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Non finito.

Cold, and then hot.
From Ice Age art to the art of Vodou.

By Anthony Howell.

A small (3.7cm long), 35000-year-old mammoth from the Swabian Jura. Image: Universität Tübingen via Spiegel.WE ARRIVED IN Europe 45,000 years ago. Neither of us got here first…

On a small pendant nudged subtly into the shape of a mammoth there’s a series of neat crosses. Maybe 23,000 years old. Did he mark his kills on his mammoth? Was he a he? A girl may have been as ferocious in the hunt as any contemporary lioness.

“May have been.” This modal form of the past perfect saturates palaeontology. Conjecture here serves us no better than metaphysics serves contemporary philosophy, now sensibly employed as the handmaid of science. The best we can do is to describe, and eschew conjecture.

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Their art is one that excels in using the shape that is already there. The upward thrust of a fragment of antler. Well, this could be a leaping horse – the leaping feeling, rather than jumping or rearing, coming from the torque of that particular fragment of antler.  Why did they work with fragments and not with the whole antler, I wonder. I once picked up a single antler that had been shed, in its entirety, when cantering ahead of the others as a nine year old, on a riding tour with my mother across the windswept Hardanger Plateau. I rode a Norwegian fjord horse with its typically short mane (my horse was actually pony-sized).

The Hardanger as it is today would have been what the Ardeche looked like back then, and the massif central. This would have been a landscape familiar to early man. Bleak, and devoid of trees. Tundra. There must have been plenty of whole antlers lying about. Maybe a whole antler had too much of the animal still in it, but if you drew with a flint on a fragment of antler the image of a deer – well, maybe the spirit of the deer was renewed. Whatever the reason, it was a fetching idea, and you did it meticulously.

Because of its naturally hogged mane, my fjord horse was just like the horses you might see in the caves of Altamira or Lascaux. I saw Lascaux the year after. I was saddened to discover that Altamira had already closed to the public by the time I got to Spain, not long after that. Now I am glad they have closed the caves, and have respect for what they have done, from the very start, at Chauvet.

'Lion man' figure. Image: J. Duckek/Wiki.But I’m not suggesting they only drew mammoths on tusks or deer on antlers. The famous “lion man” was carved out of a piece of tusk, its bandy legged shape taking the hollow inside the tusk into account – there again, working with the shape that is already there. It’s a man rather like a doll with a lion’s head, the curve of the tusk goes right through his body.

We all appreciate fragments, and fragment poetry. Sappho – a modern by comparison – wrote this some 20,000 years later:

FRAGMENT 31

He appears to me, that one, equal to the gods,
the man who, facing you,
is seated and, up close, that sweet voice of yours
he listens to

And how you laugh your charming laugh. Why it
makes my heart flutter within my breast,
because the moment I look at you, right then, for me,
to make any sound at all won’t work any more.

My tongue has a breakdown and a delicate
— all of a sudden — fire rushes under my skin.
With my eyes I see not a thing, and there is a roar
that my ears make.

Sweat pours down me and a trembling
seizes all of me; paler than grass
am I, and a little short of death
do I appear to me.

But all may be ventured, since even…

–translation by Gregory Nagy.

THE FRAGMENT IS a key ingredient in the aesthetic notion of non finito – or the art of incompletion. The fragment always refers to its potential, so there is a relationship that can be suggested between the unfinished and infinity. Gothold Lessing enjoyed the unfinished action – the sculptor showing the archer just about to draw an arrow from the quiver – and Edmund Burke preferred the transitional season of Spring.

The preliminary gives a foretaste of what is to come. Since we are discussing the Spring of art, Burke is worth quoting:

The spring is the pleasantest of the seasons; and the young of most animals, though far from being compleatly fashioned, afford a more agreeable sensation than the full grown; because the imagination is entertained with the promise of something more, and does not acquiesce in the present object of the sense. In unfinished sketches of drawing, I have often seen something which pleased me beyond the best finishing; from the cause I have just now assigned.1

Mammoth: Roufignac. Image: PSU.Burke’s preference for the transitional may be cited as an introduction to the notion of incompletion, of fragments and improvisation. The cave paintings have a swift, improvisatory feel. Often they are superimposed, one on another. Very small tribes may have spoken different languages, but you needed a fair number of hunters for a mammoth hunt. What this tribe called a mammoth, another called a borogove. But if the hunters from several tribes came together in a cave, you could all agree on a drawing. What are we hunting? We are hunting that!

