Layers of awareness: intermediality and practices of visual arts in northern Cote d'Ivoire.

Given the central role the electronic media play in contemporary and in particular in urban Africa, it should come as no surprise that the so-called traditional arts can no longer occupy the same aesthetic position they did before the advent of photography, TV, video, and more recently the Internet. Any new picture may compete with the older visual media, challenging their former monopoly and establishing new modes of interaction, and thereby changing their significance and creating alternatives in the use and appreciation of visual media. This process is perhaps best described as a chain of transformations that takes another round whenever a new medium enters the visual culture of African societies. This paper examines such transformations and tries to analyze the changing modes of awareness that accompany and Instigate this process.

Introduction

Art works are not bound to a particular environment nor do they exist in isolation from other art works. They relate to other objects in all phases of their existence--during production, distribution, and consumption. Most African artists are well aware that other media and modes of expression now complement what they had learned when they were young. They know that spectators will appreciate a sculpture or a painting in different way when they are familiar with other visual media. The modes of seeing African art are thus related to the cultural practices of seeing the world and of appropriating it by means of various media. Cultural practices and the sensational experience of specific objects merge in the mediality of a societal and historical context. A sculpture of a spiritual being becomes something else if you see it not only in person but also, say, on the screen of a TV set.

Mediality is a fairly widespread concept in media studies, but less so in social anthropology or In African arts studies. It will be helpful to briefly outline this concept in relation to two- and three-dimensional representations such as sculptures, paintings, photographs, and other images, pictorial media that would fall within the broad realm of African art. (1) There are two complementary perspectives on the mediality of such pictorial media. The first may be addressed in terms of the media's materiality. William J.T. Mitchell's concept of "picture" best frames that perspective, i.e., of the picture as the material object versus the image as the individual or cultural script that pictures may generate in the human mind (Mitchell 1994). The materiality of a picture in that sense is the underlying conditionality for any image and imagination. For instance, a sculpture is an object that neither moves nor speaks. Someone else, in Africa often a ritual specialist, has to move and speak for it--or, from the local point of view, he has to reveal how it speaks and moves. A video film, on the other hand, shows movement and sound. It cannot be integrated into the same ritual script as a sculpture, although the film may refer to the same deceased persons who are about to become ancestors as a sculpture. Addressing the materiality of pictorial media thus is a precondition for our understanding of media in general, acknowledging that an object has qualities prior to its use. (2)

The other perspective on mediality addresses the use people make of pictorial media. This approach is action centered. It doesn't correspond exactly to Mitchell's concept of the image, for "image" as the inner or mental representation of a material picture may be misunderstood as a mere reflection of the latter, at least in so far as it describes a field of reference framed by the object. This is not necessarily so; we all know from many studies of African art that, say, a mask may just be a small part within a much wider framework of social and cultural references. That is why I would strongly argue that an object must not be read as a text--the metaphor fits neither the particularity of visual experience nor the mediality of pictorial media. (3)

However, there is no doubt that objects, and in particular artworks, in their material appearance may have a substantial impact on those who experience them. A picture may generate or leave traces in the human mind, and according to the particular situation, one or another trace may appear at the surface of consciousness. Such traces may be conceptualized as a kind of reservoir from which particular images may be generated, according to the spectators' ability to appropriate, transform, and link media or pictures to their life-worldly reality. Hence, it is an open question when and under what conditions a trace actually becomes part of an image in the sense Mitchell uses the term--or if it does so at all. Obviously, one cannot expect that pictures have a one-to-one correspondence to images, be they individual or collective. An image is situational, a picture is not.

It is still another question whether the image will become part of the collective imagination. This presumes that there is a societal need for a wider and acceptable "interpretation" of a given picture or type of picture as image. It is also a double-sided process: Individual as well as social actors make use of particular images and interact with each other, thus creating what scholars might identify as a pictorial cultural script. Along the Guinea coast and its hinterland, the many forms of representation of Mamy Wata, in media from sculpture to video films, would be an example.

