Art and Soul: What’s Special About Tribal Art?

Many people consider tribal art crude and ungainly. Maybe they are, if we use the standards of modern plastic art. But we forget that the what of art is more important than the how. All art, but especially tribal art interprets mythology. It is the business of traditional art to grasp the primordial truth, to make the invisible visible, the inaudible, audible. In other words, real tribal art is about symbolic representations, about images of things unseen except through imagination and faith or mystical beliefs. It is by this faith that tribal art represents a certain truth of the soul of a people. It is also the reason why this art speaks to the truth of our own souls, for aren’t part of one human family?

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