Spirit and Image: The Art of VoodooAuthor(s): Donald CosentinoSource: African Arts, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Nov., 1987), pp. 71-73Published by: UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3336506 .

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Fang reliquaries from European buckets and bowls). Others commented on technique, dat- ing, or on the object's influence in our own world. A remark like "The painter Kan- dinsky so admired this sculpture that he often came to see it" does not tell us anything about a piece's origins or original identity, but it does reveal another side of its history, as an "ex- otic" object inspiring artists and others in the West. We need to reflect upon our own at- titudes, our constructions and manipulations of the arts of others, as we seek to understand them in their own right. Whether purposely or inadvertently, such a label did this.

The labels were not entirely without prob- lems, however. The inconsistent use of catalogue numbers caused some confusion. Only a few labels included them, but did not explain them as such. One or two referred to the catalogue numbers of other objects in the exhibition, yet these other objects were not themselves identified by numbers (as with the two Luba masks). The Mbuun speaker's staff and the Chokwe women's staffs were grouped together in one case, but their labels were mistakenly switched.

"African Masterpieces from Munich" was a fine exhibition. The works were, with few ex- ceptions, excellent and enlightening. Bring- ing these important pieces to a wide audience and publishing in English a substantial por- tion of Munich's extensive collection are major accomplishments. Both the Center and the Staatliches Museum fiir V61kerkunde are to be commended for their efforts.

Henry John Drewal The Metropolitan Museum of Art

SPIRIT AND IMAGE The Art of Voodoo School of the Art Institute of Chicago Gallery April 17-May 9, 1987

The show created by Park Chambers and Marilyn Houlberg at the School of the Art In- stitute of Chicago confirms the emergence of Voodoo chic in American culture. "Chic" may be an odd term to use for a religion associated in our folklore with eviscerated chickens, skewered dolls, and the walking dead. Surely, you argue, these are negative images grown in the hothouse of our native racism: lurid Caucasian stereotypes for anything with an African origin. And I would agree. For Euro- peans and Americans, Voodoo has for a cen- tury been as forbidden as sex and sin. And there of course, in those twin taboos, lies the source of its present allure: "Do do that Voodoo/That you do so well," sang the lyrics of Cole Porter. The image of Voodoo has se- cured a place deep in the national libido, hid- den in the plain brown wrapping of our ig- norance and concupiscence, but awaiting a perverse yuppie revival of the Great Awak- ening.

Voodoo's time may have come. For a cen- tury dime novels like The White King of LaGonave and Black Baghdad have fed the na- tional appetite for black exotica. Zombi legends have enlivened many a Halloween party (and inspired my favorite auteur,

George Romero, and his epic Night, Dawn, and Day of the Dead). And Hollywood has been

churning out celluloid Voodoo nightmares like Golden Mistress and I Walk with the Zombis. But note how these persistent themes are changing subtly during the Reagan dispensa- tion. Zombis are now the sympathetic subject of a national bestseller, The Serpent and the Rainbow, whose hero (of sorts), the ex-ghoul Clarvius Narcisse, made the cover of Harvard Magazine. Ever quick to catch a wave, Hol- lywood has just filmed Serpent, with (I pre- sume) Harvard grad student Wade Davis transformed into a junior Professor Indiana Jones. How the image of Voodoo fares in this film can only be anticipated, but if Angel Heart was a harbinger, watch out! I am sure that by now you've all seen Mickey Rourke, our fa- vorite post-Juvenile Delinquent actor, rolling in the bloody chicken feathers with America's favorite sitcom daughter, Lisa Bonet, incon- gruously cast as a Voodoo mambo. Horror has become allure, and trembles on the edge of glamour.

