Fourth Dialogue: The Power of the Image

Fourth Dialogue:
The Power of the Image
G ERARD H OUGHTON
AND J ULIEN S INZOGAN
M A R I A T I P P E T T (C H A I R )
T
H I S M O R N I N G we focused on the power of the word and
in this session this afternoon we will focus on the power of the
image, marvellous examples of which we saw an hour ago in
the Jock Colville Hall. I’d like to thank the October Gallery and Elizabeth Lalouschek for bringing those images to us. They are magnificent,
and show the diversity of African and Caribbean artists, both in the
ideas that come from the indigenous culture and those that have been
borrowed and absorbed. It was very exciting for me as a rather traditional cultural historian.
In this session we have an art historian, curator and one of the directors of the October Gallery, Gerard Houghton, and we have Julien
Sinzogan, an artist from the Republic of Benin, currently working in
Paris. I’ll ask Gerard to start with his introduction and then ask Julien
to speak, before returning to Gerard.
GERARD HOUGHTON
I must say that I’m delighted to be back at Churchill College, and still
more delighted to have been invited here, together with Julien Sinzo-
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THE POWER OF THE WORD
gan, to talk about images and the power that they exercise over us. I’ve
known and admired Julien’s work for many years, but I’m also aware
that, as a francophone, African artist working in Paris, Julien frequently
holds quite different views about the theory and practice of art to myself, who am not a practising artist, yet am still professionally
concerned with the exhibition of art from many different cultures
around the world. Despite our differences, though, I know that we do
share a common ground of basic beliefs about this complex human
activity that leads us both to the creation and the enjoyment of
powerful works of art. So, from this shared centre of agreement, I’d like
to sketch out the framework for a dialogue that Julien might later use
as a springboard to develop his own thoughts on the subject from an
artist’s perspective.
To begin with, I’d like to say a little about three separate elements of
the visual field that, for today’s purposes, I’ll differentiate as: ‘signs’,
‘symbols’ and ‘images’. Not to be too contentious, I’m going to take a
fairly simplistic view, and hope that you’ll not think that I’m
attempting too rigid a definition of the three categories I’m trying to
describe.
If I take a stick and draw a shape in the sand, a straight line, for
example, or again, if I take a pen and draw another shape on paper,
perhaps a cross, I want to call the result of such actions, quite simply, a
‘sign’. By contrast, a ‘symbol’ I would like to describe as a particular
kind of sign, one that somehow accumulates or attracts more meaning
to itself. For instance, if I had drawn a circle in the sand, that rudimentary sign could be read as the letter ‘O’, or again it might be interpreted
as a zero. Such a sign might therefore mean ‘absolutely nothing’, or, by
the same species of transformative magic, it could represent the opposite idea entirely, that of completion or fullness. The transformation of
sign into symbol, therefore, has something to do with the reader’s or
writer’s investing any particular sign with additional layers of significance, thereby freighting the symbol with a wider range of resonances
than the simple sign that denotes it.
Written languages make use of specialized sets of signs that, in English, French, Arabic, Yorùbá and the other languages that we’ve been
talking about today, we recognize as alphabets of one form or another.
Drawing on my own experience of living for some time in Japan, I’d
like to talk a little about oriental writing-systems that primarily use
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pictographic signs to describe the world. By examining these ideogrammatic signs, I hope to tease out some of the ways in which signs
develop into symbols. If I succeed, then I will later develop another line
of approach using slides, to show how ‘images’ – which I take to be
more specialized signs operating at a higher level still – come to
exercise their quite extraordinary powers over us.
The Japanese, of course, borrowed their writing signs from the
Chinese. Similarly we northern Europeans borrowed our alphabet
from the Romans, who had it from the Greeks who, in turn, used the
Phoenician alphabet that, together with the scripts of the Arab and the
Hebrew peoples, was derived from the writing signs of the earlier
Northern Aramaic culture. The origin of writing is a fascinating subject
in its own right, and we can still only speculate as to the complex processes that led certain cultures to develop, by quite different strategies,
the facility of describing the world using particular signs. Nevertheless,
let us continue with our attempts to elucidate the differences between
basic signs and symbols, and let us make things easy for ourselves by
choosing examples taken from a writing system very different from our
own. In Japanese, or Chinese, if I draw three equally spaced, horizontal
lines, the resulting sign represents the cardinal number ‘three’. However, if I draw the same three lines, but instead this time write them
vertically, then the meaning changes totally, for I have made a different
sign entirely, and this new sign means ‘river’.
It’s also quite possible to write these two signs (for ‘three’ and ‘river’)
in a number of different ways. I could draw them stiffly, with each of
the strokes being of exactly the same length and weight, or they might
be written with lines of slightly differing lengths, the central line often
being shortened by convention. Another possibility is to write the character for ‘river’ using a more cursive script, the three vertical lines being
allowed to ripple, so that, suggestive of the fluidity of water itself, they
illustrate the meandering flow of the river. Thus, while both formal and
cursive styles denote the same object, the cursive script can be made to
express qualities that are absent in the purely formal Chinese character
meaning ‘river’. Thus it appears that stylistic differences in notation can
begin to increase the layers of association attached to a particular sign.
