The Art of Language

After reading chapter two of Anthropology of Art and watching Waiting for Harry, we got a pretty good idea of the relation between art and social life in certain "primitive" societies. The next chapter we read was about art and visual communication and one of the most interesting sections was about art and language. Layton shows the relationship between the two and we can see that in a sense art functions the same way that language does.

Layton quotes Durkheim on symbolism: "...without symbols, social sentiments could only have a precarious existence...social life, in all its aspects and at every period of its history, is made possible by a vast symbolism" (93). He goes on to discuss the example of the totem in Australian religion where "objects selected as totems are frequently insignificant...so it is not the intrinsic nature of the thing whose name the clan bears that marks it out to become the object of the cult" (97). Instead, it is the value placed on it as a symbol, as something representative of something else. This tangible representative symbolism is what gives the totem its sanctity and power.

He then compares the creation of language which has two components:
" a) the division of experience into an ordered set of mental constructs,
  b) the convention association of each such construct with a specific set of verbal sounds" (99).

In other words, the combination of the tangible/ physical thing itself (the lines and dots that make up letters and words) and then the abstract association of sounds that follows makes up the symbolic construction of language. The signifiers and the signified.

After rambling on a bit more, Layton touches on something truly significant. "The arbitrary association between the signifiers of spoken language and the objects they may denote apparently distinguishes language from art, tempting us to assume that while we could not understand African speech without learning the appropriate language, we might be able to understand the art of that language's speaker" (100). As anthropologists, maybe this is the most important lesson we can get out of the anthropology of art. Art, just like language, contains cultural grammar rules and different words have different meaning in different cultures.

I never thought of it before, but Layton points out that speech is a ritual, perhaps, in fact,  the most universal ritual practice of all. One interesting difference is that language exists through the collective (it serves the purpose of allowing for dialogue) whereas art may or may not rely on the collective. Layton doesn't go into detail, but I think there are both collective and individual experiences of art which goes back to our discussions of Ellen D's aesthetic experience and making sense.

Obvious example of artists using text, rather than images, as a means of (visual) communication. 

Wait for it...wait for it...

In the movie Waiting for Harry we see art as a ritual as well as an essential part of social life and visual communication. The first part of the ritual painting of the coffin and bones for the funeral rites is building the private shade area where the men work. The shade area separates the men who are concerned with the ceremonial duties and the women who collect the food. The shade is important because each ritual has its own special area where it takes place. (The painting, the dancing, the placing of the coffin, etc. Even the tribal land they're camping on is sacred.) It is an area designated for making a certain kind of special. Next, the men begin planning what they're going to paint on the coffin and where to place the auspicious signs. Each person is assigned what to paint. This is not the time for "careless art, " as Robert Layton might call it, but instead highly specific art. In fact, the art for this ritual is representative; the pictures have meaning. They're meant to be visually communicative. It's not even enough to paint the symbols on the coffin if they're not done well. Paintings done correctly brings honor to the deceased man. We're told that the last time Les Hiatt attended one of these ceremonies the other group took one look at the coffin, proclaimed it unfit, and walked away. There is some criticism around a few of the pictures but luckily the men are satisfied. I thought it was interesting that this ritual ceremony unites people largely through the experience of art who don't even speak the same language. This whole interaction itself is quite a ritual expression of art, the way the coffin and then the bones are painted, the carving of the sand sculpture. The Anbarra people further incorporate art into their ritual and social life by painting their bodies for the funeral ceremony. This is something everyone partakes in from men to women and even children. The art that is being done is a way of passing on cultural tradition since Frank says "we build it now like they did in the old days before the Europeans." While many of the Anbarra people were dressed like Europeans, their art is one thing that continually distinguishes them from Western culture.

As far as the relationship between the anthropologists/ filmers and the people they're studying, it seems like the Anbarra people have accepted Les Hiatt. Frank refers to him as a brother and says that he will be responsible for his and Harry's burials one day. He seems to want to tell his story through the film which I think is really great. But I am surprised that Harry allowed the ceremony to occur in the daytime so that it could be filmed. For something so serious as the burial of a beloved uncle and the crossing of his spirit into the afterlife I would have thought that a little more tradition would be observed. It's great that we're able to learn about the culture of these people but it's rather sad that they have to be changed so that we can learn about them.

Stop Making Sense

My favorite Talking Heads album is called Stop Making Sense. Besides being an awesome dance party playlist, I think David Byrne is really onto something. While it is a naturally human thing to do, the problem with making sense is that we take the liberty to change things, to manipulate them, and I think in that we sometimes lose something. In terms of prehistoric art, instead of just enjoying it we apply an aesthetic. Ellen D writes that "for posttraditional humans whose thinking--and even fantasy and daydreams--is largely occupied with instrumental, pragmatic concerns, it is perhaps difficult to appreciate the more embedded, enactive, and symbolic type of thinking that is characteristic of nonliterates. Such persons may forget after they leave childhood that there are ways of knowing other than the rational, and that the world can be well and deeply experienced without being dissected and analyzed" (178). In other words, we, as the posttraditional humans she's talking about, apply our own modern logic to the cave paintings and this is how we "make sense" of them. We categorize and analyze and at some point there is an "AH-HAH!" moment when all the arrows point in the same direction or there is some magical ratios of bulls to horses. We think, "Now we understand!"...now that we have "dissected" and analyzed to a pulp. Maybe this is what the Paleolithic artists, all prehistoric artists, intended but they conceived of it in a holistic and symbolic way.  It's a paradox really. If modern people apply a strictly scientific understanding (as our culture would encourage) the art loses its cultural value, but if we only stand in awe we similarly lose an element of cultural value.  I think the real value comes not in understanding the art itself but understanding its relation to ourselves.  