And as mentioned, image and imagination do not exist in isolation. They may refer to each other, and it is obvious that one may change its significance when another appears--we all know this from the interrelated histories of cinema, TV, and video. However, intermediality is more than just a question of reach and range. It is about how the sensational experience of one pictorial medium transforms the experience of another. Once you've seen a deceased person on a TV screen, you cannot approach ancestor figures as if you didn't know about the existence of video (Forster 2001). My ethnographic aim is to understand how the particular interaction between media shapes the appreciation of art works in northern Cote d'Ivoire. (4) The theoretical question, however, is broader: How, then, is the experience and how may be the practice of creating pictorial media affected by this intermediality?

Hidden Ancestors

The first medium comes from the Senufo farmers who constitute the majority of the population in northern Cote d'Ivoire. Although the Senufo are known for their figurative art, ancestor figures are rare among them and are hidden within their houses, usually in some dark corner. Ancestor worship in the anthropological sense of the term is performed above a plain pot which is set upside down into the earth and located on the fringes of the village. The inverted pot is an object that stimulates fierce emotions among the Senufo, but it has nothing to do with sculpture. Westerners wouldn't classify it as art. Sculptures are used only when women sing the praises of the ancestors they share within their lineage. This takes place in the middle of the night, at most once or twice a year. Men are excluded from these chants. (5) Only those men who, due to an illness or some other affliction, have been asked to take part in the otherwise exclusively female organization are entitled to witness the event. Only a few men and women have seen these sculptures with their own eyes, since a lineage is not allowed to have more than two members in the sando'o society. The sculptures are rarely taken from their hiding place, and even then, only their silhouettes are discernible in the flickering fire. Despite their size--their height is nearly one meter (3')--they comprise a kind of a hidden art.

Apart from these "ancestral figures" in the more limited sense, the Senufo also have figures representing patrilineal filiation. A shrine, very small and often just a few inches tall, is set up by the men in the interior of the house. The location is hardly ever accessible and not easy for visitors to see. One or several wooden sculptures might be set up next to the shrine or behind it. But not every shrine is accompanied by such figures. Usually, figures of this kind are only carved when a father or another relative classified as a "father" appears in dreams to the owner of the shrine. (6) Except for their heads, the sculptures are, most of the time, wrapped in or are even completely hidden underneath a cloth. Only during ritual action, when speaking directly to the dead ancestors, are the figures brought from a dark corner behind the shrine, set up in front of it, and the cloth pulled aside. However, there has to be a special reason to do this and distinctive ritual precautions have to be fulfilled. Only those who share the same kinship ties are allowed to participate in the rite. This invocation is performed either very late at night or very early in the morning. In the ethnographic literature, it is commonly referred to as "interchange with an invisible partner."

The narrow limits of visibility are an essential feature of the ritual script. This is highlighted by the acts the ritual expert--an elder member of the lineage--performs when he addresses the ancestor: Before lifting the cloth with a gesture of revealing a hidden treasure, he invokes the dead to come and assist the living. The fact that the figures are visible means that the ancestors are present--or at least ought to be. The visual presence of the sculpted statuette thus focuses the attention of the attendees: It creates an awareness of an extraordinary situation, one in which a usually invisible person is made known to an exclusive audience. However, the statue is not a representation of an individual ancestor; rather, it displays generalized features of balance and uniformity, thus representing an idealized other, the ancestor of the entire lineage (Fig. 1).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Photographs

In northern Cote d'Ivoire, photography has complemented older pictorial media since the 1920s, at least in urban and periurban settings. In the more rural countryside, the use of photos has been spreading quickly since the decade before independence. (7) Black-and-white photos of elder men and women were kept in most households when I started my fieldwork in the late 1970s. The less-expensive color photos taken by itinerant photographers increasingly replaced studio photography during the 1980s, and by the early 1990s, nearly every household owned a small collection of photos.

