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Any visit to
a studio is like an initiation or, at least, an illusion of gaining access
to a foreign world to which good fortune has led us and opened hitherto
unknown doors. The alien sensation grows if we approach another culture,
at the point of a giant continent, in process of mutation. In Dakar familiarity
is often more present than exoticism. A familiarity that is due to History,
but also to the spirit and kindness of a population, which, despite its
poverty and the difficulties of transformation confronting it, always
seems warm and even seems royal, especially the women, in the nobility
of their bearing, the splendour of their bodies and the shimmering of
their robes. Despite the illusions that the mingling of life styles can
create, an Africa that we know is often full of suffering, but also infinitely
rich, profound and complex, is, for a many reasons, always very close
here.
It's a long way to the Tondoup Rya quarter, beyond the airport.
You skirt the ocean, go through residential areas with large, wooded properties.
The coast is rather flat and unattractive, the urbanisation is untidy
and fantastical, the space broken up without aggressiveness. There's the
raw light, the heat and the breeze off the sea. One is struck by the silences
and the presence of inhabitants apparently without occupation, by their
inquisitive looks from these featureless plots where the city is sinking,
where freshly painted white walls clash with piles of breezeblocks. During
the trip I think of his work, which suddenly burst onto the contemporary
Art scene and of former encounters; of the Nubas under the Mistral-purified
light of the Vielle Charité Centre in Marseille in 1989; of their monumental
quality against the grandeur of the setting, at first sight alien in their
surprise incursion there, in their realism, so foreign to the usual forms
of contemporary international art, in their scale - exaggerated, but not
gigantic - in the muddy swelling of their naked bodies, their tarry, suffering
skin. I think of these humble and extraordinary characters, sometimes
illuminated with masks painted with natural pigments, identified by some
modest accessory - a bracelet or a thin cord. They filled the space admirably,
forced your attention and aroused a sort of fascination, were immediately
accepted as a sharing, dialogue-creating presence. In the open air, beyond
the walls, in the great ambulatory of the courtyard, they provided a relay
and testimony, speechless, pathetic humanity, with their profound or absent
gazes, speaking of destiny to the inhabitants of the Panier, unused to
the activities of this place, as they were to the visitors to the museum.
I left Marseille, unfortunately without being able to meet Ousmane Sow,
but I knew that his aura, his strength, his tranquil serenity would be
seen here, too, as those of a true witness.
At the 1995 Venice Biennale
in the "Identity and Otherness" exhibition, organised by Jean Clair, I
rediscovered the Nuba couple which had been selected and seemed to have
taken refuge in some out of the way place, on an overhanging passage,
dominant, indifferent, solitary, as if the organisers had been aware they
could not constrain the couple in the petty quarrels of the art world
which this particular show provoked that year. This complicit marginality
drew special attention to them. It provoked a questioning. The art of
Ousmane Sow exists in the beyond, in a universal elsewhere, which is deep
within us and, by that very fact, touches us in a strange way.
The house
is still a building site, crammed into a tight plot and, at first sight,
it seems to belong to the world around it with its concrete structures
and its numerous floors. In fact it is set back from its neighbouring,
dazzling-white buildings, as if thrusting up from the soil, embodying
a whole village with its geometric volumes alternating with organic curves
picked out in earth tones, from pale ochre to deep Sienna or fresh earth.
Initially one doesn't grasp the true dimension, nor the undeniable architectural
qualities of its plastic organisation, both spiritual and functional.
The structure, the proportion of its floors, its peripheral galleries
and external balustrades don't impress at first, but they form a sturdy
net, linking and unifying the various, individual units of the jumbled
mass.
The house is preceded by a small, shady garden, invaded by tamarisk
shrubs. The artist calls this house in the making, "the sphinx"; in fact,
it appears to be mute, offering no secrets. After a narrow walkway, you
enter by a small door that immediately opens onto several interior passages.
Over the whole of the top of the building, stairways and suites of rooms
form a strange, vertical labyrinth, which converges on the upper floor
in a central, friendly space, a sort of interior patio lit by horizontal
openings high in the walls. In the various rooms Ousmane Sow plays with
the light falling through large bay windows, glazed doors, and often,
through small arched windows, sometimes set upside down. Shutters filter
or let it flood in according to the time of day. He has taken particular
care with materials: the floors are entirely covered with tiles cast from
his personal material made from glues, sand and pigments, which gives
them the quality of a soft skin, inviting you to tread them barefoot.
They form a sumptuous, colourful background of very natural appearance,
like an irregular chessboard. You notice, too, the attention paid to the
dimensions of the interior spaces, according to their use and, probably,
their symbolic function. On the roof of this building, which would have
impressed Etienne-Martin, the artist has kept for himself a dwelling and
a "meditation room" which can be opened in all directions, notably towards
the ocean, like the balcony that runs around it, or it can remain cool
and enclosed behind its shutters.
This house is like a contemporary version
of the traditional African dwelling, initiatory in its layout, prioritised
for collective sharing and exercise of authority or solitary contemplation.
It is still evolving, but already it feels good at the end of the day
to sit on the terrace balcony and talk with our host as we gaze into the
distance.
