Africa's Worldly 'Treasures,' Torn From the Wild

The new "Treasures" show at the National Museum of African Art invites us to take purely aesthetic pleasure in 74 pieces of carved ivory, from whole tusks to tiny figurines. The exhibition's organizers say it's "about art, about collecting" -- most of its objects are now or were once held by private American patrons -- "and lastly about African artists and African peoples."

But I, for one, find its loudest voices to be the elephants that bore these tusks.

After all, ivory isn't just some kind of natural precursor to beige plastic, as leather is to vinyl. In Africa, ivory must be an art supply that's freighted with meaning.

The six full-length tusks on view in "Treasures" trumpet the huge animals they were torn from. The curving spear of one of them, exactly six feet long, was already a natural marvel before its Babanki carver turned it into an artistic one. No matter how much its surface gets reworked by man, its shape preserves the story of the natural world it came out of. It's pristine white but also red in tooth and claw.

One of the show's other tusks, worked up more than a century ago by a craftsman from the Kongo people of Africa's west coast, actually proclaims its genesis in its carved scenes. They include a picture of a man being gored by an elephant while another hunter takes aim at it with a flintlock. (The piece may have been carved for export to Europe, and thus needed to make clear a connection that would have been implicit for its African viewers.)

Yet another tusk, for domestic African consumption, announces its origins by including static images of elephants in its elaborate decoration.

Elephant tusks, carved or not, could be crucial attributes of power in African societies, something like a cross between the crown jewels of England and the contents of Fort Knox. Some rulers had exclusive rights to the trade in ivory; others could claim one tusk from every slaughtered elephant. It's said that a single 18th-century king of Benin had reserves of something like 3,000 tusks.

Their value was almost purely symbolic -- like gold, ivory's not good for much except to show off and stockpile. And some of that symbolic worth must have derived from the sheer might of the animals they came from. It can't have been an accident that the massive ivory bracelets worn by Benin royals five centuries ago had elephant heads carved into them.

And even when one of these regal bracelets doesn't actually depict an elephant's splendor, the armband's huge size and weight must still refer to it. The arm of even the mightiest ruler slips easily within one small segment of tusk. That's a sign, no doubt, of the ruler's power -- of how far above his weight he punches -- but it's also maybe a tiny, subconscious reminder that there's something out there far bigger than him. As though to fight back against that image, one carved-ivory scepter shows a Kongo chieftain sitting on an elephant that is one-half his size. The ruler doth protest too much, methinks.

In the later 19th century, the snuff mortar of a Chokwe chief could take the form of a little cylinder of ivory, about the size of a spice bottle, with the head of a darker wooden figure acting as its lid. It looks as though the rest of his body has been caught inside the ivory tube, like the classic cartoon missionary boiling in a pot. Such a mortar certainly looks like a symbol of the way an elephant-empowered boss could dominate the little folk around him. Where an ivory bracelet may wrap a leader's arm, the smallest piece of tusk can smother the whole body of the weak.

Even some of the smaller, less ambitious ivories in this show don't let us forget where their material came from. Pins from the sedan chairs of Kongo chiefs were only 10 inches long and not even a half-inch wide, but were still carved to preserve the shape of tusks: They're like miniature reminders of the six-foot carvings in this show.

Various scepters and ceremonial fly whisks and carved figurines also recall the backward arc of tusks, as though their elephantine source is being evoked in the shapes they're given. European carvers believed in the utter transformation of the imported ivory blank into another kind of thing -- a crucifix, say, or a sexy naked Venus. It feels as though their African counterparts wanted to make images of men or women or gods that also kept an echo of a fighting pachyderm.

The show's most notable exception is an orb-shaped saltcellar from around 1500, which doesn't have a hint of elephant to it. It was carved by Africans, yes, but to the specifications of Portuguese patrons.

Treasures 2008 runs through Aug. 24 at the National Museum of African Art, on the south side of the Mall at 10th Street SW. Call 202-633-4600 or visit http://africa.si.edu.