The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Kongo · carved wooden figures charged with medicines and driven with iron · made by unnamed Kongo carvers and banganga, ritual specialists, with the clients who drove the nails, among the Yombe, Woyo, Vili and their neighbours of the lower Congo and the Atlantic coast north of the river, in the present Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo and the Cabinda enclave of Angola · the surviving figures overwhelmingly of the nineteenth century, most collected between about 1870 and 1910 · scored as one work: the type, the nkisi nkondi (plural minkisi minkondi), the nail and blade power figure, weighed most in the great Mangaaka figures of the Chiloango River region, among them the figure in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the large Yombe nail figure in the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the minkondi of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, and the British Museum · the dog figures and the small minkisi are context and are not scored · every nail and binding put on a figure in its life as an nkisi is part of the work
Mode
Ritual sculpture as instrument of law, oath and healing; a carved figure completed by medicines and by use
Mythos
The hunter who tracks the guilty; the body that must be wounded to be roused, and so bears the community’s violence in its own flesh; the force of the dead
Phase
Carved and charged by Kongo carvers and banganga, the surviving corpus overwhelmingly of the nineteenth century; most collected between about 1870 and 1910; its life of use ended by removal; in museums since
Presentation
A standing wooden figure, the medicine pack in the belly or head sealed with resin and often faced with a mirror, eyes of glass or ceramic, nails, blades, wedges and scrap iron driven into the body, cords and cloth tied on
Register
Dread with a judicial dignity: force at rest, struck many times and ready to strike
Scale
The large figures about one to one and a fifth metres high; a type, many figures of one kind and many sizes
Governing Proposition
A carved figure is made into a force by the medicines sealed in its belly, and then, over years, its public writes on it: each nail or blade driven into the body is an act, a case settled or an oath sworn or a wrongdoer roused against, and the iron stays. The wager of the type is that the law of a community can be kept not in words or in an office but in one body, wounded by every settlement, visible to all, and never finished while it is in use.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
An nkisi nkondi was made in two stages and by many hands. A carver made a standing wooden figure. An nganga, a ritual specialist, composed the medicines, the bilongo, and set them in a cavity in the belly or the head, sealed with resin and often faced with a mirror or glass; that is what made the figure an nkisi and not a carving. Eyes of glass or ceramic were set in resin. Then, in use, over years, nails, blades, wedges and pieces of scrap iron were driven into the body, and cords, cloth and other bindings were tied on. Often the right arm is raised, and once held a knife or spear, now often lost.
The figures come from the peoples of the lower Congo and the Atlantic coast north of the river, the Yombe, Woyo, Vili and their neighbours, in what are now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo and the Cabinda enclave of Angola. The makers are not named. The surviving corpus is overwhelmingly of the nineteenth century, and most of it was collected between about 1870 and 1910 by traders, missionaries, colonial officers and punitive expeditions. The large figures stand about one to one and a fifth metres high.
The work scored here is the type, taken as one: the nkisi nkondi, plural minkisi minkondi, the nail and blade power figure of the nineteenth century. It is weighed most in the great Mangaaka figures of the Chiloango River region, among them the figure in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; in the large Yombe nail figure in the Detroit Institute of Arts; and in the minkondi of the museum at Tervuren and the British Museum. The dog figures and the small minkisi are context and are not scored. The nails are not later additions to the work. They are what the figure was made to receive, and everything put on it in its life as that nkisi is part of the one work.
Movement II
The nail is the work’s turn. Kongo minkisi in general, bundles, pots, shells and figures charged with medicines, need not carry iron at all. In the nkondi the act of use becomes a cumulative, visible part of the sculpture: the object is never finished while it is used, and its surface is written by its public. In the scholarship of the type each nail or blade is an act: an oath sealed, a contract or a case settled, the force roused against a wrongdoer, a thief or a witch. The figure is a hunter, and the iron sends it hunting.
What that makes is an archive. A community’s agreements and grievances are not pictured on the figure; they are driven into it, each one a physical act on one body, permanent and visible to all, and the force grows with each. A painting of such a figure, or a figure with carved nails, or a list of oaths, would lose exactly this. The form is the institution, and changing it would leave the work nothing to say.
What it discloses can be stated: that law is a body charged with grievances, that obligation is kept by a visible record of violence held in reserve, and that justice, threat and healing were one institution. The cost is shown too, in a figure wounded by every settlement. What each nail meant, who quarrelled with whom and what they swore, is in most cases unrecorded, and the viewer outside the practice reads the condition in outline. When and from where the nailing practice came is uncertain, and so is what its first makers risked.