The garden can hardly be any bigger than the one at the house
in Grand Médine where the artist has done most of his work till now. At
least that's the impression it gives, because the house towers over it
so much. In its role as a studio it runs around three sides of the house,
enclosed by a high breezeblock wall, dotted with young palm trees and
tamarisks. Even though it's late, it still seems flooded with light. The
first impression is that of a charnel house, an indescribable mass of
decomposing bodies, where you can pick out the carcasses of men, horses,
hunched, sprawling, tangled amidst tin cans filled with a weird, stagnant
mixture. Steel skeletons appear beneath straw flesh, usual covered with
a first layer of jute skin which seems to be peeling and in process of
decomposition. No single work seems more advanced or nearer completion
than the others. They lie there on the golden sand of the earth, which
is itself brighter and more alive than the sculptures, and contrasts with
them. The sight has the terrible coherence of the stage of ultimate horror,
that of death and putrefaction. As a painter might do with a preliminary
study, the sculptor has gradually sketched out his work in its entirety
and he will now start from this global charnel house concluding the battle
to free the protagonists that exist within him, to restore their humanity
to them, their identity, to effect that slow ascension to life, the affirmation
of the person, the essential struggles of humanity, the heroism and, despite
the fact it deals with a victory at the Little Bighorn, undoubtedly the
despair of a merciless destiny.
Ousmane Sow's approach is that of a chronicler
recounting a glorious, but soon to be fatal, episode in the history of
the first American nations, which, as the artist so strongly feels, is
often close to that of Africa. He wants to give a universal dimension
to historical evidence. He did it most explicitly on the occasion of the
Bicentenary of the French Revolution with two groups of sculptures: Marianne
and the Revolutionaries and Toussaint-Louverture and the Old Slave Woman.
And when he departs from universal history to conjure up the Nubas, the
Masai, the Zulus or the Fulani, his characters seem to tell, in simple
gestures, the remembered legends of the history of his continent carried
down over centuries by these peoples. His sculpture speaks, therefore,
recounting epic stories with a mythic dimension. It brings together the
living memory of ancient times, as told by the "griots" (wandering African
poets and musicians), which he heard at home from his maternal grandmother,
Dior Diop, an old "Mother Courage", who took part in raids and war parties
along with the men of her family before colonisation. His sculpture bears
witness and seeks to inspire, arouse reflection and engagement.
As with
the American Indians of the Plains, the horse is also an essential protagonist
in the African imagination. Youssouf Tata Cissé has recently retold the
great mythic story of Niamey the Eminent, ancestor to the Wagué, who founded
the empire of Wagadou (modern Ghana): "Oh! What a special favour Niamey
has bestowed upon us!/I call upon her who watches over our brave young
warriors, astride their stallions/their wild, wild stallions/may these
young Wagué princes continue to defend us!" The sculptor's story, which
tells of the final battle for freedom, also brings to mind another episode
recounted by Youssouf Tata Cissé: the revolt by Soumarowo Fanté "king
of the blacksmiths", who took up arms against the pro-slavers, organised
the blockade of Wagadou, thus bringing about its recapture by Soundjata
Keïta and the proclamation in the "Oath of Manden" of the abolition of
slavery and the treaty: "People of old tell us:/Man as an individual/Made
of flesh and bone/Of skin and muscle/Of marrow and sinew/Is nourished
by food and drink/But his "soul", his spirit lives on three things:/See
what he wants to see/Say what he wants to say/And do what he wants to
do/Without causing harm to others/If the soul lacks one of those things/It
will suffer/And surely wither./So we, the hunters, declare:/Henceforth,
each is master of his person./Each is free in his acts,/Respecting "taboos",
the Laws of the homeland./This is the oath of the hunters./Made for the
whole world to hear.
" The admirable universal value of this has echoes
in the Oglala Sioux chief, Crazy Horse's speech to the white men when
he was captured a year after the battle: "We did not ask you to come here.
The Great Spirit gave us this country to live in. You had yours. We never
interfered with you in any way. The Great Spirit gave us a vast land to
live upon, and buffalo, deer, antelope and other game. It is becoming
impossible for us to live. Now you tell us that to live we must work.
However, the Great Spirit did not create us to work, but to live by hunting.
You White Men ask us why we don't become civilised. We don't want your
civilisation! We want to live as our fathers did and their fathers before
them." The answer was given several years later in 1881 in Congress by
Senator Pendelton from Ohio: "Either the Indians must change their way
of life, or they must perish. We may regret it, we may wish it were otherwise,
our feelings of humanity may be shocked by this alternative, but we cannot
conceal the fact that it is an alternative and that the Indians must change
their way of life or be exterminated". This was confirmed by the Dawes
Act in 1887 and its implications.
Ousmane Sow is now at the heart of the
disaster that was first born out of his reading of the Battle of the Little
Bighorn. Like a man who has intimate knowledge of the suffering of the
body, he moves silently from one corpse to another, observes it, stares
at it and with a caring, effecting, soothing hand, gradually restores
the flesh, enriches the contours, introduces the tensions that give life
to the form. An eye appears and lights up, a face cries out, a horse rises
up and neighs, two bodies clasp each other. Today it's impossible to foresee
the final appearance of the whole and the sculptor himself does not know.
Little by little, in the shadow of "the sphinx", his characters will awake
under his fingers and in some way they will impose the definitive spiritual
tone of the group. They will write themselves into a "scenography", which,
when the work is done, will still be met with various interpretations
according to the places and the audiences that it encounters. Without
a doubt this is one of the most singular characteristics of his work:
on the Pont des Arts, then elsewhere throughout the world, he relates
and reveals injustice with an approach constantly renewed with the expression
of form and space, arouses the emotion of the great, immemorial themes
that govern humanity. Henceforth, Africa is far away, undoubtedly present
through the sculptor's paradoxical ability to commemorate by finally escaping
from time, to state the gravity of truth as bard and poet. Ousmane Sow
breathes a triumphant tenderness into his poignant song.
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