“Je ne sais quoi” literally means “I don’t know what”, yet in French (and also in English in fact) this idiom is also used to refer to a quality one cannot describe. “Je ne sais quoi “ is a thing one wouldn’t know how to define but whose existence is understood intuitively. Je ne sais quoi is used when we’re describing a certain characteristic that makes something special, interesting, or unique. It can apply to a wide variety of things like people, places, music, and art! You’ve probably heard the expression used to describe something that’s hard to put into words or explain. Like that obscure piece of art that you saw in a gallery and just had to have, even though it was not something you would normally buy. It just had a certain je ne sais quoi. There’s something about it that’s hard to put your finger on. With this new curated exhibition Duende Art Projects presents such objects, while they wait for you to fall in love with them.
“Je ne sais quoi” looks at classical African art through a surreal lens, summoning subconscious and poetic associations, to create a sense of wonder. Our curated selection brings objects that could effortlessly inhabit the world of the surrealists. A Dan spoon, for example, features a pair of human legs, ready to walk away with its belly full of food. Such unprecedented and provocative configurations, can “aid the systematic derangement of all the senses .. to bewilder sensation” as the Surrealist André Breton put it. African art does not fail to surprise with its endless creativity, and one understands why the modernists were drawn so much to it. Breton himself had a significant collection of non-Western art. Just as the surrealist created objects and images with an insistently erotic dimension, a Yaka mask combines ideas of masculinity and sexuality in its facial features. Surrealists went further, breaking taboos and shocking viewers in their depiction of dismembered or distorted bodies. The blade of a razor-sharp Fon executioner’s sword takes the shape of the human head it could decapitate.
Depicting human/animal hybridity was a key surrealist concept, just as a Luba elephant mask would transform its wearer in the potent animal. A pair of horns is enough to transform Kenga armlets into abstract representations of buffalos. Graced with a pair of breasts, a Dogon house post would evoke a most feminine element in a pavilion forbidden to women. Mounted flat on a wall instead on top of head, a Zulu wig continues to impress and serve as a marker of identiy. Just as a Karamojong headdress, it is made from human hair, thought to contain a part of the spiritual essence of the close family member who donated it – in line with André Breton’s viewing of objects as possessing an innate power.
Likewise, two Yoruba ibori altar figures represent an individual’s personal destiny and consist of a leather pouch packed with empowering ingredients. The skilled bead workers of the Yoruba also created a crown finial which almost resembles an octopus.
The infinite creativity of anonymous African artists resulted in most surrealist compositions. A Pende sculpture of their supreme being presents a head with arms as ears. And what to think of the famous Kuba drinking cups shaped in the form of a human head. An extensive study of the known corpus made us discover more than a dozen examples sculpted by the same master carver, which we chose to name “The Wongo Master of the Pursed Horizontal Lips”, after his signature morphological element. Sometimes lack of contextual information clouds our interpretation of an object’s original function. A stylized face with a wide-open mouth can be discovered in a 11th century terracotta headrest from Calabar, but surely the aperture once must have served a different purpose. An owl can be seen in the middle section of old Shona headrest from Zimbabwe, yet the supposed eyes in fact represent shell disks. African artists mastered the concept of the readymade long before it became in vogue in post-World War I Europe. A Kuba drinking vessel for example was made from a buffalo horn. Yet, in line with the culture’s horror vacui its whole surface is decorated with typical scarification patterns.
Sometimes the art dealer gets to play a role himself as well; a group of 10 Kissi pennies were mounted on a metal base in such a way this ancient type of currency now resembles a small metal forest, the tops not unlike the leaves of the ginkgo biloba. Another tour-de-force of a blacksmith is the Mumuye rain-making wand, with the iron pins modeled with such vitality they resemble writhing snakes. Made with the lost-was technique, a Kotoko amulet depicts a chained prisoner – metaphorically containing a disease, not unlike an accumulation of padlocks attached to Fon power object once symbolically closing the mouth of a foe. It shows how easy objects of non-African origin could be integrated in ancient local traditions. We end this catalog with a 19th century Xhosa pipe from South Africa. Quoting the famous René Magritte painting “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, this artwork too, was much more than just a pipe – with this elaborate catalog full of contextual descriptions Duende Art Projects aims to unravel the many layers of meaning of these fascinating artworks. Enjoy, and be inspired!