Movement III
In the Mangaaka the head is carved with a formal authority to stand with any in Central Africa: the broad brow, the set jaw, the open mouth with filed teeth, the headdress cut in crisp planes. The hands rest on the hips, the knees are bent, the chin is forward: the stance of an enforcer on the alert. The body swells into the belly where the medicine sits. Below the calm face the iron stands out like a field of spines, densest on the torso, and the face is left clear.
The face and the iron are the two most distant things in the figure, and one law holds them. The calm face is the authority the iron obeys; the raised arm is the iron gathered into one act; everything in the figure is force and its restraint, the power to strike held in a body by a specialist’s art and a community’s agreements. Seen in the round the iron reads differently from every side, and the calm of the face makes it more frightening. The register is dread, with a judicial dignity.
The type is not all Mangaaka. Many figures are summarily carved below the head, the body made as a support for iron; on smaller and later examples the bindings and additions can read as heap rather than law, the accretion cluttered and no single nail required. The scored unit includes them, and they hold the type below what its best figures reach in elevation, in making and in coherence.
Movement IV
The medicine is sealed inside, and the mirror over it faces out. It is the eye through which the force sees and directs the blades, and the figure’s glass eyes, set exactly in resin, make it look. Robert Farris Thompson read the mirror as the surface of water and the boundary with the land of the dead, from which the force comes; the reading is contested in detail, and it is given here as his.
The archetypes are built into the function. The hunter tracks the guilty. The body must be wounded to be roused, and so bears the community’s violence in its own flesh. The struck and pierced body that holds a people’s wrongs is one of the deep patterns, and here it is made by use, one nail at a time, rather than told. Each figure was the nkisi of a place and a practice, with its own history of cases, and the names, the cases, the songs and the rules that went with it are lost to the object as it stands.
The orders held in the body are many and are held at once: law and the settling of disputes; contracts, oaths and debts between persons and villages; the sacred and the force of the dead; medicine and healing; the threat of death against the guilty; the hunt; and, in the iron and the trade goods tied on, the Atlantic trade itself. One act, driving a nail, makes a contract, rouses the force and wounds the figure. The family and labour appear only through their disputes, the state not at all, and an inner life is not a dimension of the type.
Movement V
A work made to be added to is now closed. Removed from use, the figures lost much of what the nails were for: the weapons in the raised hands, medicine packs and mirrors broken or emptied, feathers and bindings, and above all their life as minkisi. The defining form survives, the carved body with its iron, and the type is legible; the wood carries insect damage and the iron corrosion. For over a century the figures have been continuously in museum view, and the museum shows a closed record of a practice, not the practice.
They have been read and read again: as the “fetish” of the colonial collector and the ethnographic museum, a word that shaped how a continent’s art was seen and misnamed; as sculpture, by the modernists and their dealers; as an institution of law, healing and oath, in the work of Wyatt MacGaffey and of Thompson and Cornet; as inheritance, in Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit (1983) and in African American art, the work of Renée Stout among it; and now in the debate on collecting under force and on restitution. Whether a figure is good or dangerous, and whether a museum shows the work or its corpse, remain open.
The desk sets the type a tenth under The Ife Heads at 8.5, the nearest body of African sculpture it holds scored as one, whose case is making and swerve where the nkondi’s is form as knowledge and disclosure; a tenth above Pollock’s Full Fathom Five at 8.3, a painting with nails in it, which wins on swerve, reach and making; above the Queen Mother Pendant Mask of the court of Benin at 8.1 and above Great Zimbabwe at 8.2; under Shiva as Lord of the Dance (Nataraja) at 8.9, a type of comparable kind with a fuller making, under the Great Mosque of Djenné at 8.6, and under Achebe’s Things Fall Apart at 8.8, which holds the orders the figure enforces and their history as well. A calm face looks out over a body of iron, the mirror in its belly, the arm still raised and empty.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract part by part. The medicine pack cannot go: without it there is no nkisi, only a carving, and its mirror is the eye through which the force sees. The raised arm and its weapon cannot go, for this is a hunter poised to strike. The open mouth and the tense stance, hands on hips, knees bent and chin forward in the Mangaaka, are the alert of an enforcer. The nails as a mass cannot go: they are the record of what the figure was asked to do. But the test bites on the nail field itself. No single nail is required, the density is the sum of local cases rather than a composition, and on smaller figures the accretion can be cluttered and the bindings random. Necessary as a mechanism, partly assembled as a surface.
