Beginning with the sensibility of the painter, Stephen Newton illuminates the psychic essence of ritual procedure as practiced universally since the dawn of man’s self-consciousness. By drawing on his own radical experience as an abstract painter, Newton excavates the elemental inner processes that are finally manifest in the wider cultural arena. He locates the common roots of art and religion at the hidden source of timeless ritual and its cathartic transforming power. As the esteemed American art critic Donald Kuspit has said, “This book is truly major.”
EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK:
In my comments so far I have been at pains to stress this apparently finer point. In relation to research into the genesis of cave art, I think that it is appropriate here to again raise this issue and clarify it further. As I have said, such anthropological investigation tends to view images associated with ritual as having been seen by the shaman during the trance experience. Pearson cites Reichel-Dolmatoff’s observation that ‘everything we would designate as art is inspired and based upon the hallucinatory experience.’ Although of course many subconscious images are perceived by the shaman in trance and may well be at some point illustrated, it would be hard to sustain the notion that the many diverse artefacts and art objects directly connected to ritual performance were experienced or dreamt in a trance state. It is rather that the African tribal sculpture, or the Pre-Columbian figure to take a further example, evolved to fix and encode the ritual creative experience: that is the emotional intensity and psychic tension necessary to instigate the conditions for trance states.
It is this seemingly insignificant point that is largely missed by anthropology, as indeed it is by psychoanalysis. Just as anthropology tends to dwell on the idea that imagery is something hallucinated, so does psychoanalysis tend to depend on the interpretation of images perceived in dreams. Both really miss the key point that the hallucinated or dream image is probably in itself of relatively minor significance and may even be to all intents and purposes meaningless. Both actually serve a purpose: to contain, organise and exorcise extreme emotion. The tribal sculpture is separate from the creative process that originally gives rise to it and is instinctively carved to embody the emotional creative experience.
The investigation of art and the creative process discloses what is really going on in respect of images associated with ritual performance. It is not the task of the artist in any scenario to simply illustrate the dream image. Again, this is something completely misunderstood by much contemporary African art or Australian aboriginal art, for example, that often does just this in the misguided belief that such work is authentic. It is, as I have said, the role of ritual art to evolve and generate a representation to symbolise and materialise the ritual creative structure and to pinpoint the depth of the emotional experience. The dream image, as with the daydream or hallucination, does fulfil this role on a more primitive psychic level without the artist’s conscious and considered contributions. Such imagery might on this more primitive level and in some degree be compared to a musical score or notation: it represents and encodes creative emotion, but in isolation, divorced from the creative context, is meaningless. The musical score is more sophisticated in intention and creative organisation but still functions structurally in the same manner.
To emphasise this point just a little further, this in fact is the answer to the question posed by William Rubin in relation to the exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art, Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, that I referred to early in Chapter 4: Rubin asks the cardinal question as to why it is that a Fang mask made in the 1950s, even if executed by a tribal sculptor for cult activities, is a ‘lesser object’ than a Fang mask made in the 1930s. Rubin gives the answer that the mask of the 1930s is more authentic and preferred because the religious faith and confidence of the Fang people remained unshaken at that time. He goes on to suggest that Fang masks antedating colonial influence would inevitably be more vital and stronger.
Rubin further criticizes anthropologists for accepting as authentic tribal art produced under Western influence and so ‘aesthetically sterile.’ He recognizes that more recent tribal art is vastly inferior to older examples, suggesting that those who respond directly to these objects as art find them ‘dead.’ More recent objects are diluted and weakened, devoid of the vitality and emotional force imbued by the faith of the earlier culture. Rubin rightly attributes this to the disintegration of the cohesion of tribal culture due to colonial influence and other factors. However, the essential point is that the parallel decline in authentic ritual performance effectively divorces the art object from the creative process, so rendering it simply craft. In effect the Fang mask of the 1950s in its removal from genuine ritual experience, is also removed from Ehrenzweig’s ‘minimum content of art’ as it is embodied in the essence of ritual, without which it ceases to be authentic art.
It is only when this irreducible creative core is confirmed, as in the ritual performance, that a real and intrinsically connected iconography is free to evolve, or in the case of ritual, only when the authentic transitional creative structure is in place will genuine sculpture be produced. The inter-relationships between such factors, although varying in degree, reinforce the parallels I am drawing here. As we have seen, a close inspection of cave art reveals that the juxtaposition of figures and objects and their relationships can often be recurring across diverse cave networks and continental divides, again indicating their connections with ritual and human psychic transformation.
On more than one occasion in this Chapter I have referred to art’s function and I think that this is a key factor in the whole debate. Throughout the evolution of human culture in general art essentially served a function: to embody the spiritual and psychic element of the indigenous culture and further to encode the essence of ritual performance for subsequent generations. This is of course a sweeping generalisation, but I think as a basic tenet of human art production it can be shown to hold true up until the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century. Before the Italian Renaissance only the period of Greek classicism with its pursuit of naturalism in art neglected this central role of art.
