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as cultural styles by the Yoruba, Bini, Ibo, and Asante. The range of sculptural form is delimited, creating a consistency in style whether the sculpture is made from wood, bronze, or clay. In this light, the African artist sees the cylinder as a spatial measure that establishes a desired relationship between "a lateral limit in uniform and constant relationship with its vertical axis..."18 Whether one is examining an initiation mask of the Senufo or a Ndop statue (portrait of a King) of a Kuba of Zaire, one is struck by the apparent uniformity with respect to the treatment of mass and the compelling formality. As I have observed of African art elsewhere, "one senses an aesthetic power that corresponds to the intensity of religious belief. Moreover, a distinctive social system, the African ethos, nourishes artistic form: aesthetic and none-aesthetic interests are mutually supportive, each is served without excluding the other."19

Addition, Synthesis and Improvisation

The formal unity and expressiveness of African sculpture cannot be appropriately revealed through a brief discussion of static design and plastic art conventions, because much of this art can only be fully realized when it is experienced with song and movement of the dance. Celebrating the beginning of a new agricultural cycle, Yoruba Gelede rituals feature spectacular costumed figures with masks crowned with images of leopards, serpents, or lions that dance to music and song, revealing the interdependency of the arts and emphatically underscoring their interconnectedness and mutual dependency to realize their full expressive potential.20 The attachment of disparate objects to masks as seen among the Ngere of Liberia, the ubiquitous use of cowries of the Ibeji and Eshu-Elegba figures of the Yoruba, and the multicolored appliques of the aforementioned Gelede costumes, suggest that the African artist creates a new reality through additive means. The additive concern and the tendency toward synthesis are the two sides of the same coin, and are necessarily connected to the concept of paradigmatic realism previously mentioned. However, we may see this idea of ynthesis [[synthesis]] as an overarching cultural tendency in African cultures that is reflected in artistic expression, particularly

[[image]]
KUBA KING. Wood. 21" h., Zaire. 
Collection: Museum of Mankind, London.

the predilection to seek to integrate unlike elements into a composition achieving unity through the juxtaposition of opposites - curved against angular forms, concave against convex forms.

Virtually a universal characteristic of the creative expressions of the people of Africa and the African Diaspora is improvisation, seen most emphatically in music.21 Improvisation is seen in assemblage sculpture where discarded items are used to create a new entity, unexpected (from a European perspective) accents and intervals are realized in the placement of objects within the visual field,

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