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In pursuit of virtuosity: gendering ‘master’ pieces of
nineteenth-century South African indigenous arts
Anitra Nettleton
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Anitra Nettleton (2012): In pursuit of virtuosity: gendering ‘master’ pieces of nineteenth-century
South African indigenous arts, Visual Studies, 27:3, 221-236
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Visual Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3, November 2012
In pursuit of virtuosity: gendering ‘master’ pieces of
nineteenth-century South African indigenous arts
ANITRA NETTLETON
In nineteenth-century South Africa two different forms of
facture of objects were encouraged by European colonial
intervention. One, woodcarving, was male and produced
many objects which have been declared masterpieces. The
other, beadwork, was a female craft and was regarded as
less valuable. This article examines the ways in which these
values were located in the visible virtuosity of the facture of
objects and through the visual representation of objects and
people, drawing on well-documented pieces from the
collections of the British Museum and nineteenth-century
photographs.
In June 2009 theWits Art Museum
1 successfully
concluded the purchase of a section of a larger collection
of wooden art objects from Nicholas Maritz, a private
collector. The purchase comprised staffs, spoons,
headrests, knives, snuff containers and some initiation
figures from the Shona
/Venda/Tsonga areas of
Zimbabwe, South Africa and Mozambique. The larger
collection contained similar objects from both Sothoand
Nguni-speakers (Figure 1), most of which were
claimed to be of nineteenth century manufacture,
2 and
all were ensconced in custom-built display cabinets. The
entire collection was valued at a sum far beyond the
reach of theWits Art Museum: the Sotho
/Tswana
material was subsequently sold to another collector, and
the Nguni section is under consideration for purchase by
the Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town. Both the
monetary value attributed to, and the way the collector,
Nicholas Maritz, had displayed, catalogued and
documented the wooden objects indicates that he
considered them to have great significance. The
collection of wooden objects was also, in all these
respects, a close replica of the Brenthurst Collection,
which at present forms the backbone of the heritage
collections presently at the Johannesburg Art Gallery,
3
but which was assembled by a private collector, Jonathan
Lowen, in London in the 1970s.
On the purchase by theWits Art Museum of the
collection of wooden objects from Shona, Venda
Anitra Nettleton is Professor of History of Art in theWits School of Arts and Academic Head of theWits Art Museum at the University of theWitwatersrand. She
has researched and published articles, chapters and books on historical and contemporary arts of Africa over three decades. Her present concerns include, on one
hand, the relationships between histories and modernisms as manifested in the works of South African contemporary artists and those making ‘traditional’ forms
in the late nineteenth century. On the other hand is a project on modernist primitivism in the legendary Amadlozi group of the 1960s and its afterlife in the 1980s.
FIGURE 1. Maritz collection of Southern African Art – Nguni section.
Catalogue courtesy Nicolaas Maritz. Photograph © Anitra Nettleton.
and Tsonga sources, Maritz made a very generous
donation, comprising more than 800 beadwork items,
largely of Zulu and Xhosa origin, few of which had been
catalogued, photographed or even fully inspected.
4 Even
fewer were displayed in the collector’s custom-made
cabinets; their value and significance were clearly not
considered of the same magnitude as the wooden items.
A few beadwork items of South Sotho, Zulu and Xhosa
origin were included in the collector’s self-published
catalogue but only where they could be claimed to be of
nineteenth century origin (Maritz 2008). This
differential valorisation, I will argue, has to be
understood within a wider hierarchy, one that pervades
both the heritage sector and the art market in South
Africa and beyond, in which some African objects are
given greater importance than others. In this paper I thus
explore the variance in value attached to wood and
beaded forms, and follow some of the ideological
trajectories, which allowed both to be transformed, from
the mid nineteenth century to the present, from mere
material culture to works of art, and yet elevated only
one form, the wood-carvings, to the status of ‘master’
pieces.
5
ISSN 1472-586X printed/ISSN 1472-5878 online/12/030221-16©2012 International Visual Sociology Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2012.717748
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222
A. Nettleton
AUTHENTICITY’S DESPAIR: THE
(NINETEENTH-CENTURY) TRANS-NATIONAL
TRADE IN ARTEFACTS
In the past, African artists made a large variety of objects
for their own use (and delectation), some for prosaic
purposes and others for more arcane ends. As Europeans
came into sustained contact with sub-Saharan Africans
from the late fifteenth century onwards, their interest in
native African manufactures grew, leading, in many
instances, to their taking away with them objects which
they found to be ‘marvellous’ (Jones 1994). In at least
one celebrated case, the Sappi-Portuguese and
Bini-Portuguese ivories, Europeans commissioned artists
from different places on the west coast to make objects
for use back ‘home’ in Europe (Curnow 1984; Bassani
and Fagg 1988). The salt cellars, ciboria, horns, spoons
and other objects these particular Africans produced
ostensibly had a use-function in their destination
market, but most had no function in the society to which
the carvers belonged. Now famous and highly valued as
trans-national
objects d’art, the salt cellars and other
forms are possibly the first examples from Africa of art
made specifically, and to order, for travellers from
overseas. They are also among the earliest ‘art’
commodities from Africa made in circumstances in
which the dislocation between the world views of makers
and consumers was so startlingly wide. Their status as
‘tourist art’ is moot, because the travellers who visited or
even settled the shores ofWest and Central Africa in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not tourists,
but rather missionaries, soldiers or merchants who
worked for patrons and managed a relatively short-lived
demand for these extraordinary carvings.
It can be argued that a similar relationship between
carvers and patrons developed in Southern Africa in the
nineteenth century: as European settlement spread and
penetrated deeper into the continent, the colonial
powers garnered more information about, images of,
and objects made by, its peoples. This period saw the
market, both in the colonies themselves and in Europe,
expand vastly. Most of the nineteenth-century objects
from southern Africa which have, in recent years,
6
surfaced out of private collections and onto the market,
particularly in the United Kingdom, can be shown to
have been acquired by, and in many cases to have been
specifically made for, Europeans in Natal and the Eastern
FIGURE 2. ‘Photo taken at Umsinga (at the base of the Biggansberg, Natal). Curios sent by Colonials to Indian and Col Exhibition 1886’. Albumen print. 13.5 x
20.5 cm. Photograph © Collection of Michael Graham-Stewart and Michael Stevenson.
