In cities, persons are shadows cast by places, and no generation lasts as long as a street. - John Gray

During the 2000 years that the Shona peoples of Zimbabwe have lived on the Southern Africa Plateau, they developed an extensive & sophisticated urban art & culture. The largest extant ancient structure in southern Africa, Great Zimbabwe (Dzimbabwe meaning “houses of stone”), was once capital of the Munhumutapa Empire, which maintained a trade network that reached as far afield as China. What remains of the palatial city are tremendous mortarless stone walls, giant circuitous passageways, towers, houses & remarkably sculpted monumental stone eagles, which all together map a channeling of interconnections that continue to be lived in the sensibility of the Shona. However, conditions spiraled downward from the eventual abandonment of Great Zimbabwe to the arrival some centuries later of English colonizers, who declared the news that these same Shona were without civilization & accordingly imposed their own.

African incursions into Europe have tended to be of a more peaceable variety. The Catalonian artist Pablo Picasso, for example, was totally blown away by the West African sculpture that was being imported into Paris. These were transformative events that launched many European & American artists into unanticipated vision quests of their own. Frank McEwen - a British painter who had long been swimming against the current in the good company of Picasso as well as with Brancusi, Braque, Matisse & Leger - arrived in colonial Rhodesia in the mid 1950s to head the new National Art Gallery. This was also just in time for him to support & assist in the rebirth Zimbabwe began in its rediscovery of sculpture.

Joram Mariga had already begun sculpting independently & had formed a studio school of his own in rural Nyanga. McEwen, with the help of a well earned & healthy antipathy for the conventionalizing tendencies of western culture, encouraged Mariga & others away from tourist market stereotypes toward explorations of their own cultural & personal aesthetics. McEwen also formed the Studio Workshop at the museum, which provided classes, tools, materials, workspace & criticism for developing artists. Some of these participants later became prominent as contributors among the founding generation of Zimbabwean sculptors, which includes John Takawira, Sylvester Mubayi, Joseph Ndandarika, Joram Mariga, Henry Munyaradzi. Bernard Takawira, Boira Mteki & Nicholas Mukomberanwa. Exhibitions in the Rodin Museum in Paris, the Yorkshire Sculpture Gardens in the U.K. & The Museum of Modern Art in New York brought the work to western audiences, & confirmed the authority & vitality of current African creative work.

This exhibition, Shadow Matter / The Rhythm of Structure, follows some of the source & subsequent reverberations of this explosion in sculpture via the work of one of Zimbabwe’s elder statesmen, Nicholas Mukomberanwa (1940 - 2002), the sculptures of two of his sons Lawrence (1976) & Taguma Mukomberanwa (1978), &, weaving in another related but very different narrative, that of Nicholas’s African-American apprentice, M Scott Johnson (1968).

Migration shaped early family life for the elder Mukomberanwa as it did for Johnson. Mukomberanwa’s parents moved from Buhera in Manicaland Province to live on an asbestos mountain in Midlands Province next to the mines in Zvishavane, not so far from Great Zimbabwe. Johnson’s parents relocated to the Detroit area during World War II to work for captain-of-industry Henry Ford, settling in Inkster, Ford’s Black company town analogue to neighboring apartheid Dearborn, site of the gigantic Rouge Plant. (The Rouge River, an area of play for the young Johnson & his friends, meanders its way through Inkster, Dearborn & Detroit en route to the Great Lakes & is notorious for both its pollution & for tall tales of gigantic mutant carp.) An ambience of industrial labor & the wastes of manufacturing, with hints of the possibility of their recombination, flavored the early growth of both artists.

Along with the search for better wages, the availability of schooling (not a very high British priority) was an important a motive in the Mukomberanwa family move. By his late teens, Nicholas found himself studying at the unique Serima Mission, where its director, a Swiss priest & architect named Father Groeber, included wood carving among its studies. Using West African carvings as models, Groeber organized & encouraged indigenous carving of Christian imagery. Mukomberanwa remained at the mission until he was expelled for deviating too far from requisite Christian subject matter in his sculpting.

I still appreciate what I learned about tools at Serima Mission, but then, I began to find at Serima Mission (We) thematically were lost in the fixed imagination of western Christianity, I didn’t value fear. I needed more. - Nicholas Mukomberanwa

Johnson’s first lessons in direct carving came through encounters with the hermit who lived in the backyard of his Afro-Creek grandmother in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. This is also where he first discovered what he calls the ecstasy of resistance, which an essential distinction between subtractive sculpture & casting or assemblage. In subtractive sculpture, an artist can’t appropriate in the same way as one might otherwise. In carving, an artist can only assimilate & transform experience by finding other ways of doing the sculpting itself. A conceptual whim wouldn't reach far enough. Sculptural statements have to evolve out of pre-conceptual embodiments of experience, tactility, gesture, and attitude. Knowing has to be felt in the body. Experience has to be broken down & reconstituted through how one carves. . When the rhythms of one’s experiences link with one’s own rhythms, then this synthesis can flow out naturally as one’s own.