The drawings were fragments of a process. They were part of a whole. That larger process involved hunting, and eating as well as hunting; and then making use of every commodity the prey afforded. A new hunt may have meant that a new drawing needed to be added to those already created. Damn, there goes that modal again!

Leonardo advised looking into blemishes and blurs in the wall, and then drawing what the imagination prompted there. Early man did just that, seeing bison in the humps and cracks on the cave wall.

Antique fragments taught Renaissance artists and patrons to appreciate artistry, which could be perceived in the incomplete as much as in the finished artefact. That completion and incompletion are of dialectical consequence to each other is shown by the traditional opposition of Apollo to Dionysus, and that the two concepts are linked introduces the fragmentary aphorisms of Heraclitus and a paradoxical marriage of opposites.

If incompletion was an accepted state of value in the Renaissance, why not for early man? With this difference, perhaps: early man might work a fairly complete lion into a fragment of bone, while the renaissance artist might be more likely to leave an incomplete drawing on a complete canvas or sheet. Not by any means always, in either case. In fact the caves abound in unrepentant incompletion, which gives them their impressionist aura.

Of course it can be said that fragments are all we can expect from so long ago. But it’s more than that. They derived a positive thrill from depicting the animate on the accidentally evocative contour of something broken and no longer animate.

With the ice-age sculpture, Leonardo’s perception is very apparent. The stone has the woman already inside.

THAT’S A KEY idea in the twentieth century history of the Piraňa: a small tribe, hidden deep in the Amazon, whose language bears little relation to any other – a tribe whose notions are wonderfully discussed in Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett. Inside caves respected by the Piraňa are the epitomes of the animals – the ultimate jaguar for instance. He’s there inside the rock of the cave’s interior just as the unborn child is still asleep somewhere beyond the membrane the fertile stone figurine has been slipped inside. These comfortably Steatopygous little ladies certainly look as if they could be nicely envaginated. The unborn is deeper within, as the animals are deeper.

So we can now see how the idea doubles up. The vagina alludes to the cave, and the stone slipped inside is the fertile potential, because the child, the shape, the animal can be released from the stone.

The cave paintings of prehistory were never finished. There was no overall design as there was for the Sistine Chapel.

There is little evidence of soot from torches on the roofs of the caves, and I’ve had fun entertaining the hypothesis that the paintings were executed in the dark, perhaps by artists holding charcoal sticks in both hands. The image thus created would be there because the artist felt the activity of making it, just as great dancers have little need to look in the mirror, since they retain an image of themselves through the sensations they experience in their bodies.

Wiltshire on London. Image: stephenwiltshire.co.ukStephen Wiltshire, an autistic artist, can recreate a complex landscape at a single glance – every window, every branch, every chimney. For all we know, this way of seeing was commonplace in the ice-age.

Rather than being “finished”, the caves were simply abandoned when times changed and men began to live in different ways. Thus cave art is a record of that cave on one particular day – the day our ancestors left it forever, or the day when a rock fall blocked access to its chambers. At Chauvet, where the cave-floor is preserved, there are the prints of bears, as well as those of human adults and children. Perhaps we shared the cave – the bears moving in whenever we migrated South.

Sometimes tiny ivory figurines dating from 30,000 BC have been found pressed into subterranean crevices.

And sometimes the pieces of antler used are not fragments but spear-throwers. Each clearly has the right shape for the job; it’s an addition to the weapon that demonstrably lengthens the throw and its force. With their highly developed flint technology, the ice people were masters of their world – in Chauvet it looks as if the rhinos were saddled with wide belts that went around their stomachs. I like to imagine this had to do with well organised rhinoceros tournaments and a fair bit of gambling! There is little reason to suppose that these tribes were in awe of the wild life around them, though it is true that they recognised its vitality and its vital connection to them. But after all, they may well have hunted the mammoth to extinction (if it wasn’t climate change that did for them); a demise that may finally have contributed to the ultimate dissolution of their culture.