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In pursuit of virtuosity
223
Cape from the 1840s onwards (Nettleton 1991, 2007a,
2007b; Stevenson 2005).
While individuals in Britain, and probably in Europe,
were deeply interested in, or at least sufficiently curious
about, African objects to spend their hard-earned cash
on acquiring them, southern African artists were, it
appears, only too happy to provide their
nineteenth-century European patrons with objects
which displayed the virtuosity of carving and individual,
innovative design they desired. This was particularly
evident among the wood carvers, all of whom were men.
Southern African carvers did not, in general, produce
figures of human and animal form for any purposes
outside the secret spaces of initiations, and this (to our
knowledge) only among North Sotho, Tswana, Tsonga
and Venda communities.
7 Some figures were made for
consumption by outsiders, most often in the form of
staff finials representing people in ‘tribal’ dress, and
sometimes animals. The products made by carvers in
these communities for internal use were almost always
functional in a utilitarian sense, and their carving skills
were developed and honed on objects such as headrests,
mortars, milk pails, meat platters and bowls, some of
which were highly elaborate in design and decoration,
but never more so than in the variants that were sold to
Europeans. Virtuosity of execution and ingenious design
can be argued to have been valued by European
/settler
buyers in this nineteenth century context more than the
de-individualised and ethnic or ‘tribalised’ ‘authenticity’
that dominated tastes for the ‘primitive’ among
collectors in the twentieth century. The latter trope of the
authentic, based in an ideology of cultural purity and
outsider alterity, was largely cultivated by European
collectors, to maintain an idea of ‘primitive’ Africa, and
thus to exclude many objects from collections and from
the canon of historical African art forms.
The interest in ‘classical’ or ‘pure’ African objects from
West and Central Africa, which developed from the latter
part of the nineteenth century onwards in Europe and
the United States of America, was so fully fuelled by
notions of the primitive, that few scholars have shown
interest in objects produced in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Africa specifically and overtly for the
European market, because they do not fit their criteria
for ‘authenticity’ and therefore cannot be accepted as
truly African ‘masterpieces’.
8 Numerous woodcarvings,
which were made for sale to Europeans in South Africa
in the nineteenth century, and should therefore have
been discarded as inauthentic by these criteria, have
nevertheless and ironically, been collected as old,
aesthetically rewarding, heritage items. In these instances
the objects have often been accompanied by invented
FIGURE 3. Woman with cicatrisation ‘amasumpa’. Scars on the left-hand
side and new cuts on the right-hand side show that it was a staggered
process. Photograph © Campbell Collections, University of KwaZulu-Natal.
pedigrees intended to prove that they were made for use,
and used by native and indigenous populations.
9 The
case for this claim can be made in relation to headrests
with circle supports. In a photograph recovered by
Michael Stevenson and Michael Graham Stewart and
published in their catalogue of a collection of
nineteenth-century South East African
objets d’art
(Stevenson 2005) are men and women with objects,
made specifically for the London International
Exhibition of 1886 (Figure 2). Included among the many
forms laid out before them are some ‘Zulu’ pillows.
10 No
equivalent headrests have, to my knowledge, been
collected in the field in South Africa among
Zulu-speakers, and none of those that are now in
European museums show any signs of indigenous use as
pillows.
11 The oldest datable example of such headrests I
have found to date is in Sweden, accessioned in 1845; it
has six horn-shaped legs which are blackened, a pale
body forming the plateau and was collected by
missionaries at what was then Oskarsberg mission, later
Rorke’s Drift. That the 1886 photograph is not the
beginning of this tradition is confirmed by these early,
and relatively unexplored, collections.
12
EXPORTING OBJECTS AND THE FORMATION OF
HERITAGE COLLECTIONS
The production of such objects, in various media, which
followed an aesthetic based on the ‘traditional’, but
adapted to new tastes, and using a hybrid iconography,
arguably resulted in some of the pieces becoming
desirable commodities in both locales. In this system of
exchange, African objects, even those regarded by
Africans as useless, were seen in Europe as synecdoches
for the, apparently exotic, cultural practices they were
taken to represent. This is apparent from the
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224
A. Nettleton
FIGURE 4. ‘Carved wooden vessel for holding sour milk’. Made by unnamed
‘Zulu’ carver. Wood. 40.7 x 22 cm. British Museum, No. Af.1559. Donated by
Henry Christy ca 1860–9. Photograph © The British Museum.
descriptions of objects in use among Africans, written by
Robert Mann in 1862: he spoke, for example, of
‘Brobdignagian spoons of carved wood’, which, he
claimed, were used by Zulu-speakers ‘to scoop the blood
from the carcase of a freshly-slaughtered ox’ (Mann
1862, 18), emphasising what must have appeared to him
as a barbarous ‘native’ custom. Examples of such large
spoons can be seen in Figure 2, some sticking out of a
basket at centre having very large bowl ends, their
extraordinary size being evident in their juxtaposition to
other objects and the human bodies behind.
Yet in other sections of the 1862 catalogue Mann voiced
his admiration for the ‘natives’’ skill in carving, more
definitively evidenced in smaller spoons in the
photograph with open fretwork handles, or those with
handles of three-dimensionally spiralling rods ending in
human heads which are now favourites among
collectors. Mann’s approving tone in these passages
echoed an earlier appreciation of ‘native’ skill recorded
FIGURE 5a, 5b. ‘Milk or beer Pot’ and lids. Made by unnamed ‘Zulu’ carver.
Wood. 33 x 34 cm. British Museum, No. Af.1561. Donated by Henry Christy ca
1860–9. Photograph © The British Museum.
in Burchell’s (1824) description of Tswana spoons, and
was to be followed in later accounts, such as Theodore
Bent’s (1892) description of Shona headrests, or Mueller
and Snelleman’s (1892) catalogue of arts and industries
from the region. These records all represented Southern
African peoples via their objects, concentrating on exotic
form, ‘surprising’ skill and supposedly primitive uses
and aesthetics. Admiration was nevertheless tempered, as
in the correlations drawn by Mann between the
decorative designs, called
amasumpa, found both on
objects such as headrests (British Museum
No.1917.11.3.1) and on women’s bodies seen in
nineteenth century photographs (Figure 3).