Let’s now go on to look at the logo for today’s colloquium, “La Puissance du Verbe / the Power of the Word,” which is based upon a sign
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THE POWER OF THE WORD
found among the Akan people of Ghana.* This glyph is one of a series
of signs developed by the Akan that are collectively known as adinkra,
and that are most often found printed on fabric and as decorations on
clothing. Each adinkra sign is associated with an idea that is generally
expressed as a proverbial saying among the Akan. In other words, each
single sign represents a complex of meanings that, so to speak, are
packed away inside it. The design used for the colloquium has a range
of meanings that might be summed up in the idea of ‘adaptability’,
since it indicates the ability to transform and adapt positively to inevitable changes in circumstance. If you look at the symbol carefully, with
this idea in mind, it does become largely self-explanatory. Let us, for
the moment, imagine the sign flowing down the page, like a river.
Following its course from the top left-hand corner, we can suppose that
we move off in our chosen direction, until a bend in the river occurs,
which forces us to continue in entirely the opposite direction. Another
bend in the river forces us to turn again before eventually allowing us
to resume our original direction. But not for long, for we are again
made to sweep backwards and forwards in order to make any progress
at all. The outcome of this inescapable back-tracking is that, where we
began intending to pursue a single way, by journey’s end we have four
potential courses that can be followed, each, perhaps, issuing from the
experience accumulated as we negotiated the four deviations that lay
along our route.
Thus, as we unpack this sign of its contents, teasing out the ideas
assimilated within, we realize that we’ve moved far beyond the realm
of simple signs, and that all sorts of ideas – whose meanings can evidently be quite complex – can be hidden within a fairly simple structure. This adinkra glyph, therefore, can be said to be operating on the
symbolic level, offering a visual reference point for things which cannot
so easily be put in words. Obviously the movement of the figure itself,
winding like a river meandering towards some final delta, makes short
work of representing in visual form a complex set of contained ideas
that would take far longer to spell out in writing.
I’ve imitated the logo a little myself, winding backwards and forwards to arrive at this transition-point where sign transforms into symbol, and so I’d now like to press on more quickly and examine multiple
*
The logo is reproduced on the inner title-page of the present volume.
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instances of where these loaded signs we call symbols interface with
the even more complex structures we call images. I’d like to do this by
projecting a sequence of images by a range of artists from quite
different cultures whose work either represents directly or otherwise
incorporates these elements that we’ve been discussing – of signs and
symbols and alphabets and scripts. What follows, then, is a brief multicultural tour of artists who incorporate into their images the particular
powers of words, signs and symbols.
[Slide 1 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] To
continue for a moment with other examples of adinkra glyphs, here’s a
picture by a Ghanaian artist, Owusu–Ankomah, who has chosen four
adinkra glyphs, each with its particular meaning associated. The artist
here uses the glyphs as repeating motifs that both hide and reveal the
other subject of the painting. If you look very carefully, hidden within
the black and white shapes can be discerned first a head, then hands
and legs, until at last you become aware that there are two male figures
wrestling amongst the adinkra signs, cleverly hidden by a trompe-l’œil
effect. Called “Get Off My Back,” this canvas demonstrates a highly
contemporary approach that increases the range of reference of the
work by appeal to a traditional set of symbols, holding the two in
exquisite balance.
[Slide 2 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] To give
an example of the way a pictographic writing tradition provides
Oriental artists with alternative strategies for expression, here’s a piece
by a young Japanese artist from Kyoto, called Masahito Katayama. The
work is entitled “Genealogy of the Wind,” and although it is not
calligraphy that can be read as such, you can see the way in which the
power and practised fluidity of the brush-strokes are used to convey
the impression of the wind’s turbulent energy, and represent an
integral part of the painting’s achievement.
[Slide 3 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] To make
a direct comparison with a European artist whose brush-work shows
many similarities with the Katayama we’ve just seen, here’s a canvas
by the Austrian-born artist Elisabeth Lalouschek, the artistic director of
the October Gallery, and the curator of the wonderful visual arts
exhibition now hanging in the Archive Centre next door. Although
Elisabeth is not herself a calligrapher and wasn’t brought up in a
tradition of pictographic writing, you can see the evident intention to
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THE POWER OF THE WORD
articulate an abstract language of expressive feeling in her gestural use
of the brush, reinforcing the emotional content of the powerful strokes
by means of these vivid colours.
[Slide 4 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] Another
Western artist, this time one who was acutely aware of other alphabetic
and ideographic scripts. This work is by Brion Gysin, the English-born
polymath who was an important member of the Tangiers group that,
during the 1960s, included William Burroughs, Paul Bowles et al. It
was Gysin, the artist, who encouraged Burroughs to take up painting,
and it was Gysin, the writer, who must be credited with inventing the
‘cut-up’ technique that Burroughs would later make famous. Gysin,
who spoke seven languages fluently, including both Japanese and
Arabic, was fascinated by the calligraphic traditions of both those
languages, and many of his works were subtle explorations of the
empire of the signs that becomes available to an artist alive to the
refined strategies offered by Oriental and Arabic calligraphy. What
most fascinated Brion Gysin was the capacity of his calligrammes to
portray a dance of pure signs that attract and appropriate fresh
meanings of their own.
[Slide
5
<http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>]
Continuing on from North Africa to the Middle East with several other
contemporary Arabic artists. Here is a work that, while it might appear
to us to be a pure piece of abstract art, can, if you know Arabic, be read
as the phoneme Ba. Taken directly from Arabic script, the simple letter
with its diacritical is entirely transformed by the artist’s vibrant use of
colour. This wonderful work, which partakes of two cultures,
traditional Arabic calligraphy and modern abstract painting, is by
Wijdan, a Jordanian princess and cousin of the late King Hussain, who
trained in London and holds a doctorate from the School of Oriental
and African Studies.