I'm not going to give you a liberal rap - this new look at Voodoo isn't ready to play in Peoria, nor will it likely please the tastes of the little old (white) lady from Dubuque. She would in fact have been quite disoriented by the Chambers-Houlberg show. She would have found some of the votive objects, such as the fetus pickled in the bottle on the Baron Samedi's altar, an offensive example of Voo- doo's "concrete metaphysic." (Never mind that the Voodoo artists were themselves in- spired in that aesthetic by the god-nailed-to- crossbeams representations of paleo- Christian artists.) But what might have most scandalized the little old lady is the sense of celebration the show created, rekindling that old haunting Protestant fear that "someone somewhere may be happy," which has moti-

vated so much disapproval (and physical de- struction) of Voodoo by missionaries and other professionally unhappy people.

And yet it is the sense of celebration, a host- ing of the deities in the bodies of their ser- viteurs, that Voodoo is mostly about. A Voo- doo service is about candles, flowers, prayer ropes, and tinkling bells; lace, sequins, and swords; crates of soda water and bottles of rum, something good to eat, something good to sing, and of course music: drums to signal the loa from Guinee, drums to inspire their manifestation in the bodies of their serviteurs who have prepared this party for them. Whilst summering in Bonheur village last year, I assisted the houngan Legrand San- tiague with preparations for his annual houn (service). We stopped at the house of a neighboring houngan to borrow his best drum. We then haggled with several marchands over crates of strawberry pop and negotiated with a bootlegger over bottles of raw rum. Before the houn began, Legrand's very modest mud-walled hounfor (temple) was decorated with flowers and vines. I recognized Leg- rand's nervous anticipation as, mutatis mutan- dis, pre-party angst. But the guests were the loa, spirits of uncompromising chic who would note every detail of preparation, and reward - or chastise - in direct measure.

Having learned my style lessons in Haiti from Legrand et al., I hurried down to Banana Republic to buy an Italian waiter's jacket to complement my white painter's pants for the Chicago opening. White is the favored color for attendants at a Voodoo service, and rumor had reached me in L.A. that Max Beauvoir would fly up from Port-au-Prince to inaugu- rate the Show with a Voodoo service. Now this was an ecclesiastic coup de theatre. Max runs the most fashionable hounfor in Haiti. It is made from fieldstone and natural wood and

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looks a great deal like the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Unitarian Church in Madi- son, Wisconsin, where I saw an earnest pro- duction of God's Trumpets. Max's services are a

good deal more vibrant than that, however. He orchestrates them with operatic precision, assisted by his daughter Estelle pirouetting about the temple floor in her white Isadora Duncan scarves. A Beauvoir service is to the

average houn what a Vatican high mass is to

Sunday morning at your corner parish. I arrived fashionably late. And Max

Beauvoir was there in his white suit and

power beads, engaging a local houngan in that

peculiar ecclesiastic minuet that Voodoo de- votees call a mystic power contest. They twirled in front of the altars and the displays of votive objects, blessing them with spurts of rum. Max then bent in front of the main altar to create his favorite

vbv'e: a heart design in

white cornmeal dedicated to the loa of Love, Erzuli Freda. He shook his asson, a sacred calabash covered with a net of power beads and snake vertebrae, to bless all the sacred ob-

jects gathered from Haiti and impress the newsmen from Channel 5 who were busy videoing it all for the 6 p.m. news. The

Chicago setting was almost as dramatic as his Port-au-Prince temple, Le Peristyle Mariani; the crowd almost as cosmopolitan as that which used to pack his Peristyle before news

reports of roasting Ton Ton Macoutes, and rumors of AIDS, effectively killed the tourist trade.

The gallery walls had been repainted basic black, with a spot dramatically reflecting the

sequins on two ancient crossed flags that shimmered like the crystal ball in the Hol-

lywood Palladium. The sound of taped Rada drums animated the crowds gathered around the two altars, the flag displays, the cases of votive objects, the video screen, and the

champagned buffet. Clusters of students in bohemian blues and yesterday's feathers worked the buffet, jostling the practicing art- ists in bohemian blues without the feathers.

