Эстетика колкости, гнева, обиды и ссоры в креативных практиках традиционных культур Бразилии и Меланезии

While the wake of anger can only impinge on parts of the arena of creative artistry, and barely exhausts the whole energy-field of aesthetics’ conceivable domain, it is an important source of turbulence, of shifting others’ attentions. Anger is thus by no means an arbitrary starting-point for a discussion of art as “payback,” or more specifically as the use of the aesthetic to execute any negatively retributive ‘sting.’ Anger’s altercatory effect, of course, challenges us to consider its motivations, and therefore—considering our present interests—to ask about the role of such pertinent impetuses for artists as revenge, jealousy, personal grievance, resiling, disgust, ressentiment (bitterness for lack of recognition; social frustration) [1], sexual disappointments, the need to release ‘inner pain’ [2, p.42,98,102], aggression as a willful if not (self-important) disturbance of prevailing mores, righteous indignation, riling under injustice or oppression (even before a ‘socio-aesthetic regime’ of bad taste), let alone as the ‘high prophetic’ and publicly remonstrative stance against distortion, corruption, and evil.

One always does well to start with religious art to find the first indices of such shifts, because cultic centres—churches in colonial contexts, for sure—are magnets for aesthetic activity. Thus in Latin America, there will always be an interest in how culturo-religious tensions will be worked out when the ‘New World’ is planted on old ground. I can think of two classic pointers in Brazilian painting. Contemplate the remarkable reconstruction of an episode in the ‘founding’ of São Salvador da Bahia (in 1549), depicted by Manuel Joaquim Coste Real in 1843 under the title “Nóbrega e 40

Креативная экономика и социальные инновации Creative Economics and Social Innovations sous companheiros” (“[Manuel de] Nóbrega and his companions,” again in the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio) [3]. Here four Jesuits interrupt a cannibal feast, taking up a partly beheaded body to be eaten for burial. The incensed look on all the indigenous faces, especially those of the women, captures the collective response of traditional culture-bearers towards this disturbance. By comparison, in their utterly foreign black cassocks, two of the Jesuits show angry contempt at such a dastardly cannibalistic deed, while two lift their eyes heavenward in pious trust that their actions are a blessing. This is a late expatriate Brazilian painter’s attempt at visually reconstructing ‘a contact situation’—a rare subject for painters, yet emblematic of ‘ten thousand and one’ episodes like it that brought fundamental religious change in their wake. My second case is a barely noticeable mural, by an anonymous mestiço painter to the right of the consistory door at the great Franciscan complex overlooking Rio (with its remarkable Igreja da Ordem Terceira de São Francisco da Pentinência). Here a cardinal in full, sumptuous regalia kisses the stigmatic feet of the humble St. Francis; the very reversal of the scene in 1209 when Francis seeks approval of his order by kissing the toes of Innocent III, pope of such plenitudo potestatis! Here is a statement with a ‘sting’ from the margins—that those who live in simplicity will ultimately receive obeisance from the lords of this world [4]

This piece will now turn to focus directly on indigenous art, granting it more and more with my most intense attention, yet I must remind readers that in colonial contexts where European immigration has been massive, recognition of indigenous (even ‘mixed-race’) art has come late. In reviewing such an introductory work as Jean Franco’s The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist (1967), for instance, when it comes to the indigenous factor, most aesthetic interest is found in those who expressed themselves on behalf of the Indians—and thus on Indianismo of one kind or another [5]. Of course in such highly unequal and frequently traumatized nations ‘south of San Diego,’ payback energies were never going to develop artistically only on behalf of the indigenes, or the African diasporics for that matter. The whole ‘weight of fate,’ or the sheer powerlessness to transform the ‘static factor’ in power relations, or repetitious replacement of ‘falsely revolutionary’ governments, typically engendered widespread feelings of surly jadedness. Witness Augustín Yañez’s study La propensión mexicana al resentimento (1949), and consider how, for a the case of a famous painting, ponder Mexico’s David Alfaro Suqueiros’ caustic celebration of ‘sacrifice for liberty’—a communistic mural rendered in the 1920s—in which the curved line of the countless dead who gave themselves to the apparently lost cause of libertád all look to be Latin [6].

