Ritual, Creativity and Performance in Contemporary Art and Anthropology
Ruth Jones
For a number of years, my work as an artist has explored liminality and threshold states. The liminal realm is a transitional one, a passageway between two distinct states of being eg. awake / asleep, conscious / unconscious, alive / dead. Anthropologist Victor Turner has described it as ‘a place that is not a place and a time that is not a time’. The uncertainty of these in-between states has led them to be regarded with suspicion and anxiety.
I work in a number of different mediums including installation, public art projects and film work. Through my practice, I have tried to create physical and / or psychological spaces in which the possibility of an experience of liminality can occur for the visitor or participant. The work often employs ritual patterns to not only access the liminal realm, but also to suspend activity in it indefinitely, revealing the enormous potential for ‘becoming’ that this space offers.
Recent work has focused on the three-way relationship between humans, animals and the land, particularly in South Wales, where I now live. The work draws on magico-mythological readings of the land as well as conceptualisations of land and rural places in fields such as anthropology and cultural geography. In the last few years, I have also become increasingly committed to projects that engage people not necessarily from an art background, either as collaborators or as participants. Many of the projects I am involved with make use of public spaces and pay attention to the specificity of place.
My first encounter with anthropological writings was through Arnold Van Gennep’s observations of cultural ceremonies of renewal, which he discusses in The Rites of Passage, written at the beginning of the 20th century. He theorised three stages to any ritual activity: rites of separation (pre-liminal), rites of transition (liminal) and rites of incorporation (post-liminal). The liminal stage is associated with formlessness, disorder and contamination, while the post-liminal stage is associated with the reaffirmation of the group’s identity and culture. Some anthropologists have suggested that the liminal stage is often associated with women and femininity, while the post-liminal phase is associated with men and masculinity.
Van Gennep’s 3-stage process of ritual practices has been expanded and developed by many other anthropologists, including Victor Turner. It has also been adopted by cultural theorists, who have applied it to all sorts of performative acts in contemporary modern culture for example Susan Broadhurst’s Liminal Acts which discusses among others the work of Pina Baush, Nick Cave and Peter Greenaway in the context of a liminal performative practice.
The relationship between art and anthropology has been present since the latter’s inception as a distinct discipline of the social sciences and exchanges between anthropology and art have been both fruitful and productive. One figure who occupies the ‘liminal’ space between these disciplines and has fascinated me in particular is Maya Deren, the American experimental film maker, who set off to Haiti in 1947 to make a film about Haitian dance ceremonies and ended up writing an anthropological account of her experiences called, ‘Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti’. Deren writes:
In recent years there has been a more concerted effort to understand and interrogate the relationship between art and anthropology more vigorously, and to explore what can be gained through examining the different methodologies that artists and anthropologists employ. The publication Contemporary Art and Anthropology has sought to investigate this relationship. In his essay ‘Appropriations’ co-editor Arnd Schneider acknowledges that while strategies of appropriation can be highly problematic politically and ethically, appropriation need not necessarily be associated with ‘inappropriate’ action, for example the taking of something out of context, but can also be associated with learning and transformation. He says:
appropriation should be re-evaluated as a hermeneutic procedure – an art of dialogical understanding – by which artists and anthropologists negotiate access to, and traffic in, cultural difference…the process of appropriation is fundamental to exchanges between cultures and to cultural change.
As an artist who engages with anthropological ideas, values and theories, I see the appropriateness of this strategy. I am no expert on anthropology in a general sense, but have tended to dip in and out of anthropological texts absorbing ideas and theories when they concur with my experience as an artist, or when they can offer helpful strategies to solve problems in my practice. What happens then when I encounter an idea in anthropological writing that doesn’t sit comfortably with my conceptual framework, or my practice and its methodology? Is it enough to pick and choose from another discipline’s theories, and simply reject what we find unsettling or contrary to our views? In this context, I want to talk a bit about the anthropologist Maurice Bloch, and my fruitful engagement with his work, as well as more recent problems I have encountered with his writing in relation to his theorisation of ritual.