[Slide 6 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] Next a
picture by Laila Shawa, a Palestinian artist living in London, which
being a silk-screen of a photograph, can reproduce Arabic script
directly within the body of the work, and if you read Arabic you will
be able to make out the message. This is from a series of silk-screen
prints that were based on photographs, taken by the artist, of graffiti on
the walls of her home town of Gaza. This print, called “Letter to a
Mother,” reproduces a letter written to his mother by a young man,
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explaining why he must leave to join the Intifada and to fight against
the occupying Israeli army. The ‘letter’ is highlighted in the colour
purple because purple was the colour used by the Israeli troops to
paint over and censor the many messages of anger, hope and despair
that were daily posted afresh on the walls of Gaza.
[Slide 7 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] Here is
a sequence of images that make use of some of the most basic of all
signs and symbols. This one is by Leroy Clarke from Trinidad, a
circular sign. Artists are always on the lookout for symbols that are
instantly recognizable to everyone, so-called universals, and perhaps
the circle is the original universal sign. Here, Clarke uses this imagesign to convey his own complex message, calling the work “Enigma.”
[Slide 8 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] Another
universal circular sign is this one, by a Huichol Indian artist from the
Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico. I think everyone immediately
recognizes
the
Sun.
[Slide
9
<http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] A similar subject,
though given an entirely different treatment, by the wonderful
Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams, one of the founder members of
CAM, the seminal Caribbean Artists Movement that flourished in London during the 1960s and was critically important in gaining recognition for the work of Caribbean and black artists in Britain.
[Slide 10 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] More
circles found in the work of another Huichol artist; though these circles
don’t represent suns but the sacred peyote cactus that the Huichol
ingest in order to see visions during their religious ceremonies. These
five circles arranged in the four corners and centre of the work
represent the five sacred pillars that support the sky above us; they are
also obvious representations of peyote buttons. This wonderful piece is
in the collection of the Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis, and is
executed in the traditional Huichol manner by pressing dyed yarn into
a beeswax substrate. Interestingly, if you move your eye around this
yarn-painting – I think it works even when projected and at a distance
– you might catch the result of saccidic movements, perceived as
flickering effects that occur in the periphery of your vision, a very
sophisticated device built into the yarn-paintings to mimic some of the
visual effects observed under the powerful influence of peyote.
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THE POWER OF THE WORD
[Slide 11 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] Here
we see another circular sign, though this time as interpreted by the
Australian Aboriginal artist Jimmy Pike. This one doesn’t represent the
scorching sun of the great Australian desert, but that other source of
life in that harsh environment, the water-hole. Another Australian
Aboriginal artist, perhaps even better known than Jimmy Pike, is
Clifford
Possum.
[Slide
12
<http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] Here the dotpainting technique is used to create what is essentially a map of a place,
but the location is inextricably linked to a story. You can see two
separate sets of footprints traversing the detailed landscape until their
paths converge. Here there are two spears, and two clubs. Below are
two skeletons. This visual narrative recounts the story of two brothers
who fought over the ownership of ancestral lands until they killed one
another.
[Slide
13
<http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>]
Remaining in the South Pacific but moving westwards to the island of
New Caledonia, here is an image by Yvette Bouquet, an indigenous
artist whose work is based upon a tradition many thousands of years
old. Yvette is an autodidact artist who covers her canvases with the
signs and symbols found as petroglyphs engraved on the ancient
stones and hidden within the caves of the island. This particular
canvas, filled with interconnecting lines, describes how all living creatures are mutually independent.
[Slide 14 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] On to
Africa, where again the most ancient art can be found inscribed in rock.
These images show the earliest development of signs themselves – the
precursors of written languages now lost – out of the images found
painted on rock walls and in caves the length and breadth of Africa.
Only in the last decade or so, with the work of David Coulson and Alex
Campbell, have we become aware of the vast extent of African rock art
[Slide 15 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] and the
beauty and sophistication of some of mankind’s earliest art offerings.
[Slide 16 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] One
significant African artist who has always tried to incorporate some of
these disappearing African scripts into his work is the Ghanaian
sculptor El Anatsui, whose standing figure you will have seen at the
centre of the exhibition next door. This powerful wall-mounted relief is
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called “Unfolding the Scroll of History,” and it might be taken as
representing the development of written languages on the African
continent, from the early stick figures found on cave walls to the
dedicated
scripts
of
later
times.
[Slide
17
<http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] One of the things
El Anatsui relishes is mixing several different written languages in a
single work. Many of the languages he reproduces are no longer
spoken, so nobody can interpret the signs any more, and yet we know
that for one particular culture at least they were the signs and symbols
that described the warp and weft of a consensual reality. El Anatsui is
an artist who places signs and languages at the very centre of his work.
[Slide 18 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] Here is a
huge tree-trunk sculpture that he created during the Rio de Janeiro
summit, and which now stands in the Smithsonian Museum. First he
covered the entire trunk with sign sequences representative of all the
different African cultures throughout history; he then took a chainsaw
and slashed thousands of cuts into the wood, thereby destroying most
of the decorative patterns. For the artist, this represented the Western
cultures moving into Africa, eroding and destroying the languages and
traditions of the indigenous cultures. The whole piece is called
“Erosion,” and the pile of pieces surrounding the base of the work
represents all that is left of the cultures that have disappeared. A
sombre work perhaps, but there still remains a path of cultural
continuity, that winds round the tree trunk from the base to the
summit and that indicates the resilience of the many African cultures
that still maintain links with the historical cultures of the past.