By now important reactive elements in indigenous art are found worldwide, yet they have drawn earlier attention in those cultures where ‘native peoples’ have remained in the majority (as in Africa or the Pacific), or had ‘breathing-spaces’ of creativity to respond to the colonial impact. The interest here has been inevitably more anthropologically focussed, and the classic work to open the subject carries the

Креативная экономика и социальные инновации Creative Economics and Social Innovations highly pertinent title The Savage Hits Back: or the White Man through Savage Eyes (1937), by the German museum curator and Professor of Anthropology from Cologne, Julius Lips [7]. If the title is suggestive of an important agenda, and one I want to spend time addressing (albeit in an introductory way), this substantial monograph is more an exercise in the study of material culture, showing through his comments on rock drawings and carvings what ‘native peoples’ made of ‘colonials,’ rather than being a probing analysis of the mocking power, or ‘sting,’ or element of reprisal, that the notion of ‘hitting back’ suggests.

Melanesian material creations, writ large in Lips’ study, forever beckon (re-) consideration for their noticeable ‘payback’ elements. Bekim (tok pisin/pidgin English for ‘paying back’) is central to the myriad culturo-religious complexes of the region that have been built on warriorhood prowess and on securing prestige through the effective exchange of valuables. Traditionally, words of payback typically invoke revenge and punishment, reciprocity and the fulfilment of obligations, and the interpretation of outcomes in everyday life in terms of praise and blame, reward and requital, all in the one mental Gestalt . In acephalous societies, especially in dealings with people outside one’s own security circle, the choices between aggression and friendliness, killing and mercy, generosity and theft, hospitality and treachery, and so forth, seem to close in on each other, as if tissue-paper thin in their separateness [8]. Characteristic styles of ‘performativeness’ show up in both physical action and rhetoric (banter, subtle speech-making, etc.) to remind how easily expressions of retribution can flip back and forth between the ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ [9, p.53-55]. To survive, one must needs ‘read the world’ with an intense alertness for double or ambiguous possibilities.

Now, upon contact with expansionist, colonizing intruders, the warrior ethos of Melanesia falls immediately under threat—whether by the superior weapons technology of secular administrations, or the preaching of the peaceable life by missionaries. Half of the region’s traditional religions, I have estimated, with all the creative (‘artistic’) investment into weapons, effigies and architecture that had reinforced local group power, gets eviscerated [10, p.7]. True, in the course of time, in the peculiar histories of rapprochement between black and ‘others’ (largely whites), we can always anticipate that “the ‘savage’ strikes back” [11, p.10-13], and one does well to keep an eye out for this when it to comes to latter-day developments in indigenous art. A fascinating aspect in colonial and post-colonial interactions, though, is the complex mixture of ressentiment (feelings of inferiority, even ‘selfhate’) in the loss of old localized autonomies on the one hand, with the sometimes exaggerated acceptance of ‘all things white,’ or ‘the Cargo’ ( Kago ) in the broadest sense, as the materially wondrous whiteman’s way) on the other.

Let me culminate this article by exegeting some judiciously selected exempla that illustrate these issues from ‘grassroots’ art in Melanesia. Inevitably most of the cases discussed belong to religious contexts, because these provide inspiration over a

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Creative Economics and Social Innovations broad spectrum of peoples (unlike art schools where commodification of design has unfortunately prevailed over social comment) [12].