The older black-and-white photos were usually kept in envelopes or in glass frames. If the house was a circular structure, the photos were often added to the few valued possessions that were stored in a crate. One had to unlock it in order to take out the photos, and that was mostly done on particular occasions, such as when a family member who lived far away came to visit his or her relatives and wanted to have a look at the photos. While the people photographed were still alive, the display of their pictures was rather discreet. Access to the photo relied on the person who owned and kept the print. The photo acquired a more visible presence when the depicted person died. If it was unframed, a decorated frame was purchased. The picture was often placed at the entrance of the house of the deceased or was passed round during the ceremonial presentation of condolence gifts. If the bereaved family was wealthy and could afford a coffin, they often attached a photograph to it. At commemorative funerals, bards also addressed such photographs when they were praising those who had died recently.

During the 1980s, photos were more often exhibited on the walls. Among the rural Senufo, the photos were seldom larger than a page of an ordinary A5 notebook and their display was modest, but in the more bourgeois urban settings, the photos became bigger, and they were often kept in expensive frames. The display also changed: While most photos in rural villages were hung right under the roof or a few centimeters below, they came closer to eye height in urban villas. The encounter thus was different: In a rural house, one had to look up to the deceased relatives, while one saw them more as equals in the better-off urban households. Another difference was that more and more photos of living persons were shown; in particular, wedding photos and pictures of other rites of passage, such as children graduating from school, were framed and displayed. In these newer settings, access to the pictures was no longer controlled by an individual, but by the emerging privacy of modern life. Houses in Senufo villages were almost always open and accessible to nearly anybody, while in the cities, they were only open to invited guests or to those who were familiar with the people living there.

Photos have a different spectatorship from the sculptures I have discussed, one that is less restrictive and linked to a private, not a ritual setting. The presence of the pictures in private space thus differed significantly from the (in)visibility of ancestor figures, although the photos often showed deceased relatives as well: They provided evidence for the life of individual persons in this world, and not an idealized other. Perhaps still more important was that the pictorial medium was no longer exclusive; photos depicted living and dead persons alike. The focus was on individual traits. One could easily identify different relatives by examining the photos. Indeed, this is still a common practice when friends or guests enter a living room. In a similar way, photos are shown in everyday encounters, when an album of prints is passed from hand to hand and the spectators comment on particular photos. Photos stimulate an awareness of a specific family's history, not of remote, impersonal ancestors.

In bourgeois families, photos may be replaced by paintings when bacteria damage the gelatin or when the colors fade (Figs. 2-4). Such portraits may be accurate reproductions of particular photos, but it is more likely that the painter has more than one photo at hand for his work. Furthermore, portraits are almost always larger than photos. Although some studios "improved" photos by brightening a person's skin or adding some fat to the neck of a wealthy man or woman, the possibilities of painting are more comprehensive. The depicted person may look younger than in the source photo, or he or she may be shown in a new costume and in a completely different environment. The painting may also introduce a social perspective by incorporating symbols of prestige and lavish consumption, such as a Mercedes in front of a luxurious mansion.

[FIGURES 2-4 OMITTED]

Paradoxically, while the painting subjects are often idealized, it is in a different manner than in the wooden sculptures. The prints the painters work with are often small and do not allow them to trace individual features of the face. And the more photos a painter uses, the more he is creating a picture of a timeless appearance of the person, not a particular moment of his or her life. Furthermore, his style is frequently indebted to other genres of painting, especially to public signboards that constitute the main body of work and income for most African painters. Shiny, smooth faces of a deep Indian yellow may result, thus transferring the aesthetics of popular advertisement into what is considered to be high art.

To some extent, portraits are disembedded photographs. They generate images of social reputation. Accordingly, portraits are frequently displayed during receptions and political meetings, where they refer to the legacy of the depicted person and to the legitimacy of his successor. If a portrait depicts a deceased person, it tends to enhance his presence (women are seldom portrayed alone) by extending it to another time and place. The focus is on making the person omnipresent, not on depersonalization. Portraits generate an additional awareness, that of a particular chapter in a family's history.

