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Kota reliquary figure
Kota reliquary figure (mbulu ngulu), late 19th to early 20th century, Gabon, wood, copper, brass, and bone, 59.69 cm high (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Speakers: Dr. Kathryn Gunsch, Teel Curator of African and Oceanic Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Dr. Steven Zucker.
Video transcript
(jazz music) - [Steven] We're in the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston looking at an object
that's known as a Kota. - [Kathryn] This is a
Kota reliquary guardian. It would have served as an ornament to a basket holding
the relics of a family. - [Steven] Specifically
bones of a family member. - [Kathryn] People in this region were slash and burn farmers. They would clear land for planting and after five to seven years, the land would no longer be
fertile and the community would move to new farming lands. And for that reason you didn't have access to your ancestor's graves so it made sense to take some small part
of beloved family members with you when you moved to a new place. Families who were using
these reliquary baskets, like people using
reliquaries around the world, felt that that tangible connection to an ancestor helped them
connect to that ancestor in prayer across the divide
of the living and the dead. - [Steven] But this is not a
representation of that person. - [Kathryn] No, this isn't a portrait. It's an idealized
representation of a male figure on one side and of a female on the other. - [Steven] And that's very rare. - [Kathryn] A recent
estimate says that only 3% of the figures have two sides like this. And we're not entirely
sure why some of these reliquary guardians have two sides. - [Steven] All this tremendous
variety in these objects. The basic form is distinct,
you have a large head which is relatively flat
and this wonderful diamond shaped body below it. Then there is just tremendous variety. - [Kathryn] We are seeing more of the body of this reliquary guardian
than it's original audience would've because the bottom
part, this diamond shaped lozenge would've been sunk
into a reliquary basket. - [Steven] And so perhaps
only the shoulders, that is the upper members of the diamond would have been visible. - [Kathryn] And that's why
you see that the decoration stops fairly abruptly
underneath these two rings. - [Steven] I'm really taken
by the decorative choices. The male side has a
convex forehead whereas the other side, the female, is concave. - [Kathryn] And they have
different applications of metal, different decoration as well. - [Steven] On the male side
we're seeing large sheets of metal. - [Kathryn] If you look
closely, you can see the places where tiny
little pieces of metal have been used almost
like a staple to hold the metal sheeting onto
the wooden support. There is a tiny, subtle
one underneath the nose and until you see that
staple, you might not even realize that there are two sheets coming together there. This artist is very careful
to keep a smooth surface because the shining gleam of the metal was meant to mimic the
shining gleam of water which is thought of as the division between the living and the dead. The shining metal is hard to achieve when applying to a
convex or concave curve. And so you can that the artist has ensured it stays flat by carefully securing it to the wooden support. - [Steven] And one of
the things that I find most attractive about these objects is the way in which the inherent colors of each metal is used to define each form. - [Kathryn] We know that artists working in this tradition thought
about the different colors of the metal they were using. So you can see a red strip
of copper over each eye as an eyebrow and also
coming down the center of the forehead. - [Steven] And then this
yellow halo like form around the head itself. - [Kathryn] The new theory
about this halo shape is that artists who were
flattening and abstracting an image of the face, turned
the hairstyle sideways. It's unusual that our
Kota reliquary guardian has white eyes and not black iron eyes. Ours were used from a bone from an animal so creating a new color, a white color. Some other guardians had
that color combination but most have the yellow, red, and black color combination. When you look at the female side of the figure, we can see a
different construction method. We believe that artists worked this either by cutting very thin strips or they hand pulled
wire from existing forms which is a difficult
process involving drawing the material through
successively smaller holes and then they hammered it flat. And if you look at the side of the figure, you can see that the artist
has turned that metal and pushed it into the
wood support to secure it. - [Steven] One can image
that this would afford a maximum use of material
which must've been important because metal was precious. - [Kathryn] When you first
encounter a reliquary guardian, it seems shining
and perhaps even made of metal. But if you look closely,
you can see that the artist has uses as a precious material and uses smallest amount to make a maximum impact. So it's a very thin sheet of metal on the top of a wooden support. - [Steven] So here in the United States and in Europe, its taken us a century to catch up with the original audience to understand the
sophistication and subtlety of these objects. - [Kathryn] Its taken
Europeans and Americans a long time to walk away from the legacy of colonial beliefs about African people and Kota reliquaries in particular. And now we can understand
that they're part of a deeply thought
religious faith and also absolutely stunning aesthetic objects that were never aiming at the same goals as European and American traditions. - [Steven] And evidence
of that kind of Western misunderstanding can be
found even in the word Kota. We call these Kota objects but in fact, they were not made by the Kota people, they were made in an area
where the Kota people lived but by peoples that surround them. - [Kathryn] We're using the word Kota in our conversation today
because if people want to learn more about these,
all of the textbooks and the articles and books
are about Kota reliquaries. Even though we know, in
the scholarly community, that that is a colonial
misappropriation of a word. - [Steven] But this is
such a good reminder of the baggage that continues
to cloud our understanding that comes from the colonial period. - [Kathryn] When these were collected, it was just after people in Gabon had converted to Christianity en masse and rejected the reliquary guardians and the relic bundles underneath them as evidence of converting
to their new faith. At that time, colonial
officials, enterprising local people, and Christian missionaries collected the reliquary guardians and sold them in Europe. And because of that framework, when they presented them in Europe, they presented them as
evidence of a savage or a debased faith. It's important when we
think about and look at African art and read
earlier testimonies and books to remember the perspective
of the people writing them. Usually from a colonizer's perspective and not from an artist
or patrons perspective. (jazz music)