(People chattering)
New Guinea. The masks of guardian spirits on the Sepik River.
(Chanting, people chattering)
(Man wailing, drumming, flute playing)
British Columbia. The cannibal birds of the Kwakiutl Indians.
(Drumming, jangling)
West Africa. The secret mask society of the Dogon.
0nce, each tribe inhabited its separate world.
Today, the boundaries are disappearing, and European man has crossed them all.
(People ululating)
(Man) 2,500, 800.
3000, 200, 500. 3,800, 4000,
4,200, 4,500.
London, Sotheby's auction rooms and a wooden figure from New Guinea,
that was once part of a sacred flute.
At L5,500.
On my right, then, at L5,500.
It's a big important sale.
Dealers and collectors have come from all over Europe and America.
0n offer are traditional tribal sculptures made by Pacific Islanders,
American Indians and Africans.
For the first Fang figures lot 186, erm...
L1,000 bid, L1,000.
1,000. 1100. 1200. 1300. 1400. 1500.
L1500.
1600.
1700. 1800. 1900.
2,000. L2,000 pounds now.
200. 2,400, 600.
2,800, 3,000,
3,200, 400.
L3,400.
At 3,600. 3,800.
4,200.
At L4,200 now, on my right, 4,200.
4,500. 4,800.
5,000, 200. 5,500, 800.
6,000, 500.
7,000, 500.
8,000, 500.
9,000.
500.
9,500. 10,000,
L10,000. LAt 10,000.
It's at the back of the room. 500. 10,5...
11,000. at L11,000 now.
At the back of the room at L11,000.
- Well, it's lovely, it's an act of love. - And she has her bracelet.
The objects sold at Sotheby's will go all over the world,
though not one will go back to the people who actually created it.
Some will go to wealthy museums
where they will be exhibited not as ethnographic curios
but as important works of art.
And some will go to collectors like Lester Wunderman in New York.
0ver 20 years, he's assembled the most important private collection
of Dogon sculpture in the world.
For him, these alien objects have a greater fascination
than anything produced in New York, America or Europe.
The first Dogon piece I ever saw stopped me in my tracks.
I didn't even know who the Dogon were and I had seen a lot of paintings,
and seen a lot of art.
And I came upon this little piece of carved wood
and it communicated to me in a way that nothing ever had before.
And something... it must have taken some part of me
because I became insatiable to know who made it, who carved it,
why did they carve it and how did they feel about it?
And I began to study about the Dogon and I went there of course.
And then I began to look at Dogon sculpture everywhere.
And I guess I've seen almost every piece that's available for seeing.
And the connection was passionate from the very beginning.
What appeals to me is not aesthetics as we understand aesthetics in our eye,
but the vitality of the sculpture.
You can't look at one of these,
except that you realise that this really has a role in the life, er...
of the people and the society... it belongs to them, it comes from them.
What about that piece? Is that a particularly fine piece, do you think?
Yeah, this is really unique and one of a kind.
This, we know of no other Dogon piece exactly like this.
This round body, and of course these arms used to be complete.
But, as you can see, the head has been hollowed out by time,
it's been eaten by termites, which has stopped now.
But that's probably quite old
and, er, the termites have been at it for a long time.
Of course, we stopped that. Preserve it by having it.
In a way, it's one of the answers to people who say, "Why don't you leave the art in Africa?"
In the first place, I didn't find this in Africa.
Secondly, I think, had it stayed in Africa, it would be quite eaten up by now.
The civilised world's appetite for the uncivilised world's art is ravenous.
Its demands are even felt in Korogo Village,
deep in the heart of New Guinea.
These masks of guardian spirits,
detached from their costumes of basketwork and leaves,
are much sought... after by collectors.
An old one in the salerooms might easily fetch three or four hundred pounds or even more.
So traders have already been up to Korogo,
and the Korogo sculptors are now starting for the first time
to carve not just for their own use but for sale.
