The African Cosmogram Matrix in Contemporary Art and Culture

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which scholars analyze and reconcile the symbols and the ideology of an ancient African (Kongo) symbol called a cosmogram. Ritualistic spaces that symbolically overlap with the Christian crucifix and Buddhist mandala, graphic imagery in the mapping, layering and cyclical rhythms of space and motion in visual art, as well as performance, sound and film all fall into this focus. For instance, this effort includes the mythology of P-Funk that include a group of recurring characters, themes and ideas related in a series of concept albums, primarily from George Clinton and his founded bands Parliament and Funkadelic. Contemporary artists and practitioners of Afrofuturism construct cosmic centers such as cosmograms that are mental maps of spiritual places and spaces that represent African Atlantic cultural improvisation and the wholeness of the Universe.

keywords:

• Afrofuturism
• black theology
• cosmogram
• funk
• liminality
• multimedia
• performance

Notes

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6 Johnson, Cross Road Blues.

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8 MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, 49.

9 Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 108.

10 MacGaffey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, 126.

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16 Parliament, Deep (New York: Casablanca Records, 1978).

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19 Clark, “Jean-Michel Basquiat.”

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23 Funkadelic, Mommy, What's a Funkadelic? (Detroit: Westbound, 1970).

24 Mark Reynolds, “That Thing that Makes Funk Funky: ‘The One: The Life and Music of James Brown’.” Pop Matters, last modified April 18, 2012, http://www.popmatters.com/column/157147-that-which-makes-funk-funky-the-one-the-life-and-music-of-james-brow (accessed October 30, 2015).

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29 Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 229.

30 Banks, Digital Griots, 123.

31 Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2005), 142.

32 Lev Manovich, “The Poetics of Augmented Space,” in Visual Communication (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2006), 219.

33 Mark Dery, “Black to the Future,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 192.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nettrice R. Gaskins

Nettrice Gaskins, PhD, majored in Visual Art at duPont Manual High School in Louisville, KY. She earned a BFA in Computer Graphics with Honors from Pratt Institute in 1992 and a MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. She received a doctorate in Digital Media from Georgia Tech in 2014. Her model for “techno-vernacular creativity” is an area of practice that investigates the characteristics of this production and its application in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics). Her essays are included in Laura Hollengreen, Celia Pearce, Rebecca Rouse and Bobby Schweizer, eds., Meet Me at the Fair: A World's Fair Reader (Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press, 2014), 155–164; Vicki Callahan and Virginia Kuhn, eds., Future Texts (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2015), 60–74; and Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, eds., Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 27–43.