iSculpt.org

I had intended my first "rant" to be on the topic of sculpting frustration. Oddly enough, the very act of writing this blog seems to be working miracles in terms of dealing with my own frustration, and as a result, my motivation to tackle that subject has waned a bit.

Tonight, I had intended to sculpt, but seeing as it's after 11:00 my time, and two-thirds of the children who are home with me are still awake (jeez, I hope my wife doesn't read this), I'm pretty sure it's not happening tonight. But, I've got them at least in their beds now, so I can spend a few minutes thinking and writing about sculpting.

Instead of a short blurb on what I did tonight, you're getting a long "rant" on what I didn't. You have been warned; feel free to stop reading now.

One issue that is really difficult for many sculptors, but which hasn't really been a problem for me, personally, is that of inspiration. "What do I sculpt?" seems to be a question that many sculptors find difficult to answer. This has never been an issue for me for two reasons. First, I simply haven't mastered the craft to the extent where coming up with ideas for new sculpts is a problem. If you don't often finish your sculpts, your inspiration for those unfinished sculpts remains valid and re-usable, and inspirations seems to come faster than completed works. Secondly, and more importantly, is that my main motivation for sculpting is a very deep-seated fascination with the human body. I could spend the rest of my life doing portraits and nudes and be quite soul-satisfied. There is such an unbelievable variety in shapes, forms, and surface details among different humans that you could never exhaust the possibilities.

Though I do do sculpts with clothing, props, and accessories, the human body is my primary fascination and that fascination is the core around which my sculpting "life" (such as it is) has been built. One source of inspiration that I have more than once considered interpreting into sculpture is the photography of Leni Riefenstahl, specifically her work documenting some of the indigenous people of the Sudan called the "Nuba" and the "Nuba Kau".

I do not wish to embark upon a discussion of the morality of Ms. Riefenstahl. Certainly, she supported and masterfully propagandized one of the most horrific governments in modern memory. It is understandably difficult for many people to forgive someone who helped promote Hitler's regime, and I would not ask nor expect anyone to do so.

But Ms. Riefenstahl lived to be 101 years old. She directed "Triumph of the Will" at the age of 32, and I think that it is important that if we undertake to judge another person, that we do so by judging their entire life, not just a single high-profile portion of it. Leni Riefenstahl was only one of millions of "good Germans", and we only know her name because she was extraordinarily talented and was possessed of tremendous vision, neither of which, in and of themselves, make her any more vile or despicable than her fellow citizens.

However, because of the way she spent the last fifty years of her life, we have knowledge of and a record of something that would otherwise have been lost. Ms. Riefenstahl seems to have made an honest friendship with and to have been honestly concerned about the plight of the Nuba, something that would seem to contradict her support for the eugenic policies of the Nazis.

The Nuba and Nuba Kau were fairly isolated groups of indigenous people who lived in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. By the early nineteen-nineties, the very way of life of the Nuba and Nuba Kau was being threatened by the second Sudanese Civil war which started in the early nineteen eighties. Even as late as 1991, it was estimated that there were 1.3 million people in the various Sudanese tribes that constituted the Nuba. They are now, for all practical purposes, extinct. They are not all dead. Some of them, and their descendants still live, but the survivors are not recognizable as Nuba. At least, they are not recognizable as the Nuba that Leni Riefenstahl documented.

Cultures that had survived unmolested for hundreds of years disappeared in the blink of an eye. By the early nineties, many Nuba women and children had been forced into slavery, and the Nuba men were forced to fight in a civil war that shouldn't have concerned them and in which they didn't believe. Most of the Nuba men were forced to accept Islam with a gun pointed at them or their loved ones. The Nuba, one of the last groups of people who were truly free from serious encroachment by modern strife, modern religion, and modern "values", was obliterated by the senseless violence of the second Sudanese Civil War, though most of us in America didn't even notice.

If it weren't for Leni Riefenstahl, we wouldn't have even known they existed. They were a physically captivating and beautiful people with fascinating traditions and a view of life very different from the modern western view. Some would use the word "primitive" to describe them, but that is a word loaded with preconceptions and inherently conveying a belief that one way -- the speaker's way -- is best. The Nuba culture and way of life worked tremendously well for a large group of people for an incredibly long time. It resisted change for decades because there was no benefit to changing; their culture and traditions worked well for them and it would be hard to argue that the people who were Nuba are better off today for having been "modernized" at the point of a gun. It is hard to imagine two systems of belief more different than traditional Nuba culture -- which saw no shame in bodies or sex -- and modern Islam.

You can see a documentary from 1993 on the then-vanishing Nuba culture called "The Right to be Nuba" here on YouTube. As a general rule, I have no plans to discuss political or world matters in this blog and am about as non-political as a human can be. But I can't help but be sad when I look at the stunning photographs that make up Leni Riefenstahl's legacy. It seems wrong to me, on more than one level, to think that these beautiful images from not so very long ago, represent a culture that no longer exists.

Someday, when my talent is up to it, It is very much my intention to do one or more sculptural works based on the Nuba and Nuba Kau as Leni knew and documented them; the way they existed before the Sudanese Civil War killed so many of them and devastated their culture.

If you can afford it, Leni Riefenstahl's Africa is a visual feast that you really shouldn't miss.