In the modern world I think we conceptualize of art in a different way than our ancestors. We analyze and make sense in order to gather up experiences: we becomes experience mongers in a sense. What I mean is that we make sense of what we experience and then we spit back up bits and pieces as inspiration for a poem or  song or a painting, whatever. We are not "embedded" in the experience and we are absolutely not comfortable with things not making sense, even if our experience itself was elusive. We do not readily accept "ideas without exact reference which nevertheless have a compelling force of truth" (179).

This form of making sense is perhaps best represented in our quest to bring literacy around the world. This is the absolute be all and end all of making sense: we're making sense of the human mind, of the very thing that for a long time defined what it meant to be human: language. We break it down, assign discrete arbitrary symbols to represent words or ideas and associate them with specific meanings. In the end we fill up dictionaries full of these things and yet we seem to realize that many words mean different things to different people, words like love, beauty, fear, etc. They don't always make sense.

The reality is that at some point we have to stop making sense. To tell you a very personal story, at one point in the recent past I was completely in love with two different people. You might not understand this (you probably really can't just because you don't know me well enough and you don't know who I was in love with...but what I mean is that you might not be able to conceptualize how someone could be in love with two people). I kept trying to explain it other people and to myself, but I couldn't ever seem to really grasp the heart of how I felt. I couldn't put it in words. David Byrne's album title kept running across my brain. I realized that sometimes life doesn't make sense. You know the cliche sometimes bad things happen to good people... and when we try to impose a category or force an explanation it doesn't always fit. The human experience of life does not always make sense. Period.

Coming back to prehistoric art, I'm not saying we shouldn't try to make sense of it. In fact, I think there is something inherently valuable in the act of interpretation itself. But what we should realize is that these artists are past incarnations of ourselves, we are not isolated from them. There is no us and them...As Krisnamurti says, time is illusory. We are them.

Like a Rock: Paleolithic Sex...or lack thereof...

I've been trying to come up with a research topic for our final presentation. I thought I had a pretty interesting idea, that is what is the origin of erotic art? But in the Cave Painters Curtis writes, "it's also surprising that the caves are very chaste. There are pictures of vulvas, penises that are occasionally erect, pregnant women, and a variety of geometric shapes that suggest male or female genitals. but the animals are never actually mating and neither are the humans...one small, flat rock has an engraving of a man and woman having sex, but that is the only such representation ever found from these prehistoric times" (17).
In an attempt at humor, Curtis later quotes Leroi-Gourhan  saying that "'there are no scenes of copulation in Paleolithic art'... about ten years later the archaeologist Jean Clottes showed Leroi-Gourhan the engraving on a flat stone of a Paleolithic couple having sex. Leroi-Gourhan looked at the engraving for a moment and said, 'Well, I have written that there are no sexual scenes in Paleolithic art. Now there is at least that one'" (162).

La Marche, France

So already the chips are stacked against me. I start looking into my topic this week and I'm becoming more and more dismayed. Despite a wealth of newspaper articles and media reports on this kind of erotic art, there is very little scholarly writing. I don't particularly understand this. If there were Venus figurines and fertility carvings coming from this time period, why no erotic cave paintings? Furthermore, there is almost no analytical writing on the few images that have been found. Frustrated with JSTOR and a few other search engines, I started to read the google articles just for fun.

WHAT A RIDICULOUS BUNCH OF CRAP!

I found out first hand the dangers of extrapolating the story way beyond archaeological evidence (method 1 from last weeks blog)...pure sensationalism. Basing his conclusions on a few phallic symbols, images of spears, and the abundance of animals, one archaeologist claims that the cave paintings were just ancient expressions of teenage graffiti wrought with gore and sex!

"'In the graffiti, there is a lot of below-the-belt-art,' Guthrie said. 'The people in the art are predominantly women, and not a single one has any clothes on.' But these weren't just any women, they were Pleistocene Pamela Andersons adorned with ludicrously huge breasts and hips. The walls were also decorated with graphic depictions of genitalia."  (http://www.livescience.com/7028-ancient-cave-art-full-teenage-graffiti.html) 

Pleistocene Pamela Andersons!!! The truth is, despite some phallic and vulvic cave art images very little is known about Paleolithic sexuality. It could all be about some kind of human-animal-sexual-magic, but we don't know why the images were put there so at this point these are just wild guesses in an attempt to attract media attention. Way to objectify female sexuality! Maybe this is why scholarly research on the subject has been lacking: we just don't know enough to postulate something without sounding ridiculous. Better to err on the quiet side I guess. 

Vulva Engraving

Chauvet, France
Image of a feline and a bull combining to form a vulva shape

Three Women: 

                                              'Angles sur l'Anglin', France                                    

Reclining Woman Engraving (top) and Interpretation (bottom) from the Dordogne, France (12, 000 BC)

Reclining Woman Engraving (top) and Interpretation (bottom) from the Magdelaine Cave, France (15, 000-10,000 BC)

*Images courtesy of Ancient Wisdom. http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/caveart.htm