[Slide 19 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] And
finally, an image that reminds me that the first part of my talk has come
full circle. This is a piece by the Beninese artist Cyprien Tokoudagba
that is part of the Rendering Visible exhibition of Beninese art currently
showing at the October Gallery. To Western eyes this particular sign,
the Serpent that bites its tail, is often thought of as a gnostic symbol, but
in fact it is very much older again. It was found in ancient India and
was present in Sumerian deposits going back at least as far as 2,600
years BC. Yet here we find the same symbol on the African continent,
where the Beninese kings were using it as a sign representing almost
exactly the same things as we use it to mean. To the Fon people of
Benin it was a sacred symbol that implied ‘continuity’, ‘recycling’ and
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THE POWER OF THE WORD
continuous growth and re-growth. I leave it to you to speculate
whether we are talking about independent genesis of the same symbols
and meanings or whether the symbol is so old that it has had time to
disperse over entire continents, yet in all that time has still managed to
retain, almost unchanged, a set of essential meanings. This then, is a
good example of the extraordinary power of the sign.
JULIEN SINZOGAN
Quand on est peintre, on peut être intarissable sur le sujet du pouvoir
de l’image. On peut le peindre et le dépeindre à l’envi; et notre discipline ne lasse jamais de faire des gorges chaudes ou de déclencher
des torrents d’encre. Le verbe exerce donc bien son pouvoir dans notre
monde merveilleux des Beaux Arts. Mais pour le peintre plasticien que
je suis, écrire sur le pouvoir du verbe semble pour le moins un exercice
de haute voltige. Devant l’appliquer à mon art, je ne traiterai que ce qui
est en rapport avec ma sensibilité et ma création personnelle.
N’étant pas calligraphe, je n’utilise pas dans mes tableaux le verbe
sous sa forme épistolaire. Le sens le plus approchant du verbe y est le
symbolisme, auquel j’ai recours dans de nombreuses œuvres. Je le
traiterai ici à travers deux principales traditions qui m’ont nourri ces
dernières années: le Fa, système divinatoire ancestral de mon pays, et la
symbolique de la société secrète des Abakua de Cuba, survivance de son
homonyme de la région de la Cross River du Nigéria, dont le graphisme a été pour moi une rencontre bouleversante.
Le système de géomancie par le Fa est constitué de seize grands
signes. L’on entend généralement par ‘signe’ un ordre précis, comme
les panneaux routiers. Au signe indiquant “tourner à gauche,” le conducteur n’a pas d’autre choix. En revanche, le symbole pourrait se définir comme un signe à géométrie variable, ce qui le soumet davantage à
l’interprétation qu’en donnent les multiples cultures, ou à différents
domaines à l’intérieur d’une seule. Dans la culture occidentale, la
colombe est un symbole de paix au plan séculier, et le symbole du Saint
Esprit au plan religieux. Que dire de la croix, et de sa symbolique multiple selon les divers plans (religion, code de la route, mathématiques,
etc)? Un exemple éclairant la concernant est l’anecdote suivante: au
cours d’une discussion avec mon grand-père il y a bien longtemps, je
fus amené à tracer sur le sol une croix en lui demandant quel en était le
sens selon lui. “La croisée des chemins,” me dit-il. “Tes lignes représen-
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tent la rencontre des destins. Même les blancs l’utilisent quand ils vont
au devant d’autres races.” L’on apprécie toute la distinction entre signe
et symbole. Alors que le signe a une limite précise, le symbole a une
amplitude incommensurable et ouvre sur l’imaginaire en portant
couleurs et philosophies de la vie. Ce n’est donc pas sans raison que
nombre d’artistes et plasticiens trouvent dans le symbolisme une
source inépuisable d’inspiration.
Les ‘signes’ du Fa sont-ils réellement des signes? Ne seraient-ils pas
plus proches de la définition du symbole? En effet, chaque ‘signe’ du Fa
contient en lui tout un monde dense et complexe de formes et de
couleurs. Par exemple, le signe Gbe Meji est dit correspondre à l’est,
commander la voûte céleste pendant le jour, et être le signe mâle père
de quatorze autres signes. Il est représenté par un cercle blanc. Il a engendré pêle-mêle les têtes des humains et des animaux, les montagnes,
les mers, les vaisseaux sanguins, la cage thoraxique, certaines espèces
de plantes ou d’arbres comme l’iroko. La divinité Legba du panthéon
vodun lui est associé. Voilà beaucoup de contenu pour un ‘signe,’ à
moins que l’on ne limite le sens de ‘signe du Fa’ au tracé en pointillé
effectué par le devin sur le plateau au moment de la divination. Ce
tracé est en fait une écriture, chaque signe ayant le sien, et correspond à
une forme d’alphabet propre à notre géomancie. Ce simple tracé, ce
signe, ouvre pourtant sur tout un univers pour qui sait le lire. J’ai pour
ma part souvent développé dans mes œuvres l’imaginaire fécondé par
certains de ces signes du Fa, et un grand nombre d’artistes issus des
cultures où cette forme de géomancie est pratiquée ont eu cette même
inspiration: Jorge Da Silva à Bahia, Dominique Kouas au Bénin,
Édouard Duval-Carié à Haïti, pour n’en citer que quelques uns répartis
entre le Bénin, le Togo, le Nigéria, Cuba, Haïti, le Brésil, etc. Ces
cultures issues d’un même berceau en Afrique offrent à leurs artistes
des possibilités graphiques et plastiques infinies de par leur tradition
religieuse, où foisonnent les symboles. Au Bénin, l’un de ceux
récurrents sur les murs de nos temples est l’Ourouboros, appelé Dan
chez les Fon et Mahi, et Olumare chez les Yorouba. Ce serpent qui se
mord la queue est le symbole du temps cyclique et de la richesse, et
c’est un symbole que nous partageons avec maintes autres cultures.
