NY Times REview of Vodou Exhibition
Mysteries
Art Review: Dazzling and Devout Voodoo Energy
By HOLLAND COTTER
NEW YORK -- The 1990s have been watershed years for art. Building on the
multicultural thinking of the previous decade, traditional esthetic categories
and hierarchies have been radically revised; cultural geographies have been
remapped.
The very phrase "20th-century art" now evokes a global phenomenon, far larger
and more complex than yesterday's bankable Picasso-to-Pollock model.
"Contemporary art" describes work produced in New Delhi, Beijing, Dakar, Seoul,
Istanbul, Havana and countless points in between, with activities in midtown
and downtown Manhattan factored somewhere in the mix.
This shift in perspective has yet to make a notable impact on some big-league
American institutions, but it has had a huge effect on smaller museums and in
academia. With the blurring of lines between art and ethnology, fine art and
craft, religious and secular, "major" and "minor," cultures that were once
barely noticed are being studied, documented and exhibited. In the process,
treasures are being revealed.
Just such treasures can be found in "Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou," a
traveling exhibition that originated at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History,
at the University of California at Los Angeles, and opens Saturday at the
American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, the last stop on a two-year
tour.
The show, which has appeared in fine art and ethnological museums, is a
product of an intellectually expansive time. Its curators, Donald Cosentino, a
professor of African and Caribbean folklore at UCLA, and Marilyn Houlberg, a
professor of art and anthropology at the Art Institute of Chicago, are a savvy
cross-disciplinary team. Their splendid catalog -- a genuine page turner --
gives equal time to historians, sociologists, artists and religious
practitioners, with fascinating results.
But it is the art that counts, and the objects included here, some 500 in
all, are spellbinding. They range from vivid painted narratives to shimmering
beaded flags, from plaster Madonnas to immense carved wooden drums. In these
works, African, European and indigenous New World influences weave together to
produce intense visceral excitement and disquieting beauty.
The impression that results, one of sheer material abundance packed with
significant detail, could easily be overwhelming. But the exhibition has been
expertly shaped to introduce its subject gradually, at a step-by-step pace that
still has a cumulative pull.
The first gallery is devoted to secular material and sets the stage. Here,
Haiti's stirring, turbulent history is illustrated through bold narrative
paintings, most by contemporary Haitian artists, some commissioned for the
show.
The story begins with the Spanish colonization of Hispaniola, the island now
divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, followed by the arrival of
French and English buccaneers. The native Taino population was killed off;
slaves were brought from Africa to work the cotton and coffee plantations. The
religion called Vodou, or Voodoo, grew from transplanted West and Central
Africa beliefs that mingled with elements of Roman Catholicism. (Vodou is the
Creole spelling of an African word for spirit.)
Voodoo proved to be a powerful social binder for a slave population that, in
1791, rose in armed rebellion against its owners and 11 years later created the
world's first black republic. Then after a period of calm, a pattern of
political turmoil set in, culminating in the long rule (1957-86) of the
infamous Duvalier family, which is represented in the exhibition by a
mesmerizing shocker of a group portrait by the painter Edouard Duval-Carrie.
Through everything, including "anti-superstition campaigns" conducted by
church and state, Voodoo flourished. And the final painting in the opening
gallery suggests why. The picture, by the Haitian-born New York artist Fritz
St. Jean, is of paradise, which in Voodoo belief exists under the sea, or on
the other side of the mirror, or in a mythical Africa, and is a promised,
perfected version of the natural world. That's the way it looks here: a
delirium of tropical exuberance, with flowers blooming, friends meeting and
flamingos ferrying passengers through the sky.
At this point, the installation offers a symbolic sea change in the form of a
mirrored archway through which one passes into the rest of the show, leaving
the secular world and entering the sacred realm of Voodoo.
Immediately one is welcomed by a receiving line of the religion's chief
divinities embodied in various symbolic forms. As personalities, they are a
difficult, mercurial lot: trouble-shooters and troublemakers, comedians and
tragedians, terrifying parents who are also doting uncles and aunts.
Some are temperamentally aligned with a cool, sweet aspect of Voodoo known as
Rada; others with its hot side, called Petwo/Kongo. A few figures slip between
both camps, as the mood takes them. And they are each represented by objects in
which their individual energies are distilled.
The serpent deity Danbala, for example, is embodied in several forms. He is
there in the glinting image of snakes stitched in sequins on a temple flag; in
a commercial print of St. Patrick, shown shooing the snakes from Ireland; in
the figure of a charming ancien regime gentleman painted in a hollowed-out
calabash by the Haitian artist Andre Pierre, and finally in a linear cosmogram
called a veve, drawn in pencil in a priest's notebook but destined to appear on
a temple floor.
