Ritual and Shamanism within (Performance) Art

Issue #07: Rituals of Now

Anne Marsh in conversation with Philipa Rothfield.

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PR:

You have recently published a book called Performance_Ritual Document1 where you discuss the notion of ritual and shamanism in relation to Jackson Pollock’s work. Through that process, you evaluate his place in art history and the way in which he has been constructed in relation to Modernism and later Post Modernism. Could you elaborate on this?

AM:

Jackson Pollock is thoroughly canonised within the history of Western Art as a precursor to and then the favoured son or artist/genius of abstract expressionism. Your audience might not know that abstract expressionism was famously used as a weapon in the Cold War. After World War 2, the Americans, in one critic’s phrase, stole the concept of the Avant-Garde from Europe. They literally distributed abstract expressionism around the world as an indicator of America’s freedom and the new democratic post war order. There has been lots of art history written about that. To my mind, Pollock becomes a pawn in a particular institutional game, if you like, and that is what canonises him.

If we go back to the photographs that were taken of him painting – which are very famous, and arguably the lynch pin – especially for the general public, as they were published in the mass circulating magazine Life in 1949 and republished in many other books and journals. Hans Namuth photographs Jackson Pollock flinging the paint on the canvass on the ground just as the Navajo Indians paint, and of course as Indigenous Australians paint. This is not the Western convention of a window onto the world. Jackson Pollock was in Jungian analysis all his life, he was a troubled man, but his mentors were people who believed in shamanism and ritual and so forth. What I am trying to do throughout the book is to try and find the hidden narratives; the ones that haven’t been dominant and have been missed out in the quest to canonise a particular story. It always fascinates me what gets left out.

PR:

One of the things you talk about is the extent to which this is a tricky path to tread; that there are problems with the relation between shamanism and primitivism as it is articulated within anthropological discourse. You also talk about the problems around the notion of sexual difference in relation to Pollock’s work.

AM:

First, there is the canonisation of Pollock that I have just described. Then Feminist art historians get into a revisionist art history and start looking at the great male artist geniuses of modern art and abstract expressionism. Pollock is depicted there as an ejaculatory painter and there are some fabulous feminist tracts on what is wrong with Jackson Pollock from a gendered perspective. There is a reading of him according to revisionist art history, which starts in the 1960s, that points out that Primitivism has been around as a kind of desire in modern Euro American Art for many years, and that this functions as a kind of valorisation of the Other: the primitive and unknown. That Other, is considered to be able to represent the un-representable. This becomes very romanticised within modern art. The revisionist art historians or the critical left art historians come in and explain how problematic that is. That the West would appropriate the Other in such a way and bring that into a Western canon whilst, at the same time, totally ignoring the indigenous workers.

This has been well critiqued by artists. The late Gordon Bennett, an Australian artist, did major history paintings about this in the 90s. The problem with Primitivism in Western art is a big issue. Nevertheless, Western artists are still interested in Primitivisms. Whether that is the rituals of everyday life or the secular rituals that come to bear where people are looking for a kind of spirituality, if you like, but not necessarily organised religion. These things really influenced the hippy movements of the 60s and 70s. This is where people like Richard Schechner come in. If we look at performance art, it is interesting to note the way in which the performance studies people have a slightly different interpretation to the art historians. Coming out of performance studies, people like Peggy Phelan have quite a different approach to someone like Amelia Jones, both American scholars; but Phelan’s coming out of Performance Studies. If you look at someone in Australia like Edward Scheer who writes on Mike Parr, he also came out of that performance studies situation and was not afraid to talk about things like ritual and shamanism. Whereas in the art historical context, because of the critique against Primitivism, this has been a ‘no go’ zone.

PR:

If we just focused on the notion of ritual, in a way, it is threatened by the problematic history of anthropology and its colonialism, and therefore the way in which the non-Western Other is constructed as ‘primitive’. At the same time, there is, maybe, a sense in which there is always an element of the Other within the contemporary and the everyday. So, even though ritual and shamanism has been kept apart from the notion of the contemporary West and its sense of rationality, civil society and the state, perhaps that kind of binarism or separatism cannot be sustained.