Score: 8.3 / 10
What the work brings into the open can be stated and holds: that law in a society is a body charged with grievances, that obligation is kept by a visible, accumulating record of violence held in reserve, and that a community’s disputes are made one object it must face. Each nail is an act on the body, and the figure is an archive in iron of quarrels settled and promises sworn. The bristling body shows without words that justice, threat and healing were one institution, and it shows the cost: a figure wounded by every settlement. The disclosure is of a condition, not a mood. It is held at 8.5 and not above because much of what each nail meant is lost, and the viewer outside the practice reads the condition in outline.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The height is terror and awe, and it recurs across the whole surface. A Mangaaka seen in the round, over a metre of blades standing out from the body like a field of spines, the mirror in the belly, the mouth open, is among the most powerful images of dread in sculpture: force at rest that has been struck many times and is ready to strike. The height is not one moment. It is in the face, carved with a calm that makes the iron more frightening; in the stance; and in the iron itself, which reads differently from every side. This is dread with a judicial dignity. Charged: the unit is the type, and smaller and cruder examples do not rise, so the figure is held below the summit of the best single figures.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked: the archetypes bear the function’s load. There is the hunter who tracks the guilty; the body that must be wounded to be roused, the nail waking the force, so that it bears the community’s violence in its own flesh; and the mirror, read by Robert Farris Thompson as the surface of water and the boundary with the land of the dead, a reading contested in detail. The pattern of the struck and pierced body that holds a people’s wrongs is one of the deep ones, and here it is built by use, nail by nail. The particulars stay particular: each figure was the nkisi of a place and a practice. Held at 8.5 because names, cases, songs and rules that went with each figure are lost to the object as it stands.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is Kongo minkisi in general: bundles, pots, shells and figures charged with medicines, some without any nails. The turn in the nkondi is the nail itself, which makes the act of use a cumulative, visible part of the sculpture, so that the object is never finished and its surface is written by its public. That is a real departure in the logic of sculpture, and the large Mangaaka push the carved figure to a monumental, formal scale unusual in the region. But the axis scores the turn with the stake, and the stake cannot be seen: the type is a tradition, not one maker’s wager, the date and source of the nailing practice are uncertain, and what was risked, and by whom, is unrecorded. That, and not any smallness in the turn, holds the axis lowest with The Encompassed.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Substitute another form and the work can say nothing. The knowledge of the nkondi is its accumulation: a community’s agreements and grievances are not depicted on it, they are driven into it. A painting of a nail figure, a carved figure with carved nails, or a list of oaths would each lose the thing itself: that each settlement is a physical act on one body, permanent and visible to all, and that the force grows with each. The form enacts the threat as well: the medicine is sealed inside, behind the mirror, and the iron faces out. Few works anywhere make form so completely the instrument of what they know; the form is the institution. Held at 9.0 and not higher because on many figures the carved body is subordinate and generic, and only the head and the accretion carry the knowledge.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise. For about a century and a half the type has been read and read again: as the “fetish” of colonial collectors and the ethnographic museum; as sculpture by the modernist generation and its dealers; as an institution of law, healing and oath in the work of Wyatt MacGaffey and of Thompson and Cornet; as inheritance in African American art; and now at the centre of the debate on collecting under force and on restitution. Each reading has found something in the object the last did not, and the open questions stay open: what any nail meant, whether a figure is good or dangerous, whether a museum shows the work or its corpse. Charged: much of the yield is the yield of history and context, and the formal yield on return, real in the face against the iron, is narrower than the greatest single works’.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Field: Central African sculpture of the nineteenth century, its reach followed outward. The intrinsic force is high. Within Kongo practice the nkondi is the most potent and formal kind of nkisi, the Mangaaka the summit of the region’s monumental figure carving, and the type reorganised what a sculpture could be by making use its author. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its region the nkondi was a dominant institution in the late nineteenth century, though whether it redirected the practice or crowned it is unclear; it entered European collections as the very type of the “fetish”, and so shaped how a continent’s art was seen and misnamed; and it is answered by African American artists, Renée Stout among them, and by Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit (1983) as a source of diaspora aesthetics. Part of that reach is reach of an idea; delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over one and a quarter to two centuries. Form: the defining form of the large figures survives, the carved body with its iron, and the type is legible. But parts that carried the meaning are often lost: the weapon in the raised hand, medicine packs and their mirrors broken or emptied, feathers and bindings, and above all the figure’s life as an nkisi, its use, which ended with its removal. The work was an accumulating practice and stands now as a closed record, and that loss takes from it what the nails were for. Presence: continuous in museum view for over a century and widely shown, which lifts the figure a tenth at most. Fabric: wood with insect damage, iron with corrosion, the smallest charge.