart, rendered useless. In that breakage resides a hermeneutical rupture, in which would-be thieves are warned of the consequences of transgression. The power to enact those consequences lies not in richly ornamented surfaces, nor in any sort of “magical” processes, but in the very actions that have re-situated objects in space and in social context as vehicles of meaning. In their display, ààlè are descriptive portraits of “the thief” as a non-person, an inversion of a set of moral, ethical and aesthetic ideals. Ààlè, in short, comprise a Yoruba anti-aesthetic. Also, in a Nigeria marked by widespread corruption, theft and violent crime at every level of society, Yoruba men and women frame ààlè in allegorical terms. All these broken, useless things speak of social fragmentation and the enduring hope of reconstitution; each assemblage stands as a trigger of conscience, a moment of resistance to cultural amnesia David T. Doris (Ph.D Yale, 2002) is Associate Professor of African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Michigan, in the Department of the History of Art, the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design
Location: Cummings Art Building, AR2
A handful of earth placed upon the ground next to some market goods, a burnt corn cob suspended on a wire in a garden, a rusted piece of metal dangling from a tree in a farm, an old shoe tied with a rag to a worn-out broom and a broken comb… As objects, these may not immediately confront the alien viewer as potent or intimidating. Yet in the making and reception of these objects—which in the Yoruba language of southwestern Nigeria are called ààlè—the ordinary is rendered extraordinary; broken and seemingly useless things are transformed into powerful machines for the establishment and protection of properties. As a genre of image, ààlè forms a complement to the visual praise-poems that have come to constitute the canon of Yoruba art. The objects deployed in ààlè are often stripped of surface, broken apart, rendered useless. In that breakage resides a hermeneutical rupture, in which would-be thieves are warned of the consequences of transgression. The power to enact those consequences lies not in richly ornamented surfaces, nor in any sort of “magical” processes, but in the very actions that have re-situated objects in space and in social context as vehicles of meaning. In their display, ààlè are descriptive portraits of “the thief” as a non-person, an inversion of a set of moral, ethical and aesthetic ideals. Ààlè, in short, comprise a Yoruba anti-aesthetic. Also, in a Nigeria marked by widespread corruption, theft and violent crime at every level of society, Yoruba men and women frame ààlè in allegorical terms. All these broken, useless things speak of social fragmentation and the enduring hope of reconstitution; each assemblage stands as a trigger of conscience, a moment of resistance to cultural amnesia David T. Doris (Ph.D Yale, 2002) is Associate Professor of African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Michigan, in the Department of the History of Art, the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design