DOUBLE VISION

Brian Nissen

..only an auctioneer can equally and

impartially admire all schools of Art..

(Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Artist.)

A scene from a popular film I once saw comes to mind. The heroine is preparing herself to sleep in a jungle clearing in a remote part of northern Australia. She is a young, blonde, beautiful reporter on assignment from New York, and has come to do a story about a famous crocodile hunter. He is trying to convince her that there is no danger in sleeping out in the jungle. Out of the night an aborigine in full ceremonial dress suddenly appears and confronts her. She screams. She is terrified. The hunter tells her that the aborigine is a friend of his, and means no harm. Regaining her calm, she takes out her camera, and pointing it at the aborigine, prepares to take some photos of him. The aborigine waves an admonishing finger at her, saying - ‘You can not take my picture’. She lowers the camera, apologizing profusely. ‘Please forgive me — I should have known better. Of course you people believe that capturing your image is like capturing your soul. How insensitive of me. I’m sorry’ …and so on. ‘No no,’ says the aborigine ‘You can not take my picture — you have forgotten to take the lens cap off your camera….’

When looking at art that comes from a culture not our own, we have to look at it with an awareness of the context in which it was made. We should realize that our frames of reference will probably inhibit or distort our appreciation of what we are looking at. It is not a problem of loss of certain nuances, but rather of misreading. What we see is a translation. Our version of the Other. When dealing with archaic or aboriginal art we are immediately confronted with a contextual gap.

No one doubts that the cult of Primitivism among early twentieth century artists served as a catalyst, a stimulus to their imagination and as an instrument that helped them to demolish worn out concepts and jaded aesthetic canons. But their appreciation had precious little to do with the real meaning and potency of the works they held in such esteem. They imposed their own contexts on them — mostly exotic, colonial or romantic idealizations (the noble savage), the purity of naïve art, infantile art and art of the deranged.

Examples abound of the pitfalls of cross-culturalism. I remember the great 1984 exhibition ‘Primitivism in the 20^th Century at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, so flawed by the insistent pairing of ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’ works side by side in a most banal and misleading way. Invidious juxtapositions. I recall some small African aboriginal sculptures in the exhibition — figures with greatly distorted features; bulbous limbs and zany anatomical structures that were heralded as examples of expressionist sculpture until later they were found to be realistic portraits of deformed and diseased people.

In New Guinea after their first contact with Europeans, ‘natives’ were seen wearing Kellog cereal boxes as ceremonial headgear, to the great amusement of the foreigners. But then we put their magic artefacts in our museums. We do the same violence to context, but of course will not recognize it as such.

I remember the tremendous impact my first encounter with pre-columbian sculpture had on me when I went to live in Mexico, and especially my first sight of the great Aztec monolith, the earth goddess Coatlique. This enormous, brooding stone is surely one of the world’s greatest and most powerful sculptures. It also has a strange history, and has been through a stunning metamorphosis of contexts. Octavio Paz has written a telling account of her various incarnations — from Goddess to Demon to Monster to Masterpiece. Torn down from the great temple of Tenochtitilán where she had reigned as a goddess she was buried by Spanish soldiers as a pagan idol, Coatlique laid undiscovered until 1790, when she was uncovered by accident, categorized as a demon, and was promptly reburied. She was again excavated briefly in 1803 so that Von Humboldt could take a look at her and then reburied. Later she was dug up once more, and kept in the university hidden behind a screen and regarded as a freak, a monster. Eventually she was put on public display, now seen as a scientific and anthropological curiosity. Today she is to be seen in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, and exalted as a masterpiece, a sublime work of art. The Coatlique monolith is still the same the same object, but the metamorphosis of the meanings attributed to it is the result of it existing in different contexts. We appreciate it as a work of art, but its spiritual context is lost to us, as is all art of the past that existed as spiritual magnets. Coatlique has elaborate signs and symbols carved on her; she was a physical and a conceptual presence. There are also signs and symbols carved under her massive feet. These were only ever seen by the sculptors who made her and the attending priests who directed the work. The magical functions of these hidden carvings are no less potent and important as those on the visible parts of the sculpture. The fact that they would never be seen was irrelevant. We are not looking at an ‘art object’, but at a magical presence, a force whose power was dependent on belief, and is therefore untranslatable. Her meaning and intensity are all but lost on us and we are reduced to admiring what is, as it were, a shadow of the original.

In 1990 the flying birdmen of Papantla from the state of Vera Cruz in Mexico were brought to New York to perform as part of the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition ‘30 Centuries of Mexican Art’. They perform a dance on top of a hundred foot high pole and then spin off, unwinding on ropes in ever widening circles. Their pole was erected between the twin skyscrapers in lower Manhattan. As they prepared for their dangerous dance, insurance agents arrived, and insisted they change their splendid ceremonial headdresses for crash helmets. A safety net was also required. The birdmen always hold a ritual ceremony before each dance to insure their safety, which involves sacrificing a rooster by cutting its throat. An outraged Society for the Protection of Animals arrived to stop the ceremony. The birdmen refused to perform without the security of their ritual. Negotiations between the Mexican Consulate and the organizers became heated. Finally the requirements of crash helmets and safety nets were set aside, but the Birdmen held their own safety ritual in secret, cutting a rooster’s throat in the nearest men’s toilet in the basement of the skyscraper.

Although we see the art of the past and that of other cultures through the dark mirror of interpretation in which meanings and motivations may only be dimly perceived, many formal aspects of their works affect our sensibilities and perceptions through an amalgam of affinities. Malcolm Lowry’s great book ‘Under the Volcano is regarded in Mexico as a modern Mexican classic - a difficult and rare achievement for a foreigner writing about Mexico. Other English writers — talents such as D.H.Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Graham Greene had been in Mexico and written about it, but their observations and perceptions of the country tend to be superficial novelized travelogues, or as in the case of Evelyn Waugh an acerbic and jaundiced view of it. Lowry didn’t necessarily understand Mexico any more than they did, yet his novel touches a very particular Mexican nerve. The point is that Lowry had a strong temperamental affinity with the country and its ways. That was his point of contact.

The meaning of a thing is tied to its context — change one and you change the other. If we want to tune in to other minds doing other things, we should tune into both the doing and the context in which it is being done.

Published in (Parenthesis) Vol. 1 #5 - April 2000. Mexico