The ability to sharpen stone gave them their mastery, and it’s good that the exhibition, Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind, currently at the British Museum (through 15 May 2013; catalogue, by curator Jill Cook, here), includes a flint – wonderful in its symmetry and honed double-bladedness, as well as the flint apparatus for flaking. While symmetry may be perceived in nature, it took thousands of years for this to develop as a quality fashioned by craft (and a perception with significant ramifications). Here is technology raised to the level of art. For the scratches incised by flint on ivory are as delicate as any filigree of Arabic embroidery. This changes my view of the Ice Age artist, since considering only the cave drawings, I had seen that artist, as I say, as displaying a penchant for impressionism, but these formidably accurate miniatures dispel such a notion.

In the Ardeche, I have visited a nudist campsite called the Plage des Templiers.  It’s located in a gorge so deep you have to send your camping gear down by flying fox. As you descend by scrambling down through the craggy limestone gullies into the woodland below, you start to take off your clothes and may well encounter a naked man armed with an axe who is on a mission to bring back some firewood.

Chauvet. Image: Jean Clottes/Chauvet Cave Scientific Team via New Yorker.Later you can stroll down the banks of the green river at the bottom of the gorge, happily naked with your friend in a wild landscape which used to be surveyed from on high by sixty pairs of Bonelli eagles. Once the kayaks have gone by, there is no sign of contemporary civilisation. You are naked as intended, and the Chauvet cave is beyond the rock bridge of the Pont du Garde, just a few miles away. The cave people would have strolled where you stroll – of course, it would have been much colder, and the vegetation far more northern and stunted, and they would have worn their furs. But it’s still a deliciously romantic sensation. You may not be cave people but you feel like Adam and Eve.

Sunbathing and swimming by the rock bridge, you may imagine it covered in brightly coloured drawings. Maybe the early people drew and painted everywhere, but of course the drawings outside have all washed away. Only those in the caves remain.

In Chauvet the hand is used as a mask (the hand placed on the wall, then over-painted, leaving its unpainted silhouette when removed) and also as a print. The former may have first given us the insight of an outline. The prints are often clustered together. Sometimes they lose definition, becoming collections of large red dots or blotches – and then, magically, the cluster of blotches takes shape as a mammoth.

Hands make art. Image: Bradshaw Foundtion.It’s through magic that the painting is produced. Dots and blotches play a key role in early art and in aboriginal art. They emit the buzz of pattern. They merge and separate and suggest shapes, particularly when the artist is under the influence of some hallucinogenic mushroom – shapes the shamanic trance may be telling him about.

TRANCE PLAYS A key role in Vodou, the belief system underpinning much of the art from Haiti that was brought together in a brilliant show called Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou which I was lucky enough to see in Nottingham back in November. Although this exhibition is over, there is a magnificent catalogue – which contains reproductions of most of the exhibits.

When thinking about art, there is a tendency generated by the twentieth century to set up a dialectical opposition between the terms “abstraction” and “figuration”. This is a false dichotomy. As handprints may evolve into blotches on the cave wall that group themselves into the shape of a mammoth in Chauvet, so a pattern of tiny linked hexagrams on a curved length of tusk may suggest that the tusk is a fish with sleek scales.

In the art of Haiti, pattern is strongly integrated with shape, figuration and meaning. A mass of sequins or tiny beads may evoke the stars in the sky embroidered onto the flounced skirt of a spirit.

Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou. Gallery 4. Nottingham Contemporary. Photo Andy Keate.A trance-induced immersion in the spots floating in front of one’s eyes – a drawing done with little dots (like bird-pecks) – the spots spilt across an aboriginal boomerang or the spots the artist Roger Ackling makes by scorching them into a piece of driftwood with the aid of the sun and a magnifying glass; the tiny multi-coloured discs of sequins, beadwork, tracery – combined with the patter of drums and rain. Such “stippling” brings the figurative form of the spirit to the surface as if it were a fish tempted by crumbs you cast on the waters. Form emerges out of decoration.

