Philosophy of African Art: The Aesthetic Issues Raised by Exhibiting African Sculpture in the Guggenheim Museum.
Author: Odhiambo Siangla
The purpose of this research was to establish the understanding of the philosophical aesthetics in African arts exhibited in America.
By engaging electronic archives, the technology of e-gallery allowed extensive study of the nature and value of sculpture exhibited in Guggenheim Museum. The study focused on sculptural pieces that, prior to the exhibition, were not typically considered fine arts due to their association with utilitarian purposes in civic and religious life of the African people.
Many artworks from Africa are housed in the American institutions where they are found to be of different philosophical forms and values. Yet, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition of 1996 focused on African sculpture and provided archival evidence for this study, which is oriented to philosophical aesthetics.
The sculpture selected for the study appeared as a past exhibition, presently made available in the form of electronic archives and placed at the same philosophical footing with those fine arts known to have come from other continents. With the archival strategy in research, the study explored the philosophical analysis of the continental sculpture being considered independent art.
The study addressed questions that could not easily be answered by the study of African history of art. Thus philosophical aesthetics through the archival evidence provided an advancement of three dimensional arts embracing social and physical space. The aesthetic value of these selected African pieces, being the main purpose of this dissertation, was analyzed and recorded. The understanding of meanings, pleasure, and emotion that one would get from the collection resulted in a growing body of literature, which concerned formulating and presenting detailed discussions in the general philosophy of art.
The author argued that there is an African philosophical foundation inherent in the African sculptural art forms. Thus in the study of the Guggenheim Museum exhibition of African art, there arose a link of the African science of knowledge to African artistic value.