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged as command of carved wood with assemblage. At its best the making is load-bearing. The Mangaaka heads are carved with a formal authority to stand with any in Central Africa: the broad brow, the set jaw, the open mouth with filed teeth, the headdress in crisp planes, the body swelling into the belly where the medicine sits. The setting of mirror and glass eyes in resin is exact and makes the figure look. The nails, though not one hand’s, were driven with a knowledge of what the figure required, the densest on the torso and the face left clear. Charged: the type varies widely, many figures are summarily carved below the head, the body made as a support for iron, and the accretion, which is the work’s genius, is not a matter of command at all.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the calm carved face and the chaotic field of driven iron below it, or the sealed medicine within and the blades without. One law holds them: everything in the figure is the force and its restraint, the power to strike held in a body by a specialist’s art and a community’s agreements. The calm face is the authority the iron obeys; the mirror is the eye that directs the blades; the raised arm is the iron gathered into one act. Nothing in the figure stands outside that law, and its range is wide, from the most composed carving to the most random accretion, from healing to killing. Charged: on smaller and later examples the bindings and additions sometimes read as heap rather than law, and the type cannot be credited with the coherence of its best figures alone.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Orders held in the one body: law and the settlement of disputes; the social bond, contracts, oaths and debts between persons and villages; the sacred, the force of the dead and the world beneath the water; medicine and healing; violence, the threat of death against the guilty and the witch; the hunt; and, through the iron and the trade goods often tied on, the Atlantic trade itself, a history the figure absorbed. They are integrated, not listed: one act, driving a nail, at once makes a contract, rouses the force and wounds the figure. What holds the axis lowest with The Swerve is what the body leaves out: the family and labour are present only through their disputes, the state is absent or replaced by the nkisi, and consciousness, an inner life, is not a dimension of the type at all.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.0, then The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.7 and The Sublime at 8.6. A form that is the institution it serves, each settlement a nail driven into one body; a type legible after one and a quarter to two centuries though its life of use has ended; one law of force and restraint from the calm carved face to the field of iron; and a dread with judicial dignity that rises from every side of the figure.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve and The Encompassed at 7.6. The turn of the nail is real, but the type is a tradition, the date and source of the practice uncertain and its stake unrecorded; and the body that holds law, oath, the sacred, healing, violence and the Atlantic trade holds the family and labour only through their disputes, the state not at all, and no inner life. Next above them, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2: a reach partly of the colonial idea of the “fetish” rather than of the object. One fact under all of them: the type is charged for its weaker members and for what was lost with its use.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two of five: The Imperishable at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep meet it exactly at 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 and The Swerve at 7.6 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it governs falls below 7.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 100.6, an average of 8.38 that displays 8.4, in Tier IV, four tenths above the 8.0 at which it begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the type and its scholarship, chiefly the work of Robert Farris Thompson and Wyatt MacGaffey; the Mangaaka figure in the Metropolitan Museum and the Detroit figure are known well as images, and any single figure’s history of use, in most cases unrecorded, is known thinly. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the type, the nkisi nkondi of the nineteenth century, taken as one, weighed most in the great Mangaaka figures of the Chiloango River region, the large Yombe nail figure in the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the minkondi of the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, and the British Museum. The dog figures in the form of the two-headed dog Kozo and the small minkisi are context and are not scored. Under the rule that all one work is the work, every nail, blade and binding put on a figure in its life as that nkisi is part of it; the lost weapons, emptied medicines, broken mirrors, missing bindings and the end of the figures’ use with their removal are weighed on The Imperishable. The type is charged for its weaker members on The Sublime, The Made and The Inner Law. The reading of the mirror as the surface of the water of the dead is Thompson’s and is stated as contested. Nothing is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the date of acquisition, the height and the rank in size of the Metropolitan Museum’s Mangaaka; the date and height of the Detroit figure; the size of most figures of the type; the number of nails on any single figure; the derivation of the name nkondi; the documentation of nailed figures before the nineteenth century; any link of the nailing practice to the crucifix of Kongo Christianity, which is debated; the survival of the practice into the twentieth century; and the title, date and subject of the work by Renée Stout that answers the type.