An African mask, a Balinese cremation ceremony, a
whirling dervish trance, a painting by Vermeer: they all
present indissoluble wholes. The forms and content of
this art are bound by particularities of the aesthetic
processes involved as much as by the rules and
regulations of their social milieus. In order to be just
to any of these cultural products, we have to understand
them in the light of their proper context and history.
Ethnic art is an integrative part of a tribal reality.
Taken out of its world, ethnic art becomes a museum
piece, an object of veneration, a Ph.D. dissertation,
and a possibly lucrative source of income. In its place
of origin, however, most tribal art has very specific
psychosocial functions. Rites and rituals, for one,
reinforce the social bonds among tribe members,
integrating various aspects of individual and social
dynamics.
One role of rituals is to create a unified vision of the
cosmogony and mythology of a particular tribe. Hand in
hand with what has been (historical reality), and what
is (present reality), come visions of what might be
(future potentialities).
The vertical structuring of the self (the depth of
history) coalesces with horizontal structuring (the
expansion of the present) to create stable individual
and social identities. Religion and art in their fused,
syncretic form become a tremendously powerful
integrating force for the anxiety-ridden premodern
individual. The chasm between the instinctual and the
human-created reality is bridged, and the schism is
temporarily healed.
All art reflects its ethnic sources. Its stylistic
oscillations vary historically and within the bounds of
a particular language. The music of Bach, while soaring
to mathematically constructed heights, nevertheless
reveals a metric profile of west European folk music.
There is nothing in the history of Western art music
that can compare to the polyrhythmic complexity of
African, or to the melodic refinement of Indian, music.
The expressive distortions of African masks had to wait
for Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to find their
match in Western art. Thus although a multiplicity of
cultural forms has existed throughout the development of
Western civilization, its full impact has remained a
marginal possibility until the twentieth century. The
inevitable development from “the raw to the cooked to
the gourmet” reflects the process of refinement and
increasing complexity of most cultures. Western
cultural hegemony, however, has not only been built on
brilliant recipes. The legitimacy of its success has
been built on artistic achievement as much as on its
economic and political power.
If Western art shows a powerful coherence and a
fluctuating cosmopolitanism in creating its universal
canons, it also reveals a tight restraint on the
instinctual and a certain colonial attitude to ethnic
art. This attitude is a symptom of the general Western
habit of “objectifying” reality, a habit that perhaps
interferes with a genuine understanding of the art of
others. At worst, the influence of ethnic art on Western
art has produced little more than a makeover, such as
“Chinoiserie” in the visual arts or the “whitened jazz”
of American popular music. At best, ethnic influence has
become a vehicle for new syntheses that can stand on
their own.
With the inevitable expansion of communication
technologies, the incorporation of tribal art becomes a
given. Human consciousness naturally expands to
encompass all created art. To say that art today should
be limited to either Western or tribal art is a form of
fundamentalism that most thinking people would not
subscribe to. On the other hand, an indiscriminate
artistic promiscuity creates a state of confusion that
treats genuine artistic realities as candies to be
consumed at will, independent of their actual entity and
history.
Because of these freshly acquired territories, a new,
multicultural art industry is blossoming. But, instead
of genuine artistic realities (in the context of their
place in tribal life), we are given three-minute
segments in which to discern exotic qualities. “Experts”
are sold to us as representing particular cultures, and
anybody else is waved aside as not being a legitimate
artist. Should anybody from the Balkans (myself
included) have an exclusive copyright on odd rhythms?
Should anybody Chinese have an exclusive right to
calligraphy?
Good art does not have any extraneous guarantees. It is
the integrity, the coherence of its elements and
processes, the authenticity of its statement and
expression, its ability to stand by itself that give a
work of art its strength and longevity. Of course, no
art object stands in a vacuum; there are frames of
reference that establish its intelligibility and its
context. Whereas tribal art matches its standards to an
artistic archetype, Western art matches its standards to
historically fluctuating aesthetic postulates and
models.
While both tribal and Western art have more or less
clear frames of reference, the newly evolving synthetic
culture inhabits a no-man’s-land. What has been
promulgated as the new multicultural, global art shows
as much fragmentation and entropy as anything the pop
industry has created. Repackaged ethnic art, taken out
of context, is simplified and made palatable to an
artistically bulimic public. It is the particularities
and idiosyncrasies of ethnic art that give it depth and
strength, not the “beige” quality of commercial efforts.
This does not mean, however, that value lies only in
purism and efforts to conserve the authentic. Most
cultures are mishmashes of various influences that
crystallize into unique synthetic products. To
successfully synthesize new cultural realities, we first
have to fully assimilate the depth of their particular
systems of reference and then to acknowledge the
structural pivots that lie in the intersections of their
very being.
Our common human ancestry, our need for a variety of
experiences, point to an ability to assimilate diverse
cultures and thereby to expand the potential of our own
humanity. Building a new, unique cosmopolitan culture
must encompass both the individualities and the
commonalities of its participants. Anything short of
building this edifice from the basement up is bound to
leave us all fluttering, uprooted in an artificially
created cyberspace.
This appropriate title is a quote from a
magnificent collection of poems by Ted Hughes, 1971,
From the Life and Songs of the Crow, published by Harper
and Row, New York.
Salman Rushdie, 2002, Fury, The Modern Library, The
Random House Publishing Group, New York.
1 Laughlin, McManus, and d’Aquili describe how shared
rhythmic practices affect
neurocognitive systems in the body by driving, tuning
and entraining brain waves
(C.D. Laughlin, Jr., J. McManus, E.G. d’Aquili, 1990,
Brain, Symbol and Experience,
Shambhala, Boston, pp. 296–333).
2 Rubin, William, 1994, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, The
Museum of Modern Art,
New York.
3 Dissanayake, Ellen, 2000, Art and Intimacy, University
of Washington Press,
Seattle, p. 134.
Endnotes
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