AM:

No, I don’t think it can; I don’t think any binary can be accurate. Each term forecloses upon the other; it is always going to be there in some way. If you talk about everyday life and how people are situated in everyday life, from performance to dance: people do yoga practices, Feldenkrais, body centred practices. The idea of the body is a huge concept throughout modern art. The idea of a performative turn is centred on body practices, and bodily practices. These can’t necessarily be analysed through a purely rational motivation.

PR:

There is something you’re saying about the centrality of the body in certain kinds of practices, where the body may introduce an element of Otherness into rationality. What is at stake in identifying the body as central to certain practices that somehow suggests an element of ritual within the contemporary everyday?

AM:

If a practice is centered on the body and it is not simply an analysis of the social construction of the body (a dominant approach within critical theory), if the practice is also about movement, it may be intuitive. If it’s about some kind of haptic relation that the performer or the practitioner is having to the space, to their own experience, to the relationship that they are trying to establish with the audience; whether that is participatory or just in terms of them being spectators: other elements come into that which are not purely rational elements.

PR:

So, there is a kind of disruptive potential of the corporeal within certain dominant notions of sociality or subjectivity, or even social practice. I wonder if you provoke a similar disruption, by allowing the question of shamanism, ritual, the artist as shaman, to enter a discussion that so far has been dominated by a modernist perspective, and whether such disruption is greater because of your focus on performance artists and body art.

AM:

I think the body is a disruptive element. I think that in the last 20-30 years, theorists and practitioners have come to understand that the body, the somatic, the haptic, are equally important as notions of social construction, especially in the realm of any kind of performance which is centred on the body. That is why I start with Jackson Pollock. Even with a performative painting, we are still talking about the relationship between the body and the representation, if you like.

PR:

I notice there are a couple of terms you use such as the unknown, the unconscious, the abject and the uncanny, as ways of exploring what might be at stake in invoking the figure of the shaman. You talk about Freud and his notion of the unheimlich or the uncanny. Then you look at the turn towards the body in body art (despite the dominance of (post)structuralism at the time). There is a sense in which, and this is a quote from you: ‘Artists continued to experiment and investigate the unknown, the unconscious, the abject and the uncanny’. Can you offer an example?

AM:

Well, I might talk about a performance by a younger artist, Catherine Bell, because it pays homage to Joseph Beuys, who is considered to be one of the great Shamans of Western art from the 60s and 70s. It is also a mourning ritual for her father who had recently died. It’s a performance that is presented exclusively for the camera, it’s only on video. One of the things I’m interested in is how do we, as an audience, interact with these new digital technologies. If a performance is just made for the screen, for example, do we find it as compelling as if we would have if we had been there? For the performance, ‘Felt is The Past Tense of Feel’ (2006), Bell sits with 40 dead squid on a stage painted black. She has had a pink felt suit made, after the suit that they were once going to bury her father in, and she wears this fastened over her father’s suit. Joseph Beuys’ felt suit, which he wore during performances, is often displayed as a relic of performance art and it has this shamanistic quality to it. Bell gets the squid and sucks out the squid ink and she spits it on the pink felt suit. Eventually, it’s all over the suit, her face and hands so she literally fades to black. The performance lasted about an hour but there are two video cuts of it, one is about 20 minutes and the other is the whole hour duration. After the performance, she got gallstones because you can’t suck that much squid ink and not get ill, which she had not realised. For me, it is a younger artist doing an endurance work, the sort of work that we often associated with male artists of the 1970s. Bell talks about her feeling when she was looking into the eyes of the squid and thinking about her father’s decomposing body in the ground. You can imagine the smell would have been amazing if you were in the room and the sucking noises, which are not on the video, could have been disturbing. For me, this was a very shamanistic and cathartic action, which is quite abject, because even on the video, you feel this beautiful young woman sucking all of this yucky, icky squidgy thing.

Another artist I could talk about is Dominico de Clario. He is now an established artist who has been doing work about the Chakras for years. He uses different coloured neon lights as representative of the Chakras. What is interesting about Domenico is that he often creates a kind of fictive narrative about the works themselves. One was called ‘a solstice event with seven live horses for uqbah’ which was performed in 2005. He spins a story about driving along in a car; it is almost like a Carlos Castaneda story. He is driving and he is very tired, and he pulls the car over after he nearly crashed. He winds down his window to get some air and there are these tiny horses. There is a sign about these horses from Uqbah being ‘guide horses for the blind’. This is pertinent because de Clario often performs as a blind-folded piano player. He then spins a narrative about the horses and this dream-like encounter. When I was writing about it, and he was sending me materials about what the performance was about, I started to think: I don’t think this is true. I don’t think what he is actually saying could have actually happened, and I remember writing to him saying ‘now I’m quite happy that this didn’t happen and I think the fiction is really great but are you happy that it goes ahead like this?’ And he said, yes, of course, spin the story. For me that was interesting because often we are looking to get to the truth, and yet Domenico’s work is about spinning stories.

