This brief essay introduces African ephemeral arts in a section on ephemerality for the Museum for African Art exhibition catalogue. “The Ephemeral and ‘Un-Transportable’.” In Material Differences: Art and Identity in Africa. This source serves as a precursor for the Arts Council of the African Studies Association conference papers and two issues of African Arts organized by Allyson Purpura and Christine Mullen Kreamer ( Purpura and Kreamer 2009 Purpura and Kreamer 2010). Frank Herreman included a section in Material Differences: Art and Identity in Africa ( Herreman 2003) investigating the ephemeral. The texts are helpful in creating an understanding of the unique nature of the ephemeral in Africa and the ways in which some art and objects are created and left to decay, or are erased, buried, or destroyed as an important part of their function. Each article provides a sense of the importance of the fleeting nature of these arts and the significance of ephemerality in their ongoing interpretation. The texts in this section address ephemeral arts in Africa as a whole. The essays and books are organized by thematic category of ephemeral art: architecture, mural painting, altars and reliquaries, healing arts, power objects, funerary objects, body arts, material culture and everyday life, and contemporary art. While there have been few cross-cultural studies on ephemeral arts in Africa, with the exception of the collection of essays in the two issues of African Arts (See Purpura and Kreamer 2009 and Purpura 2010 in General Overviews), the texts in this section present many case studies on ephemeral arts in cultural context. Purpura has suggested: “Ephemerality defies conventional expectations around preservation, display, and commodification of art and confounds the museum’s mission to preserve works in perpetuity” ( Purpura 2009, 11 cited under General Overviews). The transiency of the objects is part of what makes this topic such a rich one for study. Due to their short life-cycle, these arts are rarely preserved in museum collections for long-term study. The following bibliography is organized in two separate categories: ephemeral art and performance art, each connected through the trope of transiency.Īs Allyson Purpura has noted “the ephemeral is at once a concept, a condition, a process, and an analytic framework” ( Purpura 2010, 13 cited under General Overviews). The two topics remain distinct in the scholarly literature with overlaps in studies on the symbolism of ephemeral materials in performance traditions. While there is a great deal of scholarship on performance traditions, there is very little on African ephemeral art. Performances exist as a moment in time-once past, they remain a memory. The ephemeral is what is seen, used, or performed until it decays, is buried, destroyed, or completes its durational moment. Ephemeral art may include transient materials intended to decay, those created in order to be destroyed, or even a piece marking a temporal instant, as in performances and site-specific installations. It provides insight into the values placed on materials and the opportunity for deeper understanding of cultural traditions, spiritual beliefs, or individual philosophies. Ephemeral art presents an interesting and not often covered lens in the field of African studies.
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