Collections of nineteenth-century Southern African ‘art’
that have been assembled in recent years, such as those
put together by Conru (Klopper and Nel 2002), Pethica
(Pethica, Klopper, and Nettleton 2008) and Maritz
(Maritz 2008), concentrate on the kinds of objects found
in these mid-nineteenth century accounts of native
manufacture, which are replicated in, for example, the
register information for a number of finely carved bowls
from Natal in the British Museum. These examples
(British Museum Nos.1559, 1560, 1561, 2175, 2176,
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In pursuit of virtuosity
225
FIGURE 6. ‘Snuff Box’. Made by unnamed carver, probably Natal. Wood and
wire. Wits Art Museum. Photograph © Wits Art Museum.
4875, 4876), in terms of age at least, fall into the
‘authentic’ category (Figures 4 and 5). However, while
few if any of these bowls can be shown to have had
use-value, or in fact to have been used at all in the local
context of their facture, it would have been their
purported local use-value, as much as, if not more than,
aesthetic qualities perceived in the objects’ forms and
decoration, that exuded appeal for their original buyers.
Many versions of these bowls are found in collections
across Europe and America
13 although they represent
only one among a range of different objects prepared for
sale to the commissioners for the 1862 International
Exhibition in London.
The image of Zulu men and women in Figure 2 offers
some evidence of this. They hold objects, carved of wood
and wear beadwork items, while other objects of a variety
of materials, such as grass baskets and embellished skins,
all apparently newly-made for this purpose and thus
approximately the same age, are laid out before them.
Among them are two lidded vessels in front of the
women at centre left of the picture which could well be
small examples of the fluted genre on tripod legs. There
is an irony here that resides not in the fact that
nineteenth-century traders dealt in some virtuoso
artefacts by preference, but in that these objects were
subsequently elevated to canonical status of authentic
South African ‘art’, possibly early in the century as at
least one of these bowls was included significantly as a
Zulu object in a sales catalogue by Oldman, the firm
from whom the British Museum obtained many
southern and central African artefacts.
14 This clearly
shows that what has been constructed by more recent
collectors and twentieth-century connoisseurs around
African objects deemed ‘authentic’ is an impossible aura
of the genuine, considered to adhere to the ‘pure’ (read
primitive) that must be ‘uncontaminated’ by contact
FIGURE 7. ‘Carved treble wood pot or tureen use to hold sour milk’. Made
by unnamed ‘Zulu’ carver. Wood. 31.5 x 42 cm. British Museum, No. Af.2175.
Donated by Henry Christy ca. 1862. Photograph © The British Museum.
with the outside. Yet, as much as this search for an
authentic aura down-plays the skill-value, the technical
element of the object as masterpiece, the status of objects
as ‘masterpieces’ is nevertheless dependent on a
recognition of skill as well as an estimation of age.
Virtuosity is thus a criterion for excellence that we have
inherited from the collection practices of nineteenth
century colonial officials and tourist-art traders, but one
that we have disguised with a cloak of authenticity.
DISTINGUISHING THE ‘MASTERPIECE’
An historical differentiation between ordinary objects
and masterpieces and thus between the authentic and the
supposedly hybrid can be traced through an analysis of
fluted vessels such as those in Figures 4 and 5, which
have been identified by some connoisseurs as ‘Swazi’
(Nel 2002), but which are demonstrably not. They were
recorded unequivocally as Zulu in the documentation
which accompanied them to Europe (British Museum
Registration Slip for No. 1560; Mann 1862), in the
Oldman sales catalogue mentioned above, and some
were not only made, but were collected before the Swazi
nation could be said to have been established (Nettleton
2007a). These objects, which are considered ‘major’ by
many public collections in different parts of Europe,
such as the British Museum and Musée du Quai Branly,
have two significant extraordinary features. One is
gigantism, an exaggerated increase in object size
(Graburn 1976), and the other, often linked, is a move to
virtuoso display of technical expertise in the elaboration
of design motifs. A small snuff box in theWits Art
Museum (Figure 6) provides a starting point to trace this
development. Among most South African peoples, snuff
boxes with elaborate surface decoration formed part of
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226
A. Nettleton
FIGURE 8. Leila Hawkins. Drawing of a Zulu African headrest. Plate 14 in Christy, H. and L. Hawkins Gleanings of Aboriginal
Ornament
. . . 1862. Watercolour on Paper. 23.7 x 30.3 cm. British Museum, No. AM.2006 Drg 72. Photograph © The British Museum.
FIGURE 9. Zulu, Headrest ‘
Isicamelo’. British Museum, No. Af.2183. Donated by Henry Christy. Wood, leather thong. 58.8 x 17.5 cm.
Photograph © The British Museum.
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In pursuit of virtuosity
227
an individual’s private and prized possessions. Their
indigenous value is reflected not only in the labour
vested in their detail and its precision, but also in the
signs of their use and repair. Before 1850, expert carvers,
probably speakers of a dialect of Zulu, in the vicinity of
Delagoa Bay started making very large vessels which
required similar investment. They may well have adapted
the ridged relief surfaces of the small wooden snuff
containers as a formal prototype for the large bowls, and
retained the blackened and burnished finish commonly
used for the whole body small objects, but more
commonly, on larger objects, only for distinguishing
decorative elements against a lighter background. They
may also have drawn on elements from other sources
within North Nguni carving, pottery and basket-making
repertoires, especially in the kinds of shapes used for the
vessels. The date of 1850 as that before which the
manufacture of these bowls in particular started, is
secured through the history of a particular example in
Museum of Natural History in Lille (France). It was
donated to the museum in 1850, which was also the year
of the death of the donor (Joubert and Valentin 2002,
152).
15 It is, suggests Sandra Klopper (2000 and personal
communication), likely that these carvings were
obtained from people who were moved into native
reserves around Port Natal in the 1840s.
