4 Reasons Why Modern Science and Arts Are Not Associated With Africans and Their Creativity?
African Art
The long, circuitous history of settlement within Africa, commencing with the emergence of homo sapiens in eastern Africa, has produced cultural multifariousness dissimilar that of whatsoever other continent. Africa is a vast landmass with a population of about 885 million people who speak more than 1,000 different languages, each linked to item ethnic groups and communities. I cannot generalize most African art and culture. Egyptian, Sudanese, and Ethiopian art forms, responding to Mediterranean cultures, Christianity, and Islam are utterly different from the arts of West or southern Africa.
Before 19th-century western colonialism brought Europe into direct contact with sub-Saharan Africa, communities created and used fine art in ways relating to their African worldviews, as well as their functional and decorative needs. Africans who had not experienced much contact with European cultures of ancient or modernistic times shared the stance that art was not produced exclusively for philosophical research, aesthetic contemplation, or narrative reasons. Visual creativity was associated with the applied and decorative arts (such as textiles, jewelry, pottery, artifacts, and furniture) and – through costumes and masks – it fulfilled of import spiritual functions in ritualistic and ceremonial activities.
In the W, from the Renaissance to the 19th century, paintings were understood equally objects requiring visual scrutiny; they were expected to yield information about the world of empirically verifiable external reality or to generate word about myth, legend, and history. To facilitate the representation of 3-dimensional visual experience on flat surfaces, artists used scientific systems such every bit linear and aeriform perspective and the color theories devised by Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Goethe, and Chevreul. Rational enquiry, so highly prized in the West, influenced the visual arts, resulting in illusionistic art that seemingly renders "real" form and space (Jan Vermeer, The Milkmaid).
The naturalism and rational logic of Western art is seldom apparent in African art, with the notable exception of twelfth and 13th-century Yoruba Ife terracotta heads. Virtually sculpture is stylized and symbolic because it expresses the sacred.
In traditional African communities relatively unaffected by not-African cultures and mod urbanization, the boundaries betwixt terrestrial existence and the spiritual realm are non clearly differentiated. Events in the earth are explained by the intervention of powerful, unseen ancestral forces, and of good and evil. The spirit world is manifested through performance art; music, trip the light fantastic toe, drama and images are integrated in masquerades. Visual creativity is expressed through artifacts and costumes with masks, designed to inculcate fright, awe, and reverence in spectators and participants.
African art forms are functional and interrelated. For this reason African sculptures and textiles seen in static isolation in museum collections get visual objects with different meanings than those generated by use in communities. Documentary photographs of masquerades clearly indicate the importance of colour as an chemical element appealing to the senses. It is important to note that although ceremonies are based on "tradition," those traditions are not fixed. Rather, they evolve in response to changing environments. This has particular importance for the visual element inside ritual ceremonies. As cloth, beads, and objects were traded, the maskers incorporated new textures, forms, and colors into their costumes. Therefore, modern ceremonies are more than colorful than those of the by, since a much wider range of machine-printed patterns and cloth, dyed with synthetic colors, are now available. Color has become more pregnant, stimulating the optics and enhancing emotions that are activated by rhythmic drums, human voices, and dynamic bodies. African "art" is not for the eyes lonely.
Source: http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/african1.html
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