At the moment, they're still carving masks to the old traditional patterns.
But already the shrewder among them are beginning to realise
that they're working for an uncritical market.
In the past, they carved for people who knew the meaning of every symbol,
who appreciated the subtleties of the shapes
distilled and refined over generations
and who could see when a piece was sloppily conceived
or carelessly finished.
But few traders could have comparable knowledge or insight.
Most are concerned only with quantity.
They'll buy all they can get.
So why waste time on refinements that the customer can't appreciate?
Today in the cult house at Korogo,
where once only half a dozen sacred masks were kept hidden away from prying eyes,
50 or 60 are laid out on the floor, awaiting prospective buyers.
The other side of the Pacific, Hawaii.
0nce this was a Polynesian kingdom,
but Europeans have been coming here for 200 years
and the process that is just beginning in New Guinea
is here approaching its end.
(# Hawaiian folk song playing)
(Woman speaking Hawaiian over PA)
(Woman over PA) Welcome to Tavana's Polynesian spectacular.
All the songs and dances of Polynesia that you witness tonight on stage,
have been carefully chosen and largely researched
so that everything that is presented is presented in the light that it was first seen.
The announcer's claim is a bold one.
Guitars and ukuleles didn't come to Polynesia until the 19th century,
and the essence of Polynesian dances was originally poetry,
to which the dance movements were simply an accompaniment.
But poetry is boring to people who don't speak the language,
so poetry has disappeared.
This particular dance comes from Tahiti.
You don't have to be a Polynesian expert to understand this message.
But it's all that is left of a rich range of dances that the island once possessed.
Some dignified and subtle, some witty, some aggressive and dramatic.
All but this one ignored or lost.
Hawaii's capital, Honolulu, is a tourist town,
one of the holiday centres of the world.
Surfing was the sport of the Hawaiian kings
and today surf enthusiast flock here to ride the spectacular breakers.
0thers come to try and catch a glimpse of the Polynesian Island paradise
that lives in everyone's imagination.
And there are plenty of people to cater for them.
Hawaiian tiki charms, although tikis are Maori and have nothing to do with Hawaii.
Mugs with the grinning fangs of a Hawaiian god,
made not in Hawaii but in the Philippines.
Everywhere you're offered souvenirs with highly authentic... sounding names.
They come in all shapes and sizes... lamps, candles, key rings...
and this is a bottle opener, and on its back is a label which says,
"The Hawaiian god of happiness.
"He is a cuddly little imp, he loves to be touched.
"Rub his tummy and it makes him happy and it makes you happy too."
All pure invention by the tourist trade.
There never was a god of happiness in ancient Hawaii,
and this little plastic knick... knack
is what has become of the once terrifying image of Kukailimoku,
the great Hawaiian god of war, the eater of land.
(Chanting)
(Drumming)
But in some places, people are fighting to preserve their traditions
in as pure a form as possible.
This dance is being held in Ksan,
an Indian village in British Columbia dedicated to the propagation
and where necessary the resurrection of the arts and skills of the Gitxsan Indians.
(Chanting and drumming)
All kinds of skills are practised at Ksan.
The technique of weaving traditional blankets was totally forgotten.
Ksan heard of an enthusiast in 0regon
who had worked out how to do it by unravelling one.
She gladly passed on her knowledge,
and today, blankets are once again being woven here.
Walter Harris, once a building contractor,
decided he wanted to carve.
So, he consulted an anthropologist, who had studied museum pieces,
and worked out the principles of design intuitively followed by the old sculptors.
Now he carves masks and poles,
which, while they're full of his own invention, still conform to the traditions of his tribe.
I asked one of the group who founded Ksan, Polly Sargent,
whether you needed to be an Indian to make good Indian sculpture.
People are people. The only thing I do think is that the people
have a special feeling for wood.
They're good carpenters, or 90 per cent of them are good carpenters,
and they understand how to handle wood,
and of course that's what we have excelled in here is the wood.