I first came across the work of Maurice Bloch whilst researching my DPhil. I was exploring the relationship between liminal states and femininity, particularly in relation to rituals surrounding death and burial, and read Bloch’s essay ‘Death, Women and Power’, in which he observes that in many cultures, women are allocated a central role in death rituals. I had also read parts of his book Prey into Hunter in which he describes the initiation rites of the Orokavia people of Papua New Guinea in which children are hunted as pigs by actors wearing bird masks prior to their initiation, symbolically killed and return as initiates and hunters of pigs. Research into this and other examples of the phenomena of ‘becoming-animal’ have fed into the publication / DVD project which I have been working on with Iain Biggs for sometime ‘chimaerae verae’ (true chimeras).
Recently, I have been examining in more detail what ritual actually is, what it does, and what values are attributed to it? Ritual is one of those words that is very difficult to define and any definition will depend upon the perspective of the writer. Ritual has been an important part of my practice for many years, and, like many other artists, I have been fascinated by what Arnd Schneider has described as ‘the inventive and creative character of the ritual process’. There are certainly many instances of artists employing ritual in their practices, a well-known example being the Ulay / Abramovic performance collaborations of the 1970’s and 80’s. The work of Alastair MacLennen in Northern Ireland where I lived for eight years was also evidence to me that ritual could be employed to powerful effect in contemporary art. However, an essay I read recently by Bloch called ‘Symbols, song, dance and features of articulation: Is religion an extreme form of religious authority?’ has forced me to rethink, or to ‘reframe’ my understanding of ritual in relation to creativity, and to address the relativity of ‘value’ which is attributed to ritual by different artists and different anthropologists as well as within cultural theory in more general terms.
Bloch begins the essay by stating that there has been a lack of theoretical interest by anthropologists in ritualised speech, singing and dancing, which to him seems strange because these are recognised as the prominent distinguishing features of rituals. He goes on to describe that:
the history of the social anthropology of ritual has been dominated by the influence of Durkheim, who stressed how through participation in ritual singing and dancing collective representations were made to appear as external to the individual, as having a force of their own. How this process happened was never actually explained by Durkheim. But for him the transformation of everyday ideas into sacred ones took place during rituals involving singing and dancing.
Bloch makes a sharp distinction between everyday language and formalised and ritualised speech. He describes how ceremonial speech in ritual acts is an ‘impoverished’ speech, that is, only certain words or phrases can be used and are presented in a formal language, while other words or phrases are forbidden, and that very often the statement of one group of words must then be followed by another preordained set of words, thus restricting severely what can be said:
Formalization therefore goes right through the linguistic range. It leads to a specially stylised form of communication: polite, respectful, holy, but from the point of view of the creativity potential of language, impoverished.
Bloch then extends his discussion to song, and then finally to dance, suggesting that bodily movement used to convey messages is a language although he argues that it is ‘a rather poor one in comparison to the language of speech’.
He argues that the restrictions on the language of dance in traditional authority situations parallels the formalisation of speech and often accompanies it. He suggests that in fact the restrictions of the free use of bodily language in such situations are if anything even more strictly enforced:
Messages carried by the language of the body also become ossified, predictable, and repeated from one action to the next, rather than recombined as in everyday situations when they can convey a greater variety of messages. As with speech, the formalisation of body movements implies ever-growing control of choice of sequences of movement, and when this has occurred completely we have dance.
For Bloch then, dance, like formalised speech acts is restrictive, there is no potential for body movements that allow for bargaining, argument or discussion, these being ‘replaced by fixed, repeated, fused messages’. For Bloch, to accept this code implies compulsion ‘Communication has stopped being a dialectic and has become a matter of repeating correctly’.
From these observations, Bloch concludes that art is in fact an inferior form of communication because it disallows the generative potential of language. He accepts that this theory goes against the grain of art as a ‘kind of super-communication, a supreme occasion for creativity’. And he seeks to find a reason as to why art should be believed by the majority of people to be creative:
The reason for this view probably lies in the fact that the generative processes of language are normally unconscious and that they are so complicated that they cannot be raised to a conscious level. However, when nearly all this generative potential of language (or bodily movement) has been forbidden, removed, the remaining choices left are so simple that they can suddenly become controllable, hence enjoyable. This, however, is an illusion of creativity; in fact this is the sphere where it occurs least.