The main bowl shape often corresponds to those used in
many of the small snuff boxes, but also to marriage
baskets and to some clay vessels; three or more legs were
added (Figure 4), often with a circular, or even more
elaborate vertical and horizontal struts enveloping the
bowl. The whole, except for the lid, was carved from a
single piece of wood, with spaces between the vessels and
the enveloping struts (Figure 5). The legs are pure
inventions by the carvers, possibly derived initially from
iron tripod cauldrons exported to South Africa in
thousands in the nineteenth century. But these wooden
versions were extended into non-functional forms and
carved in very intricate patterns. The lack of functional
logic in some of these products is evident in the
composition in Figure 7 where two outer, upright bowls
on tripod legs are joined to an inverted cone-shaped
bowl whose hollow interior is revealed only when the
whole object is turned upside down and the outer
containers become the ‘legs’ for the inner bowl. It is
really rather difficult to imagine any indigenous purpose
which such an object might have served, although the
register slip from the British Museum (No. AF2175)
records that it was used to ‘store sour milk’: the same
descriptor, however, appears on almost all the bowls of
this type acquired around the time of the great
exhibitions of 1862 and 1886. This archive also offers an
indigenous vernacular name for the object ‘
umgenge’
which is a name used in isiZulu for milk pails: the outer
containers of this particular example follow a similar
over-all shape to that of the milk pails of this name made
and used in Zulu homesteads.
That such vessels (and ordinary, usable milk-pails) are
large, and monoxylous, carved with ‘only’ an adze and
knives, was marvelled at by Robert Mann (1862), and by
everyone else since, as an index of the skill of the carver,
and the virtuosity of their facture was made visible
specifically in the intricate detail on surfaces, here in the
form of ridges raised in relief, sometimes forming
interlace patterns. The interlace design is found on
small-scale snuffboxes of the type discussed above, but
their application to the entire surface of larger vessels is
peculiar to the examples with legs like those discussed
here. Similar decoration is found on some (probably)
Zulu headrests (Davison 1991; Joubert and Valentin
2002), such as one drawn and painted by Leila Hawkins
in 1862 (Figure 8), where the horn
/thorn shaped legs
and containers at its short ends have the same surface
treatment as the larger versions. Like the elaborate bowls,
such headrests were accessible to European buyers
around Port Natal from before 1850, and Hawkins’s
image details one of a significant number that can be
traced back to the great exhibitions of London and
Paris.
16 An extraordinary example, part of the Henry
Christy donation to the British Museum (Figure 9),
might be considered an illustration of virtuosic carving
because it is unique in many respects, from its smooth,
rounded bar-like horizontal plateau to its inverted
V-shaped legs with elaborate ridged surfaces. Further
examples include ‘a large wooden pot of native carving’,
recorded as being at the centre of a display of artefacts
and produce from the colony of Natal in the Paris
International Exhibition of 1867 (Mann 1867). None of
these bowls or the related headrests, however, has
surfaced from the bowels of South African museum
collections or stores: all examples presently in South
Africa were acquired from the late 1980s onwards,
repatriated from London via private collectors and
dealers. Furthermore none has been recorded among
items of heritage material still held by local traditional
leaders or local communities, or collected in the field,
either in the nineteenth century or more recently. This
supports the argument that they were made specifically
for sale to outsiders, unlike more common milk-pails
and headrests, of which hundreds have been collected in
the field and documented in use (Klopper 1992, 1995,
2002), and which are well represented in South African
collections, but which are relatively scarce in European
collections.
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228
A. Nettleton
FIGURE 10. Leila Hawkins.
Drawing of Four pieces of multicolour beadwork:
two are large enough for a small cape
. Plate 9 in Christy, H. and L. Hawkins
Gleanings of Aboriginal Ornament
. . . 1862. Watercolour on paper. 30.3 x
24 cm. British Museum, No. AM.2006 Drg 67. Photograph © The British
Museum.
The creation of many virtuoso pieces that appear
‘traditional’, but which are eminently impractical may be
explained by the outside demand for extraordinary
objects, which did not have to serve a functional
purpose. These include the headrest with ‘built in’ bowls
illustrated by Hawkins (Figure 8), the apparently giant
snuff boxes (Figures 4 and 5) and the conjoined milk
pails (Figure 7) whose central bowl could only have been
used when the two outer ones were empty. However that
these virtuoso items were used in Europe to represent
local ‘native’ utensils, is clear in Dr Robert Mann’s
descriptions of objects: ‘Great potentates, like Umpanda,
have their beer brought to them in wooden pots of
some
such dimension and fashion
’ (Mann 1862, 18; emphasis
added).
17 It is probable that, without the aura of
supposedly ‘primitive’ but nevertheless with elevated
royal practice attached to them, the pots would have held
little appeal for the overseas market, so fictions of
traditional use were invented for them, and their
absolutely stark, evenly polished and pristine newness,
did not prevent their being promoted as particularly
‘Zulu’, and later ‘Swazi’, masterpieces in European
displays. The genesis of the ‘Swazi’ label for these objects
remains something of a mystery, but these fictions
unfortunately continue to stick fast to the objects in the
face of mounting evidence to the contrary.
In the local context, in the practice of everyday life, in
mid to late nineteenth-century colonial South Africa,
investment in objects with extraordinary visual qualities,
thus appears to have functioned as an index of exotic
virtuosity to outsiders. But they were also read as
statements about an individual’s personal taste and
status within indigenous society. The name of the
sculptor of some of these bowls is given in British
Museum register slips (No. Af1560), following Robert
Mann (1862) as ‘Unobadula’, ‘the renowned Zulu carver’
(Nettleton 2007a). There can therefore be little question
but that these objects were initially imported to London
and Paris to show people in the metropole how,
purportedly savage, ‘others’ lived. They, however,
provided simultaneous, concrete and visual evidence of
the inventiveness and the skill of local craftsmen, whose
talents could be harnessed by the civilisers. They were
regarded with admiration by many onlookers, identified
as masterpieces, bought by individuals for their home
collections, and now resurface as valuable virtuoso
masterpieces in the contemporary market.
VIRTUOSITY IN OTHER FORMS – THE QUESTION
OF GENDER
Virtuosity in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries was also clearly evident in other objects not so
avidly collected by outsiders, but used and highly valued
by indigenes. It is here that the gender of the maker
enters the equation. At the same time as Europeans were
developing a market for, and thus a set of specialised
makers of, masterpieces in wood, they were enabling the
formation of another tradition of aesthetic production.
This happened via the, increasingly large, numbers of
glass beads introduced into trade with the peoples
inhabiting Natal south of the Tugela, and with the Zulu
Kingdom, possibly at times in exchange for the very
wooden objects that were being exported. The trade in
beads enabled the rise and development of a re-invented
art of the body among indigenous peoples. Yet this art,
made almost entirely by women, and noted often in
drawings, in missionary accounts and in the earliest
photographs of native peoples, was never given the same
value as the wood-carving, and it still suffers neglect.