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THE POWER OF THE WORD
GERARD HOUGHTON
I finished the first part of my talk with an image of the ancient symbol
of the ourobouros, the serpent eating its tail, a sign that perhaps first
came out of Africa and travelled towards Persia, before later being
passed
on
to
us
by
the
Greeks.
[Slide
20
<http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] As Julien just
mentioned, this Beninese version represents the deity known as Dan –
the rainbow serpent – a sky god whose multicoloured body contains all
the hues of the rainbow. However, other versions of this same symbol
were common in Mesopotamia in which the serpent’s body was
divided into two bands of black and white, indicating that the cycle of
rebirth or repetition was thought to be composed of two
complementary and opposite elements. In this second part, I’d like to
follow this hint, while still pursuing my earlier Oriental tack, and talk a
little about those representations of complementary cycles that in the
West we refer to by their Chinese names of Yin and Yang.
[Slide
21
<http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>]
Perhaps a little oddly, I want to return to the Orient by way of an
extraordinary English artist – this being a large gouache-on-paper work
by Gerald Wilde (1908–86). One of England’s great post-war painters,
Wilde is often overlooked today on account of his work’s being so
unlike that of any of his contemporaries that he didn’t fit into any of the
neat pigeon-holes which art historians use to describe paintings of that
period. Simply put, Wilde was an original, and his work quite unique.
Trying to explain Wilde’s elusive otherness, the art critic David
Sylvester once said that he was the only British painter whose work
could truly be described as Abstract Expressionist in style. However,
such a description, pointing us towards New York of the 1950s and
1960s, leads us in the wrong direction entirely. My own feeling is that
Wilde’s genius points us towards the East – because these rippling
forms that we see here in a work entitled “Intelligence Now” (though
other versions were also called “Transformation”) obviously describe
some sort of organic process, a most uncommon subject for a Western
artist of that time.
It’s difficult at first glance to imagine exactly what it was that Wilde
was seeing and representing; but these red lines might be thought of as
ripples fanning out across the surface of water. What is clear is that
there’s an implicate order within the apparent chaos of lines that
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appear to radiate from some common centre. Perhaps this ‘centre’
offers us a clue, looking as it does rather like the original version of the
Chinese Yin–Yang symbol. As many of you might know, the original
version of that symbol found in the ancient texts is always shown not
as the two black and white interpenetrating shapes now so familiar in
the West, but as three rotating forms – commas, fish, dragons or
whatever they may be – spiralling around a single point.
Now, imagine that we are looking down upon a large weather system – looking at a radar map provided by today’s weather satellites.
The Wilde image now begins to make some sort of sense as one realizes
that the patterns radiate outwards from the central ‘seed cells’. There is
a natural logic to the patterns of development and transformation
shown, with, every so often, the formation of an entirely new ‘seed cell’
as the interacting lines of force unite to create new centres that again
generate newly evolving patterns of energy. This image, of course, represents just one moment in this organic development – a single snapshot of a moment in time – but it is evident that the picture refers not
just to the instant captured, but to the entirety of the process surveyed.
Notice that in the lower right-hand area, at the developing edge of the
‘front’, the spiralling eddies unite, for a brief moment in the flowing
cycle, to create a flawless circle – that perfect sign, and powerful symbol. Wilde, I would suggest, was here trying to render visible a
complex set of ideas not often attempted by English artists – though
such ideas have been long been familiar territory for Oriental artists.
To demonstrate this quickly, let me show some images by the Japanese
artist
Kenji
Yoshida
[Slide
22
<http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>], who, having been
selected, as a young man, to become a kamikaze pilot, knew just how
fortunate he was to have survived the war. Every canvas that Yoshida
has painted ever since has borne one and the same title – “La Vie.” Let
me run through a few examples of Yoshida’s beautiful work to
illustrate the constant – almost unconscious – appearance of Yin–Yang
elements in his work. Here’s another one [Slide 23
<http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>], again done in
Yoshida’s vivid colours, the whole palette intensified by the application
of gold and silver leaf. This picture, I think, is very beautifully done
[Slide 24 <http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>], and, as
with the earlier Wilde, you can sense how Yoshida is attempting to
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paint, in two dimensions, a moving process of transformation. There
isn’t just one simple static Yin–Yang symbol here, the familiar black
and white rotating forms, each carrying within it the seeds of its
opposite, but a complex rotating spiral of energy that manifests as
shape-shifting images of those elemental forms, the whole emblematic
of an organic process in a state of vital flux.