As an artist, who had taken for granted the idea that art has the potential to be creative and inventive (although it all too often falls short of this ideal), I was quite surprised and taken aback by Bloch’s conclusions to this essay. Of course, he is talking about art in very general terms and he is referring on the whole to formalised and traditional art forms often in the context of a religious ceremony, but it is impossible to ignore the implications of what he says for the contemporary artist who uses or engages with ritual as a fundamental element of a creative practice.
My efforts then since reading this have been towards asking the questions: is there another more positive way to address the relationship between art, creativity and ritual? Under what, if any, conditions can ritual in contemporary art practices be creative?
It can be argued that ritual is the means by which communities preserve and reiterate traditions. In this context, ritual can be seen as positive, in the sense that it preserves history and creates a sense of identity for individuals and groups, but it is also potentially a source of the abuse of power, in that those who hold positions of authority within a community can dictate and control ritual processes in order to maintain and reaffirm power relationships which may be abusive or stunt the creative, emotional and intellectual development of the powerless. I think it is largely within this context that Bloch describes ‘art’ as an illusion of creativity, since if people in a weak position of power can be convinced that their rituals are life affirming and positive, then the maintenance of power becomes far simpler for the empowered than having to adopt violent or coercive means of maintaining authority.
However, I believe that ritual can also be a powerful tool that can be used to disrupt tradition and traditional power relations. My DPhil research explored strategies that women artists were employing to disrupt patriarchal culture and generate feminine imaginary and symbolic structures, and I concluded that the more successful strategies did not tackle the problem head on, but used mimicry as a device to appear to be complicit with patriarchal values while simultaneously calling them into question. The use of repetition, which is connected to ritual activity, was a fundamental part of this process; repeated acts of mimicry and parody can amount to a negation of certain traditional values without overthrowing every aspect of culture and identity that might be positive and useful to women. Similar strategies, it could be argued, have been employed by artists in a post-colonial context, for example Jimmie Durham, and other situations of unequal power relations.
The important thing, therefore, is to be able to distinguish when ritual is being used to reinforce tradition and unequal power relations, and when it is being used to disrupt and reframe them? How can we make that distinction? Only through context: the same ritual in one context will confirm tradition, while in another context, will disrupt it. This is why artists have to be so careful about the contexts in which their work is viewed, experienced or read. An artwork does not travel from one place to another without its meaning changing and the rise of interest in site-specific practice reflects that.
In my view, when ritual is used to disrupt traditional power relations, creative potential exists, partly because the outcome is not predetermined. This is partly why my work has been so involved with the ‘liminal’ phase of rituals, since it is during this phase that the subject is considered to be potentially in danger, and when transformations of identities can occur. According to Van Gennep, in an anthropological context, it is of vital importance that the ritual goes through the post-liminal phase in order to return stability to the community. My research has been concerned then with posing the question: What happens when the liminal phase is expanded and suspended? What potential then arises for creative transformation? Hence the emphasis on participation in my projects, which is an attempt to avoid placing the visitor in the position of an ‘observer’, thus mimicking the traditional anthropologists role, a model of objective rationality which has been challenged from many perspectives. Joseph Campbell is not the only person to have suggested that ‘in the science of anthropology the ideal of objectivity has never yet been, and in the nature of things will never be, attained’. Maya Deren’s experiences in Haiti are an interesting example of the possibility of a consciously subjective account by an artist / ethnographer, since she regularly participated in ritual ceremonies and describes at the end of the book in the chapter ‘White Darkness’ her experience of being “possessed” or ridden by a loa (Haitian god). About this account, Joseph Campbell says:
Since the artist’s creative expression is never expected to be objective, Maya Deren’s role as an artist gave her a certain degree of freedom to let go of her previous identities and expectations and embrace Haitian culture. If the anthropologist does this, however, the validity of his or her work will very likely be called into question. Thomas J. Csordas’s online book Language, Charisma, and Creativity presents his ethnographic account of his study of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in Ohio. The study is interesting on many levels, not least because, as he points out, the position of the ethnographer is vastly different when he or she studies a group close to his or her home (as opposed to a distant tribe, already preconceived as ‘other’). Csordas has acknowledged that when he writes about the religious rituals of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal using the convention in ethnographic prose of describing events in straightforward declarative language eg: "The spirit speaks through the medium,"…or… "The deceased becomes an ancestral spirit that is responsible for the well-being of the clan" he is suspected by others outside of the movement of being a "believer".