There are clearly a number of reasons for the relative
neglect of the beadwork items in the world at large until
recent times: these can be traced back to the
mid-nineteenth century. The manuscript by Leila
Hawkins and Henry Christy called
Gleanings of
Aboriginal Ornament from the International Exhibition,
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In pursuit of virtuosity
229
1862
housed in the British Museum (Am2006-Haw),
contains not only the drawing of the headrest discussed
above, but also images of five other woodcarvings, eight
pieces of Southern African, beadwork (Figure 10), some
decorated gourds and red pottery ware from the same
region. Leila Hawkins was the artist, but little is known
about her. The dealer-collector, Henry Christy is, by
contrast, well known as he became a major benefactor of
the British Museum (Braunholtz 1970). Many of the
woodcarvings illustrated by Hawkins made their way
into the BritishMuseum collections, and are easily traced
in the records, yet only a few pieces of the beadwork
illustrated by her were accessioned at the same time.
MATERIAL GENDERS AND THE CIVILISING
MISSION
This then returns us to the question of why the beadwork
was so little valued both in the past and in the current
building of heritage collections, but with the beginning
of an answer. The gender-biases of craft versus art are
reflected in the relative roles of Hawkins and Christy in
the drafting of their
Gleanings. The issue of gender
combines here with that of differentiations of art from
craft. African woodcarving was in the past almost
exclusively a male activity: it fits comfortably into the
category of sculpture and was, to some European
observers, at least one step removed from the category of
craft. In the mid-nineteenth century, in Europe,
art-making was still a process which involved material
objects, but which was also supposed to involve thought
that was individual and inspired, resulting in works that
transcended the everyday. In addition, while the art
object was expected to be well crafted, it was not to be
repetitive. However, with hindsight, it is clear that this
ideal was seldom achieved, and that the criteria were
differentially applied to objects made in different media
and by different people.
Woodcarvings were often repetitive, but could
compensate for a supposed lack of originality by the
gravitas of their size and their male facture.
Woodcarvings could also stand on their own; they had a
kind of existential autonomy which enabled them to be
displayed and viewed. Beadwork, on the other hand,
would have fallen squarely into the category of craft as a
repetitive form of facture, lacking the gravitas of weight
and size. Furthermore it lacked the independence that
woodcarvings generally displayed, being always
dependant on a support, most often the body, for its
visibility. This is evident in the photograph in Figure 2:
where beadwork is laid out on the ground next to the
woodcarvings it is far less visible than the woodcarvings,
but is more clearly seen when displayed on the bodies of
the men and women in the background, jauntily
suspended from the staffs which they hold, or draped
over other objects.
Beadwork items shared the same evidentiary role
pertaining to the ‘primitive’ that woodcarving played in
the European imaginary of Africa. But beaded forms,
simultaneously and ironically, served to undermine the
missionary and colonial attempts to civilise, attempts
that arose out of their identification of local clothing
practices as both primitive and immoral. The irony is
embedded in the fact that the beaded items were made
from materials imported into Africa from Europe by
those attempting to change African ways. Bishop
Colenso, in 1855, reflected on the experience of being in
a trading store in Natal and on the beads available there:
The natives, it appears, are as capricious in their
taste for beads as any English lady in the choice
of her bonnet. The same pattern will only suit
them for a season or two, and they are at all
times very difficult to please. One fine blue bead
was oval, not round as it ought to have been;
another black round one was a little too large.
(Colenso 1855, 30)
He concludes with an analysis of the preferred colours,
red, white and blue, with their indigenous names, all of
which suggest an already highly-developed symbolic
language and technical appreciation of glass beads.
VIRTUOSITY AND ENCHANTING TECHNOLOGIES
IN BEADWORK
It is, however, the quality of the facture of the beadwork
objects, which I pursue further in the exploration of this
question of value. Alfred Gell (1992) suggests that the
sense of wonder we feel when we see a well-made object
arises from recognition of a mismatch between our own
levels of skill in the execution of a craft and that which
we recognise in the object itself. He argues that it is this
‘enchantment of technology’, which constitutes a
‘technology of enchantment’, and thus distinguishes the
aesthetically valent object from the ordinary. The
recognition of the skill required to make a perfect
example of a headrest, for example, would lead to
admiration of that object among those who had tried to
carve, or who had imagined themselves trying to carve.
Viewers, buyers or users of such objects would recognise
the skill of the maker and, as I have argued above, local
Zulu carvers, working for both local and foreign clients,
achieved extraordinary levels of virtuosity.
However, it seems that recognition of virtuosity and the
technology of enchantment are less common for
beadwork, except possibly among those members of the
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230
A. Nettleton
FIGURE 11. Zulu(?) Apron. Beads, grass, twine, leather, gourd. 61.25 x
7.35 cm. British Museum, No. Af.3170. Donated by Henry Christy before 1872.
Photograph © The British Museum.
FIGURE 12. Zulu, Beaded Belt. Beads, twine, grass core. Dimensions
unavailable. British Museum, No. Af.3177. Donated by Henry Christy before
1872. Photograph © The British Museum.
social classes who engage in needlework, something
which is not as obviously gendered historically or
cross-culturally as may be assumed (see Parker 1984;
Nettleton 2000). Sewing was taught to young women in
Victorian England, and to women converts in Christian
missions in South Africa and elsewhere, because forms of
needlework were thought to improve character,
requiring perseverance and precision. Josiah Tyler
reported in 1871 that the girls at Inanda Seminary
(Natal) were taught an array of subjects, and that ‘Special
attention is paid to needlework in its various branches’
(Tyler 1892 [1871], 255). The missionary Godfrey
Callaway (1936, 135) said that through the teaching of
weaving at St Cuthberts in Tsolo (Eastern Cape) the
young women, ‘learned habits of quiet, steady work in a
direction that fosters their own innate desire to create
something beautiful’; and he linked this to the imparting
of a religious motive for the work.With few exceptions,
such as members of the English nineteenth-century Arts
and Crafts Movement, authors such as Owen Jones and
missionaries such as Callaway and Colenso, Victorian
men were less likely than women admire such skills and
practically none of them would have been encouraged to
practise them. Leila Hawkins, who may well have been
taught to paint with watercolours as part of her
specifically female education, lovingly and painstakingly
sketched Zulu beadwork alongside headrests and
wooden containers, while Henry Christy wrote
accompanying descriptive notes, but only wrote in detail
about the wooden objects. It is likely that he was
relatively unmoved by the beaded items, and thus was
not particularly interested in collecting them, although
he did donate some pieces to the British Museum.