Just as the more primitive and authentic religious icon painting prior to the Renaissance genuinely developed original iconography and narratives to register the painter’s creative experience and psychic death and rebirth in the manic-oceanic engagement with pure painterly form, so too did the authentic tribal sculpture fulfil the self-same role. To varying degrees and at different times, art during and after the Renaissance, in its objective to revive Greek Classicism became more concerned with naturalism and the pursuit of more ‘scientific’ methods of representation. The associated preoccupation with craftsmanship, aesthetics and beauty, further served only to dilute the primary imperative of art.
This is, of course, why African tribal sculpture had no reference to the concept of aesthetic beauty. Boris de Rachewiltz underlines this factor in his Introduction to African Art. In Chapter 4, ‘The Creative Process,’ he refers to ‘the unsatisfactory nature of the word “art” in the phrase “African Art” where an aesthetic analysis based on the Kantian definition of beauty is inapplicable.’ He notes that this is equally true of archaic Egyptian art which has the same magico-religious function as African tribal art, in which artefacts ‘all serve a specific end, their creation being based on rules belonging to the world of magic.’ He goes on to say that ‘There are thus close points of contact between Egyptian artistic conceptions and those proper to Black Africa. Above all, they both lack a word for “the Beautiful”.’
De Rachewiltz traces the ‘…roots of a common heritage of thought’ in which beauty is ‘not an end in itself,’ but rather ‘capable of an integrative function.’ In tracing back this idea of integration and tribal communion he further ties in earliest African ‘rock painting’ with initiation ceremonies and rites of passage. He states:
‘In Africa, integration effects communion with the clan, and participation on a hyper-physical plane, in the drama of creation. The purpose of the highest African initiation rituals is to experience the forces that preside over every tangible manifestation and, in so doing, achieve a state of psychic fusion with the generative processes. The precise means of doing this will vary from tribe to tribe; but analogous objects such as masks, statues and ritual instruments, are used everywhere.’
To question whether such artefacts are beautiful or ugly is pointless. What we should be doing suggests de Rachewiltz is to ask whether or not the object can fulfil the purpose for which it was made. He says ‘Here we have a species of functionalism, the search for an adequate relation between an object and its end, between potency and act, or between the tangible reality and the transcendent manifestation which it serves. This is the essence of so-called “artistic” work.’ He really answers Rubin’s question about Fang masks when he concludes that ‘From what has been said it will be plain that such an art will exist only as long as the faith which gave it birth.’
For de Rachewiltz, the artwork is intrinsically linked to the creative process, which is conjoined with ‘the faith’ as it is re-enacted in the rite of passage: such initiation rituals ‘constitute the sine qua non of tribal life…’ and he recognizes their genetic bond with the ‘generative’ creative process and its art object.
In my final comments at this point, it might be worth mentioning that today both academics and dealers continue to search for a definition of authenticity in African art. Christopher B.Steiner in his African Art in Transit examines ‘the quest for authenticity and the invention of African art.’ He cites the dealer Henri Kamer in defining ‘an authentic piece of African art’ as ‘by definition a sculpture executed by an artist of a primitive tribe and destined for the use of this tribe in a ritual or functional way.’ He further quotes the ‘African art connoisseur’ Raoul Lehuard in saying that ‘In order for a sculpture to be authentic, it must not only be derived from a formal truth, but its language must also be derived from a sacred truth.’ As I indicated in my opening remarks of this Chapter, these are the fundamental factors that were intuitively transmitted to Picasso and other modern artists in a type of revelation. For Picasso understood, as I have said, that the ‘psycho-spiritual’ essence of rites of passage was exactly analogous to the very creative process of making a painting.
ILLUSTRATIONS (all paintings by Stephen Newton):
- Stephen Newton
- Empty Room 1997, oil on canvas, 73 x 73 ins
- Room with Red Carpet 1998, oil on canvas, 76 x 80 ins
- Two Chairs and a Table 1997, oil on canvas, 73 x 73 ins
- Art & Ritual – Front Cover
- Art & Ritual – Back Cover
BIO:
STEPHEN NEWTON is a painter whose work has been exhibited internationally. His academic career began with a B.A. from Leeds University and an M.A. from Nottingham Trent Univer-sity. He went on to receive an M.A. (Distinction) in Art and Psychotherapy and a Ph.D. in Psychoanalysis and the Creative Process from the University of Sheffield. He is the author of The Politics and Psychoanalysis of Primitivism (Ziggurat Books, London, 1996) and Painting, Psychoanalysis, and Spirituality (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001). Stephen Newton is Visiting Professor at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, England.
Visit: www.Newton-Art.com
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Art & Ritual:
A Painter’s Journey
Author: Stephen Newton
Introduction: Donald Kuspit
Series Editor: Marcus Reichert
Illustrated in colour – 230pp
Paperback 23.5 x 15.5 cms
ISBN 978-0-9561038-0-2
£14.95 / $21.95
