Art as a Cultural System
Clifford Geertz
| Art is notoriously hard to talk about. It seems, even when made of words in the literary arts, all the more so when made of pigment, sound, stone or whatever in the non-literary ones, to exist in a world of its own, beyond the reach of discourse. It not only is hard to talk about it; it seems unnecessary to do so. It speaks, as we say, for itself: a poem must not mean but be; if you have to ask what jazz is you are never going to get to know. | |
| Artists feel this especially. Most of them regard what is written and said about their work, or work they admire as at best beside the point, at worst a distraction from it. "Everyone wants to understand art," Picasso wrote, "why not try to understand the song of a bird? . . . People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree."1 Or if that seems too avant garde, there is Millet, resisting the classification of himself as a Saint-Simoniste: "The gossip about my Man With a Hoe seems to me all very strange, and I am obliged to you for letting me know it, as it furnishes me with another opportunity to wonder at the ideas people attribute to me. . . .My critics are men of taste and education, but I cannot put myself in their shoes, and as I have never seen anything but fields since I was born, I try to say as best I can what I saw and felt when I was at work."2 (Ibid., pp. 292-3) | |
| But anyone at all responsive to aesthetic forms feels it as well. Even those among us who are neither mystics nor sentimentalists, nor given to outbursts of aesthetic piety, feel uneasy when we have talked very long about a work of art in which we think we have seen something valuable. The excess of what we have seen, or imagine we have, over the stammerings we can manage to get out concerning it is so vast that our words seem hollow, flatulent, or false. After art talk "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," seems like very attractive doctrine. | |
| But, of course, hardly anyone, save the truly indifferent, is thus silent, artists included. On the contrary, the perception of something important in either particular works or in the arts generally moves people to talk (and write) about them incessantly. Something that meaningful to us cannot be left just to sit there bathed in pure significance, and so we describe, analyse, compare, judge, classify; we erect theories about creativity, form, perception; we characterize art as a language, a structure, a system, an act, a symbol, a pattern of feeling; we reach for scientific metaphors, spiritual ones, technological ones, political ones; and if all else fails, we string dark sayings together and hope someone else will eludicate them for us. The surface bootlessness of talking about art seems matched by a depth necessity to talk about it endlessly. And it is this peculiar state of affairs that I want here to probe, in part to explain it but even more to determine what difference it makes. | |
| To some degree art is everywhere talked about in what may be called craft termsöin terms of tonal progressions, color relations. or prosodic shapes. This is especially true in the West where subjects like harmony or pictorial composition have been developed to the point of minor sciences, and the modern move toward aesthetic formalism, best represented right now by structuralism, and by those varieties of semiotics which seek to follow its lead, is but an attempt to generalize this approach into a comprehensive one, to create a technical language capable of representing the internal relations of myths, poems, dances, or melodies in abstract, transposable terms. But the craft approach to art talk is hardly confined to either the West or the modern age, as the elaborate theories of Indian musicology, Javanese choreography, Arabic versification, or Yoruba embossment remind us. Even the Australian aborigines, everybody's favorite example of primitive peoples, analyze their body designs and ground paintings into dozens of isolable and named formal elements, unit graphs in an iconic grammar of representation.3 | |
| But what is more interesting and I think more important is that it is perhaps only in the modern age and in the West that some men (still a small minority, and destined, one suspects, to remain such) have managed to convince themselves that technical talk about art, however developed, is sufficient to a complete understanding of it; that the whole secret of aesthetic power is located in the formal relations among sounds, images, volumes, themes, or gestures. Everywhere else -- and, as I say, among most of us as well -- other sorts of talk, whose terms and conceptions derive from cultural concerns art may serve, or reflect, or challenge, or describe but does not in itself create, collects about it to connect its specific energies to the general dynamic of human experience. "The purpose of a painter," Matisse, who can hardly be accused of undervaluing form, wrote, "must not be conceived as separate from his pictorial means, and these pictorial means must be more complete (I do not mean more complicated) the deeper his thought. I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it."4 | |
