Visionary Animal

Renaud Ego, Deke Dusinberre

Description

Why were depictions of animals a crucial trigger for the birth of art? And why did animals dominate that art for so long? In order to answer these questions, Renaud Ego examined some of the world’s finest rock art, that of the San of southern Africa.

For thousands of years, these nomadic hunter-gatherers assigned a fundamental role to the visualization of the animals who shared their lives. Some, such as the Cape eland, the largest of antelopes, were the object of a fascinated gaze, as though the graceful markings and shapes of their bodies were the key to secret knowledge safeguarded by the animals’ unsettling silence.

The artists sought to steal the animals’ secret through an act of rendering visible a vitality that remained hidden beneath appearances. In this process, the San themselves became the visionary animal who, possessing the gift of making pictures, would acquire far-seeing powers. Thanks to the singular effectiveness of their visual art, they could make intellectual contact with the world in order better to think and, ultimately, to act. They gained access to the full dimension of their human condition through painting scenes that functioned like visual contracts with spiritual and ancestral powers.

Their art is an act that seeks to preserve the wholeness of existence through a respect for the relationships linking all beings, both real and imaginary, who partake of it. The fundamentally ecological dimension of this message confers on San art its universality and contemporary relevance.

Visionary Animal is a translation of L’Animal voyant, published in France in 2015. This rich collection of essays is beautifully illustrated with the author’s photographs of rock art from across southern Africa.
The Stranger at the Summit

Prologue: Observing Silence

Chapter 1 Images that Transcend Myth and Ritual

Chapter 2 A Nomadic Mentality

Chapter 3 Spirits of the Place, Spiritual Places

Chapter 4 A Fluid Tangle

Chapter 5 Animals as Prism (Symbolism and Aesthetics)

Chapter 6 Investing in Appearances

Chapter 7 Galvanic Bodies

Chapter 8 The Shimmer of Wholeness

Epilogue: Believing Your Eyes

Lack of Ending

Notes

Captions for portfolio

Location of Main Areas of Paintings and Engravings

The Continuum of Pictorial Vitality

Index

Acknowledgments

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des arts visuels
• ART
• History
• General
• General officer
• Archaeology
• History of art

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781776142330
• Langue: English

Extrait

Visionary Animal
Renaud Ego
Visionary Animal
Rock Art from Southern Africa
Translated by Deke Dusinberre
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Original edition: L animal voyant: Art rupestre d Afrique australe .
Actes Sud - Errance, Arles, Paris, 2015
English language translation Deke Dusinberre 2018
First published in English in 2019
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/12019012262
978-1-77614-226-2 (Hardback)
978-1-77614-232-3 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-233-0 (EPUB)
978-1-77614-271-2 (Mobi)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
This translation into English was made possible by funding from the French ministry of culture and the Centre National du Livre (CNL). This book was published with the support of the French Institute of South Africa-Research (IFAS-Recherche, Johannesburg). Under the authority of the French ministry of foreign affairs and the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), it promotes research in the humanities and social sciences about southern Africa and within this framework supports scientific cooperation.