Chicago-transplanted Haitians were out like

spring flowers in pink and blue silks. Adidas-shod yuppie profs and tweeded con- servators exchanged knowing comments on

lithographs and archetypes. Rumor had it that

Mayor Washington had also been invited to help inaugurate the Show along with Beauvoir, but he didn't arrive. With the elec- tion a week away, Hizzoner may have found it wise not to supply Eddie Vrdolyak with any undue ammunition, especially not for the Our

Lady of Czestochowa crowd, and especially not on this gorgeous Good Friday afternoon on which the curators had chosen, for what- ever pixilated reasons, to open the Show.

Co-curator Park Chambers looked reflec- tive among all the excited Voodoo admirers. He was standing under a purple velour flag with Baron Samedi, the loa of Death and Sex,

appliqubd on it at an angle. The Baron, wear- ing white trousers and purple morning coat, and of course his wire-rimmed shades, was the jauntiest imaginable image of Death and a perfect expression of the contrarious metaphysic of Voodoo theology. Chambers

himself appeared in mordant juxtaposition to the Baron. He was wearing what might be de- scribed as post-modernist Gene Autry; black leather hand-tooled cowboy boots with

acutely pointed toes embellished with

polished silver and rhinestones. As Chair of the Fiber Department at the School of the Art Institute, Chambers is finely attuned to ques- tions of style and approaches Voodoo art on its own aesthetic merits. "You have to view the

objects in the context of folk art, or eccentric art," he says. "These are objects that com- municate specific things, using specific im-

ages and colors reserved for individual loas.

They're all conceived by authentic Voodoo

priests, but generally executed by members of the temple."

Co-curator Marilyn Houlberg, artist, an-

thropologist, and tastemaker extraordinaire of nova cultura africana, was simultaneously cutting her own usual magnificent figure. She was gathered with a shifting nucleus of ad- mirers near the v'evb Max Beauvoir had re-

cently drawn for Erzuli, the loa of Love. Houl-

berg looked a bit like a loa herself in a flowing black ribbed-cotton, bat-winged, calf-length cardigan sweater over a black ankle-length skirt with black cowboy boots. Her ensemble, which was highlighted by countless strands of encrusted snake vertebrae, antelope horns, and black leather amulets decorated with in- tricate silver filigree, certainly would have

appealed to Erzuli Danthor, the dark and

dangerous aspect of Voodoo femininity. As I edged closer, Houlberg was busy ex-

plaining the ecstatic jumble of clay pots (govi), cloth dolls, ceramic figures, crucifixes, medicine bundles (paquets), votive bottles, silver utensils, iron implements, saints'

chromolithographs, fresh cut tulips, bowls of

popcorn (for the twins, or marassa), and a vi- brant plaster Mammy Wata purchased in a

Chicago boutique, which constituted the Rada altar of the exhibit (see photo). "These

objects are examples of how cultures try to make sense of each other when they're forced

together cataclysmically. You have to re- member that Africans from all over the conti- nent found themselves on a tiny Indian is- land, first with Spanish overlords, then with French ones, and with the Catholic church

dominating it all... Imagine the reverse, if a

bunch of the French seventeenth-century powdered-wig set suddenly found them- selves plopped down in an African jungle. The results would be equally intriguing."

Even as Houlberg offered this ingenious gloss to the magnificent pile of altar objects, one noted that it was in their position vis-a-vis each other that these objects seemed to gather strength and significance - an aesthetic les- son I learned many years ago as an altar boy in pre-Vatican II Catholic churches. Houlberg and Chambers had the good sense to let Max Beauvoir and his co-adjutor houngan make the final arrangement of sacred objects, which did more to breathe a kind of sacred life into them than even the spraying of the Barbancourt rum they had brought along from Haiti.