(David) So the fact that the artists who are working here are all Indians,
is of course deliberate but not essential.
(Polly) I don't think so. (David) Yeah.
(David) Why were all these poles and masks
carved in the old traditional times? Why were they done?
They were done so a great chief could, er...
say this piece is mine, this land is mine.
When he put up his pole he said, um...
"This is my pole, and because on that pole you see the one... horned goat,
"and the territory in which that one horned goat was found
"belongs to me and to my family and not to you."
(# Woman singing Gitxsan song)
Perhaps one of the reasons why Ksan has been so successful
is that the things made here are bought not only by white visitors
but by the Indians themselves and used for their original purposes.
0ld people draw solace from hearing once more the chants of their youth.
And the young see in the old dramas
a way of recovering their pride in being Indians,
a chance of stating their identity in the face of the ways of the whites
that threaten to swamp them.
(Chanting, rhythmic rattling, drumming)
The outside world has had little influence on this parched, poor land.
This is the southern edge of the Sahara... arid and hostile.
Why should any strangers want to come and settle here?
Its only inhabitants are the Dogon.
Most of their villages are far beyond the reach of roads.
They're built entirely of mud,
each rectangular flat... roofed house accompanied by a thatched granary.
The fact that their sculpture, like their buildings,
has remained largely unaffected by the world beyond,
has made it of particular fascination,
and it was to study the art that anthropologist Hans Guggenheim first came here.
But he soon became deeply concerned with the problem that dominates the Dogon, drought.
This part where we are standing now
is filled with water at one time of the year,
it is inundated, because when we say that there is no water here,
what we mean is that the water that comes down during the rainy season
in huge downpourings,
disappears after a very, very short time.
(Hans) When I first heard about the terrifying problem of drought
that had struck West Africa as well as the Dogon country,
it occurred to me that we would have to look for a solution.
And I thought could one not develop a granary with modern technology
that would make it possible for people to store rain water.
(David) He worked out a way of lining the inside of these granaries
with chicken wire plastered with cement, which would turn them into giant cisterns,
and he persuaded the chief of one village to try it.
But before work could begin, the gods had to be consulted by means of an oracle.
(Men speaking quietly)
An elaborate grid was drawn in the sand, full of symbolic patterns.
During the night a fox had trotted over it, attracted by small pieces of bait.
If his foot had trodden on certain symbols it could mean that it would be disastrous
to start building a water granary.
(Chatting quietly in Dogon)
(Man) Ca c'est... (Hans) Ca c'est les greniers d'eau.
(Man speaking in Dogon)
- Is it OK, Hans? - (Men chatting quietly)
- Do they say we can go on? - We can go on.
Happily all is well.
Custom also demands a sacrifice before the building begins.
If such traditions are neglected,
the people would certainly have no confidence in the project.
Indeed, the builders might not dare to start work
for fear of the consequences.
The priest goes into the shrine to pray,
while blood, the essential libation, soaks into the shrine.
So the experimental water granary was built.
The village craftsmen understood exactly what was required.
The cistern was so sited that rainwater from all the surrounding flat roofs
would drain into it, channelled through pipes.
But could a granary of mud lined with no more than cement strengthened with chicken wire
contain such an immense weight of water?
Would it not burst?
Hans Guggenheim's American experts had assured him that it would hold,
but there was still a lot of doubt.
The building was topped with a cap of thatch, so that when it was finished,
the cistern looked just like a normal granary.
And that was particularly important to Hans Guggenheim.
(Hans) I call this an invisible technology.
Because I wanted to make sure that these granaries would not...
interrupt the beautiful flow of architecture that we find in Dogon villages.
All their life revolves around the granary, their daily activities, their work in the fields,
the collecting of millet.
If the granary isn't filled with grain, the people starve,
and so naturally they, er...
they try to beautify it
and to emphasise the place where grain goes in and where grain goes out.