His final chapter explores the conflict between creativity and ritual that both sheds light on my problems with Bloch’s conclusions about art and also provides some useful insights for the contemporary artist involved with ritual processes. He begins by observing that creativity is not the same thing as liberation, firstly, since cultural form circumscribes the limits of creativity and secondly, because it is always possible to become bound by what one creates. It is true that Bloch’s account does not make this distinction, since he equates creativity in language with an infinitely large number of possible utterances. He holds this view for ritual discourse and for art in general, therefore for him everyday speech is most creative, while art is an inferior form of communication.
In support of Bloch, Csordas acknowledges that rituals can have conventional effects without being creative. Lynn Whidden’s account of Powwows in Canada would concur with this since she describes rituals which on the surface are ‘ a dazzling display of color, movement, and sound – yet the visual elements are all codified and carefully controlled’. Csordas, however, challenges the idea that even a carefully codified rite of passage cannot be creative since ‘It does not create a new social status, but it does create a new member or occupant of a social status’. In contrast, Bloch never sees ritual communication as creative action (never even as the creation of authority), but only as an exercise of a traditional authority that by definition connotes the stifling of creativity.
Part of the problem for Csordas is that Bloch posits a discontinuity between ‘propositional’ (everyday) and ‘illocutionary’ (formalised / ritualised) language, denying certain continuities between different language structures, for example it could be argued that metaphor is an essential structure of all thought and language, and that it is possible that metaphor and symbol presented in illocutionary language create the possibility for knowledge that can subsequently be cast in a propositional form. Csordas employs the work of anthropologist Stanley Tambiah to suggest that both propositional and illocutionary frameworks are used within ritual language. This is supported by Deren’s accounts of Haitian rituals during which language alternates between formal, ritualised language and everyday conversation and socialising without any apparent conflict. Tambiah also suggests that creative processes can alter rituals, citing historical examples of ritual innovations that went against the traditional grain, and also proposing that the effect produced by the performance of that innovation is creative, even though it is eventually incorporated into the pre-existing frameworks. Csordas sees the fundamental difference between the methodologies of Bloch and Tambiah as ‘the perception by Bloch of a gap between a ritual form and its “use” and the perception by Tambiah of an integral connection between ritual form and its “performance” ‘. Csordas points out though, that Tambiah’s illustrations of creativity in ritual innovation is not the same as demonstrating the creation of meaning in ritual.
Jens Kreinath in his essay ‘Ritual: Theoretical Issues in the Study of Religion’ has argued that there has been a tendency for rituals to be analysed in relation to the texts and discourses of religion. Ritual would therefore be seen as the symbolic representation of religious meaning. Kreinath claims that it is of vital importance that rituals are studied and theorised on their own terms, through looking at the actual performance of ritual action independently from religious frameworks, uncovering how they work, in and for themselves. He cites Clifford Geetz in suggesting that religion does not create ritual, rituals create religions. For Geetz, this is possible because rituals ‘act to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence’. Kreinath claims that even when we take Geetz’s view that ritual creates religion, there is still a tendency to apply ritual action back to religious thought, while Kreinath wants to explore ritual as ‘a form of human action that establishes and transforms social relations’. It is this definition of ritual that I feel is most helpful to the contemporary artist. In my view, part of the reason why ritual can transform social relations is because rituals, like works of art, have the potential to present two or more concepts simultaneously in the same temporal space, even when these concepts conflict with one another, which is something that sequential language structures cannot do.