Of course, I brooded in my freshly stained Italian waiter's jacket, the cultivation of a new

image for Voodoo at the Art Institute of

Chicago says much more about white Ameri- ca than it does about black Haiti. Voodoo chic emerges at a time when the aesthetics of indi-

genous American religions waver from the bizarre to the tacky. Oral Roberts sees a nine- foot Jesus; the Blessed Virgin Mary and her Son confide Cold War secrets to Virginia Lueken at the site of the Vatican Pavilion in

Flushing; Tammy Bakker stands by her man; Moonies stalk the airports; Rajneeshis flee

Oregon... you get the picture, and it looks

pretty bleak to anyone with any genuine reli-

gious sensibility. But such zoo-like behavior on the part of our prophets has not led to atheism, agnosticism, or even undue cyni- cism for most of us. Rather, the poverty of our own spiritual forms has made us hungry for exotic cults from other traditions.

This seemed to be the point of "The

Spiritual in Art," the magnificent show that

inaugurated the Anderson Wing of the Los

Angeles County Museum of Art last year. The thesis for all the Mondrians, Kandinskys, and Pollocks on display was simply that the basis for much of modern art is not abstraction but

spiritual hermeticism. It isn't quantum physics or relativity but visions of theosophy and anthroposophism that have inspired the modern art movement. The lodestar of

twentieth-century art is not Albert Einstein. It's Mme. Helena Blavatsky.

Antonio Gramsci wrote a less sympathetic appraisal of all this spiritual questing in his Prison Notebooks. "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." Was the

guru of occidental communism prophesying the emergence of Voodoo chic? Could he for- see that a new nightclub would open in West Los Angeles called The Loa? Or that a rock band would call itself the Divine Horsemen? Or that a boutique on Melrose Avenue would commission Haitian artisans to create Voodoo bottles with plastic body parts inside, and ad- vertise its wares with a nude mannequin dis-

creetly covered with a Voodoo flag loincloth? Given his keen nose for analogies, Gramsci

might have sniffed the air of the Roman Em-

pire past its prime in these holy revels. Was it not in the declining days of the Empire that Isis was pushing Juno out of the Roman tem- ples? That Mithraic rites, Eleusinian mys- teries, and the peculiar cult of the carpenter from Judea were all jostling for the position of the passe Jupiter?

If that unkind analogy does describe the spiritual yearnings of alienated yuppies, then they have chosen well in Voodoo. Its aesthetic has always been attuned to fashion: saints' pictures, Masonic imagery, the glints of chasubles, sunglasses, wedding cakes. The orisha brought over by the Yoruba and the Fon have always been au courant and are no doubt amused by the attention they now receive from segments of American society grown hip enough to understand, a little, the sophistica- tion of Voodoo.

A writer like Russell Banks appreciates that sophistication, as does the essayist Michael

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Ventura, or the art historian R.F. Thompson, or earlier the dancer-turned-religious ethnologist-and-mythologist Maya Deren. These observers understand that Voodoo chic cannot be bought. Not in a boutique. Not in a film script. Voodoo chic is spiritual duende. It's accessible to those who go out to meet it on its own turf, within the framework of its own mythology and the peculiar outlines of its own sacred history The Chicago show went that distance. It had fun with the "eccentric art," but under the rubric of Voodoo's aesthe- tic, and in appreciation of its contextual im- peratives.

In these late days of the Empire, it's un- likely that the appetite for Voodoo chic will abate. So it's all the more important that we get its spiritual dimensions right. "Spirit and Image" was a step in that direction. "But," I wondered as I checked out the Playboy man- sion, which Hugh Hefner has donated to the Chicago Art Institute (we'll leave the implica- tions of that patronization for a later essay), "why not expand the context in another show? Instead of an altar or two, why not show Voodoo ritual art within its natural spiritual context, the hounfor? Let the spiritual seekers gauge the true dimensions of the aesthetic Voodoo has wrought."

And so I slouched back to L.A., burdened with these visions to be born.