And, er, that is why we have these beautiful Dogon doors
that have been carved over centuries.
Many of them have been bought up by tourists and foreigners
who've come by collectors
and are now in the museums.
But they still try to maintain their tradition,
they still attempt to carve locks
- and to give meaning to these buildings. - Mmm.
And so I felt that it would be important to also have a door carved for this particular granary
and for all the granaries, the water granaries, that would be built subsequently.
Blacksmiths have supernatural powers and a special relationship with the gods.
None but they may carve masks or doors.
The local smith, after considerable deliberation, agreed to do the job,
and there was much discussion in the village as to what symbols he would decide to carve
on a door of a granary that was to contain not millet, like any other, but water.
Hans Guggenheim believed that this one door
could be of great importance to his project.
A new technology with potentially huge benefits
can, in fact, seriously damage a complex society like the Dogons.
If it does violence to the people's view of the universe,
if it seems to flout the decrees of the gods, it may either be totally rejected
or, if forced upon them, undermine the people's faith
and upset their society.
Just as he knew it to be essential that the correct consultations and sacrifices
were made before work started,
so he believed it invaluable for the whole work to be concluded
with a piece of carving by the blacksmith.
But that in itself could also have an effect on the sculptor he had originally come to study.
If the smith produced a new design of door,
it could start a new artistic tradition in the village.
And it was a new kind of door.
Beneath the line of ancestor figures,
which traditionally stand guard on doors made in this particular village,
he had introduced a new element,
a frieze that told how this first ever water granary came to be built.
How a goat and two chickens were taken to the shrine and there sacrificed.
And how the fox had trotted over the sand oracle and foretold success.
And finally, to give the ultimate proof of the confidence and support of the village,
the men of the secret mask society came to dance around the new cistern.
(Chanting and whooping)
(Drumming)
Three months later, the rains came again,
the cistern filled to the brim and held.
It could be the beginning of a change that could transform their lives,
give new impetus to their art
and yet not weaken the traditional structure of their society.
(Drumming and chanting)
There is a desert as harsh and as unfriendly as the Sahara up in the far north.
The Arctic, a desert of snow and ice.
There too men somehow manage to live,
and there too, in conditions so severe
that there can be little time for inessentials, they carve.
Since they had to carry all their belongings with them on their long journeys over the ice,
it's not surprising that their sculptures traditionally were very small.
Most of them were of walrus ivory.
Here is a little walrus,
a seal, a whale,
and another seal that's been skinned.
But tiny though they are
their form is extremely subtle, and perhaps that comes from the fact
that the Eskimos' eyes must be miraculously attuned
to the very tiniest variation in shape amongst the ice floes
that might betray the presence of a polar bear
or a seal that they're hunting.
Most are clearly functional.
This is an adze
engraved and carved with a mysterious face.
And here another one with the figure of a snow owl
and two strange figures crouching above it.
It seems almost certain that carvings of this kind had some sort of magical purpose.
This is a spear straightener in the form of a crouching caribou,
and on it engraved lines of caribous and hunters.
But some are much more mysterious.
These are swimming geese perhaps,
but then some have human faces.
And here is a strange seal figure.
Perhaps these were counters in some game,
or maybe they were part of the apparatus of a magician.
Whatever they are, they're part of a tradition which stretches back, unbroken,
for 2,000 years.
But then in the 1950s things changed.
Suddenly the Eskimos began to carve large, heavy pieces out of stone.
And this was the man who brought about that change... Jim Houston,
in 1948 a young Canadian artist who was on his first visit to the arctic,
travelling and painting among the Eskimos.
I made a drawing of a person and the man indicated to me that he wanted it,
in the Eskimo language, which I did not speak at that time,
and so I very reluctantly tore out that page of drawing and gave it to him.
And a little while later he came and opened his hand
and he revealed to me a small caribou,
a little stone carving of a caribou with inset ivory eyes, just about that long.