Mukomberanwa moved on to the national capital & became involved in McEwen‘s Studio Workshop in 1962. But, like many contemporary artists, Mukomberanwa needed some kind of day job to keep himself & his family going. There not being many alternatives, he took on employment with the British South Africa Police, one of the few steady jobs available. Mukomberanwa juggled this unavoidable conflict of interest for years, sculpting even on his lunch hours the way Coltrane practiced between sets until, finally, he was fired for carving on the job in 1976. Fortunately by that time, the current of support for Zimbabwean sculpture had strengthened to the point that he was able sculpt full time for the rest of his life.

Scott Johnson loved holding stones. He loved collecting them. This natural attraction to stone fueled a decision to study geology at Western Michigan University in 1992, which he supplemented with studies in African American Anthropology under Dr. Warren Perry. As an artist Johnson began experimenting with conceptual installations, exhibiting at a gallery he opened and ran while still an undergraduate. Eventually, what really pulled his coat to where he might go creatively was seeing virtuoso Yoruba sculptor Lamidi Fakeye at work carving a bust live. With eyes opened to the possibility of finding and working with such a master, Johnson volunteered with Operation Crossroads Africa in 1994 and was stationed in the cradle of contemporary sculpture in Africa, Zimbabwe.

Johnson began studying sculpture with a number of the local carvers who worked off of the endless alleyways of Bulawayo. After some more back & forth between the North American art world & Zimbabwe, Johnson was working in the mines near Bulawayo, making his own tools in the scrapyards, & at one point even losing his vision for two weeks due to a welding job - all just to keep his explorations of sculpture going. Accepting an invitation to visit Nicholas Mukomberanwa (whom Johnson had already met at an opening at the Reece Gallery in New York City) he appeared at Mukomberanwa's farm in Ruwa, about an hour out of Harare, in 1996.

Johnson had hoped to become an apprentice, but he first had to respond to Mukomberanwa’s challenge. Nicholas said,” I’ll give you 2 weeks to prove that you have a vision, make one piece and I’ll decide If you can stay”. Nicholas wanted no seasoned imitators on his farm. Johnson stayed three years.

Only with Mukomberanwa did Johnson become exposed to the skill, speed & deftness with which a master engineer, a master craftsman of balance, composition & weight could make his own way through any sculptural challenge & not confine himself to a signature style. He also witnessed first hand the high stakes machinations of the art business & a model of integrating creative work with family.

The depth of regard Mukomberanwa received from ordinary Zimbabweans made an enduring impression on Johnson concerning the role & value of artists in a society. Johnson’s experiences with Mukomberanwa confirmed many of his own intuitions about artists & culture. Mukomberanwa’s living example helped him to liberate himself from the fixed imagination & discourse of Euro-American culture.

While the Shona can count on a solid culture to which they also feel obligated, Nicholas Mukomberanwa and M.Scott Johnson explore the new Pan African aesthetic system. There’s a synthesis of rhythmic sensibilities in Johnson’s composition, pulling not just on his experiences in Zimbabwe, but on a post –industrial Detroit Techno identity. Johnson states,” Derrick May and Jeff Mills were my Mbira”.. The deconstructed urban landscape of Detroit helped to develop a tactile appetite for radical compositional asymmetry. The convergence & divergence of Johnson’s & the Mukomberanwas shows the resilience, range, kinship & promise of the liberated Pan-African sensibility.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Nicholas’ sons, Lawrence & Takuma, have each been able to draw inspiration & example from what has become the world’s most prolific sculptural community. The plethora of master sculptors, each one self-defined in relation to the best in the others, has created a dizzying atmosphere of broad vision & high aspiration. Already more than capable sculptors in this flourishing scene, their promise is reaffirmed here as they explore the challenges of maintaining integrity, invention & evolution in an artistically confident & thriving Zimbabwe.

THE SHADOWS

Life was the result of neither design nor chance, but the dynamic interaction of living substance with itself. - Geneticist Theodosious Dobzhansky

The highest achievement for an artist is to bring the darkness, the unknown, the unconceived, into the light of the known. The truth of a sculpture is located in the shadows - Nicholas Mukomberanwa

Consciousness is a variable, not a constant, and its fluctuations are indispensable to our survival. … As organisms active in the world, we process perhaps 14 million bits of information per second. The band of consciousness is around eighteen bits. This means we have conscious access to about a millionth of the information we daily use to survive. … By far the greater part we receive through subliminal perception. What surfaces in consciousness are fading shadows of things we know already. - John Gray

Without shadows experience flattens. Beyond shade, shadow includes whatever's passing beyond the immediate scope of attention. Images & symbols extend this slim reach of consciousness by condensing & coding experience into portably memorable bits. These bundles of compressed energy get released via imagination in sensorial terms - vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, but also in terms of proprioception.

