Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Luba
19th-century, 20th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
94%
Memory Board (lukasa). late 19th-early 20th century. Wood, beads, metal
The backside of the device curves out and is ridged, so it's handheld. The face of it — set off so so nicely by those spikes at each corner — has two, like, planes or fields or depicting zones: one that projects outwards, made up of affixed beads; one that goes inwards, comprising marks incised straight into the wood. These are like two completely separate and self-sustaining pictures, glancing off each other here and there. (This glancing resolves itself into five convex ridges at center.) Beads constellate atop the wood surface and either do or don't interact with the cuts beneath them. For instance, a stacked double-diamond shape recurs at the top and the bottom of the board; in the upper instance it's accented by a dot at each diamond's center, below a bead just grazes its edge. Elsewhere the beads cluster and breathe, sometimes drip; the incisions are all stiff runic structures. Unconscious, conscious. The device was used to record historical events. (2024)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
68%
Memory Board (lukasa). late 19th-century. Wood, beads, metal
The truly surpassingly great Luba memory boards (MBs) have much less apparent order than this one, which looks a little ornamental to me, indulgent. Also, the wood support's narrowness (relative to other, better MBs I've seen) forces the arrangement of beads upon its surface into a bit more density than the maker, it seems, had the decorative capacities to make good on. The artistic quality of MBs as a form, though, does not consist in decoration or ornament: it consists in the way two spatially coexistent but operationally separate decorative schemes — that of the beads atop and the engravings into the wood — stand apart and aloof, but only till the moments when they congeal uncannily. To that end, here, there're the disarrayed colors of the bottom bead-cluster butting up against the board's raised-bump waistband, and there's the asymmetricality of the bedecked parabola-pair up top. Both effects are too ordered, but there's a lack of precision to them that points at what's great about great MBs. (2024)