Ancestors that Move and Speak to the Living

More recently, other pictorial media have complemented photography, and partly taken over from it. Video coverage of marriages, funerals, and other events became common during the early 1990s, and a number of former still photographers in the city of Korhogo expanded their business within a few years, now calling themselves cameramen. But producing a video is more expensive than taking a snapshot, and at the turn of the century, such video films were mainly produced for the urban middle class. Most rural Senufo knew about the films, and if they had the opportunity to document their rites of passage, they did so. More often than not, however, in order to do so they had to rely on the help of some relative who lived in a city and could provide a camera and/or the money for a professional cameraman.

In the late 1980s, the production of the film was more or less spontaneous, but by the end of the 1990, a scheme emerged that was partially influenced by the cultural script of Muslim marriages, since the urban Dyula (literally Muslim traders, but now more a term for converts living an urban life; see Launay 1982, 1992) were the first patrons of the new pictorial medium. On the other hand, lengthy docu-soaps (documenting real marriages, funerals, and so forth) from the national TV channel influenced the films in many ways, from plot to costume to speeches and other elements, thus contributing to the emergence of the new genre.

Access to the film was also subject to novel constraints. One had to know how to use a VCR, and power to run the TV set was a necessity, too. It was not unusual that a documentary of a certain feast was kept not in the village but in the house of some relative who lived in the city. One had to travel, sometimes for an entire day, in order to see the film. On the other hand, the mere fact that in the film a deceased relative would speak up and talk to his or her descendants attracted many young men to travel to see the film (Forster 2001).

How, then, does this pictorial medium relate to the others? It is noteworthy that many cameramen addressed photography and filmmaking by the same term, "filmer" in local French. However, the video film generates other, active images, those of an event. The emphasis is not so much on an individual or his reputation but on a specific event, say, the marriage of a brother or the funeral of a grandfather. At first sight, one is tempted to say that such videos will necessarily contribute to the uniqueness of the remembrance, but that is not so. In addition to preserving the events of a single feast, they also generate a script for subsequent feasts. The script may later turn into a performative genre, since the sequence of events documented on one occasion is often reproduced at others. In 2002, I witnessed a marriage where the feast was interrupted and the scene then rearranged according to what would fit best into the (unwritten) script of the film realized by a cameraman from the city of Korhogo.

A still more recent medium is the Internet. It spread slowly in Cote d'Ivoire, much slower than in Nigeria or Cameroon, where cybercafes now belong to the ordinary urban landscape. However, whenever the people in Cote d'Ivoire learned about the new medium, they quickly appropriated it, too. The presence of the Internet is still limited to the major cities, but there, some providers already offer web-space for obituaries. (8) The websites contain photo galleries, a CV, condolence lists on which visitors may post messages, sometimes praise poems, as well as music files (often mourning music of either African or European origin) that may be downloaded (Figs. 5-6). The service offered depends on how much the descendants are willing to pay for the obituary. In some cases, a file with the voice of the deceased person is also provided.

[FIGURES 5-6 OMITTED]

Access is much more limited than for any other media. The viewer has to be literate and has to know how to use a computer--or at least, needs someone who can provide help. But that happens. In Internet cafes, one often comes across two or three people sitting in front of a screen, one helping the other. Looking at websites in general is much more a social experience than it would be in the West. It is difficult to tell how the new medium is appropriated by an African audience; (9) however, the obituaries on the Web seem to deal with awareness of action: You may interact with the ancestor and/or with his or her descendants, although not in the same way as with a living person. The Web thus appears to re-embed the photo and partially the video into the new medial context of the site, too, as the deceased person may appear and even speak up at the spectators' will. It is certainly a new layer of awareness--one that uses the Internet as a medium of other pictorial and audio media and one that links a local audience to the general one of the African Diaspora in, say, France, Great Britain, or the USA, as a closer look at the condolence lists quickly reveals.

