Gary Larson had a cartoon of an elephant in a trench coat and Fedora, the elephant was wounded in the jungle years earlier, lived to seek out his shooter and found him in a dark alley of a distant city, "you should have finished the job!"
I was at a college taking Art History, it was a curators course that they stuck us in as a prerequisite to Architecture classes, seemed they didn't really care if you really learned any art history. I spent an agonizing 3 months studying the Greek Parthenon, what went into it and what it all meant. The room was a salad bowl auditorium sort of like that Roman amphitheater they always brag about. A salad bowl of bored humanity being taught that art originated with the Romans and the Greeks. In my life time I only saw two buildings shaped like that Parthenon, a federal courthouse and the roofs of the porches on the houses in my neighborhood. Oh, how my world is filled with significances.
This confirmed my view that history is a point of view and consists of the bragging rights of one people at the expense of another. So, the whole story is never told and gives the illusion of continuous and irrefutable glory. Chris Columbus really got lost, stumbled upon an inhabited country, couldn't understand or communicate with those people and regarded them as primitive savages and initiated the slave trade and yet he is still celebrated in our schools despite our clamor for diversity and reconciliation between the victims of the skin color scale.
Is there an antidote to this madness? Yes! Change the historical sidebar into a full story, a full history. Write the history and put the other cultures in the sidebar. It's sort of saying our culture was thriving and waning and re-emerging, meanwhile, across the water, this was happening.
I picked up an interesting book called "African Art, The Diaspora and Beyond (The Daniel Texidor Parker Collection) by Daniel Texidor Parker." I would call this a must read book (somebody call Oprah!). The text alone is a mind opening vista. You would not get this from any establishment natural history museum or art museum history expose'. It is hard to look at because I don't understand and hard to put down because it is so enlightening. Small doses of true history are more palatable, the wisdom and reason of the past can be absorbed without arrogant regurgitations (fashions, trends) and once cords are struck in our beings, the sensibilities we already have are heightened and begin to color our expressions with truer passion and dearer compassion. Thus my question, is there an African Style? What does it look like?
Posted By: Arnold Johnson
Saturday, December 12th 2009 at 10:56AM
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