Hawkins, however, was clearly captivated by aspects of
the design in the beadwork, capturing images of a
‘fringed apron’ and a ‘semicircular collar of red and
white beads’ in a ‘netted technique’, along with two large
beaded panels in check patterns.
18 Watercolour as a
medium does not really lend itself to precision drawing,
and some of Hawkins’s images of the larger items of
beadwork are impressionistic rather than definitive. This
is certainly the case with her rendering of a bead apron in
Figure 10, which bears a strong but not accurate
resemblance to a beaded item donated to the British
Museum before 1872 by Christie (Figure 11).
Most of these objects have a subtle three-dimensional
and textural quality and complexity that one tends not to
notice when viewing them as two dimensional designs,
when analysing their geometry and colour, or when
talking about aspects of style which relate to groups’
identities and to archaeologies of identity (Jolles 1993,
2004; PrestonWhyte 1994; VanWyk 2003). It becomes
increasingly clear as one works with beadwork items,
that the virtuosity of their makers manifests not only in
the design elements, but also in the actual facture, the
feel, tension and finish of the object (Figure 12). Gell
(1998) also argues that decorated objects please people
because they are inherently pleasing to look at, because
they have agency in that regard and, we might add here,
because they are pleasing to feel, both visually and by
physical contact.
19 Most of the beadwork pieces donated
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In pursuit of virtuosity
231
FIGURE 13. Zulu, Collar. Beads, twine. 51.45 x 2.45 cm. British Museum, No.
Af.3163. Donated by Henry Christy before 1872. Photograph © The British
Museum.
to the British Museum by Henry Christy prior to
1872 were not only designed using simple geometry and
complex symmetries, but their fabric is well made.
20 It is
clear that as we confront these items in a close encounter
with their materiality we reach another means of
understanding their value.
Appadurai, in his analysis of commodities and
constructions of differential values among objects,
speaks of a ‘methodological fetishism’ (Appadurai 1986)
in which we make a turn from sociological analysis of
transactions to focus on objects as material things.
Art-historians, it could be argued, do so as a part of
professional practice, but such analysis has been
differentially applied to objects of different status within
what Clifford calls the art culture system.
21 It is only
relatively recently that the aspects of skill and creativity,
of a marriage between local traditions and outside
demands in the production of objects formerly classed as
craft have come to be appreciated as ‘art’ within the
culture system. Their acceptance as authentic expressions
of a new kind of aesthetic sensibility within the debated
realm of the ‘traditional’ is less secure, however.
TRACING A HISTORY OF VIRTUOSO BEADWORK
I return here to nineteenth-century collections of
beadwork, in this case items collected by the American
missionary Grout in Natal prior to 1862, because they
allow us entry to questions about origins and
development of styles of beadwork.
22 Once beads had
been introduced in large numbers to the Southern
African region (from 1800 onwards), they were worked
into extraordinary forms. Klopper (1992, 2000) has
argued that the original forms of beaded items among
Zulu-speakers were simple strings of beads combined
and wound or slung around the body in several ways,
calling on illustrations of Natal and Eastern Cape peoples
from works by various colonial authors to back up her
claims. Yet the photographic record, from the 1840s
onwards, indicates that the makers had already
developed beaded objects of more complex structure and
varied form.
23 In Figure 2 (1886) we see a number of
complex forms including sewn bead fabric panel worn as
an apron by the woman second from the left, and belts
and necklaces worn by others, made using a variety of
construction methods. Sometimes the beads were strung
and sewn over grass cylindrical cores (Figure 12), but at
an early date a technique for sewing beads into bead
fabric was perfected, as was a netted technique which
created the effect of lace, recorded by Hawkins in her
watercolours and in a network lace collar collected by
Christy (Figure 13).
The emergence of these beading techniques has been
largely been ignored, or sought in the possibility of their
having been taught to the natives by missionaries,
especially missionary women (Sciama 1998; Labelle
2005). However, a survey of missionary literature from
the nineteenth century has thus far turned up no
evidence to support this explanation. Black women were
taught sewing on mission stations, but of the kind which
allowed them to make dress that was modest and
befitting converts to European mainstream Christianity
(Colenso 1855; Mason 1887; Tyler 1891). It is difficult to
imagine the wives and daughters of European
missionaries teaching beading techniques to the ‘natives’,
when the latter were likely to turn those skills to the
making of forms of body adornment of which most
missionaries entirely disapproved (Nettleton 2000).
Further, in Europe beaded fabric was achieved by
knitting rather than sewing, and was reserved for small
items such as reticules and hats (Ettinger 1991;
Schürenberg 1998). Examples of the latter have survived
in South African collections from both English-speaking
settler and Voortrekker contexts, indicating the presence
of the object type, and probably the techniques of
manufacture (Strutt 1975). European use of beads lay
mainly in the beading of cloth, or the making of
jewellery to be worn over clothes. Africans, by contrast,
appropriated the beads introduced by the colonists, also
applied them to cloth, but also to other materials and
invented ways of using them independently to make
statements about their difference from, and their
resistance to, European settlers. That they then became
the fodder for photographic representation of the
natives, as in a photograph, possibly taken by Captain
Wentworth (Figure 15)
24 which formed the basis for an
illustration in Gustav Fritsch’s (1872, 24) volume on the
indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, is one of the deep
historical ironies that abound in studies of authenticity
and origins.
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232
A. Nettleton
FIGURE 14.
Kaffir’s Kraal Albumen print. 8.9 x 5.5 cm, from album of Capt JE
Parish, ‘Ethnology, South Africa’ 1860–1880. British Museum no Af.A5.29.
Photograph © The British Museum.
FIGURE 15. ‘
Zulu’. Three Young Zulu Women. Photograph by Capt.
Wentworth. Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Stiftung
Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Courtesy of Keith Dietrich.
BEADS AND BODIES – RELATIONAL VIRTUOSITY
The politics of the trade-induced creativity took a
particular turn. Gell argues, that what gives objects
significance is their relation both to other objects and to
a wider social context (Gell 1998), and one of the
relational contexts in which beadwork is made and
admired, is constituted by the human body. That this
was not entirely missed by the missionaries is evident in
Bishop Colenso’s admiring account of dancing girls at
Pakade’s Kraal in Natal: ‘About thirty dancing girls,
some of them with their noses, mouths and chins
whitened with clay, and all loaded with the king’s beads
which look like large white bands of cloth across their
dark figures’ (Colenso 1855, 107).