The other gods are accompanied by customized versions of similar objects,
along with telling accessories. The goddess of love, Ezili Freda, a creature of
extravagant airs and graces and prone to fits of weeping, is supplied with a
consoling bottle of her favorite perfume. Her cousin and rival, the irritable
Petwo deity Ezili Danto, is represented by a print of a brooding, dark-skinned
Madonna. The nasty scratches that scar her cheek are proof of her willingness
to go hand-to-hand with anyone who crosses her, or to protect those who seek
her aid.
Devotees, in their turn, must cajole the gods with offerings, examples of
which are on display. Some consist of rum bottles sheathed in fabric and
studded with gems. Others are bowls or vases wrapped in ribbons like Christmas
gifts, with feathers or crucifixes protruding from the top. Still others,
adapted from African prototypes, are cloth bundles stuffed with earth and
healing herbs, and bound so tightly with string that they look as if they might
explode at a touch.
The charge of physical and psychic tension they radiate relaxes in the next
section of the show, a dark corridor lined with rows of temple flags. These are
probably the most familiar of all Voodoo objects, and they are enchanting,
combining the graphic clarity of African applique banners with the
scintillating luxuriance of Christian liturgical vestments.
Although a few precious turn-of-the-century examples are included here, most
are fairly recent; little surviving Voodoo art can be reliably dated before the
1940s. Some of the flags are made by artists recognized as masters of the
medium. Among them is Antoine Oleyant (1955-92), whose distinctive style is
seen in a cubistic image of the god Danbala, dressed in a checked shirt and
holding a rooster and a tiny Haitian flag on high as his signature serpent
floats around him like a windblown scarf.
Oleyant produced flags for rituals and the commercial market, and he is
surrounded here by other outstanding artists in whose work the sacred and
secular meet. Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948), extolled by Andre Breton in the
1940's, is one, and in paintings like his "Magique Noire," Voodoo images and
modernist painterly flair meet.
Most arresting, though, are the assemblages of Pierrot Barra and his wife,
Marie Cassaise, created from castoff objects -- machine parts, dishes, broken
tools, holy pictures, dismembered dolls -- swaddled in bandagelike layers of
plastic and satin. The results are emblematic of post-modernism's assimilative
spirit and powerful works of religious art. Barra's life-size figure of the
goddess Ezili Danto, her body encrusted with sequins, dolls sprouting from her
hair, is a nightmare of organic growth and suffocated energy, at once
resplendent and dreadful.
The blend of beauty and danger this image conveys, the sense that dynamic
forces are at work, is characteristic of Voodoo art. And it is dramatically
evident in the three full-scale altars with which the show concludes,
particularly the one dedicated to the gods known as Gede, who preside over
death, sexuality and rebirth.
The piled-up images -- miniature coffins, a skull wearing a top hat, a cross
wrapped in slaves' chains -- represent the forbidding night side of a religion.
But they are also evidence of its vivid, life-affirming theatricality. Here
spiritual experience is orchestrated as a mystery play, and art effects a
psychological trial from which the participant emerges shaken but renewed.
How, if at all, can such a dynamic be conveyed in a museum? The question is
still in debate after more than a decade of hard thinking. One can imagine a
visitor to the American Museum of Natural History perceiving with skepticism,
even dismay, ritual reduced to the status of a curiosity. But other reactions
are equally possible, as other, similar exhibitions have confirmed. When the
Museum for African Art mounted its landmark "Face of the Gods" in New York five
years ago, the Afro-Caribbean altars in the galleries created in the galleries
attracted ardent and persistent religious devotion throughout the run of the
show.
Post-modern thinking in the 1990s has, to its credit, cleared the way for
both views to coexist, with their attendant limitations and revelations. And it
is thanks to that embracing atmosphere that the art of Haitian Voodoo --
culturally eclectic, materially ephemeral, contemporary and traditional, sacred
and profane -- can be seen at last, and seen as the magnificent spiritual tour
de force that it is.
"Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou" opens Saturday at the American Museum of
Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, and remains on view through
Jan. 3. The show is a collaboration between the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural
History in Los Angeles; and the national museums and Centre d'Art in
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and UCLA's African Studies Center and Center for
African-American Studies. The presentation at the American Museum of Natural
History is supported by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Endowment Fund.
Friday, October 9, 1998
<A HREF="aol://4344:104.nytcopy.6445375.574106743">Copyright 1998 The New York
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