Although both Wilde’s and Yoshida’s visions point us on the way to
an understanding of just how complicated may be the layers of meaning that might pervade an abstract image, I now want to introduce an
even older painting to develop this idea further. [Slide 25
<http://www.theoctobergallery.com/power.htm>] This is a slide of a
Chinese scroll that I’m fortunate enough to have picked up during my
time in Japan.* In fact, it isn’t even Chinese, being painted by a
Japanese artist, but he’d studied and travelled widely in China during
his apprentice years, and this scroll is executed in the distinctive style
of the Southern Literati school, a tradition which flourished about four
hundred years ago. This particular work is more recent, probably
having been painted in the 1870s, towards the end of the artist’s life.
Before I say anything more about the painting, however, I’d like to ask
you to look at it yourself for a few minutes, to enjoy its charm, listen to
what it says directly to you, and gather those critical ‘first impressions’
of your own.
One of the signal differences between any piece of writing and any
picture is that the written work is presented in a linear fashion,
whereas an image is arranged spatially, with no fixed point from which
to begin, nor any end-point at which the viewing of the image can be
said to be complete. An American neuroscientist, Harry Jerison, a
professor at UCLA, has demonstrated, in detail, just how different are
the ways in which any two individuals will look at and ‘construct’ a
given picture. He does this by tracking very precisely the path taken by
a person’s eyes as they roam around within the picture-frame. Indeed,
so different is each individual’s way of seeing that it defines what Dr
Jerison calls that person’s “scan-path,” a mechanical description of a
way of looking at a picture that is recognizably distinct from the scanpaths of other people. Apparently, each of us, when presented with the
same image, will examine it quite differently, scrutinizing objects in the
*
The scroll is also reproduced on the cover of the present volume.
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67
foreground and background of the picture in different ways, in
different spatial sequences and at quite different rates, in order to
determine first the content and then, by extension, the ‘meaning’ of the
picture.
When I showed him this scroll at a conference in France, Dr Jerison
was fascinated by my assertion that Chinese artists of the time were
more than aware of the phenomenon of scan-paths, and would even
attempt to control a viewer’s idiosyncratic construction of the painting
by manipulating that viewer’s scan-path from the outset. Let me show
you what I mean. When we look at the scroll, what we initially see are
the several large ‘blocks’ of mountains and trees set out within the picture, and immediately we recognize a Chinese landscape scene. There
are three ‘mountain’ elements arranged along the diagonal from
bottom left to top right, and there are two slightly larger ‘tree’ elements
which fill the intermediate spaces in the upper-middle-left and lowermiddle- right positions, and which align themselves about the
opposing diagonal. At the very simplest level, therefore, the painting
sets up a creative tension – in the form of a cross – between these two
main ingredients, the mountains and the trees – between, if you like,
the geological realm and the biological. To the Chinese, rocks
symbolized the Yang (male) aspect, while the second term of this
dyadic relationship, the plants – living material intimately associated
with water – would be understood to be essentially Yin (female) in
character. Both plants and rocks, Yin and Yang, represent separate but
integrally related aspects of the same overarching natural system
known as the T’ai Chi – the Great Primordial.
Now, if we enter the picture via the closest point to us, the little
clump of foothills in the left foreground, our gaze is immediately
drawn upwards, past the little shrine on the promontory, to the highest
point of that outcrop. From there, the eye is swept onwards along the
backbone of hills climbing from left to right through the middle
ground, irresistibly upwards towards the tallest of the mountain peaks
in the distance. The farther summits, being successively lower, cause
the eye to traverse to the left and, by a clever ruse, to reverse direction
and begin to descend. Encountering a closer copse of trees, our
attention is pulled back from the distant mountains, diagonally
downwards across the central point, and on towards a second grove of
trees growing even closer by in the foreground, whereupon another
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THE POWER OF THE WORD
subtly integrated visual bridge leads us back towards the foothills from
where we first began our ascent. In fact, the viewer’s gaze is lured
round and round an endless circuit within the picture-frame, a threedimensional perspectival loop that almost seems to trace out the
Moebius-strip figure of our Western symbol for infinity. Whether rising
along the rocky mountain paths or climbing the tree trunks up to the
highest branches and beyond, the end of all our circular journeys
within the picture-space is found to be at the starting-point again.
As we tread these mountain paths of the imagination, the captive
eye intuits two complementary circles, one above the other, and while
it is possible to circle, for a time, within the closed ambit of either one,
we can also cross between the two circuits at the point where they
intersect in the very centre of the picture. If we travel in a clockwise
direction around the lower circle, then we will inevitably find ourselves
moving anti-clockwise (though, as with the adinkra glyph, we have
neither stopped moving forward nor intended to change direction)
around the upper circle, and vice versa. This form, with its mysterious
properties, is one of the variants of the Chinese T’ai Chi symbol. We
can test this intuition by looking within each of the two circles for the
‘seed’ of its opposite – and there they are. Each circuit encloses an area
of negative space. At the centre of the one in the lower half of the
picture we find a rather strange looking ‘man’, and, central to the
opposite circuit, an even odder figure to Western eyes, one that
represents a natural rock formation which the Chinese would
recognize to be a ‘spirit-stone’ or kwai-shi, an object that radiates great
natural power. These two focal points are drawn differently: the man is
represented by a dark blot, whereas his complementary opposite, the
spirit-stone, is depicted as light and open. According to the Chinese
convention, we know, therefore, that man here represents the Yin
element within the Yang cycle, the spirit rock exemplifying the Yang
element at the moving heart of the Yin.