Instead of a Conclusion

This is a report on an ongoing research project. It is too early for a general and comprehensive interpretation of all the phenomena of intermediality in relation to African arts. However, a few points are worth mentioning. The pictorial media each generate specific images as well as a genuine awareness of specific aspects of the life-world. Layers of awareness add to each other. Hence, new pictorial media do not simply replace older ones, and existing genres of art do not necessarily fade when new art practices evolve. New genres of art may modify existing art practices, but they also complement them. Thus, the hidden sculpture of the ancestor still has its value. You can ask him a question and receive an answer through the offices of ritual expert, while with a video, you would only be able to listen when the ancestor speaks himself, and the words would always be the same. The portrait is a necessity when it comes to questions of representation. But it also appropriates and incorporates the heritage of African studio photography. The video film is a new and autonomous genre of art, but it has to cope with the modes of representation on websites, and vice versa. As layers of awareness add to each other, so do pictures and images, and so does artistic ingenuity.

[This article was accepted for publication in October 2005.]

References cited

Behrend, Heike, and Tobias Wendl, eds. 1998. Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika. Munich: Prestel.

Boehm, Gottfried. 1999. "Vom Medium zum Bild." In Bild--Medium--Kunst, eds. Yvonne Spillmann and Gundolf Winter, pp. 165-78. Munich: W. Fink.

Boehm, Gottfried, ed. 1994. Was ist ein Bild? Munich: W. Fink.

Brosch, Renate. 2000. Krisen des Sehens. Tubingen: Stauffenburg.

Elkins, James. 1999. The Domain of Images. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Forster, Till. 1985. Divination bei den Kafibele-Senufo. Berlin: Reimer.

--. 1988. Die Kunst der Senufo. Zurich: Museum Rietberg.

--. 2001. "Wiedersehen mit den Toten." In Geist, Bild, und Narr: Zu einer Ethnologie kultureller Konversionen, ed. Heike Behrend, pp. 155-71. Berlin: Philo.

Knops, Pierre. 1980. Les anciens Senufo, 1923-1935. Berg en Dal: Afrika-Museum.

Launay, Robert. 1982. Traders Without Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

--. 1992. Beyond the Stream: Islam and Society in a West African Town. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. 1998. The Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge.

Mitchell, William J.T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

--. 2002. "Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture." Journal of Visual Culture 1(2):165-81.

Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright. 2001. Practices of Looking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(1.) Pictorial media often merge with other, nonpictorial media In everyday experience: the TV, the telephone, the radio, or the CD (Mitchell 2002). I hesitate to adopt the term "visual media," for I argue that such media are almost always based on Individual and/or collective creativity; they aren't solely a mirror of something "out there."

(2.) This is the approach of the many studies that now figure under the heading of "Bildwissenschaft" or "Critical Image Studies," e.g. Boehm 1994, 1999, Elkins 1999.

(3.) This action-centered approach is more prominent in social anthropology and in what now is often framed as "Visual Culture Studies," e.g. Mirzoeff 1998, Brosch 2000, Sturken and Cartwright 2001.

(4.) My fieldwork on the so-called traditional arts of the Senufo was carried out between 1979 and 1999. However, this article is more a report on an ongoing research project that started in 2001.

(5.) Pierre Knops published one of the few photos of such a performance in his memoirs (Knops 1980:116, ill. 24).

(6.) The goal is to acknowledge patrifiliation to the father as complementary to matrilineal descent (Forster 1985:150-67; 1988:94-5).

(7.) The archive of the former Photo Studio du Nord, owned by Cornelius Yao Azaglo Augustt, provides an overview of photographic production in northern Cote d'Ivoire from the late 1950s to the early 1990s (Behrend and Wendl 1998:84-91).

(8.) The most prominent of these websites is probably www.abidjan.net. There is a column "Necrologie" at the left margin offering access to the virtual cemetery at http://necrologie .abidjan.net/index.asp (accessed July 31, 2005). A typical obituary is Zekou Gbopo Boble Marie-Madeleine, who died April 14, 2005 at the age of 84, http://necrologie.abidjan.net /communique.asp?id=757 (accessed July 31, 2005). Daily newspapers started to publish similar websites slightly later, e.g. Fraternite Matin at http://www.fratmat.net/content /emploi.php (accessed August 1, 2005). The sites stay up for varying amounts of time, usually three to six months, sometimes a year or longer.

(9.) Anthropology and African art studies are facing numerous methodological questions when dealing with such media, e.g. how to address the intentionality of seeing when participant observation is almost impossible.