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Illuminated Signs:
Style and Meaning in the Beadwork of the Xhosa- and Zulu-speaking Peoples By Gary van Wyk This article was first published, with footnotes that are omitted here, in African Arts, vol. 36:3 (Autumn 2003), pp. 12-33, 93-94. For citation purposes, please note that figure numbers, placement, and captions have been altered here. PART 1: INTRODUCTION & SIGNIFICATORY FUNCTIONS OF BEADWORK PART 2: XHOSA BEADWORK PART 3: ZULU BEADWORK, CONCLUSION, & REFERENCES PART 1: INTRODUCTION & SIGNIFICATORY FUNCTIONS OF BEADWORK  1. Detail of Nongoma apron, ca. 1960, worn by married men and unmarried women. Photo: Gary van Wyk, Axis Gallery. Today, in "the West"-a label that globalization is dissolving-the rhythm of pattern remains less art than craft, still of a lower class. "Decorative." Elsewhere, though, such repetition sounds the music of the spheres. It echoes the spiritual realm like a meditational chant, reflects it like a mandala. It is religious art. Just as Modern artists appropriated "primitive" sculpture to break the mold of Western art, so too they pillaged non-Western performance arts and two-dimensional traditions, evacuating their sacredness. Though a string of Western painters, from Paul Klee to Sean Scully, say, have drawn "inspiration" from non-Western graphic arts, their sources remain inadequately appreciated in their own right today. To appraise them anew, perhaps we must borrow the eyes of those who have borrowed from them; pause a moment to consider abstraction in the abstract. In Western art, abstraction has been a tendency toward a purificatory and heroic emptiness of figuration, or of reference. As John Rajchman observes in Constructions, this leaning masks alternative readings of abstraction, such as that of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who identifies an abstraction quite different from the self-purifying kind-that of those "abstract machines" that push art forms beyond and beside themselves, causing their very languages, as though possessed with the force of other things, to start stuttering "and...and...and..." He connects this stuttering abstract "and" not with dying or heroic self-extinction but with a strange an organic vitality able to see in "dead" moments other new ways of proceeding. And this sort of vitality, this sort of abstraction, he thinks, is something of which we may still be capable, something still with us and before us.Perhaps such re-examination of abstraction by Western artists and theorists returns their cultural debt as a prism through which we can peer afresh. They glimpse a non-Modernist abstraction that is about addition and plenitude, not reduction. This is an abstraction that interrogates signifying languages, just as Wittgenstein used the visual trick of the "rabbit-duck" drawing (Fig. 2) to point to "the gap between perception and what a mind might make of it… There was always a change lurking, a bit of the unknown surfacing, a duck in the rabbit…Language could be shown to fail them all" (Nesbit 2000:272). An abstraction that pushes art forms beyond themselves, "as though possessed with the force of other things." The beadwork and murals of many South African peoples appear to be of this order.  2. The duck/rabbit visual trick. From Jastrow 1900:295. This article sketches some of the parameters within which the patterns of beadwork among the Xhosa- and Zulu-speaking peoples, though apparently abstract, in fact conveyed meaning, provided "readings." Beadwork traditions were semiotic systems, structured through differences. They should be understood as inherently dynamic, like language itself and semiotic systems in general. It is therefore impossible within the scope of this essay to be comprehensive, to fully describe every system and track its changes over the last century or so. Rather, the outline given here sketches illustrative case studies in the hope that it will encourage further in-depth studies, particularly those based on intensive fieldwork. The Significatory Functions of Beadwork First, like flags or languages, beadwork traditions signaled a sense of belonging to a people, to a place, and to a chain of tradition. They were signs of identity that flagged ethnic and or regional roots-not that these identities were fixed and rigid nor that people were not uprooted often within their histories. By diagnosing different historical moments, however, we can illustrate how art styles proclaimed origins. Pictorial surveys of South African peoples, such as Barbara Tyrrell's Tribal Peoples of Southern Africa (1968), undertaken from the late 1940s onward, or the photographs of Jean Morris (1959-1990s) in Abantu (1976), Tribal Life Today (1984), and Speaking with Beads (1994), show dramatic differences in dress structured according to people and place. The abstract elements of beadwork patterns play a key role in flagging difference-like the tartan kilts of Scottish clans (Fig. 3).
