Art, Innovation, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Benin.

Paula Girshick Ben-Amos

Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1999. 178 pp., 50 b/w illustrations. $35 hardcover.

More is known about the art of the kingdom of Benin than perhaps any other kingdom on the African continent. In Art, Innovation, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Benin, Paula Girshick Ben-Amos brings together an understanding of Benin art and politics that is based on her own extensive fieldwork in Benin, which began in the 1960s with her collecting of oral traditions. She is also familiar with a huge body of relevant historiographic and archival information, with recent research by other Benin specialists, and with Benin objects, including their intricate iconographical details. Using this extensive background, Ben-Amos questions to what extent art operates as political strategy, how objects acquire political meaning, and how the use of art enhances and embodies power and authority.

Today the people of Benin see art as commemorative. It enshrines the past and captures images for posterity. But Ben-Amos suggests that during the period that is the focus of this book, art in Benin was strategic-as much about how to attain ancestral and political legitimacy as about the legitimacy that was attained. Artistic creation included a complex of processes and performances involving its commissioning, production, and display. At each stage there were negotiations about meaning and outcomes.

The stability of Benin's ruling dynasty was threatened in the mid-seventeenth century, and it was only in the eighteenth century that reigning monarchs were able to stand firm against the challenges of powerful chiefs. In spite of social and political unrest, it was a period of remarkable artistic invention. Choosing a specific period of some sixty turbulent years, from around 1690 to 1750, Ben-Amos seeks to discover how art was created, allocated and used, by both kings and their powerful rivals, to control historical memory.

As past studies have emphasized, art has always been an instrument of political ideology in Benin. Ben-Amos argues that to understand such use, we must look at political agendas and use available oral and documentary evidence. Western fascination with the art of Benin and how it reflects the ruling political system began early. After the 1897 British Punitive Expedition to Benin, hundreds of objects were auctioned off to pay for the expedition, and early-twentieth-century accounts of the kingdom made its royal arts among the best-known African objects.

Throughout the rest of the century, a number of scholars tried to make sense of a sequence of royal art styles and to understand the political structure in which it had been used. Ben-Amos sees her approach as differing from the formalistic approach of such scholars as William Fagg and Philip Dark. She deals with smaller units of time and searches for "multiple origins, mutual influences, and fundamental innovations." She also concentrates on the intricate interaction of "particular economic conditions, social institutions, cultural ideologies, and political struggles, as they change the circumstances in which artistic forms and meanings are created" (p. 29). Ben-Amos also has reservations about the functionalist approach of Douglas Fraser and Herbert Cole. Their landmark study of leadership art in Africa (African Art and Leadership, 1972) viewed such art as primarily a mechanism that supported the status quo, confirming legitimacy and insuring stability. She acknowledges the impact of new approaches in social theory, such as that of Anthony Giddens (Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis, 1979) and Pierre Bourdieu (Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977), that shift emphasis from control and stability to process and agency.

Ben-Amos offers five concise but complex and rich chapters containing her questions, evidence, and recommendations for answers in order to see why, during this short period of history, "certain art forms and images were created and how they were employed in the political process" (pp. 7-8). In chapter 1, "The Study of Eighteenth-Century Benin Art," she evaluates the nature and limitations of documentary, oral, and visual sources and discusses how these sources have been employed in Benin scholarship, questioning the assumptions that underlie the formalist studies of Fagg and others in the 1960s. In chapter 2, "Kings and Chiefs in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," Ben-Amos turns to both oral traditions and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century visitors' accounts, recognizing that these are two complementary sources whose information can be cross-checked against each other. Her research, along with that of others, provides a database of oral traditions that flesh out the historical picture of a weakened mid-seventeenth-century monarchy plagued by succession problems and the growing power of chiefs. The end of that century, according to Italian and Dutch records, witnessed the eruption of civil war, which was followed by a period of reconstruction and restoration.

Chapter 3, "Art and Innovation in the Eighteenth Century," surveys several art forms produced in the fifteenth to the seventeenth century and compares them with those made between circa 1690 and 1750. The function of art shifts from the glorification of military successes to an emphasis on the legitimacy of descent. Focusing on specific objects, Ben-Amos suggests that much of the innovation in iconography had to do with a search for legitimacy. Chapter 4, "Obas Ewuakpe, Akenzua I, and Eresoyen in Eighteenth-Century Art and Tradition," is a careful investigation of specific objects--two brass altarpieces, a stool, and two brass masks--used in the reigns of these three Obas over a sixty-year span. Here Ben-Amos emphasizes the prominence and "perhaps even the invention of the individuating mechanism of emblems" (p. 117).

In chapter 5, "Art as Political Strategy," Ben-Amos observes how art is used in political maneuvering, how it confers legitimacy, how it empowers those who used it to shape historical meaning. She asks, "What was it about art forms that made them so fruitful an arena for communicating royal legitimacy and power in the context of eighteenth-century political struggle?" (p. 10). Providing a brief backdrop of the study of "art and politics in Africa," she emphasizes "art and social fulfillment," "art and social memory," and "the ambiguities of art as strategy."

The book is well designed and arranged. It includes some thirty-six photographs, some with multiple views and details. The images are not equally "readable" in Indiana University Press's uneven printing, but they are acceptable. Twelve sets of drawings enhance our understanding of iconographical details and make the discussion easier to follow.

I highly recommend Art, Innovation, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Benin for students of history, art history, and anthropology, Benin specialists, and those interested in the intricacies of leadership in African history. It may be somewhat complex for the general reader. Ben-Amos is entirely successful in her attempt, as described on the dustjacket flap, to "tease out the political meaning of material objects and thereby illuminate connections between art and politics." A fuller understanding of Benin's exceptional artistic innovation during this historical period is made possible by this probing examination of the social milieu and historical circumstances that brought the art into being.

ROBIN POYNOR is a professor of art history and assistant director of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida. He is a co-author of the recently published A History of Art in Africa.