THERE IS LITTLE art from Haiti from before 1941 as all the artefacts created prior to that were destroyed in a campaign that started with one Sténio Vincent’s 1935 decree against “superstitious beliefs” and then this campaign was ruthlessly promulgated by the Catholic authorities – a crime against culture to rival the demolition of the twin Buddhas in Afghanistan. However, the artists of Haiti swiftly created new works, and everything was exuberantly recreated.

Haitian art and experience pays respectful attention to the intersection where the living cross over into the realm of the dead. The word for “crossroads” is Kafou. And it’s a two-way exchange. By your behaviour in a trance, people know which Iwa or spirit has crossed over and is possessing you. A rich pantheon of supernatural entities provides inspiration for the artists: there’s Danbala and his wife Ayida Wèdo, regal spirits of wisdom and fertility, their snake tails entwined, Papa Legba, the master of the crossroads, and Baron Samedi, the spiv who oversees the underworld, together with his gigolo sidekick.

But the underworld is not necessarily a malign place. It exists because it persists in the thoughts of the living – in their thoughts and in their dreams. If you dream about your mother, you return her to life. And you can “pass across” without too much reluctance, because you know you will be kept alive in the dreams and memories of your children and your friends.

Each of the spirits has an equivalent in the Catholic hagiography – so when the Roman church attempted the repression of Vodou, worshippers were able to adapt. While ostensibly paying homage to a Christian Saint, one was covertly acknowledging the Iwa with which the saint was “twinned” – so Vodou not only survived, it grew all the richer for being able to accommodate another faith within its labyrinthine references. There’s a background chorus of zombies, of course – spirits from slavery times who were brutalised by their experience sweating it out in the rum distilleries. Veritably the living dead, whose volition had been taken away.

Exhibition catalogue. Nottingham Contemporary.

Exhibition catalogue: Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou, by Alex Farquharson and Leah Gordon, co-curators. Nottingham Contemporary.

HAITI WAS THE only “slavery” colony to throw off the yoke of its masters, the French, in 1804. It was the first independent nation of Latin America and the Caribbean, the first black-led republic in the world, and the second republic in the Americas. The heroes of its revolution drew inspiration from Queen Anacaona– who resisted the Spanish conquest for many years until she was captured by the Spanish and hung in front of her people in 1503. Queen Anacaona is revered in Haiti as one of the country’s founders. The heroes of the Haitian uprising, men like Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, also figure in the iconography of Haitian art. Often the spirits wear the garb of military and naval officers at the time of Bonaparte, festooned with cockades and gold braid. Spirits of perhaps less than staid morals, such as Madame Brigitte (the consort of Baron Samedi), appear in the opulent ball-gowns that, as Alex Farquharson, co-curator of Kafou, writes, “evoke the outrageous luxury of slave-owning colonial society in Sainte-Domingue, as if these female goddesses have supplanted the former colonial masters and mistresses, this time on behalf of their servitors.”

As with all faiths, there is good and bad. To infiltrate the dream life of the people they so brutally oppressed, the Duvaliers – Papa and Baby Doc – used Vodou priests as informers. They could hand you over to the far-from-tender mercies of the paramilitary force nicknamed Tonton Macoute (Uncle Gunnysack), named for an ogre who kidnaps naughty children by bagging them and taking them to devour for breakfast. This infiltration gave Vodou a bad name, obviously – just as when the torturers in the Naval School in Buenos Aires played tangos loudly enough to drown out the screams during the time of disappearances. When you heard the tangos, you knew what was going on. But neither Vodou nor the tango can be blamed for these subterfuges.

For nearly two centuries, Haiti has been considered a pariah state, first by slave-owning empires, then by liberals appalled by the bloody dictatorships of the Duvaliers. This isolation has served its art well, since its refreshing mythology has been allowed to flourish independently of the west. And what emerges is an artistic culture that has its roots in revolution.

HAITIAN ART IS not exactly fragmentary – often the paintings are busily complete – yet it shares with the ice age a sense that it is part of a process. Its purpose is to evoke, celebrate and entice the Iwa to manifest their presence among the living. If the ice age celebrates man as animal, Haiti celebrates man as ancestor. With a large part of its population illiterate, the image may tell folks more than words, as it did for the ice people. These distantly separated artists – those of the cold and those of the heat – also have in common that delight in making use of what is already there. For where the cave artist picks up a fragment of tusk, the Haitian artist makes use of junk – old car tires, abandoned dolls, rusted oil drums.