Project Manager: Elna Harmse
Copyeditor: Alison Lockhart
Proofreader: Judith Shier
Indexer: Marlene Burger
Cover design: Hybrid Creative
Typesetter: MPS
Typeset in 11.5 point Bembo
Contents
THE STRANGER AT THE SUMMIT
PROLOGUE: OBSERVING SILENCE
I. BEYOND MYTH AND RITUAL: MAKING VISUAL ART
Lingering ghosts
The two mirrors of anthropology
Pictures as prism
Three ways of formalizing: Dancing, recounting, painting
II. A NOMADIC MENTALITY
The scattered legend of humanimality
The trickster: An intercessor between worlds
Temporal regeneration and animal merger
Creativity, fiction, transgression
III. SPIRITS OF THE PLACE, SPIRITUAL PLACES
Mapping a mental landscape
Order and ornament
The world s outer skin
The way of the wall
IV. A FLUID TANGLE
A weave of shifting perspectives
Sympathetic links and thinking strings
Changing bodies, changing scale
Exempting appearances
Correspondences and synaesthesias
Opening the constellation
V. ANIMALS AS PRISM (SYMBOLISM AND AESTHETICS)
Taking care
An intriguing quasi-companion
The question of symbolism
A sense of finery
Drawing by design
VI. INVESTING IN APPEARANCES
Detaching
Bringing to life
Relating appearances
Consenting
Maintaining a respectful distance
VII. GALVANIC BODIES
Rain-animals
Rain-snakes: An example of dynamic liquidation by water
Antelope-men and winged bodies
Intercession and metamorphosis: A dialectic of freakishness
Putting on a game face
VIII. THE SHIMMER OF WHOLENESS
Painting forces
The singular case of Zimbabwe s formlings
A temporal bridge composed of paint
Eye contact
EPILOGUE: BELIEVING YOUR EYES
What is the Symbolic Effectiveness of Pictures?
LACK OF ENDING
NOTES
PORTFOLIO
Captions for Portfolio
Location of Main Areas of Paintings and Engravings
The Continuum of Pictorial Vitality
Index
Acknowledgements
Biographies
As I went through the marshes a doe sprang out of the corn and flashed up the hillside leaving her fawn.
On the skyline she moved round to watch, she pricked a fine black blotch on the sky.
I looked at her and felt her watching; I became a strange being. Still, I had my right to be there with her.
Her nimble shadow trotting along the sky line, she put back her fine, level-balanced head. And I knew her. [ ]
A Doe at Evening , D.H. Lawrence
The Stranger at the Summit
The sun was already high and we were still at the foot of Brandberg, the Fire Mountain . Behind us was the desert of Damaraland; ahead, the harsh profile of that mass of rock; all around, silence. Angula Shipahu, his son Thomas and I had just finished dividing the food and equipment between our backpacks. Basil s jeep was just a white dot in the distance, vanishing in the waves of heat. We would see him again in a fortnight, on the other side of the Brandberg, where he would come to pick us up.
We set off, marching in single file. I was excited about returning to this magic mountain, even if it was austere, shielded by its aridity. Conversation soon lagged. Everyone concentrated on walking. After just a few hours, the climb became difficult - harder than I expected. I was out of shape, my head was spinning. In the ruthless sun, the skeletal shade of a few acacias brought no coolness. My hands began to burn as the trek became a true climb: here we had to scramble over a rock, there straddle a burnt tree trunk or cross a ravine, backs to the wall, groping for a hold. The silence became a sparkling din, the sun a molten cymbal that spun before my eyes and, clearly, the oryx steak I had eaten the previous evening - which had been suspiciously overcooked - was not going down well. Every time we reached a crest I hoped to glimpse the shelter where we would spend the night. But there was just another steep climb behind it, another slope down which alarming cascades of red rock seemed ready to fall. Thirst began to torment me. I was out of breath. It was impossible to turn back, even if the idea had occurred to me. Down below, a vast stretch of sand ran towards the Atlantic in a hazy blaze. Higher up was water - but would it be there, as Angula claimed? My thirst no longer bothered to disguise itself.
Because I was so slow, night was already approaching as we reached the shelter, and suddenly night was there, abruptly dropping like a curtain. With it came a fading of my thirst, my belly ache and my stiffness because - stretched out in the dust beneath the shelter, below the mass of a leaning stone that weighed several hundred tons - I shone my torch on the painting, the extraordinary painting that covered the lower wall just a metre above me. Painted in swirls and convolutions was a cloud, the abode of the rain. A huge snake entered this cloud, only its tail sticking out; thus fertilized, the cloud unleashed strings of rain on the earth, where graceful antelope ran and cranes raised their necks, wings spread in a mating display.
Then, in the middle of the night came the rain, suddenly, gently, barely heralded by a breath of wind. It was as if, having contemplated this painting, I had triggered its mechanism. A long, thin rain ensued. The darkness was scented with dust and the cool green fragrance of wild mint, thyme and sage.
Two days later, we began climbing again towards the high plateaus where we would stay. In the morning light, whose hue went from pink, briefly shot with blue, to a chalky white, I studied the ridge. Despite my fears, we managed to reach it in six hours. Brandberg! I shouted. I was happy. The high Umuab Gorge stretched to one side, the Karoab Gorge to the other. We were walking slowly when Angula stopped and began to dip his hat in a puddle - but I didn t give him time. The thrust of my hand on his back and above all the tone of my sharp, focused yell - Jump! - made him leap forwards just as I leapt back. Motionless and powerful beneath his cover of twigs was a puff adder, just a step away. It stared at us with golden eyes set in the perfect triangle of its massive head, not aggressively coiled but stretched out, sure of its strength, with its black chevronned bands. The snake was the master of the rain, and I also realized it was the keeper of the gate. Let me be clear: at that moment I had the feeling that this adder was opening the gateway of time to us, and that, accompanied by the wonders of this augury, we would be vouchsafed a glimpse the paintings that dwelled there, in the privacy of their age-old whisper. I was entering the Brandberg.
PROLOGUE
Observing Silence
Such a long time after having written a first book on the art of the San people, I still hesitate a moment before breaking the silence, because silence is the very substance of which paintings are made. Visual artists know and experience this silence - which the act of depiction reiterates in forms that sustain it - beyond measure. Poets are likewise familiar with that muteness from which, when briefly shattered, words spring, and to which words return. That is why painters have for so long found poets to be partners in a dialogue in which they all retain a shared if strange frame of mind differentiated only by their choice of materials. 1 None of them, however, now have any further say in the matter: they have been stripped of the right to their own view ever since the establishment of special fields - art history, literature, aesthetics, sociology, anthropology - has appropriated them as simple subjects or objects of academic study. Their acts and words are no longer accorded the authority arising from their experience, itself a kind of organic knowledge. I reclaim the right to their view.
My first book on South African rock art, titled San , was published in French by Adam Biro in 2000. Nothing of the sort existed in France, and in many respects it differed from the few books and articles published in English, based as it was on the conviction that anthropological studies, which did not interrogate the art of making pictures, were necessarily incomplete, especially since those studies unwittingly embodied an extremely conventional view of the role of those pictures. What I didn t realize, however, was that my intellectual venture, triggered by an intense passion for an ancient art to which I committed two full years, would become a lifelong affair.
It was nearly twenty years ago that I first came across paintings and carvings in South Africa and Namibia. I was totally unprepared to see them. They abruptly rose before me, like the mountains that often serve a