Donald Cosentino University of California, Los Angeles

books Continued from page 26

iconography and symbolism (pp. 43-53, 341- 45). Little of what he says is new, which, con- sidering the lack of good analyses and in- terpretation in other treatments of Grassfields arts, is an unfortunate lacuna.

The book is mostly descriptive except for the third part, where Harter speculates about realism and expressionism in Cameroonian arts, relating them to similar movements in Western art. In postulating that realistic and expressionistic traditions coexisted in the Grassfields, he addresses some older hypoth- eses on the evolution of art forms (p. 338). Discussing African art in the terms of Western concepts and from the point of view of West- ern aesthetics is of course the privilege of the author, but it teaches us little about African aesthetics and artistic creativity. Similarly, Harter considers the progressive geometriza- tion of forms, the simplification of symbols, and tendencies toward abstraction - all is- sues that belong in the realm of earlier art his- torical scholarship and seem rather dated.

The last chapter on history and geography strikes me as a later addition to the text, no doubt stimulated by Jean-Pierre Warnier's re- cent work on trade and the prestige economy of the Bamenda plateau. These very impor- tant considerations should have set the stage for the book, because much of what is said here is crucial to a study of the provenance and style of artists and workshops.

Unfortunately, the text of Arts anciens du Cameroun is marred by the lack of effort to

guide the reader through it. I do not know how an "uninitiated" person will be able to deal with the sometimes excessive use of Afri- can terms, which are spelled differently ac- cording to language areas, and often in ways that do not follow the standard adopted by other scholars. African words are sometimes introduced without explanation, leaving the reader to his own devices to figure out what is meant (e.g., lakam, p. 15). Names of chiefs abound, particularly in reference to the dating of artworks. However, the dates of the chiefs' reigns are not systematically given. While there is an index, it would have helped to have a glossary of African terms, a list of chiefs, and a timetable in the appendix. Also, Harter often describes objects that are not pic- tured in the book, usually referring instead to the publications where the images can be found. This requires the constant use of supplementary materials, and I recommend having handy Lecoq's Les BamilWkk (1953) and Krieger's catalogues on the collections of the Berlin Museum fiir V61kerkunde.

Worse for the scholar, Harter often does not bother to indicate his sources. A case in point is the reference to a Bamum memorial figure that Northern erroneously interpreted as a portrait of a German officer (in her book, The Art of Cameroon, 1984, pp. 99-100). Harter re- peats this information (p. 162) without giving the source. He refers to authors or photogra- phers, but does not offer any hint as to where to find the texts cited or pictures mentioned. A typical passage is about carvings produced in the Isu chiefdom, also known during Ger- man colonial times as Bafum Katse (p. 242, translated from the French): "According to in- formation received on location by the German Rothe in 1912, a master carver at the beginning of the 19th century had a technique - heavy and vigorous at the same time, which gave the objects a grotesque and terrifying expression. This mood is not surprising because one knows that katse means murderers and that the Isu were partly cannibals (see Glauning)." We are never told where the Rothe quote comes from. Also, as Glauning has written several articles, it would be helpful to have the exact citation. The passage, by the way, is in Glauning's 1906 report on his voyage to the northern region of the Bamenda Bezirk (Deutsches Kolonialblatt, p. 236). Glauning's observations read somewhat differently from Harter's summation. The "cannibals" - this stereotype begs for an explanation - are not the Isu but the Munken, who were greatly feared by their neighbors. Isu was called Bafum Katse, "the Bafum of the murderers," by the Hausa, because supposedly several Hausa traders had been killed there. One can literally go through each page of the book and come up with incomplete references. On page 182, for example, Harter mentions a photo- graph taken of the palace of Nsob by a Mr. Liebereng at the beginning of the century. Lieberenz (note the z) worked between the two World Wars. The image is in the Berlin Museum fuir V61kerkunde photographic ar- chives where many of Lieberenz's images are kept (no. VIII A 1166).

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