But I was absolutely shocked. I mean, it...
it seemed to me to have exactly the feeling of all the ancient things,
it had the best qualities of primitivity in it.
Er, later on... That man's name was Neoamiluk.
And later on he showed me two others he offered me in exchange for some drawings.
And, er, so at that instant I felt if this is...
if this is real, if this can go on, if... unless he's some special kind of genius
and unlike other people,
there is some sort of a great possibility here, something could be revealed.
And the thrilling part was that this is 1948.
I'm not looking at a carving found out of the ground from 3,000 years ago,
I'm looking at something made by a man this minute.
That's the exciting thing.
A few years later, Eskimos all over the Canadian arctic were carving.
Jim Houston had found for them a new source of income
that they desperately needed as they progressively abandoned
their old harsh wandering life and settled down in villages on the coast.
There was nothing like enough walrus ivory to meet the new demand,
and the sculptors were forced to use stone, and then washed up bones of whales.
Planes flying between the lonely settlements collected the sculptures
in ever increasing quantities
and brought them down to this vast warehouse near 0ttawa.
Here dealers come to select pieces for the galleries that have sprung up in hundreds
in the cities of North America and beyond,
some of them selling nothing but Eskimo sculpture.
The sheer quantity of the carvings is numbing.
The variety of styles enormous.
For Houston the site is a thrilling one, for it certainly represents a great deal of money
that will be flowing back up north.
Less certain perhaps is the artistic quality of the work.
(Houston) In all this welter of things, some good some bad,
certain things leap out at you, it seems to me.
Here's a whale, a white whale. Kelalogak, they call it.
It seems to me notable because it has the essence of what, er...
He seems to suggest...
You see the sort of fatness and the weight of the whale,
you see a driving movement.
And even the stone, which is a soft green jadeite,
has a sort of watery significance to it,
you see the shine on the spine and so on.
Er, he carves it all around,
he keeps after the details,
he thinks of the thing in the round, it's a round object.
He doesn't just think of it as a thing to set down and so one view is not important.
It's the whole total animal is important.
- Now, I don't care for that very much. - (Chuckles)
Personally I would love to cut that off
but this seems to have such a virtue in it.
It starts off... It seems to orient itself right here.
And in this case, the man has decorated the stone in a rather old way
by engraving it and cutting into it.
But he gets a great sense of driving from the centre.
Now, the mere fact that you said you would cut that off...
might not the chap up in Cape Dorset or whatever say to the man who is carving this,
"If I were you I'd cut that off,"
and wouldn't that be the European telling the Eskimo what to carve?
Yes, it would. But the man up north is...
almost in every case not an art man at all.
He probably wouldn't... The danger may be that he said, "Would you put that on?"
Well, exactly, but the mere fact that he says anything
might mean that the Europeans are changing the way the Eskimos carve.
Er, yes, I think that's true to some extent.
That change, in some people's eyes, has been very much for the worse.
An anthropologist who knows the Eskimo well, Edmund Carpenter,
is very critical of the outsiders who have fostered Eskimo art.
They encourage the Eskimos to make scenes from the past.
Er, when the rifle was already in use now they were showing the harpoons in use.
And often you'd find that the Eskimos would copy things from catalogues,
from mail... order catalogues, and the Canadian government would have to destroy these objects
because they didn't want people to feel that this wasn't a native craft,
a native art form deeply rooted in belief. Well, of course, it wasn't.
This is a carving that interests me tremendously.
This is a shamanistic piece, a big vertebra of a white whale.
Here we see the devil's foot with very pointed claws, unlike a human foot.
Everything is in balance and yet sort of out of balance.
You see this hand, remarkable.
You see these faces, the pair of them, beautifully and magically in balance,
and the keynote of the thing is magic.
That looks... Is that a truly traditional...
- Absolutely. ...mermaid?
