and lines on a small piece of paper, and they reduce the possible views to a single one. These simplifications allow us to analyze the photograph of a sculpture more easily than we can the actual object in its full complexity.
A
frican sculpture is more fully plastic, and presents more unique
formal inventions than we, citizens of the late twentieth century, can now fully appreciate or even clearly see.' We have become jaded, accustomed to the leaps of imagination produced by African sculptors, because, mimicked by artists everywhere, theirs has become part of the art vocabulary of the world. For example, African artists frequently switch from a full round, three-dimensional treatment of some parts of a sculpture to a flat, relief carving in others without any transition: the Dogon mother and child (page 130) which is rendered in sculptural rods and knobs except for the hands and feet, which are simply deep grooves cut in the surface; or the Chokwe neckrest(page 117) that switches without warning from the bulky, rounded presentation of the body to the shallowly engraved face; the Mambila figure (page 161) whose airy, billowing forms suddenly stop at the face which has no volume at all. African sculptors also freely mix an organic treatment of the body with a completely geometric, inorganic one, again without transitions. The full round, muscular arms and softly curving stomach of the Fang reliquary on page 22 flow directly into the metal-capped, cylindrical peg of the navel. There are many other examples of a shockingly abrupt change in the sculptural language used by African artists. African sculpture shows an extraordinary sense of mass, of weight and density occupying space, one of its fundamental qualities. Much African sculpture suggests not an inert shell, but an inner mass pressing towards the viewer. Swelling, bulging forms are the clearest manifestation of this, but there are subtler ones. To sense the density of African sculptures, they should be experienced as displacing air, containing volume; their surfaces should be felt not as enclosing a hollow core, but as full, as the edge of thickness, in order to sense the active interior.(An alternative conception of sculpture sees it not as volume, but as flat or curved surfaces and lines, as for example Cycladic or Cubist sculpture; this alternative approach is rare in African art. The Mahongwe figure, on page 100 would be an example.) The quality of dense mass in African art partly accounts for what is often experienced as an aggressiveness, described as a projection of energy. Though the outward projection of mass is probably the real source, energy may be perceived as coming from nonformal attributes such as
76 COPYRIGHT PROTECTED
13