ACLA Conference 2007
Puebla, Mexico 19-21 April
This is the full text of a paper presented at the above conference by David Corbet, sans footnotes
© Le Flaneur
1. Art and language
This paper investigates the intersection between so-called ‘shamanic’ practice in the visual arts, and the academic/curatorial/critical context within which such practice emerges, with particular reference to the contradictions inherent in academic research in this area. This arises, appropriately to this conference, from my research into the role of text (and other symbol-based language systems) in the contemporary plastic arts. While painting, sculpture and printmaking have historically often been concerned with depicting events from literature and mythology, their present entanglement with the forms of written language is essentially a postmodern phenomenon. At some point the division between spoken language and the realm of object-making has became irrevocably blurred, with texts increasingly used to add layers of meaning to works of plasticity, at many different levels, from the overt to the implied. As we shall see, certain kinds of artists have always been confident practitioners across image making, language and performance, and their work provides a prism through which to view and explore some of the philosophical issues affecting creative practice in our time. It seems to me that the visual arts are still in many respects playing out an endgame arising from the immense intellectual upheavals of early last century, and that the next great shift of consciousness is not yet upon us, but is certainly coming.
Which brings me to the word ‘shaman’. The enormous literature on the subject would make a two-hour-paper in itself, but a brief diversion into the word’s etymology is worthwhile. According to the Hungarian anthropologist Mihály Hoppál it is the Turkic-Tungus word for a traditional healer and spirit guide found in Turkic-Mongol areas of Northern Asia such as Siberia and Mongolia, and translates as ‘he or she who knows’ (from the Tungusic root “sa” – “to know”. The word has passed from Sanscrit (śramana – ascetic) through Pali (śamana), Chinese (sha men), Tungusic (sămán), Turkik-Tungusic (shaman), Russian and German into English. The religious historian Mercia Eliade has described a shaman as “a medicine man, priest, and psychopomp. He cures illness. He directs the communal sacrifices and he escorts the souls of the dead to the outer world.” ‘Shamanic illness’ is also a concept referred to by many scholars – whether literal or metaphorical, and shamans frequently achieve their status by way of extreme personal trauma and out-of-body experiences. These trials and subsequent enlightenments are of course a common feature of many religious figures in history. There is no universal gender requirement, however in some societies (for instance Korea) shamans are always women. Hoppál questions whether the term ‘shamanism’ is appropriate, and proposes the use of the term ‘shamanhood’ as less suggestive of a fixed set of practices, emphasising shamanic knowledge:
A shaman is a person who is an expert in keeping together the multiple codes through which this complex belief system appears, and has a comprehensive view of them in his/her mind with certainty of knowledge. The shaman uses (and the audience understands) multiple codes: he/she expresses meanings in many ways (in musical, verbal, choreographic forms, and meanings are manifested also in objects, e.g. amulets). Thus his/her audience knows the used symbols and meanings — that's why shamanism can be efficient: people in the audience trust it. Such belief system can appear to its members with certainty of knowledge.
He cites Finnish anthropologist Juha Pentikèainen’s view that shamanism is a “grammar of mind, because shamans need to be experts in the folklore of their cultures”. Shamanic practices occur, with wide variation, in most regions of the world, most prominently among indigenous peoples, but with some important manifestations in late 20th century and contemporary western art.
Naturally, there is often a whiff of pseudoscience and mysticism in the air as soon as shamanism or occultism is mentioned, and to a degree this goes with the territory. The term ‘paperback shamanism’ has been coined in reference to some of the popular literature, for instance the works of Carlos Castaneda, with which most Americans would be familiar. This paper embraces a broad usage of the term, drawing on anthropology, comparative religion, linguistics, art history and aspects of popular culture. In this broad sense shamanism can be described as a set of practices concerned with metaphysical or psychic processes, and the focus of my research is on three key attributes that appear to be common to all such practice:
knowledge + ritual + transformation
2. The artist as shaman
Two overlapping spheres of contemporary shamanic practice in the arts are observable. The first is the Euro-American tradition from Dada and Fluxus through much contemporary performance, body, installation and environmental art. All such practice occurs within heavily mediated societies where an influential Academia gestates, and often sustains, the artist. The second sphere is the vast body of ritual practice still actively ‘lived’ by many indigenous peoples, where technology is only gradually penetrating rural areas, and oral histories and tribal knowledge remain far more powerful cultural factors than media or formal education. In such societies shamans are often important figures at village level, fulfilling an acknowledged role of seer, maker of sacred objects, conductor of rituals and keeper of arcane knowledge. Although this is changing, historically the artefacts made by such individuals have been consigned to ethnographic museums and excluded from consideration as mainstream contemporary art. Alongside this has prospered the western, primitivist idea of the pure, untouched ‘wild man’ at one with nature. A growing body of scholars, for example the contemporary anthropologist Michael Taussig, interrogates the evolving post-colonial encounter between indigenous and settler peoples, and has comprehensively demolished many of these notions. It is perhaps more useful to think in terms of degrees of 'mediation' when considering cultural production in tribal societies. Based on my own experiences travelling in Africa and Australia, it seesm evident that at the farthest end of the scale (from the tertiary-educated western urban ‘neo-primitivist’) there exists the unmediated tribal shaman, uninfluenced by Academia, and living in such a way that 'ritual' and 'life' are not separate, but are one and the same thing. The expanding nexus between these poles is in fact where we can learn most, and gives rise to a dynamic third force – the third-world artist who is sustained by a tribal network at home, but also functions partially within the international curatorial system, through cultural exchanges, biennales and the like.
