O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Enough of This Wandering in the Maze : ‘African Icons of Power’ at Bowers Museum Could Aid Viewer With Some Thematic Keenness

OK, let’s say you’ve spent three-quarters of an hour or so looking at the 89 African objects on long-term loan to the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art from the Paul and Ruth Tishman Collection, now owned by the Disney Co.

Certain pieces caught your fancy. You smiled at the wood sculpture of a seated king from the Isu or Esu culture of the Cameroons who displays his enemy’s decapitated head in one hand, a knife in the other and a crazy grimace that looks as though it’s sliding off his face.

You were intrigued that a sculpture of a youngster with an awkward, blocky torso, suckling at his impassive mother’s breast--the work of a Senufo artist from the Ivory Coast--is supposed to show the Ancient Mother goddess imparting wisdom to a teen-ager about to assume adult responsibilities.

A small sculpture of a man’s head with cowrie shell eyes, by a member of the Lega culture of Zaire, appealed to you primarily because of its delicate economy of line. Other works drew your attention because of their expressive qualities, such as the bulldog tenacity of the squat brass helmet mask used in the court of Benin in Nigeria in the 18th Century.

The whimsy of an elaborate four-faced helmet of antelope skin--fashioned for procession and masquerade use by the nouveau riche of Cross-River, Nigeria--struck you as the cultural equivalent of lavish accouterments marketed for the society ball set in the West.

A door from the Northern Senufo culture of the Ivory Coast that teems with a floating array of carved imagery--of birds, a hunter bagging a critter, armed riders on horseback protecting the village, and a large menacing crocodile--impressed you with its vibrant activity.

You were surprised to learn that the Yoruba of Nigeria have the highest birth rate of twins in the world and that if they don’t survive--as sadly happens all too often because of low birth-weights--sculptures decorated with acrobatic beaded figures and jackets sporting double images of animals are treated by the family almost as literal surrogates for the babies.

But you weren’t entirely pleased with your museum experience. Your head is a jumble of miscellaneous facts, and you haven’t gotten a handle on any particular aspect of African cultures.

Since most of the pieces are displayed on stepped platforms against the walls, you felt frustrated at not being able to walk around the ones carved in the round (like the Shango bowl with the image of a fellow smoking a pipe while riding a bicycle, made by the Yoruba in Nigeria).

According to the label, the human face on a dance mask from the Baga culture of Guinea turns into a crocodile head if viewed from the side--but that was impossible in this installation. So you tried bending over the platform to see the mask from a slight angle--whereupon you triggered a high-pitched electronic security beeper.

Beyond the intrigue of surface appearances, you had some basic questions. Really basic questions. You wondered why the belly buttons on the figures tend to stick out so prominently and why elongated torsos apparently were so prized by sculptors in the Ivory Coast. You had a hard time visualizing how someone could balance a huge, Epa hunter headdress on his head, or how someone would wear the horned antelope-skin headdress from Nigeria.

But for some reason, despite the admonition in the exhibit brochure that “each object must be seen against the backdrop of its own deep and relevant cultural context,” there were no photographs showing headdresses, masks and dance staffs being used in the ceremonies for which they were designed.

There were no photographs of similar door frames, house posts or shrine sculptures on the buildings for which they were designed. In fact, there were no visual indications at all that these objects have had a life apart from their aloof presentation in a museum gallery, for the edification of Western viewers.

There wasn’t even a wall map showing the location of the portions of West and Central Africa represented in the exhibit, just a tiny, almost illegible drawing of the African continent shoe-horned into the free brochure.

Reading the labels in search of useful information, all too often you found indigestible factoids that appeared to be wrenched directly from the specialist literature, and tortured writing that required several readings to grasp.

You could care less, for example, whether somebody named Fu-Liau Bunseki is quoted in a 1981 book by one R. F. Thompson as saying that the concentric circles on a standing female figure from the Kongo culture of Zaire represent “the so-called ‘royal enclosure motif.’ ”

You felt surfeited with minutiae (“the upraised coiffure is usually bilateral with a vertical median line or ridge”) and malnourished with basic cultural information about the people who made and used these objects.

Maybe you realized intuitively that good museum labels are written to accommodate viewers’ needs and interests, not those of the curator. What does a person new to African art really want to know? How does a label communicate crisply and clearly with people who are standing up and moving through a gallery filled with objects? How does a curator stimulate interest in the premise of an exhibit?