Now that we’ve discovered a key to help us read further into the
painting, we can be certain that interpenetrating Yin–Yang elements
will be discovered at even deeper levels within the fabric of the picture.
The Chinese artist who painted this serene landscape scene may not
have realized all that he was inscribing into his image, yet at the same
time he could not have done otherwise. He was describing the world as
it is, and he could no more avoid finding within it the complex inter-
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play of ever more finely shaded patterns of complementary opposites
than a Western scientist could avoid finding the same world to be an
arrangement of elements made of molecules and atoms. Primordial
matter was composed of two opposite principles, everywhere manifested as light/dark, male/female, strong/soft, geology/biology and
so on. The natural world, therefore, could not do other than show forth
these two principles found mixed in different proportions, and could
be analysed according to a mathematical progression that developed
from the monad of the T’ai Chi to the Yin–Yang dyad and on through a
set of six ‘trigram’ combinations, which could be arranged to form
sixty-four hexagrams, and so on to ever more subtle levels.
The character at the centre of the lower circle is a significant addition
to the scroll’s narrative. If you look carefully, you can see that he’s
carrying some sort of twisted staff, which announces him to be an old
man of the mountains, a magician or Taoist sage. These sen-nin, or hermits, living in ascetic seclusion high in the mountains, were believed to
feed on nothing but the rising mist as they maintained their esoteric
practices in the single-minded pursuit of the elixir of immortality. They
were adepts of the Way, seekers after chi, or vital energy, initiates who
knew that the same energies expressed in the great macrocosm of the
natural world were also to be found controlling the microcosm of the
human organism. In these mountain hideaways, at one with nature,
their numbers were certainly swelled by poets and painters, by alchemists and other seekers of the way, all possessed of practical skills and
knowledge gleaned from a close reading of the great book of nature. It
is significant that the sage appears to be orienting himself towards and
paying obeisance to the little shrine on the promontory above. Standing
where he does, the magician symbolizes the necessary third element of
the scroll – humanity, the link between heaven and earth. We find man
occupying a critical position within the scheme of things, as shown by
the little clusters of dwellings half-hidden at the very centre of the
scroll, a position precisely pin-pointed by the circular window of the
main house. Closer inspection reveals two human figures (almost certainly a man and a woman) with their arms raised in the traditional
manner of greeting with great respect. Another human community is
to be found nestling in the foothills of the distant mountains, identified
by its encircling and protective thicket of trees, a small pocket of Yin
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encircled by but existing harmoniously within the surrounding world
of Yang.
Diametrically opposite the corner where we first entered the frame,
in negative space unvisited by the circling eye roving through the landscape scenes, is a corner reserved for words. Remember, however, that
in Chinese words are also pictures – and, in fact, the Chinese painters
made little or no distinction between what to us are the quite separate
realms of writing and painting. Just as the same instrument, the brush,
is used to perform both actions, so too the same verb describes both
painting and writing. The poem was an integral part of any painting,
and the painter was, of necessity, also a poet, the two being complementary aspects (Yin–Yang) of the one expression. This picture-poem,
simply translated, says, “Far away and high above Cold Mountain, a
small rocky path / White clouds with mist rising.” This next symbol is
difficult to read, but I take it to be “In this place, the houses of men.”
And the last line mysteriously adds “The whole locale is protected by a
mighty river.” So the picture, we learn, as well as being about ‘mountains’ and ‘trees’ and ‘men’, is about a ‘mighty river’. By the way, the
very last character in the poem – the three vertical lines that I mentioned earlier – is that Chinese sign for ‘river’.
One of the several odd things about this particular scroll is that
whereas in almost any other painting done in this San-Sui (MountainWater) style you would expect to see water coursing down through the
rocks, growing in size before flowing out of the picture-frame in the
lower foreground as a mighty river, this image is devoid of any visible
sign of water. We infer the presence of water from the abundance of
trees, but – except in the poem – water itself is signally absent. If the
poem is to be read strictly, the mighty river, rather than running
through the scene, surrounds and protects it. Something very strange is
happening here, a dislocation between the image and the explanatory
poem has been introduced, and the convention consciously subverted.
Taking into account some of the things we’ve already discovered in the
scroll, we are required to make an interpretative leap in the dark to
understand the meaning of the whole satisfactorily.
I take the absent ‘mighty river’ to refer to some absolutely essential
thing which is so obvious that we seldom even notice it. I read the
scroll as a carefully coded text concerning man’s place in nature. The
great cycle of nature that ensures the succession of seasons, that sees
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water evaporate from the rice fields only to return as rain, is the
‘mighty river’ protecting the whole fragile ecology of this hidden place
among the mountains. Here man must know how to support the
natural world in order to be supported by it, in his turn. Taken together
as both poem and painting, the scroll can be read as an ecological – or
philosophical – treatise, describing the part man must play in
maintaining alignment and harmony with the greater whole. The wise
old magician performing his solitary rituals sees sufficiently into the
heart of things to point us in the direction we must follow, and he must
warn us when we go against the flow of that mighty river upon which
our survival depends. As our eyes follow the path prescribed by the
picture itself, the endlessly circling loop, we read about and see
repeatedly confirmed on every side the narrative of man’s necessary
interdependence and co-existence with the natural world. By
controlling our scan-paths, the image corporeally confirms its hidden
message: we are initiated, inculcated, and transformed.