3A-3D. Joan Broster lived among the Thembu between 1952 and 1966 and collected costumes among several Xhosa-speaking peoples. The differences between the costumes signal ethnic identity. Each costume includes accompanying decorations for arms and legs and such accoutrements as staffs and tobacco bags. For some costumes these items total more than 200. Photos: Gary van Wyk, Axis Gallery. Second, because tradition linked the living to their ancestors, beadwork was spiritual art. Absent the ancestor figures and masks that focused belief for other African peoples, this religious function of beadwork was vital. The cultures of Xhosa- and Zulu-speakers were essentially iconoclastic. The Xhosa peoples produced virtually no figurative sculpture. Among the Zulu, even as late as the 1920s, it was said that "any person making an image of any living thing is committing an impropriety" (Dube 1928:43). Visual art for these Nguni peoples was located mainly in abstract forms and in beadwork. Recently, utilitarian objects used by Zulu-speakers have gained recognition, often under the umbrella of "abstract forms." They conform to the Western stereotype of African art as male-carved wooden sculpture, often polished up and darkened for a market that prefers these signifiers in its art from the "Dark Continent." Beadwork, full of color, proclaims another Africa, one of light, abstraction, and women's work. As will be suggested here, it is the primary sacred art form among the Xhosa, and is also of key importance among Zulu-speakers. It is therefore high time that beadwork is recognized as a primary medium both in Nguni art and within the broader context of African art.  4. This Thembu charm necklace ("necklace of promise"), dated to the late 1940s, testifies to the magical powers ascribed to beads and also reflects its maker's individual creativity. Length 17" (43cm). Private collection. Photo: Lisa Brittan, Axis Gallery. Third, beadwork ensembles allowed social identities to be read. Differences in dress within particular beadwork conventions mapped social typologies: a person's gender, age grade, and marital status, and sometimes his or her social rank and role and spiritual state (Fig. 5).  5A & 5B. Joan A. Broster described in detail how differences in Thembu dress signified differences in status. The costumes of the teenagers shown on the cover of her book (Fig. 5A) contrast vividly with those of an elderly Thembu couple from the same period (Fig. 5B). Thembu youths used the cerise pompoms from the 1940s onward. Their black collars were made from seals for industrial piping systems on the gold mines in Johannesburg, where young men went for stints of work before circumcision. They signal this migration, and having earned the wages required to pay the bride-price for marriage. The young man's spectacles and plastic armbands are further indications of his "modernity." The types of permissible items and colors schemes in these four costumes reflect status, and some are gender-specific. Fourth, beadwork was, and still is, a vehicle of self-expression, reflecting the individual styles of both its creator and wearer. Like linguistic systems, it is open to individual inventions and borrowings that expand the language, and redundancies that contract it. Fifth, many beadwork colors, patterns, and motifs conveyed symbolic references-an ability to indicate concepts that mirrors the function of language. Such symbolism even enabled the construction of complex narrative messages whose semantics were intelligible within a limited territory, functioning like a dialect. From at least the 1950s onward, some beadwork included literal messages spelled out in Western alphabetic signs. These render obvious the significatory function of beadwork, but the meanings of the written statements were often unclear, even within the territory of their creation. This ambiguity underscores Ferdinand de Saussure's axiom of semiotics that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since these various functions combine, multiple simultaneous readings are possible. A plenitude of possible meanings arises, a kind of stuttering of the abstract signs so that they proclaim, "and, and, and." This is the opposite of the increasing standardization of the languages of Xhosa and Zulu, which occurred through missionary activity and later state controls. PART 2: XHOSA BEADWORK
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