Come to think of it, what is the premise of “African Icons of Power: Timeless Artworks from the Paul and Ruth Tishman Collection”? The title presumably is meant to evoke the concept of “vital force”--a sort of supreme power that can be transferred from dead human beings to sculptural objects and thence to useful (or malign) interference in the lives of the living.

According to the brochure, the show “focuses on the rich body of iconography (symbolic imagery) used by African artists in communicating ideas surrounding beliefs about birth, growth, health, religion and social responsibility.”

But that’s not a focus. Any serious exhibit of African art is obliged to deal with these issues because they are the reasons the works were created in the first place, just as Christian symbolism is central to Renaissance paintings.

Rather, “African Icons” is really about the showcasing of individual objects from a well-regarded collection, displayed like so many bagged trophies.

No question about it, the Tishman collection is well thought of in African art circles in the West. Works from the collection have been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (in the exhibit “For Spirits and Kings,” in 1981), the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian, the Musee de l’Homme in Paris and elsewhere.

An Orange County collector wrote to me recently, recalling the experience of observing “three impeccably dressed elderly gentlemen” leave an African art gallery in Paris.

“That one is Paul Tishman of New York,” the dealer told the curious collector. “The other two are his advisers, William Fagg of the British Museum and Charles Rattan, who opened the first African gallery in Europe. Tishman never buys unless they both agree.”

Still, the point of a museum exhibition is not merely to showcase fine examples of work but to put them in context for viewers. The study of iconography can be a fascinating enterprise, but it makes sense only when the student is immersed in the larger culture. The Bowers show, on the other hand, is mired in pedantry and a failure to see the forest for the trees.

One wall text was devoted to a quote from Paul Tishman to the effect that, regardless of tribal and regional differences, African art embodies “the same spirituality, the same invocation of magic . . .”

But exhibit co-curators Armand Labbe (director of research and collections at the Bowers) and anthropologist Joseph Nevadomsky (an associate professor at Cal State Fullerton) don’t discuss cross-cultural connections except in the most general way.

So should the Bowers have turned away the offer to exhibit objects from this major 500-piece collection? Of course not. But a much better tactic would have been to develop a thematic exhibit that investigates a specific aspect of African culture--maybe focusing specifically on Nigeria, or objects used in initiation ceremonies--using pieces from the collection to illustrate this theme, rather than vice versa.

An example of thematic keenness is an exhibit at the Center for African Art in New York (which will travel, though not to California). Called “Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals,” the show is specifically about the hidden information--meant to be understood only by healers, tribal fraternities, kings or the women of a community--that is embedded in 19th- and 20th-Century sculptures and textiles.

Instead of exhorting viewers to clear their mind of “ethnocentric cultural conditioning,” in Labbe’s words, why not start from square one, describe in detail a specific African culture and discuss why the objects were made and how people used them, in a logical and lively way that viewers can easily assimilate?

In any case, this impatience with “cultural conditioning” seems misplaced. No matter how well-meaning or well-informed we may be about other cultures, no matter what our own racial background, our viewpoints ultimately are shaped by American culture. Would we chastise Nigerian viewers of American art because they saw it from a different point of view?

It’s unrealistic to expect viewers to be able to toss off their “cultural conditioning” at will--as Labbe himself neatly proves when he compares Madonnas and saints used by Catholics as devotional objects with images of lesser African gods.

Incidental intelligence: Quick, what do paying admission at the Bowers Museum and leaving Disneyland with plans to return later that day have in common? (Hint: This ritual also identifies the over-21 crowd at all-ages rock clubs.)

Yup, all these activities involve getting the back of your hand stamped. (The usual practice in museums, when there might be confusion between visitors and non-paying patrons of the bookstore or restaurant, is to issue a cheap metal badge.)

Queried on two occasions about whether Bowers visitors object to this practice, the woman at the admissions desk said very few did--and in any case, she added, the blue ink is biodegradable.

* “African Icons of Power: Timeless Artworks from the Paul and Ruth Tishman Collection” remains indefinitely at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St. in Santa Ana. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday, and Thursday nights until 9 p.m. Museum admission is $4.50 for adults, $3 for seniors and students, $1.50 for children 5 to 12, free for children under 5. (714) 567-3600.