In Australia the largest growth in recent decades has been in the ‘genre’ of Indigenous painting (on bark and on canvas), which regularly achieves unprecedented sales figures at auction, and has become an extremely lucrative industry, sustaining many remote communities, dealers of varying reputation, and a considerable curatorial and institutional infrastructure. If one reflects that making paintings – in the sense of discreet, portable artworks that can be bought and sold – is a recent phenomenon among Australian Indigenous artists, with synthetic paint and canvas becoming widespread only in the last fifty years or so, then some might find it surprising that the best work is so very good, and has been rapidly taken up by the major contemporary art collections of the world, transcending the ethnographic tag that has dogged aboriginal art for centuries. The 10-year old ‘art career’ of the celebrated contemporary painter Paddy Bedford (Goowoomji), an 84 year-old senior ‘lawman’ of the Gija people in northwest Australia, is revealing. Bedford began painting on canvas and board only in 1998, and he is one of many extraordinary individuals, such as the revered late artists Emily Kame Kngwarreye (who began at 80) and Rover Thomas (at around 70) who more or less instantaneously began to make significant ‘modern’ paintings at an advanced age. This phenomenon is by no means confined to Australia, and I will return to it presently.
3. Does art matter?
It seems evident that humankind’s undying love affair with the plastic arts is driven by the perception that there are rare works of art have a unique power to move us profoundly – to reveal to us our humanity, our mortality, and our place in the universe. The same can of course be said of great literature, theatre, cinema, dance and music, with some important differences. Walter Benjamin spoke of the “aura” (which he equates with authority and/or authenticity) of unique works of art. In our digitally mediated world of images his central thesis that “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of a work of art” is worth revisiting. He defines authenticity as “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced”. Benjamin’s concept of aura proposed qualities inherent in the physical object, but he importantly, he acknowledges its ritual origins: “We know that the earliest works originated in the service of a ritual – first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of a work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function.”
When we talk today about the ‘power’ or ‘aura’ of a work of art, either ancient or modern, we are surely describing a personal experience which transcends the purely formal or aesthetic attributes of the work – something we ourselves bring to the encounter. Yet I’m sure we have all had the experience, for example when contemplating a major Rothko, of an almost palpable ‘hum of power’ which seems to ‘emanate’ from certain works. Is this the same thing as Benjamin’s aura/authority/authenticity? And if it is, why do many reproductions of Australian Indigenous works retain strong elements of their ‘hum of power’ even on the printed page? Does the Mona Lisa have the the hum? Hard to say – its stratospheric value, dimly lit shrine and bullet-proof glass generate their own potent aura. Does the Rothko still have the hum, if we encounter it out of context? What about an ‘original multiple’ screenprint of Warhol’s Marilyn? What about a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde (Damien Hirst), or more problematic still, Explaining art to a dead hare (Joseph Beuys)?
A 2004 British poll of 500 art experts named Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) – a ‘readymade’ (i.e. mass-produced) ceramic urinal – as the most influential artwork of all time. It is inscribed “R.Mutt” – a homonym for the German word armut, meaning poverty, and in this single act the international phenomenon of Arte Povera was prefigured. The British press and public of course heaped vitriol on the poll, and seemed to assume Fountain was a recent work by some attention-seeking young ‘art star’, but of course it has been sitting quietly in the Tate Gallery for decades, and its presence there illuminates a critical articulation point in 20th century culture – the birth of conceptualism, and the subsequent eclipse of ‘retinal’ art. Duchamp’s readymades revealed an important truth – that the significance of a work of art is not inherent in the formal structure of the work, only in the overlay of cultural meaning brought about by the act of creation, or in his case transformation. Although he would not have put it thus, Duchamp was practicing a kind of intellectual shamanism, giving us clues to the cosmic organising principles of the universe. Not only that, but he was engaging in that most shamanic of practices – transmutation.