Kafou at Nottingham Contemporary, sculptures by Pierrot Barra, Gallery 3.  Photo by David Sillitoe.Here, I feel, the adaptation is transformational: the car tire is not just a car tire, it could be a face framed by some fantastic bonnet, while the cheap mass-produced doll could become a holy statuette, richly decorated with beads and hand-painted fabric, as in the work of Pierrot Barra.

These are not anonymous, naïve artists. The practitioners’ groups, movements and workshops place a strong emphasis on originality. I admire the work of Andre Pierre, which conveys something of the delicacy of Indian or Persian painting, while Gerard Valcin’s mermaid and fish spirits – the men in their suits and uniforms, the women in their see-through blouses – come together in a buzzy, flat contemporary pattern. Levoy Exil uses chiaroscuro to create disturbingly ambivalent scenes where the black reads as background but then equally it reads as shape – an idea which has political as well as pictorial implications.

[video_lightbox_youtube video_id=Ulz8USSuQH8&rel=0 width=450 height=253 anchor=http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/kafouvidanchor150.jpg]Gérard Fortune’s Ezili/Serpent shows a woman standing on a snake with a smaller woman in her arms – who may be a child but is not an infant. The smaller person is waving at us. They are presented between blossoming trees, and the snake is marked with ochre flecks and the entire picture is made out of spots and dots and petals and patterns. It’s op-art – so much so that the image keeps getting overwhelmed by the abstract energy of its method of rendition, and then re-emerging as image only to get overwhelmed once more. It’s a masterpiece.

Each artist seems positively bursting with identity – far more identity in many respects than the latest Goldsmiths alumni with sights set on the Tate.

Jean-Michel Basquiat had roots going back to Haiti, and during a filmed interview, one Haitian artist talked admiringly about the K Foundation’s iconoclastic piece of performance art, back in the seventies – when they burned a million pounds. Haitian artists are aware.  They may be outsiders, but theirs is not outsider art – it’s contemporary art – and some of the very best being created today.

In a documentary called Dreamers, made in 2002 by Jørgen Leth, we get this statement by Gérard Fortune, which shows how in Haiti the painting is a product of a process:

GF: It’s God who teaches me everything. I call Him and He helps me. And when I’ve made something beautiful, I always thank Him. It’s a boat that brings people to the towns in the provinces. It’s a boat shaped like a fish. It’s like the fish that swallowed Jonah. It’s taken them and brings them to their destination. You see, sometimes I can’t sleep at night. Then I get up and start to paint. I pray to Jesus and then I light a candle to see better. Then I paint all night. That’s the time when I make the best paintings, because it’s quiet and nobody talks to you. That’s when the spirits come to inspire you.

JL: As a painter, do you believe there is a connection between art and magic?

GF: It’s through magic I produce the painting.

 ♦


Anthony Howell, a former dancer with the Royal Ballet, was founder of The Theatre of Mistakes and performed solo at the Hayward Gallery and at the Sydney Biennale. His articles on visual art, dance, performance, and poetry have appeared in many publications including Art Monthly, The London Magazine, Harpers & Queen, The Times Literary Supplement. He is a frequent contributor to The Fortnightly Review. In 2001 he received a LADA bursary to study the tango in Buenos Aires and now teaches the dance at his studio/gallery The Room in Tottenham Hale. He is the author of a seminal textbook, The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice.

Notes:

  1. Edmund Burke, ‘Infinity in Pleasing Objects’, A Philosophical Enquiry, p. 70.
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Juliet Siriema
Juliet Siriema
10 years ago

Lovely review of the Haiti exhibition (I also like the more recent one you did of Mark Leckey). Just one minor correction, if I may: the vodou spirits are called ‘Lwa’, not ‘lwa’. When written in lower case it’s kind of ambiguous but if you think about the origin of the word (a contraction of French ‘le roi’) it makes sense. I only know this because my husband knows Mauritian creole. Also, the K Foundation thing was in the mid nineties, not seventies. Apparently they really regretted it afterwards! But I think it’s brilliant that the Haitian artist is able… Read more »

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