My first example is that of popular reactivity in an apparently secular setting in which blacks are able to measure themselves up against prior claims of white superiority. In various villages among the Mengen, Pomio district, East New Britain (New Guinea Island region), villagers have taken it upon themselves to build local drinking clubs (from the 1980s, after pre-Independence changes in liquor laws permitted local community freedom of choice on such matters). An anonymous Mengen’s red, black and white paintings on the walls of one such club took my eye. Side-by-side with depictions of traditional spirit-powers appropriated for clan warrior prowess is the icon of an fierce dragon’s head breathing fire, juxtaposed with a ‘stubbie’— or small bottle of beer. The implication is that the Mengen now have access to a new source of spirit power; the positioning of the icons, indeed, suggests that alcohol complements and continues the work of tribal identity and strength provided by the old spiritual forces. On an adjacent wall Papua New Guinea’s national coat of arms—a stylized bird of paradise on a spear and kundu drum—is centralized. To the left a human figure confidently holds up a stubbie with his left hand towards the icon; but he is only ambiguously indigenous, for despite his black crinkled hair he wears European clothes and is without the face and arms coloured in. At best we have the image of a sophisticated, urban Papua New Guinean expressing independence by having the same right to drink as a white. Out from the right, however, comes a distinctly black, bare arm, also holding a stubbie, capping off the social comment. ‘We are just as good as you.’ The painter seems to say, ‘we are no longer dominated; we now get out own back, and the source of power is no longer confined to the white “masters”.’ The indigenous payback is clear, but conveyed with white materials—with introduced paints and emblems of introduced ‘cargo’ [13, p.16].

My second example is the plain enough re-use of introduced religious iconography with a view to making a social comment about colonialism (or neocolonialism). The Catholic church adjacent to the airport at Mount Hagen (Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea) holds a striking enamel painting on wood to illustrate this strategy. A white-robed yet brown-skinned Melanesian Jesus, grimacing under his crown of thorns, stands on trial before a Pilate in a chair. Intriguingly, the procurator is just as brown as Jesus, and might be passed off quickly as another Melanesian were it not for the fact that he is wearing an Australian military (“digger’s”) slouch hat—teaching us (perhaps consciously, but in all likelihood naively) that all colonial orders are the same [14, p.60,77]. That Jesus is depicted as black at all, and not as a Cargo-bearing white, can be a significant enough social statement. And this more powerful when both a black Jesus, indeed also a mural setting a black St. Francis in a forested paradise of birds, show up in a Melanesian context where Asian neo-colonialism has denied national independence, as under the

Креативная экономика и социальные инновации Creative Economics and Social Innovations entrance of the cathedral and on the side-wall of the Franciscan friary chapel in a very Indonesianized Jayapura, the capital of West Papua (once Irian Jaya), Indonesia’s easternmost province) [15, p.184]. It is when content and/or context indicate some ‘retort,’ some departure of an expected blandness, that the art of payback falls more clearly into our view.

A third example suggests itself as a special expression of our second, as a case among others of the hidden, the hinting, or the ever so subtle engagement in a ‘game at which two can play.’ I think immediately of the open air memorial-cum-crucifix near the Catholic Mission on Vao islet (off northwest Malekula, Vanuatu). Strikingly rendered on its white surface, an unknown painter presents a crucified Jesus who is black-skinned (and wearing a decorated laplap ), yet with two mourners, presumably the two Marys, who are white, a datum that might otherwise merit little attention were it not for the fact that the majority of Vao villagers are known for their resistance to the Christian presence. These people remain in possession of the eeriest ceremonial glades of Melanesia, rung around by freestanding dolmens and their spirits conjured up by beating the large, formidable tamtam slit gongs, each painted to look like a ‘spirit face’[16, p.293]. Again, one has to be in the know about the context. The iconic power of this cruciform representation, whether intended, ‘naïve’ or unconscious, is double-edged: Jesus is black, why is it that (many local) blacks are not worshipping him? and/or: can’t you see? whites have their object of worship, and blacks have theirs [17]. Either way, there is a ‘sting’ in this work, at least upon contemplation, yet one very context-specific, that acts in defence, if not reprisal, against the anomalies created by local socio-religious change.

Powerful statements of ressentiment , or of disillusionment with the harsh realities of change have barely begun to be asserted in Melanesian art. One senses them on their way, with the young artist Daniel Asang (Madang, Papua New Guinea), who has captured the entrenched problématique of intra-village sorcery attacks in his depiction of the angry-eyed sorcerer, an isolate made all the more terrifying through enshrouding the head with a wickedly alert black bird—and a shadowy alter ego lurking behind. Asang has a habit of rendering collections of human faces, whether traditional or ‘modernized,’ with vacant, hollow black eyes—conveying a new emptiness of life that is sometimes reinforced by the adjacency of dark, evil-charged figures. [18, p.149]. Unlike so many of his up-and-coming contemporary artists, now showing in the ‘secular forum,’ Asang shows a bitter, if still instructive and aesthetically commanding reaction to the dilemmas of human existence in Melanesia, whether in traditional or post-traditional circumstances.

