Sculpture zoomorphe Boli
Boli zoomorphic sculpture

Sculpture zoomorphe Bamana, Boli Bamana zoomorphic sculpture, Boli

MALI

Details

Sculpture zoomorphe Bamana, Boli
Bamana zoomorphic sculpture, Boli
Mali
Longueur: 42 cm. (16½ in.)

Provenance

Antoine Ferrari de la Salle, Abidjan, 1989
Collection Lionel Sergent, Nîmes
Sotheby's, Paris, 30 novembre 2010, lot 123
Importante collection privée, acquise lors de cette vente

Further details

Exceptional examples of the celebrated style of Biwat sculpture are rare, and most of the known spectacular examples can be placed within a short, rich decade of collecting in the mid-1920's to mid-1930's when the art of the Biwat, sometimes called 'Mundugumor', was discovered outside of Melanesia. Many works can be linked to anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and his time in this region, as well an Australian farmer living in New Guinea, whom Bateson knew, E. J. Wauchope (in Chinnery, 1998, p.33). Many important Biwat figures then went to Museum collections, and a great number passed through Australian families, as is the provenance for this superb flute stopper.

As Robert Welsch has commented, Biwat carvings are among the most mysterious carved objects made and used by New Guineans in their ritual lives. A number of them have entered private collections and museums. Some are carved and painted, while others can be quite heavily ornamented. Margaret Mead spent a few months among the Biwat or Mundugumor people on the Yuat River in 1932 together with her second husband, Reo Fortune. She published a photograph of a heavily ornamented stopper in an essay on masks and ritual in Natural History (1934). This object was given to her during her fieldwork and is now in the American Museum of Natural History. Other flute stoppers in museum collections are, like this figure, stripped down to the carved wooden figure. This flute stopper with heavy emphasis about the head with a diadem at the crown, an expansive forehead, furrowed brow and large eyes and salient nose, is most closely related in style to another in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History (see Schmitz 1969, plate 88).
Most of the rituals practiced by the Biwat or Mundugumor people have never been observed first hand by foreigners. The Biwat had abandoned their initiation ritual, and most other rituals, about 1930, planning never to hold them again. Mead and Fortune commissioned a performance of the flute initiation rituals in the autumn of 1932. In her field notes, Mead described the ritual that they observed in some detail (see Nancy McDowell's, The Mundugumor, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, pp.130-152). Mead (1935, p.181ff) also wrote about the initiations in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (New York, Morrow) and in a brief 1934 article "Tamberans and Tumbuans in New Guinea" (Natural History 34, pp.234-246).
The only other significant early observations of Biwat art in situ come from Father Karl Laumann, a Roman Catholic priest based at Kanduanum Mission station on the Sepik River not far from the mouth of the Yuat. In his pastoral work Laumann visited most of the villages along the lower and middle Yuat River, where he observed a number of large carved figures that stood taller than a man. In the early 1950s Laumann published several of these photos in his two articles in Anthropos ("Vliss, der Kriegs- und Jagdgott am unteren Yuat River, Neuguinea," 47(5/6), pp.897-908, 1952, and, "Geisterfiguren am mittleren Yuat River in Neuguinea," 49(1/2):27-57, 1954.).
It is clear from both Mead and Laumann's accounts that despite anthropomorphic and animal imagery in some of these various Biwat carvings, it seems fairly certain that all of these carved figures represent either Bush or River spirits rather than human or animal spirits or ghosts. Spirits can sometimes take human or animal form among the Biwat, but the spirits themselves are neither human nor animals. This distinction between river and bush reflects the key distinction found in nature in the Biwat region. People were clearly dependent upon both the bush and the river for their basic needs for food and shelter. When they clear a patch of forest for gardens or a settlement they know this is a temporary human space that will eventually be overrun by either the encroaching bush or a flooding river. These two powerful forces are symbolized by the two distinctive kinds of spirits. Unfortunately for modern collectors, we cannot unambiguously associate any of the Biwat carvings as either bush spirit or river spirit unless the carving resembles a crocodile-placing it squarely in the river Spirit realm. Bush spirits are more ambiguous.
As Laumann (1952) suggests they are especially important in providing strength and success in war and hunting. Ultimately, such figures must be controlled to promote human health, prosperity and social order in the civilized space of the village (in Christie's, Jolika Collection, June 2013, lot 10). Along the Sepik and Yuat rivers, one common way of proving that the spirits were indeed attending ceremonies was to provide them with a voice, and this was the function of the sacred flute, called wusear in the Biwat language. The flutes themselves consist of a bamboo tube blocked or stopped at the bottom. They were played by blowing across the opening like a bottle neck, and used their voices or fingers to modify the sound (Meyer, 1995, p. 211).