| The feeling an individual, or what is more critical, because no man is an island but a part of the main, the feeling a people has for life appears, of course, in a great many other places than in their art. It appears in their religion, their morality, their science, their commerce, their technology, their politics, their amusements, their law, even in the way they organize their everyday practical existence. The talk about art that is not merely technical or a spiritualization of the technical -- that is, most of it -- is largely directed to placing it within the context of these other expressions of human purpose and the pattern of experience they collectively sustain. No more than sexual passion or contact with the sacred, two more matters it is difficult to talk about, but yet somehow necessary, can confrontation with aesthetic objects be left to float, opaque anti hermetic, outside the general course of social life. They demand to be assimilated. | |
| What this implies, among other things, is that the definition of art in any society is never wholly intra-aesthetic, and indeed but rarely more than marginally so. The chief problem presented by the sheer phenomenon of aesthetic force, in whatever form and in result of whatever skill it may come, is how to place it within the other modes of social activity, how to incorporate it into the texture of a particular pattern of life. And such placing, the giving to art objects a cultural significance is always a local matter; what art is in classical China or classical Islam, what it is in the Pueblo southwest or highland New Guinea, is just not the same thing, no matter how universal the intrinsic qualities that actualize its emotional power (and I have no desire to deny them) may be. The variety that anthropologists have come to expect in the spirit beliefs, the classification systems, or the kinship structures of different people and not just in their immediate shapes but in the way of being-in-the-world they both promote and exemplify, extends as well into their drummings, carvings, chants, and dances. | |
| It is the failure to realize this on the part of many students of non-western art, and particularly of so-called "primitive art," that leads to the oft-heard comment that the peoples of such cultures don't talk, or not very much, about art they just sculpt, sing, weave, or whatever; silent in their expertise. What is meant is that they don't talk about it the way the observer talks about it -- or would like them to -- in terms of its formal properties, its symbolic content, its affective values, or its stylistic features, except laconically, cryptically, and as though they had precious little hope of being understood. | |
| But, of course, they do talk about it, as they talk about everything else striking, or suggestive, or moving, that passes through their lives -- about how it is used, who owns its, when it is performed, who performs or makes it, what role it plays in this or that activity, what it may be exchanged for, what it is called, how it began, and so forth and so on. But this tends to be seen not as talk about art, but about something else -- everyday life, myths, trade, or whatever. To the man who may not know what he likes but knows what art is, the Tiv, aimlessly sewing raffia onto cloth prior to resist dyeing it (he will not even look at how the piece is going until it is completely finished), who told Paul Bohannan, "if the design does not turn out well, I will sell it to the Ibo; if it does, I will keep it; if it comes out extraordinarily well, I shall give it to my mother-in law" seems not to be discussing his work at all, but merely some of his social attitudes.5 The approach to art from the side of Western aesthetics (which, as Kristeller has reminded us, only emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, along with our rather peculiar notion of the "fine arts"), and indeed from any sort of prior formalism, blinds us to the very existence of the data upon which a comparative understanding of it could be built. And we are left, as we used to be in studies of totemism, caste, or bridewealth -- and still are in structuralish ones -- with an externalized conception of the phenomenon supposedly under intense inspection but actually not even in our line of sight. | |
| For Matisse, as is no surprise, was right: the means of an art and the feeling for life that animates it are inseparable, and one can no more understand aesthetic objects as concatenations of pure form than one can understand speech as a parade of syntactic variations, structural transformations. Take, as an example, a matter as apparently transcultural and abstract as line, and consider its meaning, as Robert Faris Thompson brilliantly describes it, in Yoruba sculpture.6 Linear precision, Thompson says, the sheer clarity of line, is a major concern of Yoruba carvers, as it is of those who assess the carvers' work, and the vocabulary of linear qualities which the Yoruba use colloquially and across a range of concerns far broader than sculpture, is nuanced and extensive. It is not just their statues, pots, and so on that Yoruba incise with lines: they do the same with their faces. Line, of varying depth, direction, and length, sliced into their cheeks and left to scar over, serves as a means of lineage identification, personal allure, and status expression, and the terminology of the sculptor and of the cicatrix specialist -- "cuts" distinguished from "slashes," and "digs" or "claws" from "splittings open" -- parallel one another in exact precision. But there is more to it than this. The Yoruba associate line with civilization: "This country has become civilized," literally means in Yoruba "this earth has lines upon its face. "'Civilization' in Yoruba," Thompson goes on: | |