But I prefer to close my account with artistry that combines a ‘sting’ with positivities; and one need look no further than to the creations of the well known wood carver David Anam (and his small ‘school’). His most significant work was for the post-War reconstruction of Ngasegalatu Lutheran church, near Finschhafen (in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea) during the 1950s. Against his

Креативная экономика и социальные инновации

Creative Economics and Social Innovations dectractors, he carved ancestral figures as thick exterior pillars of the church: they combine the role of the world of demons and monsters Europeans might be expected to negotiate before entering the inner sanctuary of a cathedral and the Melanesian Christian affirmation that the ancestors can point to the Christ. Apart from the fact that the moving crucifix is in brown wood, and that the carved figures forming the bases of the church’s main interior pillars are of both black and white preachers, the carved candlesticks on either side of the altar have a curiously exaggerated Gothic quality. On either side of the altar, these candlesticks bear a very strong presence at ‘the sanctuary end’ of the church: they invoke the aura of the spirits in the ‘whiteman’s world’—whether in Europe or the Bible—that preceded the effects of the Christ, and in an instant they put the apparently superior European and the apparently primitive Melanesian on the same footing [19].

The dove Anam commissioned Lamu of Bubalum to carve at the side of the church, and in memory of the Ngasegalatu church destroyed in the War, is la pièce de résistance . The church as a whole becomes the ark; under its eve a tiny window has a brown hand (with bright white nails) reaching out to the surrounding, tropically-vegetated world, and upon it a blue-grey dove looking anxiously into space, its claws clinging fast as if the gesture of hope in its holder is more important than any projected flight [20, p.26-27]. Here we have one of the most powerful pieces of (painted) woodcarving to be found anywhere in the world, and it seems lost in obscure, faraway village Melanesia. Exegeting the possible significations conveyed by it are too multiple for adequate treatment at this point. Suffice it to say that this piece is a ‘confronting’ statement of positive reciprocity. A black Noah, in the ‘general psychological’ context of a black people whose past has been put under question for its revenge wars, puts out the ‘spirit’ [21, p.287-394] of peace. The topographic context, note well, is a church reconstructed from the ruins a War that was not of the blackman’s making. The proclamation of ‘the pacific’ is however not without its stings, revealing how great art derives from the need to challenge and celebrate in the one intuition. We can return to an Indian insight to help in a last reflection, as if finishing where we began; of “the eight sentiments’ and the eight “durable psychological states” said to condition artistic creation in Hindu theory, anger and valorous energy are both included; but the secret of the aesthetic mode is to move beyond these—to transfigure them, as it were [22]. There can be no doubt that negative attitudes can be crucial for creativity, and a useful starting point for understanding “changes in aesthetics” in such an intriguing region as southwest Pacific Islands. Already in Melanesia’s traditional cultures positivities had the power to modify the non-concessive, and both in the actual social changes there and in aesthetic principle one might venture to conclude that the truest “Art of Payback” arises when creativity finally negates or radically transforms the energies that can destroy life itself. By hindsight, of course, Westerners can see how art can leave socio-emotional ‘crudities’ behind and realize its more extraordinary potentials, as

Креативная экономика и социальные инновации Creative Economics and Social Innovations happened in various ways over three millennia of socio-cultural change. Pace David Anam, no one can predict for Melanesia at this point in time whether the formidable masks and finely carved weaponry of a fast passing era, or so-called ‘primitivities’ for which the region has been renowned, will be replaced by great artistic achievements that will match those in other parts of the globe — taking retributive impulses of the region’s cultures in new and different directions.

This paper is respectfully dedicated to the ever sensitive Professor Grazia Marchianò.