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Lot Essay

Un des premiers comptes rendus sur les sculptures boli nous vient de Joseph Henry en 1910, dans lequel il déclare: "nos grands fétiches boli reçoivent des hommages particuliers, tributs et importantes coulées de sang, car à chaque instant on a recours à leur intervention [...] Les trois principaux sacrifices offerts pour des raisons particulières,[... ] le premier se fait pour obtenir une faveur, pour s'attirer les bonnes grâces du fétiche, le second pour conserver sa vie, se soustraire à une mort déjà décrétée, et le troisième est offert pour apaiser un fétiche auquel on attribue la mort de l'un des siens, pour le supplier d'épargner les survivants de la famille. A la fin de chaque sacrifice important toutes les pièces qui composent le fétiche sont lavées dans le surplus du sang cueilli dans des récipients en terre dits 'da', et ce n'est qu'après cette opération, qui s'accomplit dans le plus profond silence, qu'on les replace dans leurs peaux de bouc" (Henry, Jos. L'âme d'un peuple africain: Les Bambara. Leur vie psychique, éthique, sociale, religieuse, 1910, pp.152-153; voir également RAAI, no. 212.13).
En 1931, Michel Leiris, membre de la mission Dakar-Djibouti, décrit un "boli du konoas", l'appelant "l'une de ces formes bizarre [...] en forme de cochon, toujours en nougat brun (c'est-à-dire du sang coagulé) qui pèse au moins 15 kilos [...]" (Leiris, 1996 [1934], p.195). Deux ans plus tard, en 1933, le même boli apparu dans Le Minotaure, après avoir attiré l'attention des surréalistes et des intellectuels français qui contribuèrent à ce magazine d'avant-garde: "cet objet fut placé au centre d'un enthousiasme pour le Primitivisme [...] et fut considéré comme un des chefs-d'oeuvre du Musée de l'Homme " (Colleyn in Boli, Galerie Johann Levy, Paris, 2009, p. 22).
Comme le nota Henry un siècle plus tôt, Colleyn et Conrad estiment que les boli font partie des objets les plus sacrés selon la croyance Bamana. Ce sont des objets dotés de spiritualité qui, selon Conrad (in Colleyn, Bamana, 2001, p.28) "reçoivent des sacrifices afin d'activer et d'influencer la force virtuelle spirituelle connue sous le nom de nyama. Les boli pouvaient être façonnés de toute sorte de matériaux tel que le bois, l'écorce, pierres, racines d'arbres, cuir, métal, tissu, os, cheveux, queues et griffes d'animaux et des éléments humains tels que le sang, les excréments, placentas et des morceaux de cadavre. [...] Le boli a été décrit à la fois comme un symbole de l'univers et comme le réceptacle des forces qui l'animent. Il est en outre un intermédiaire qui permet la communication avec les ancêtres ou le pouvoir surnaturel dont la force l'imprègne. [...] En tant que dépositaires d'un énorme pouvoir spirituel ou nyama, les boli sont considérés avec peur et crainte. Ils étaient traditionnellement les instruments les plus essentiels à la communication entre les mortels terrestres et les pouvoirs surnaturels qui contrôlent nyama, et ainsi, d'après Sara Brett-Smith, ils sont une part importante de la structure judiciaire Bamana, animant des objets à qui la communauté Bamana donne un pouvoir décisif".

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