This account, published after a 10-week visit to the
colony, is one of the earliest verbal descriptions of the
effects of beads. George Ffrench Angas’s drawn, painted
and then engraved images of the Zulu, published in
1849, comes a little closer to an approximation of the
visual appearance of beads on Zulu people’s bodies; and
he was followed by a horde of photographers of varying
ability who depicted similar bodies, materials and
objects.
25 What is clear from all these images, however, is
that objects made with extraordinary care, both in
relation to their appearance and in relation to how they
would feel on the body, serve that body in the first
instance. They complete each body as part of a visualised
network of social relations and as an aesthetic entity even
if, in some instances, the beads may have been placed on
the bodies by the photographers rather than being
chosen by the subjects themselves (Figure 14).
The virtuosity of the makers of these objects thus did not
lie only in their ability to work with complex forms of
symmetry and geometrical patterning, something that
has caught the attention of a number of scholars in
recent years (Becker, Getz, and Mathison 2001; van
Heerden, Getz, and Smuts 2004). Nor was it to be found
only in the making of messages via colour combinations
and design shapes.
26 Their virtuosity lay in their ability
to make beadwork items that could function as a kind of
second skin, that could move on the body, drape over the
body and stand on the body almost as a form of
scarification (Figure 15). It is clearly documented that
Zulu peoples as well as many others in Southern Africa
practised scarification. Joshua Tyler recorded the scars
worn by Zulu women on their chests and upper arms,
some of which are visible in the photograph of the
woman in Figure 3. The ways in which beaded items
were made, which allowed pieces to stand away from the
skin, like the raised keloid scars which marked bodies as
cultural entities, were quite different from the draped
and often voluminous use of cloth in both European
women’s dress in the colonial period, and in African
adaptations of that dress. Beaded items of body wear
assumed a proximity to uncovered skin and performed
the task of clothing or of scarification by transforming
that skin and that body from a natural to a cultural state.
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In pursuit of virtuosity
233
Southern African peoples thought of ways to make
beadwork items that could fit and enhance many parts of
the human body, from bandoliers worn across the torso,
but also wound around the body in different ways, to
aprons that could be worn on the chest and back as well
as around the hips, to arm and leg bands that could
double as neckbands, to breast fringes that are also
wrapped around heads and to panels used in a large
number of different ways. They were wound around
grass cores to make belts, sewn into a pliable fabric or
stiffened by wooden rods, but always with an edge that
made them stand out from the surface on which they
rested. In each instance these items would originally have
been worn against the skin, by men and women. The
beadwork items turn every body into a work of art, an
expression of relations in the world, including the
ancestral and the spiritual. It is really only when one
begins to understand these objects in their bodily context
that it is possible to follow fully their potential to resist
western hegemonies of dress and the body in the colonial
period. The bandoliers, aprons and leg bands were
modifications of indigenous forms, but they were also
up-to-date, because they enabled a complete evolution of
indigenous dress into a modern form, one in which
colour and pattern, as well as forms and techniques
transformed the appearance of the wearer. Yet these
forms retained their difference from European forms and
transgressed European norms of modesty, and they
enabled a distinctive dress aesthetic, one which
continued to be employed throughout the twentieth
century. Sir Henry Bartle Frere, the first British High
Commissioner in South Africa (1877–1880) reveals a
view sympathetic to indigenous (in this case Xhosa)
dress in a letter of October 1877, where he opposed those
who ‘remained savages, clad in red blankets, if they used
any covering’, ‘their well-turned limbs
. . . covered with
red clay and fat’, with the indigenes who ‘follow
European ways’, in a ‘Christian village of thriving
cultivators clad in substantial (but alas! such ugly) habits
of calico and broad cloth’ (Frere 1877, cited inMartineau
1895, 198).
ENVOI: WOMEN’S WORK
In Southern Africa, beadwork was the domain of
women, and there can be little doubt that black women
learned crafts of sewing from European missionaries
because, prior to Europeans’ introducing western-style
clothing and large amounts of calico and broad-cloth,
African men did most of the sewing. In South Africa,
prior to the mid-nineteenth century most African dress
was made from animal skin, although it may have been
subsequently adorned with shell, metal or seed
ornaments by women.Women would also have used
grass belts made by men.With the arrival of
missionaries, cloth and western-style clothing, women
were trained as seamstresses and bead-workers, making
beaded items for themselves and for their men. Aprons
and bandoliers were made of beaded fabric, of which
there are classic examples in the Christy collection, and
belts were beaded over coils of grass or rope, sewn onto
leather backings and given increasingly complex designs.
It was women who found the ways of creating these
modern forms through the use of beads, transforming
skin and cloth garments and bodies in the process. Their
mastery of beadwork sewing was passed down from one
generation to another until well into the mid-twentieth
century, and it is still alive in beaded items made for sale
in South African cities today.
While not one of the beaded items discussed here could
pass the litmus test for the ‘authentic’ required by
collectors of supposedly ‘traditional’ African art, because
the material of their facture is the stuff of colonial
intervention, they were nevertheless more firmly
embedded in indigenous cultural traditions than the
elaborate bowls, erroneously attributed to Swazi carvers,
that now fetch extraordinary prices, and grace so many
public and private collections. The beaded items
resurrected from the neglect they suffered in the Maritz
collection display an extraordinarily innovative facture
and resultant fine-ness of feel and appearance. That they
have only be seen as the products of those who mastered
the techniques of sewing, not as objects which
transformed entire traditions of marking bodies and
identities is one of the enduring prejudices that plagues
the display of African art from the British Museum to
most private collections. It is, however, clear that the
virtuosity of African artists in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries can be shown to have expanded
across many repertoires of skill in response to demands
for objects resulting from colonisation and direct trade.
The particular Southern African response to beads was
probably unexpected by Europeans colonists, but it led
to the creation of extraordinary objects, thus laying a
claim to their makers’ modernity, to their difference
from the colonial settlers and to the originality of their
production. The buried treasures of the Christy and
Maritz collections, separated by almost 150 years, bear
testimony to this.