4. Art and ritual
In considering ritual as a key attribute of shamanic practice, it is interesting to revisit the ontological theories of the once influential writer Jack Burnham, who in the 1970s analysed in some detail Duchamp’s immersion in esoteric knowledge, particularly Kabbalah, and the arcane alchemical and occult references throughout the maestro’s art and writings. Following Jung, Burnham advanced a general theory of universals, which is worth considering for a moment:
Universals account for the formation of three basis types of human communication: speech, gesture and iconicity. All forms of human facturing are surrogates for these fundamental means of communication. This fact [and Jung’s diagram] are crucial to the idea of religious paradox. The primary symbols of many organised religions constitute a formal or geometric basis for the system of universals controlling human thought. They are the containers of the various levels of knowledge. They represent metaphysical insight into the organising principle of life itself. They possess enormous power as sources of psychic energy. They recapitulate the ontology of natural growth, and more specifically the evolution of the human race and the intellectual and emotional development of every child. In effect the code of human universals lies in two contrasting forms: the first is in every human brain, the second is in all artefacts comprising the manmade world. Consequently the code is carried from generation to generation by two separate means: organically through the brain of every living individual, and inorganically through the trans-lingual relationships embodied in every artefact, writing and spacial arrangement. This invites a great paradox. All profound art and writing lies in conflict between being as the essence of spiritual revelation, and the illusional permanence of the written word, the icon, or the sacred space.
The ritual theory of myth espoused by ancient Greece specialist Jane Harrison and explains how storytelling, theatre, dance and music have evolved out of ‘primordial’ ritual, and the plastic arts (iconicity) must ontologically, have a common genesis:
In time ritual sustains itself through the use of icons and religious artefacts. At a later stage these degenerate into works of ‘art’. Just as we lose the art of living through formalised ritual, we began – many thousands of years ago – to transfer our hopes of maintaining the code of universals to inanimate objects: scrolls, books, paintings, sculpture and architecture.
In considering the work of Australian and other Indigenous artists who have created profound and universally acclaimed modern paintings with no formal ‘training’ as painters, and often without a preliminary sketch or any revision, we can see that these artists are in fact painting what they already ‘know’ – essentially the dreamings – creation stories and relationships to land – of their people. They are initiates into an ancient system of knowledge, and lifelong practitioners of body painting and other rituals. Their knowledge is handed down from generation to generation independent of any preserved physical code, and is sustained by ‘lived’ ritual. There are of course many layers of knowledge contained in such works – some of it only accessible to the members of the group whose particular dreamings or tribal totems are invoked, however the western enthusiasm for aboriginal art, independent of any special understanding of its motifs, suggests that something bigger is going on. These works may are very likely triggering within us innate and ancient psychic resonances and therefore, in Burham’s conception, giving us “intrinsic pleasure”.
If this is true, then one can postulate that the power and significance of any work of art lies in the clarity with which it expresses the ontology of our universe – the organising principles of life itself – hardwired into our DNA. This negates the search for ‘meaning’ in the causative sense, and very possibly undermines the basis of much artistic scholarship. Burnham suggests that “this continual coming-into-being has no definable origin or meaning; it in fact appears to be meaning itself.” These ultimately metaphysical attributes are common to all significant art, whether a cave painting, an Etruscan vessel, a ceremonial mask, a Da Vinci portrait, a Rover Thomas painting, a roomful of Roscoes or, in my opinion, a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde. And if the ontological thesis holds up, it is the same code that informs significant architecture, design, writing, performance, music and mathematics.
