In
the art community some works are called art, which were certainly not
intended by their creators as art.
This statement can apply to many things, but here I mean to refer to what
in the past has been called “Primitive Art”. In my experience
I recently approached a museum to offer to do a workshop on Native American
Rock Art and initially they seemed interested. The education curator was
a Native American and was keen to education the community on aspects of
Native American culture. When the words “Rock Art” were used,
she was suddenly offended. Shortly thereafter the workshop was declined.
What had happened?
Article Continues
Art
in most contexts is bad enough, the tourist art in gift shops in Arizona
and New Mexico contains paintings of topless Indian princesses cavorting
with wolves, the desert equivalent of the paintings of topless mermaids
cavorting with dolphins one finds in Florida and California. I don’t
believe that using the term ‘art’ and possibly comparing rock
paintings to tourist paintings was the reason the word ‘art’
offended. I believe a museum employee understood art in a more profound
sense and that she understood the rock paintings not to be art in any
academic sense. The paintings on rock facings in the Southwest accomplish
many things; they represent a historical record in a society without writing,
they may contain magical properties that protect the community (more about
this below). More recognizable to the western literate mind, rock paintings
may record the journal of a shaman’s internal journey. The Surrealists
also considered art to be a means, a door, into the internal and infinite,
the Surrealists saw themselves as shamans and saw their work as a means
to explore the many facets of the mind, leading the viewers into realms
of dreams and awakenings. Much of rock art, especially Australian rock
art where it is most overt, can be seen in this context and should be
viewed from the perspective of a mystic journey.
In fact there is another use for artifacts that the West might term as
art but whose creator would find that the term Art misses the point by
a large and significant margin.
“Art as Technology” by Arnold Rubin is a wonderful book that
explores many facets of decorative art in literate and pre-literate cultures.
One of the many themes of this book that I find useful for this essay
can be summarized thus: What we consider art, and very often can be seen
in museum and in personal galleries, was not intended as decoration, not
entertainment and not self-expression of any kind. In a world of magic
these images and sculptures are in fact a kind of technology. A sculpture
that set in the center of a family home, a costume worn during village
festival are not expression or a representation, these artifacts are important
for what they do. They are technology in the sense that they are themselves
the very means of securing a bountiful harvest, protecting one’s
children from disease and guiding a relation into a beneficial afterlife.
This is not an altogether unknown use for art in our culture. I may see
a statue of the Madonna in a museum on a pedestal displayed with other
secular and sacred artwork, but this same statue in a church will have
candles burning before it and, perhaps, pictures of children at the statues
feet. In changing the context, the art changes from art to technology.
It is no longer viewed for the purpose of admiration of workmanship and
place in art history but, instead, becomes technology directed at a purpose,
a way to focus intention.
I think that this was my offense with the museum’s educational curator,
by calling Southwest Native American rock painting art, I completely lost
the point of what this work was for, and I threatened to move this work
into the wrong context and strip the work of its power to transform and
inform.
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Read our June Essay: PBS' How Art Made the World
Read our May Essay: What College Art Teachers
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Read our April essay: Technological Innovations
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Read our March essay: Does Handwriting have
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Read our January essay: Counseling your students
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Read our December essay: Why Teaching Visual
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