The one who waves her arms when the kayak man sees her,
he beckons to her and says, "Kaili, kaili, kaili,"
and she answers to him, she's very old in Eskimo mythology
and very important, the sea goddess.
The most important figure in Eskimo mythology everywhere in the north with out exception,
is Sedna, or Nuliajuk.
And, er, it's, er...
it's a very complicated story of a woman who...
Ioses one eye and loses all of her fingers and so forth,
and she's unable to comb her hair and so forth.
Today... She lives beneath the sea.
Today when the Eskimos carve her, they make her into a mermaid
and they show her with her hair carefully groomed with fingers and with two eyes.
The myth is gone, the whole meaning of the story.
And it was the most profound story. I think it was...
like Orpheus, it was like the Christian story, if you wish. Er...
And that's gone. Now it's simply a paperweight.
(Edmund Carpenter) I see the modern Eskimo art...
as Western, it's designed for Europeans,
it has no meaning except financial return for the Eskimos.
Er, we've asked them to make art that we like
and to make it cheap enough so we can afford it.
But we've told them what we want and they've made it.
They've done a very good job.
It means that every man can have his own Henry Moore now.
In stone.
But it's not Eskimo.
I really feel there's a basic indignity
that cannot ultimately escape having some influence
and it's the indignity of asking people to be other than themselves.
Our unwillingness to accept people on their own terms,
our demand that they become like us...
consumers in our world enlarging our market.
Then we say they're welcome
but they're not welcome as people who are unique and different.
There's no coexistence.
You know, to me, art...
alien art becomes really exciting
when it forces you to go beyond your own identity, when it really challenges you.
Not when it confirms all your previous convictions,
but when it's a very painful experience to try to come to know it
and to appreciate something that really lies beyond the scope of the identity
that you chose for yourself. Now, that to me is education.
And it may well be what human relations are about too.
Africa again. This time Nigeria.
These figures are also the result of an interaction
between European and tribal traditions,
but here the result has been very different.
These figures were not made to sell to an unknown alien public living far away,
but to serve a religion that is founded in the very ground on which they stand.
They're part of a strange revolution that has produced something totally new
in African art.
It all began here in this sacred forest at Oshogbo,
one of the holy places of the Yoruba people.
This is the ancient shrine dedicated to Oshun, the goddess of fertility and water,
and it's supported by these pillars which traditionally are quite bare.
But in 1961 they were falling into disrepair,
and Suzanne Wenger, a Viennese artist who had come to settle in the town,
managed to get some money to commission their repair.
She engaged two of the local builders,
and as they worked, suddenly under their fingers appeared
these strange images.
(Drumming)
Some are half... hidden among the branches and roots of the sacred grove.
Some are giant shrines, where the people come to worship.
(# Classical music playing)
Suzanne Wenger came here originally just to paint,
but she became deeply interested in Yoruba religion, began to worship at the shrines,
and soon she was initiated as a priestess of the god of creation.
In her studio, she works mostly in batik,
a method of painting on cloth with molten wax and coloured dyes
that originally was developed in the Far East
and which she had learned in Vienna.
Some of her batiks she sells,
but many of them are made for religious purposes
and portray the Yoruba gods as she sees them.
Working with her are other Yoruba artists.
Some of them have taken up the art of batik painting.
Nearly all of them carve,
and it is their statues that crowd every room in the house.
0shogbo, where she lives, is a small town in the centre of Nigeria.
She herself is the only European living in the old quarter.
Although this place is, by tradition, sacred to the Yoruba,
not all the people living there still follow their tribal beliefs.
Some are Christian, many are Muslim, and it certainly caused a sensation
when Suzanne Wenger first settled there and became a traditional priestess.
Her house was built originally for a wealthy African merchant.
She has turned it into part workshop, part hostel for visiting worshippers,
part temple and part art gallery.
In front of it, she and her helpers have built fences of concrete figures,
dancers and musicians in a Yoruba carnival.