NOTES
[1] The University of theWitwatersrand’s Art Museum is
now ‘branded’ with this name: it used to be called the
University Art Galleries.
[2] These claims were quite elaborately developed by the
collector, Nick Maritz, in the catalogue of the collection.
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234
A. Nettleton
He attempted to correlate every wooden object with
British forces in South Africa during the nineteenth
century (Maritz 2008).
[3] See Davison 1991, the official catalogue of the Brenthurst
Collection. The Collection is, however, on loan to the
Gallery from the Oppenheimer family which can
withdraw it at any time.
[4] There are over 800 of these at the latest count, but most
are without clear provenance. Maritz collected them as a
side-line, an addendum to his main interest, to keep
runners and dealers coming back to him (Maritz
personal communication 2009).
[5] I have scare-quoted ‘master’ here because the gender
relations involved are conditioned by the same
patriarchies against which feminist art historians such as
Greer (1981), Pollock and Parker (1981), and Parker
(1984) have taken a stand.
[6] This process started with Jonathan Lowen who put
together what is now called the Brenthurst Collection in
the 1970s in London. He was followed by numerous
others such as Kevin Conru, Udo Horstman and Terence
Pethica, and by an assortment of dealers in Southern
African antiquities.
[7] No initiation figures are known from male initiation
lodges among peoples speaking Nguni languages and
inhabiting the Eastern coastal areas of South Africa –
generally referred to as Zulu and Xhosa. There is no
record of female initiation on a large scale among these
peoples either, and no record of the use of figures in
wood or clay for such initiations. Claims that such figures
were made in the past is dependent on a very fragmented
archaeological record or on speculation (see Nel 2011).
[8] These issues of authenticity do not get laid to rest simply.
See Kasfir (1992), Shiner (1994), Steiner (1996) and
Nettleton (2007a) inter alia, for discussion of this
problem.
[9] See, for example, the annotation for the bowls of this
type in the catalogue for the Brenthurst Collection
(Davison 1991) as compared to the more cautious
approach taken by Klopper (1995) and Nettleton’s
(2007a and 2008) clarification of the status of these
bowls.
[10] Photograph published in Stevenson 2005. A second
photograph of the same scene in the collection of Udo
Horstmann was referred to me by Sandra Klopper. In
Horstmann’s version of the photograph the atefacts are
identically laid out, but there are far more women in the
background in the version that I have used. The man
with the white shield in the right of the version used here,
is situated on the other side of the group in the second
version. The Horstmann version has an inscription
situating it in the context of the 1862 exhibition.
[11] Examples in the Royal Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
(No.1891.2) – see Nettleton 2007, Figure 416; in the
Royal Ethnographic Museum in Leiden (Nos.803-
21–803-24 inter alia), and in the Brenthurst collection
(Davison 1991) show no signs of use as pillows. They are
pristine.
[12] The number of this headrest in the Etnografisk Museet,
Stockholm is 1845.01.0001. It is part of a much larger
and generally ignored set of important collections whose
material could throw light on the issues of local
production for overseas consumption.
[13] Examples of the vessels with fluted or ridged surface
designs are found in museums in Lille (Joubert and
Valentin 2002, 152), Stuttgart (Phillips 1995,
Nos.222 and 223), London (Figures 4 and 5), Paris
(Nettleton 2008), Yale University Art Gallery
(No.2006.51.69) and most recently the Cleveland Art
Museum.
[14] See Oldman,W. O. Illustrated Catalogue of Ethnological
Specimens 1909 (May?) No.1716.22 in the Ross Archive
of African Images, Yale University. Available from http://
raai.library.yale.edu/site/index.php?globalnav
=image_
detail&image_id
=286.
[15] See Klopper 2002 for an overview of the main aspects of
the carvings made for foreign trade in the nineteenth
century. The histories of particular genres of objects
allow us a more nuanced inflection of interactions
between makers and patrons, and these bowls are no
exception to this rule.
[16] See British Museum Nos.1559, 1560, 1561, 2175,
2176 where the entries on the registration slips make this
quire clear. It is possible that headrests in Museums such
as the Royal Ethnographic Museum in Leiden, listed in
note 11 above, were derived from the same carvers and
middlemen.
[17] Robert Mann was a colonial official and a commissioner
for the 1862 London International Exhibition, and the
1867 Paris Universal Exhibition.
[18] British Museum Nos.Am2006 Drg65-Haw, Am2006
Drg67-Haw and Am2006 Drg66-Haw refer to the
drawings. Corresponding pieces in the British Museum
collections are Nos.2163, 3163, 3164 and 3170.
[19] Gell’s (1998) discussion of the agency of art objects is
important in this regard because he established
conditions under which objects could be given agency,
not that they simply have agency.
[20] There are a number of pieces, some of which are
illustrated here. They were all accessioned before
1872 when some were exchanged with the Museum in
Berlin.
[21] Clifford (1988) provides a rather too neat triangular
graphic model of this system, but it usefully illustrates
how porous the boundaries between our categories of art
and artefact are.
[22] See Brottem and Lang (1973) for a short account of some
of Grout’s acquisitions which were donated to the Robert
Hull Museum of the University of Vermont. Also see
Stokes 1999, for a discussion of another nineteenth
century collection, in the Field Museum,
Chicago.
[23] Further examples can be found in Virginia-LeeWebb
1992, Stevenson and Graham-Stewart 2000, and British
Museum Nos.Oc,A3.67, OC,A3.66, Af,A5.14 and
AfA3.36.
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235
[24] This image was copied in an engraving by Fristch (1872)
as part of his studies of physical ‘types’ of peoples in
Southern Africa.
[25] Some of the original paintings by Angas in the British
Museum of a married woman and a woman in marriage
dress (no 1876 0510.500), and another of two young
Zulu women whose names Angas inscribed on the
painting as ‘Unomnyenya and Unobasoko wearing
Isikaka’ (No.1876 0510.501) suggest that he was aware of
these as individual persons and therefore that his
observation of their apparel was probably quite
individualised, although he turns them into
stereotypes.
[26] Labelle (2005) points out many of the problems with this
approach to understanding the significance of beadwork
and it is important to understand the limitations of these
attempts to translate the visual into the verbal at that
level.What distinguishes many of the claims about
meaning in beadwork at this level is an almost complete
lack of understanding of semiotics.
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