The senses of plants are sophisticated; some can detect the lightest touch (better than the activity of human fingertips), and they all have a sense of vision. The oldest and simplest microbial life forms have senses that resemble those of humans. Halobacteria date back to the beginnings of life on earth. They are organisms which can detect and respond to light by virtue of a compound called rhodospin - the same compound, present as pigment in human eyes, that enables us to see. We look at the world through the eyes of ancient mud. - John Gray

Proprioception, the perception of movement and spatial orientation from stimuli within one’s own body, operates so reliably in the background of consciousness that it has earned a status as an almost totally overlooked sixth sense. Proprioceptive awareness attends to the shifting & interrelated sensations of weight, pressure, tension, equilibrium, inclination & movement within oneself. This sense is literally what ordinarily gets called feeling (& one also recognizes a feeling via reading oneself proprioceptively). Language for proprioceptive experience may be thin enough to make it seem almost nonexistent, but proprioceptive imagery abounds in dance, music, sculpture, architecture, theatre, stance, gesture & attitude. To think directly in terms of feeling or sensation is to be navigating more complex blocks of information than the far more simplified isolates of language can tolerate. Proprioceptive attention, whether called intuition, feeling or soul is the most precise & vital of human capacities.

The body as metaphor is an all-important concept in the art south of the Sahara. Combine that metaphor with metaphors of motion and, in the words of an African-American rap group of the 1980s, one "steps into the cipher." We enter, in other words, a code, a stylized form of consciousness, involving all in deep and primary vitality. - Robert Farris Thompson

Images are created through a cooperation of the real and the unreal. …An image is not memory but something that emerges new. …(and) stands out with as much surprise as life - so that life cannot explain it. …In art important successes happen independently of skill. - Gaston Bachelard

Thus, the kind of direct "intuitive improvisation” practiced by the Mukomberanwas & Johnson while sculpting is an exercise of eloquent, cultivated & seasoned expertise akin to that of the improvising musician or the Zen archer. The shaped stone itself is the vehicle of articulation. The stones indeed speak.

Improvisation is the ultimate human (i.e. heroic) endowment. It is, indeed; and even as flexibility or the ability to swing (or to perform with grace under pressure) is the key to that unique confidence which generates the self-reliance and thus the charisma of the hero, and even as infinite alertness-become-dexterity is the functional source of the magic of all master craftsmen, so may skill in the art of improvisation be that which both will enable contemporary man to be at home with his sometimes tolerable but never quite certain condition of not being at home in the world and will also dispose him to regard his obstacles and frustrations as well as his achievements in terms of adventure and romance. - Albert Murray

Nicholas approached a rock with such humility that he was able to become as pliable as the medium. Nicholas’ approach to carving was more animist. He didn’t want to disrupt the natural character or endowment of the stone. It was more a matter of navigation, of seeing the pattern & veins in the stone & following that. His tools would find the path of least resistance in the stone. He made use of “not doing.” - M. Scott Johnson

THE RHYTHM

The definition of the self is deeply embedded in the rhythmic synchronic process. This is because rhythm is inherent in organization, and therefore has a basic design function in the organization of the personality. Rhythm cannot be separated from process and structure; in fact one can question whether there is such a thing as an eventless rhythm. Rhythmic patterns may turn out to be one of the most important basic personality traits that differentiate one human being from the next. All human rhythms begin in the center of the self, that is with self-synchrony. Even brain rhythms are reliable indicators associated with practically everything that people do. - Edward T. Hall

Rhythm reveals motion’s coherence. Ways of moving liquify attitude. States of being, even identity & consciousness, are actually rhythmic conditions; & it’s via rhythm that these conditions can be transferred, shared & transformed. When looking at what seems to be abstraction in the sculpture of the Mukomberanwas & Johnson, what we are observing are, more accurately, indications of these paths of movement. The living resonances of the sculptors, the process of carving & the emanations of the sculptures are all rhythmic enactments. Rhythm links, mediates & transports among these various attitudes.

Each beat, like a person, has insides. Those insides allow for multiple conditions of being. - David Pleasant

There's nothing like being around 13 or 14 sculptors & hearing the rhythm of the hammer 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. That sound opens up doors of consciousness. - M. Scott Johnson

THE MATTER

At times we think we know ourselves in time when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of a being’s stability. Memory doesn’t record concrete duration. Space contains compressed time. - Gaston Bachelard

Sculpting transforms stone into inhabited space as the stone becomes imbued with the sculptor’s own life force. In these humanly delivered hollows, cavities & incisions, the stones remember the rhythm of their arrival, While they proffer a cornucopia to the eye, they also address more than sight. Their sculpted surfaces speak texture talk to the hand. Their shapes guide the eye, the imaginary hand & the imagining viscera until their shifting equilibrations can be felt proprioceptively under the skin, as if these shaped movements were actually happening inside ourselves. Few fulfill the dynamics of sculpture as a topography of intimate being as have Nicholas Mukomberanwa, M. Scott Johnson, Lawrence & Takuma Mukomberanwa.

© 2007 patrick brennan

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