DOGON, MALI

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Dogon religion involves the use of a multitude of shrines and altars, many of which are dedicated to ancestors. Some are for a clan’s physical forebears or other members of the community who have died, while others are intended for Nommo, the mythical progenitors of the Dogon. Other altars are used in the representation of a person’s own living psyche and agency. Offerings of grain and animal sacrifices are made within the shrines, as well as stones and iron objects, in the spirit of gratitude, connection and appeals for protection. Ashes of ritual materials and symbolic red and white pigments are also spread over altars, invoking purity and vitality.

Various types of figures are placed in shrines, as well as vessels and other items that are intended to address the needs and channel the energies of the spirits they honor. One such altar object is the miniature ladder (wagem bilu), a small representation of the life-sized notched ladders the Dogon use to access their granaries. It usually accompanies ancestor figures and vessels on family shrines that are located in the ginna – the home of the clan’s head, of which there are several in each village. Wagem bilu symbolically allow the relevant spirit to ascend to join the company of the other ancestors in the spirit realm.

This particular tradition symbolically reenacts the myth of Lebe, the first human to experience death. A wooden figure was made to support Lebe’s life force, from which his soul was released at the end of his days. As the phenomenon of death spread its new shadow across the lives of the Dogon, similar figures were created by each clan to facilitate the passage of souls, following Lebe’s example.

The shrine object presented here – one of remarkable rarity – appears to be a fusion of the wagem bilu form with that of a human shrine figure. Its limbless body, abstracted to the extreme, is capped with a geometric head. The purity of form on display in this figure, combining a rhythmic flow of angles and curved surfaces, produces a monumental and enigmatic aura in a sculpture just over a foot high.

Dogon and Tellem art had a profound influence on European and American modern art, especially within movements like Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. Some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century – Picasso, Braque, Giacometti, Bréton, Basquiat, Klee, and others – eagerly assimilated and adapted the elongated human figures, stylized forms, and symbolic abstractions of the Bandiagara tribes and African art as a whole, forever changing the evolutionary course of Western painting and sculpture.