5. The intellectual as shaman
The problem with this metaphysical approach, and the work of the artists discussed here, is that like poetry, it is resistant to Academia’s taxonomical methods – the tendency to codify formal, aesthetic or cultural qualities assumed to be inherent in the physical object, in a highly structured and hierarchical fashion. According to Burnham:
By living from generation to generation through the medium of objects around us we create a series of surrogate styles and epistemological worlds, but even more important, we induce the permutative reduction of the universals themselves. Gradually the code is separated into thousands of pieces by our arts of historical progressivism. While the code is used daily in everyone’s mental operations, we unknowingly dissect it historically into thousands of pieces for spiritual insight, entertainment and scientific advancement. In the human war between causality and synchronicity, causality slowly wins in the shape of culture and its inorganic handmaidens. Certain classes of objects become enormously valuable without us really knowing why, on the other hand he word ritual become synonymous with boredom, tiring repetition, outdatedness and meaninglessness. And the inversion is complete.”
Duchamp’s cryptic late work The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) is considered by many to be an elaborate allegory for the systematic destruction of the ‘authenticity’ of art by its practitioners, the outward form revered long after its original power has been progressively leached away by contemporary practice, curatorship and scholarship. In this context, much contemporary practice can be seen as a self-conscious project by western artists to recreate the conditions where the art object is once again be seen as “an expendable container for the transmission of lived truths”.
Duchamp’s intellectual successor is widely considered to be Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986), the über-model for the 20th century western artist-shaman – part psychic healer, part seer, part guide, social provocateur, volkisch idiot-savant and nemesis of Academia. He was Professor of Monumental Sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (where he had studied after WW2) from 1961 until his expulsion in 1972, following a lengthy stand-off with the school’s authorities over his abolition of any entry requirements to his class, presumably in pursuit of his famous dictum that “everyone is an artist” .
Beuys was himself rather dismissive of Duchamp’s legacy, in a 1964 Aktion (action, or performance) famously proclaiming (and also painting) “das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet” (The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated), “because [Duchamp] stopped at the point where he could have developed a theory based on the work achieved, and the theory he could have achieved I am developing today”. The eighty year-old Duchamp, who died four years later in 1968, no doubt just smiled and said nothing.
The literature on Beuys is vast, and I have to assume the reader has a basic familiarity with his persona and self-created ‘legend’, if not the details of his prolific work and writing.
The art critic Robert Hughes has written witheringly of Beuys: “The late conversion of the Luftwaffe pilot, and the spiritual anguish that preceded it, have become an important part of the legend for his fans. … For them, Beuys’ wartime sufferings have joined van Gogh’s ear in the hagiography of modern art: and particularly the occasion in 1943 when he crashed in a JU-87 and was saved by wandering Tartar tribesmen who wrapped his traumatised body in felt and fat, thereby planting the germ of his later obsessive interest in fat and felt as art materials, emblems of healing and magic”.
The art historian John Moffit has analysed in detail Beuys’ shamanic imagery and personal mythology, and his obsession with anthroposophy – the “pseudophilosophy” enshrined in the writings of Rudolf Steiner. He has explained the artist’s trademark attire, and many of his otherwise inscrutable actions, as a series of ekphraseis – direct text-to-picture illustrations or ‘pictorialisations’ of Steiner’s written texts, particularly those dealing with the evolutionary process leading from chaos to order. He concludes that “despite taking as his immediate subject matter a sprawling body of pretentious and garbled writings … [Beuys] transcends this dross, transmuting his esoteric source materials into haunting, often unforgettable images, many of which breathed an undeniably great poetic and evocative power, some of which are invested with strange but undeniable beauty.”
If forced to choose one seminal Beuys’ work, my choice would have to be the legendary 1974 action at the Rene Block Gallery in New York, I like America and America Likes Me, in which, having been transported from JFK airport wrapped in felt, he cohabited an area of the gallery for 5 days with a live coyote, wielding a shepherd’s staff and protected by a felt cloak. There are many possible interpretations of this encounter. The coyote stands for America itself, but also for persecuted nature and the colonial encounter with Indigenous peoples, for whom the coyote has great mythic significance.
Beuys’ potent mix of arcane knowledge, mythology, Jesu-kitsch, animal spirits, ritualised actions, metaphorical materials and the physical processes of decay and rebirth, has created an artistic legacy that resonates visibly through the contemporary art of our time, although the extraordinary conceptual leap from a urinal signed ‘R.Mutt’ to cohabiting with a coyote is arguably yet to be repeated.