I agree with Csordas that the only way the problem of creativity in ritual can be addressed is with an adequate theory of performance within the context of ritual. He proposes that such a theory must pay attention to three things: the event in relation to its situation and social life; the genre, and its context within a system of genres, and to the act, in which motives are circulated in both illocutionary and propositional frames. Creativity may be found to occur at any of these levels, or in the interaction between them. According to Csordas, it is Bloch’s lack of a theory of performance that allows him to only see constraints in ritual language, ignoring the rhetorical skill of the performer, variations in the degree of formalization, and the dynamics of the performer / audience relationship. Csordas points out that Bloch’s study of circumcision rituals performed by elders might lead him to see ritual as a demonstration of traditional authority, but as he says:
Csordas suggests that creativity is to be found not in one instance or moment, but in ‘the dialectical relations between ritual and social life’ and in order to formulate theories of performance that are appropriate to the analysis of rituals, it is vitally important to see ritual language as an embodied language:
Creativity cannot be understood as a function of representation without being in the world, or of textuality without embodiment. Imagination is not a matter of mental representations but a multisensory engagement of the world best understood as a transformative, imaginal self process. Ritual language takes its place among techniques of the body as a tool for reordering the behavioural environment, cultivating the disposition of the habitus, and creating a sacred self.
Taniec Kruka
In the context of the above discussion about ritual and its relative values, I want to talk briefly about a short film I made recently in Poland. I was invited to take part in the Site-Ations international project for 2005 called ‘Sense in Place’ (organised by the Artists Project and The University of Wales in Cardiff see www.site-ations.co.uk/senseinplace ). The project happened in 8 different European countries with an emphasis on both new member states to the EU and countries that were geographically on the periphery of European borders. I represented Wales in Lodz, Poland. The project in Lodz was called ‘Fabryka Fantasmagoria’ and took place in a disused textile factory. Artists were asked to respond to the site in terms of its architecture and history.
The textile industry in Poland flourished during the 1800’s and early 1900’s and Lodz became the city most strongly connected with textile production in Poland. Lodz did not exist as a city until the textile industry took off here, and what had been a small collection of towns and villages, mushroomed into a huge city in the space of 50 years. I was interested in the impact that this must have had on the people of the area, and how during this period, the changing status of the land must have challenged our tendency to make a sharp distinction between urban and rural lifestyles and communities.
I chose to work with two sites, firstly the disused factory where the work was installed, and also the ballroom of the Poznanski Palace. Israel Poznanski was one of the most successful of the textile industrialists and he built a Palace for himself and his family that included a ballroom. In Lodz, the factory owners would build their houses right next to the factory and the houses and communal gardens of the workers would also be very close by. This model seemed to imitate the feudal system of rural areas with a Landowner surrounded by his land and the peasants who worked for him. It suggested that the rapid growth of the city had meant that factory owners simply adapted this rural system to meet the new circumstances.
I developed my previous research which has explored the relationship between humans animals and the land for this work, focusing on the Crow as an animal who seems to transcend the rural / urban divide, adapting quite comfortably in both situations. The Crow is also sometimes seen as a messenger for the female deity sometimes called the triple goddess who embodies the land in European folklore. The figure of a Crowlady (half woman, half crow) is therefore for me a liminal figure, who sits between worlds on many different levels.
I collaborated with a folk dancer, Agnieszka Nasnajewisz, to create a short film ‘Taniec Kruka’ (Crowdance) which attempted to open up a liminal space between oppositions such as urban / rural, aristocracy / peasantry, folk / classical, past / present, that have characterised the history of the city of Lodz. The dancer was dressed as the Crowlady and she choreographed and performed a dance to Chopin’s Mazurka Opus 68. While Chopin is associated with classical piano music and lived most of his life in Paris, his origins were Polish and he often drew inspiration from old Polish folk melodies. The rhythm of this Mazurka is that of a kujawiak, which has a slower beat than the Mazurka and associated with high romance and lost love. Agnieszka mixed dance steps from traditional kujawiak, (which would normally be danced in groups made up of pairs) with more idiosyncratic dance steps suited to this particular performance. I asked her to choreograph the dance as though there was an imaginary partner with her that we could not see.
The music I used for the film has been arranged by Maria Pomianowska for an ancient Polish folk instrument called the suka bilgoraska which loosely resembles a viola. In this recording she is accompanied by other folk instruments. The film was projected in the disused factory onto a screen made out of semi-transparent fabric stretched over a cloths rail found in the factory. It was back-projected so that a ghostly mirror image also appeared on the floor. The film was looped so that it played continuously without a title or credits.