PREAMBLE

PAINTING RUNS IN MY FAMILY, BUT NOT RELIGION. MY MOTHER’S maternal uncle, Walter Tempest, was a late nineteenth-century watercolorist and member of the British Royal Academy, and my mother was an acclaimed painter of abstract landscapes. In my early twenties I vacillated between painting and writing before deciding on anthropology as my vocation. In recent years my daughters have excelled in the arts I chose not to pursue. Heidi Jackson exhibits regularly in Sydney and teaches art for a living, while Freya Jackson, now studying art in college, already promises to follow in her sister’s and grandmother’s footsteps. Where some people bear witness to a religious tradition, sustained over many generations, I marvel at the artistic trait that has given my family a very present help in times of trouble. My mother’s accidented landscapes often appear to be outward expressions of her inward struggle with the pain of rheumatoid arthritis.¹ The death of Heidi’s mother when she was thirteen, and her attenuated ties with her homeland following our decision to embark on a new life in Australia, undoubtedly found expression in Heidi’s New Zealand landscapes. And Freya frequently turned to painting and drawing when overwhelmed by the confusions of her adolescent years.

In writing about art, I have drawn inspiration from my family history as well as from my ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa and Central Australia, focusing not on art as an expression of individual genius or as an aesthetic,² but rather on the work of art, where work is to be read as a verb rather than a noun and understood as as a techné for making one’s life more individually and socially viable.³ Art opens up an artificial—one might say a ritual or utopian—space for trying to get around or beyond the mundane difficulties that beset us and the misfortunes that befall us.⁴ As John Dewey put it, “Art is thus prefigured in the very process of living.”⁵ Or, in the words of Jim Carrey, “Painting is a way I free myself from concern…putting something out there rather than having it in here.”⁶

Crucial to this point of view is the pragmatist assumption that art (ars) and techné are intimately linked, and that the work of art is a matter of making, acting, and doing before it is a form of knowledge, an object of contemplation, or a thing of beauty.⁷ As William James noted, “what really exists is not things made but things in the making.”⁸ As such, art and craft must be placed on a par. The creation of an efficient tool may contribute as much to our well-being as the creation of a religious icon or statue, a prayer wheel, a mask, or a musical instrument. Nor is the work of art simply a way of expressing inner experience; rather, it is a way of processing experience and working it through; not necessarily a means of changing the world, but an oblique way of changing our perception of the world, particularly when it becomes too much for us to manage by direct or mundane means. It is because the work of art makes our lives more viable that art or craft objects are often regarded as participating in our lives as social beings,⁹ though the contrary is also the case, since the human body is commonly likened to a container such as a house, a suit of clothing, a cooking pot, a drinking vessel, that can be opened or closed, picked up or discarded, go to rack and ruin or be repaired.

Elements of these metonyms and metaphors find expression in Alfred Gell’s view that “art objects are the equivalent of persons, or more precisely, social agents” that mediate agonistic exchanges and manipulate social relations within “a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.”¹⁰ But while I share Gell’s fascination with how art objects transform experience—bedazzling, intimidating, or mystifying us—my focus is less on outward effects than on the dynamic interplay of subjective and objective dimensions of reality. Art emerges in the space between oneself, standing apart from others (eigenwelt), and oneself as a participant in a world shared with many others (mitwelt).

Philip Bromberg’s insights into dissociation are relevant here. Repudiating the common assumption that dissociation is necessarily a sign of mental disorder, Bromberg emphasizes the creative value of dissociation in managing unbearable experiences by shifting one’s focus to something outside oneself, something that can be regarded as objective rather than subjective, not-me rather than me.¹¹ Though there is a danger that this defensive strategy can estrange us from the very reality we are struggling to come to grips with, it provides the possibility of seeing one’s own world from the inside out, not from within but from somewhere other or elsewhere, thereby offering one some purchase on experiences that seemed both unthinkable and unendurable.

This risk that we may lose our reason in the process of recovering our footing reminds us that the human condition is inescapably liminal. In D. W. Winnicott’s terms, art and religion are “transitional phenomenon,” emerging in the space between self and other and constituting a “third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore…an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate but interrelated.”¹²

Rather than identify religion with belief and liturgy, I prefer to focus on the existential situations in which divinities and spiritual entities as well as ideas about ultimate reality, fate, and natural justice come into play as potential means whereby human beings gain some purchase on shattering experiences and regain some measure of comprehension and control over their lives. Limit experiences, however, do not necessarily bring us to religion, as my own family history makes clear. Nor do post-Enlightenment notions of religion necessarily illuminate the African and Aboriginal lifeworlds I have described in my ethnographies. Nor are “spiritual” resources the only resources available to us in crisis, despite our tendency to use a quasi-theological language in recounting experiences that confounded us. For these reasons, many of the forms of life we refer to as “cultural”—including religion, art, ritual, ideology, and belief—may be construed as ways of circumventing and even subverting the world as we find it,¹³ ways of affirming “another nature,”¹⁴ ways of living by other means. As Louise Bourgeois put it, “Art comes from life…. Art is not about art. Art is about life.”¹⁵

To explore this point of view, I have divided this book into three parts. Part 1 introduces my ethnographic and intersubjective methodology and adduces perspicacious examples to illustrate my key themes: the dialectic of inner and outer; the shape-shifting character of consciousness; the relation of art, ritual, storytelling, and religion; and the symbolic links between natality and creativity. Part 2 focuses on several antipodean artists whose work has engaged my interest for many years, while part 3 explores the works and lives of several European and American painters, performance artists, photographers, sculptors, and graphic artists whose work speaks just as compellingly to my central themes.