7. Material as metaphor
This sprawling legacy, which I term Povera Internationale, is apparent in the work of a multitude of contemporary artists of many cultures who share a preoccupation with aspects of tribal or ‘folk’ knowledge and ritual, and with complex transmutations – often with ‘poor’ materials acting as potent metaphors for psychic and metaphysical processes. One example is the ‘Cool Briton’ Damien Hirst, who has created some of the most profound and confronting works of the late twentieth century, and will no doubt create more One Thousand Years (1990) presents the viewer with a a large vitrine in which a grisly tableau continuously unfolds – a decaying cow’s head being slowly consumed by maggots in an endlessly repeating life cycle. Hatched flies buzz around the enclosed space, sometimes terminated abruptly by an insect-o-cutor. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1992), the aforementioned dead shark in tank of formaldehyde, exerts a horrific fascination even on the printed page, presenting us with a meditation on our own mortality, our ability to contemplate it (or not) and our deepest fears, chemically arrested from natural decay and ironically sanctified as ‘gallery art’ – and purchased in 2004 for $12 million by an American collector.
The French American Louise Bourgeois has largely ignored the art world and pursued her intensely personal work with single-minded purpose for decades, producing extraordinary tableaux and objects loaded with potent overlays of ‘ritualised’ meaning – by turns sinister, lyrical or ominous, seeming to distil her simple materials into objects of archetypal power. The late Jewish Iranian (sic) Choureh Feydzou spent a lifetime creating an immense and ‘living’ record of the accumulated materials of her life, incessantly worked upon, endlessly re-combined, labelled, boxed, bound, woven, bottled, preserved, coated in a patina of black pigment (her metaphor for death and rebirth) – a momentous journey into the life of a stranger through the ‘poor’ detritus of her existence, each tottering shelf or table supercharged with an unbearable pathos. By contrast, the Cherokee American Jimmy Durham, self-described ‘political’ artist, exhibits a deadpan humour worthy of Duchamp, ransacking art history, tribal ‘tourist’ art, found objects, written messages and his own Cherokee mythology, and transmuting his materials into objects of astonishing power and simplicity, “durable because they contain intensely meanings which they can no longer pour out.”
If time allowed, there is a fascinating journey to be had, both chronological and geographical, through the many contemporary manifestations of transformative art. I was fortunate in 2002 to spend several days at Documenta 11 in Germany, which was directed by the Nigerian-born curator and writer Okwui Enwezor, and provided an extraordinary overview of world practice, with an unusually high representation of artists from developing countries. These artists all operate somewhere on my notional scale between unmediated object-making and the heavily mediated western Academy, in a postcolonial biennale-land where tribal work now rubs shoulders with video and sound art, and where cultural identity, individual mythology and personal documentary have become as important components of many works as the physical object or installation.
8. In the beginning was the word
It is difficult to discuss the culrural context of such varied artists without detailed reference to their work, so I will close with a general observation. It is evident that much of this work cannot be solely understood within the framework of the visual arts, for these artists are the shamans of our time, operating across language forms, excavators of the future, spirit guides to our common destiny.
The linguist Roman Jakobson’s famously said that “in relation to language other (semiotic) systems are concomitant or derivative. Language is the principle means of information communication”. As the plastic arts appropriate the forms of writing, storytelling, theatre and cinema, we might conclude that they are just returning to an earlier state, before the specialisations that developed out of the European Rennaissance and Enlightenment. They are after all just different manifestations of the same universal meta-language, the same ten stories told over and over down the ages, the hero with a thousand faces. In response to the self-referential, fashion-driven mannerism that characterises so much contemporary ‘gallery art’ (as well as design, architecture and urban planning), could we be witnessing the re-emergence of the artist as a kind poet-scientist-philosopher-shaman, revealing to us profound truths about our common humanity, “re-living the Mysteries” and guiding us towards psychic wholeness? And if so, how does it affect our practice as creative artists, educators, curators or critics? This may ultimately be a question for pure philosophy, but perhaps there is a general case to be made for a more cross-disciplinary approach to the teaching of the creative arts. Such insights as I have gained from my semiotic adventures through the empire of signs have been immeasurably enriching to my own studio practice. The jury is still out on whether the art lives up to the thesis, but that must be the subject of another paper.
I will close with this thought from the Sioux writer Black Elk:
In filling a pipe, all space (represented by the offerings to the powers of the six directions) and al things (represented by the grains of tobacco) are contracted within a single point (the bowl or heart of the pipe), so that the pipe contains, or really is, the universe. But since the pipe is the universe, it is also man, and the one who fills he pipe should identify himself with it, thus not only establishing the centre of the universe, but also his own centre; he so expands that the six directions are of space are actually brought within himself. It is by this expansion that man ceases to be part, a fragment, and becomes whole or holy, he shatters the illusion of separateness.
From Black Elk Speaks : Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Thank you.
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