It’s often said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in talking about pictures painted by artists from a range of different cultures
around the world, I’ve tried to limit myself to just a few words of commentary for each picture presented. However, with an image of the
subtlety and complexity of this last Chinese scroll-painting, it quickly
becomes obvious that it requires far more than a thousand words to
unpack even a small part of the meanings contained within the work.
Although we were visually oriented beings long before we become enthralled by the power of words, what often surprises me is how few
people, in front of an image, are able to articulate the powerful sense
impressions encoded in that image. Perhaps our literate cultures have
become seduced by language, overcome by the power of the word. But
then again, as my Chinese scroll always reminds me, perhaps the
visual and the verbal fields, the picture and the poem, are not two
separate super-powers vying for ultimate supremacy. Perhaps they are
simply different aspects of the same instinct to make sense of an always
mysterious world, complementary opposites, twin aspects of one and
the same thing.
JULIEN SINZOGAN
J’en viens à la deuxième partie de mon exposé: la symbolique Abakua
est un agencement de signes formés de points, de ronds, de croix, et de
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THE POWER OF THE WORD
flèches. Partie de la Cross River au Nigéria dans les cales des négriers
vers Cuba et Haïti, elle me revient comme une page déchirée de notre
histoire. Les sociétés Abakua sont exclusivement masculines et secrètes.
Mais l’anthropologue cubaine Lydia Cabrera a levé un coin du voile en
publiant il y a quelques années Anaforuana, où sont présentés les principaux symboles Abakua dont je me suis inspiré pour mon travail.
Parmi les œuvres exposées ici à Cambridge figure, par exemple, la
toile intitulée Castigo (punition/châtiment), qui reprend les trois niveaux de punition au sein des sociétés Abakua: le castigo simple, le castigo
riguroso et la peine de mort: le castigo capital. Il n’y a pas de date
formelle pour l’exécution de la sentence. L’éventail dans le temps est
donc relatif et si le condamné rectifie sa conduite, la marque de sa
punition peut être effacée ou annulée par une croix.
Dans leur esprit tout comme dans leur forme évolutive et fantaisiste,
les tracés Abakua sont donc de véritables symboles.
Je vais conclure avec l’exemple d’une aventure qui m’est arrivée en
1986: à l’époque, je travaillais pour un laboratoire, et nous sont arrivés
de Bamako quatre médecins. Ils avaient un problème délicat: expliquer
à leur population les causes et le développement de la bilharziose, qui
sévissait dans la région. J’avais suggéré – ce fut adopté et j’en fus très
fier – que nous procédions par images pour régler le problème. Nous
avons réalisé en commun un film d’animation qui montrait comment le
virus de la bilharziose, doté d’une ventouse, passait par le pied dans le
sang quand on marchait dans une flaque d’eau polluée; comment il remontait jusqu’aux poumons où il se multipliait rapidement et devenait
donc mortel. Nous avons testé le film dans un village au Mali où il
reçut un écho extraordinaire. Le principe fut adopté à l’échelle
nationale.
Comme quoi, parfois, l’image fait le travail du verbe.
Je vous remercie.
T I D J A N I –S E R P O S
Madame la Présidente, j’ai écouté avec beaucoup d’intérêt ce que nos
amis ont dit tout à l’heure, et ils ont commencé avec l’une des
premières images. C’était justement le serpent qui se mordait la queue,
et qui chez nous a une signification capitale. Il ne faut pas oublier que
ce matin, quand le président du collège ouvert le colloque, it a lu le
poème “Souffles” qui disait que les morts n’étaient pas morts. Cela que
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Fourth Dialogue
disait le peintre avec le serpent qui se mord la queue et qui montrait un
éternel recommencement, le mot l’a dit, l’image l’a montré. Donc, déjâ,
il y a ce dialogue qui peut se faire entre les mots et l’image. Chez moi,
quand le roi monte sur le trône, la première parole qu’il prononce, c’est
cette parole-là qui détermine ce que les artistes feront pendant tout son
règne. Et si vous regardez la façon dont ce serpent a été fait, il y a eu
collision de deux symboles. Il y a le symbole du roi qui a dit – et c’est
pour ça que ce serpent a des dents – qui a dit, “Je suis le requin qui
terrorise la barre chaque fois que des étrangers viennent troubler le
royaume.” L’autre serpent, qui est un serpent qui mord la queue, ce
serpent normalement n’a pas de dents, et c’est le signe de la richesse.
Donc ici, il y a collision de deux formes de discours. Il y a le discours
royal, qui date de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, au moment où les
Français voulaient envahir le royaume, et il y avait aussi le premier
symbole, qui était un symbole de richesse, un symbole de continuité,
du refus de la mort, etc. Et l’artiste nouveau a pris deux symboles
anciens, il les a mis ensemble pour créer le discours contemporain,
parce que ce type de serpent n’existe pas dans la tradition. Mais il a pris
la tradition pour parler à la modernité. En allant prendre l’inspiration
dans la tradition, cet artiste-là nous a convié à un nouveau dialogue qui
n’existait pas et qui est le dialogue d’aujourd’hui.
JULIEN SINZOGAN
Je remercie Professeur Tidjani–Serpos pour son explication. C’était remarquable.
MARIA TIPPETT
Thank you to both our speakers.
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