A Bird Dance near Saturday City: Sidi Ballo and the Art of West African Masquerade

9. An Aesthetic of Affect

9 The Aesthetics of Stretching Thought When art announces itself with the attributes that distinguish it from everyday life, a frame of special time and place is perceived that offers audiences opportunities. One is the opportunity to revel in aesthetic engagement, which people can do in everyday situations too, but perhaps not as freely. This is aesthetic distance, a freedom to ignore quotidian concerns and plumb artistic composition or just to enjoy the pleasures that composition offers. Another opportunity is for contemplation and reflection. The ideas and emotions artworks inspire are instruments for exploring life’s actual situations and testing one’s own perspectives and sense of self against those situations. Art time is a temporary haven from life in real time, and in art time people can benefit from reflexive and analytical moments that loop out from the aesthetic and pour back into the everyday. Often these complementary opportunities for enjoyment and reflection are not simply offered by artworks themselves. They can be vigorously hurled at audiences with aesthetic power by artists intent on providing audiences with a thick, rich, intense experience. Good artists know how to manipulate AN AESTHETIC OF AFFECT material and conceptual form to encourage strong responses. The ideas and emotions much Mande art skillfully orchestrates are intended to play with the thoughts and emotions of ordinary life so effectively that listeners and viewers can be nearly, or completely, overwhelmed. The concept of holding back does not prevent artists, in many situations, from trying to have a powerful impact on their patrons. In this kind of intense artistic environment, distance and detachment— aesthetic removal from workaday worlds—are a little bit of fiction. Far from isolating people from the experiences of life, a Kòmò performance, an evening with bards, or a bird masquerade all become experiences potentially as catalytic and profound as any life-changing business deal, social moment, spiritual event, or philosophical revelation. If art can create time and space out of phase with daily life, it can also provide a direct path back. When it is good and people are ready to engage it, art helps them inscribe their evolving personal history with meaning and significance. Art can have affecting power. Oriented to entertaining visual and audio composition, to configurations of form that please, Mande aesthetics is equally oriented to affect, influence and action. Mande artists of all kinds use strategies that aim to make their works compelling and memorable. Not every viewer or audience member finds appearance and meaning equally interesting, of course, because like everywhere else, people’s orientations and responses vary. Many people watching Sidi Ballo did not think about his performances beyond their intense entertainment value. But many Mande find that being agreeable to the senses and being rich with intellectual and emotional significance both complement and necessitate each other. The Mande world that artistry articulates and influences includes numerous ideas and experiences that relate to concepts such as clarity and obscurity, the power of nyama, mother-childness and father-childness, the character and value of heroes, the lessons and wisdom in history, social good and personal good, and the goal of raising audiences above themselves to spiritual solidarity . The epics of bards and the songs sung at masquerades, the feats of Kòmò dancers and masqueraders such as Sidi Ballo, and the motifs and compositions of sculptures and costumes, all inspire images and impressions that swell up out of real lives to make people think, feel, and act. Performances are particularly vital, because their media-bridging impulses are brimming over with contemplative and emotional material with which audience members can make themselves very busy. Aesthetics helps performers deliver these materials effectively, so performance artistry is very socially oriented. Mande audiences expect that performers will try to make them think, as suggested by the axiom “Every festival is an opportunity for educational dialogue .” That may be why the language used in songs often emphasizes words or constructions that encompass both an idea and its opposite and why the idea 192 From Dogoduman to an Aesthetic of Affect An Aesthetic of Affect 193 of death is invoked at such ebullient celebrations as baptisms and weddings. Such strategies create contemplative perspectives that keep all the poles of life in view so that the grand and wonderful ones can be all the more appreciated (Kone 1997). This nearly didactic orientation applies across the spectrum of arts, even in venues that...