0n the balconies above, her pet monkeys play.
I'm not a studio artist.
I'm all the time deeply involved to my surrounding, I always was.
Vienna, Paris, everywhere, I got involved into the human context
and that is what happened here at once also.
And this is what was surprising people, because if there are sympathetic Europeans
but they do not step out very far from their cars and reservations
and if somebody steps out, it is an anthropologist.
I'm not an anthropologist, I am living that life.
As she became more and more involved in Yoruba religion,
she brought her own artistic skills increasingly to its service.
First restoring the old shrines
and then building totally new ones on ancient sacred sites.
(Suzanne) I wanted to make sure that the architecture blends into the surrounding,
with the trees and so on.
But I was then still a bit embarrassed, it was the beginning.
And I was sitting there for three months,
every day a bit, longer or shorter time,
and more or less not doing more than to look into the branches of these enormous trees
and somehow begging them to transmit
their aesthetic laws To me.
Then I started to call Adebisi, my assistant,
and as I used to speak with my hands very much,
if more now since I have to do it to explain myself,
we are working without plans naturally, I started to make him sit with me
and I showed him which parts of the branches I think are most expressive,
and that we have to make this tree a doors,
with the gates, and I was telling him how it has to look,
and that it has to be these two serpents and why and so on.
And this is how we still work. You know, I have the idea,
I'm cooking out the idea till I have the feeling...
this is how it has to be and this is how I always knew it has to be,
then I start to tell him.
(Trowels scraping)
(David) Work is unceasing.
Historic sites are being marked with ever more complex sculptures.
This one represents the chameleon which appeared at the dawn of creation
and gingerly stepped down onto the newly made earth
to see if it was cool enough for the gods to walk upon.
There are many both in Africa and Europe
who regard these new shrines as desecrations.
The sites are after all historic and sacred to the Yoruba
and there is a living artistic tradition flourishing all over Yoruba land
that has produced some of the most splendid and noble sculptures in all Africa.
Why should that be abandoned in favour of a new style
influenced by cultures from far away?
Suzanne Wenger's view is that continuity of tradition is less important
than religious commitment, and that she certainly has.
This is the place for Egbe, that is the heavenly society.
Every section of the shrine is for a certain section of the religion.
Egbe is the heavenly society,
it is the other parts of your soul which are not in the moment living on earth.
Florid forms, that's flower, that are flowers that I sow seeds.
That is now the story house, that are the steps,
and it's supported with the tree.
The inside is a tree, you will see it then there.
But it's all like a snail because the snail is the symbol of...
of beginning, like DNA, you know?
We are entering now the womb of creation.
So it is also the basis of the tree of derivation
which you see now here.
That is the tree of life, the middle, who supports this building.
It is a living room, it is a living room for the gods.
Only people who impersonate the gods
can live here unharmed and happily.
So that is a bed and a cupboard, and windows to look out,
everything under the shadow.
And who does come and stay here? Do you stay here ever?
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I do.
- For how long? - I stay, er... I, er...
It is just as I like, you know? There is no any obligations.
To some European eyes, Suzanne Wenger's strange amalgam of Western styles
and African myths may seem to be without meaning or value.
But she seeks no golden opinions from the art critics of the West.
For her the crucial test is whether what she creates is effective and meaningful
in the African community that has now absorbed her.
The fact that her shrines have become places where the Yoruba people worship
in increasing numbers is the measure of success that she values most highly.
For Suzanne Wenger and the Yoruba, the driving force of art is religion.
A great drummer is fine because he speaks with the voice of the gods.
A sculptor carves well because he has a true vision of the divinity.
And in that they are at one with tribal communities all over the world.
People of the West, having imposed their ways of life
on so much of the rest of humanity, now find their old faiths dying.
Perhaps that is one reason why they find the fervent images
created by tribal artists so compelling,
for it's through them that they can still glimpse other faiths,
other worlds, other ways of being human.