PR:

The post colonialist theorist, Dipesh Chakrabarty, argues against subjecting the time of local Indian practices to the temporality of modernism with its notions of truth and falsity. Chakrabarty posits a mythical time in relation to a number of Indian social practices, religions and social forms that was never disrupted by the progressive chronology of the modern. In a way, he makes space for another axis, another temporality, without making it subject to the temporality of modernism.

AM:

Yes. If you talk about Shamanism, and going back to Castaneda, who was so well read in the seventies. He talks about the Shaman’s seeing. The seeing of the Shaman is always about a story. When you do any research on Shamanism, when the West comes in and criticises it and says ‘that can’t possibly be true’ and the Shamans say, ‘well it’s not true, we are spinning the story’. The people believe in the story. That is where the healing will happen. Who is to say that that isn’t as effective as Western healing?

PR:

It’s the power of placebo as conceptualised in Western thought.

AM:

So if I suck something out of your neck and I have it in my mouth and I spit it out, and it’s an ugly thing and you believe that is what has come out of your body.

PR:

I’d be thrilled…

AM:

I’d be thrilled too, rather than going to hospital and being butchered in a very medieval way by someone cutting into you and taking something out and not showing you. I’m being a bit facetious but these different ways of knowing, which have been foreclosed upon, are always going to be intriguing for artists. The greatest art historian of all time could say, ‘no this is not the case, you can’t do this’. But many artists will say ‘a door has been closed. I’m going to open that door’. What has been hidden, what has been foreclosed upon, this is what some artists are going to make work about.

PR:

From what you were saying about the centrality of narrative for a certain notion of shamanism, I wonder how that is transposed to practices such as performance, especially practices of performance art and certainly dance that are not so narrative based. Is that maybe where the notion of ritual comes in to the fore as distinct from the notion of shamanism?

AM:

Yes I think so. The shaman relies on the presence or the charisma of the particular person, or the fiction of the person. Joseph Beuys always used to say when he went to a university that is all locked down in rationalism, he had to be this kind of seer, this kind of shaman, otherwise people wouldn’t be interested. He is purposely creating that narrative around him. With dance and performance modes that aren’t narrative, or narrative in a different kind of way via the body centricity of the performance, these practices can always instil a sense of ritual. I think ritual has a temporal mode to it. But I think that the ‘being here now’ aspect of dance has a presence that is different from the narrative or fictive presence of the shaman who wants to create a particular character.

PR:

How might we look at body based practices as occurring in a ritualised context? It might not be around the figure of the shaman as such but there are performance rituals; the proscenium arch stage, the Melbourne Festival ritual of all the crowds going to see things at the Arts Centre that is a ritual too.

AM:

I think ritual is in our lives in very ordinary ways, I think that artists have been interested in the everyday and everyday rituals. You go along the road and someone has died and people create little shrines to them. That is just a very ordinary way of doing things. Social media is being used as a tool to create flash mob rituals. Some of them are absolutely brilliant and people just come along and participate in these things. Like boat-people.org who invited people to wrap their heads in replicas of the Australian flag and visit different public spaces. They then sent in their pictures to a website that everyone could access. I think rituals of everyday life, rituals of the body, are pervasive. We wash our body, we take care of it, we do exercise classes, walking is a kind of ritual, an everyday meditation.

PR:

Very much so, it is also culturally configured. A lot of Foucault’s work is very much looking at that. That’s looking at ritual as inscriptive and also relational to notions of subjectivity.

AM:

I don’t think that ritual is going to go away. It is so embedded in our condition that we are going to be doing that all the time. Artists will look at those rituals of everyday life and deconstruct them in a way and see how they are put together.

  1. Anne Marsh, Performance_Ritual Document_, Melbourne: Macmillan, 2014