| is ilýj™ -- face with lined marks. The same verb which civilizes the face with marks of membership in urban and town lineages civilizes the earth: "Û sa kÈ + kÈ;" Û s·ko (He slashes the [cicatrix] marks; he clears the bush). The same verb which opens Yoruba marks upon a face, opens roads, and boundaries in the forest: Û lýnÚ + n; Û la ýýla; Û lýpa (he cut a new road; he marked out a new boundary; he cut a new path). In fact, the basic verb to cicatrize (la) has multiple associations of imposing of human pattern upon the disorder of nature: chunks of wood, the human face, and the forest are all "opened" . . . allowing the inner quality of the substance to shine forth.7 | |
| The intense concern of the Yoruba carver with line, and with particular forms of lines stems therefore from rather more than a detached pleasure in its intrinsic properties, the problems of sculptural technique, or even some generalized cultural notion one could isolate as a native aesthetic. It grows out of a distinctive sensibility the whole of life participates in forming one in which the meanings of things are scars that men leave on them. | |
| This realization, that to study an art form is to explore a sensibility, that such a sensibility is essentially a collective formation, and that the foundations of such a formation are as wide as social existence and as deep, leads away not only from the view that aesthetic power is a grandiloquence for the pleasures of craft. It leads away also from the so-called functionalist view that has most often been opposed to it: that is, that works of art are elaborate mechanisms for defining social relationships, sustaining social rules, and strengthening social values. Nothing very measurable would happen to Yoruba society if carvers no longer concerned themselves with the fineness of line, or, I dare say, even with carving. Certainly, it would not fall apart. Just some, things that were felt could not be said -- and perhaps, after awhile, might no longer even be felt -- and life would be the greyer for it. Anything may, of course, play a role in helping society work, painting and sculpting included; just as anything may help it tear itself apart. But the central connection between art and collective life does not lie on such an instrumental plane, it lies on a semiotic one. Matisse's color jottings (the word is his own) and the Yoruba's line arrangements don't, save glancingly, celebrate social structure or forward useful doctrines. They materialize a way of experiencing; bring a particular cast of mind out into the world of objects, where men can look at it. | |
| The signs or sign elements -- Matisse's yellow, the Yoruba's slash -- hat make up a semiotic system we want, for theoretical purposes, to call aesthetic are ideationally connected to the society in which they are found, not mechanically. They are, in a phrase of Robert Goldwater's, primary documents; not illustrations of conceptions already in force, but conceptions themselves that seek -- or for which people seek -- a meaningful place in a repertoire of other documents, equally primary.8 | |
To develop the point more concretely, and to dissipate any intellectualist or literary aura such words as "ideational" and "conception" may seem to carry with them, we can look for a moment at some aspects of one of the few other discussions of tribal art that manages to be sensitive to semiotic concerns without disappearing into a haze of formulas: Anthony Forge's analysis of the four-color flat painting of the Abelam people of New Guinea.9 The group produces, in Forge's phrase, "acres of painting," on flat sheets of sago spathe, all done in cult situations of one sort or another. The details of all this are outlined in his studies. But what is of immediate interest is the fact that, although Abelam painting ranges from the obviously figurative to the totally abstract (a distinction which, as their painting is declamatory, not descriptive, has no meaning to them), it is mainly connected to the wider world of Abelam experience by means of an almost obsessively recurrent motif, a pointed oval, representing, and called, the belly of a woman. The representation is, of course, at lease vaguely iconic. But the power of the connection for the Abelam lies less in that, hardly much of an achievement, than in the fact that they are able with it to address a burning preoccupation of theirs in terms of colorshapes (in itself, line here hardly exists as an aesthetic element; while paint has a magical force) -- a preoccupation they address in somewhat different ways in work, in ritual, in domestic life: the natural creativity of the female. |
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| The concern for the difference between female creativity, which the Abelam see as pre-cultural, a product of woman's physical being, and therefore primary, and male creativity, which they see as cultural, dependent upon men's access to supernatural power through ritual, and therefore derivative, runs through the whole of their culture. Women created vegetation and discovered the yams that men eat. Women first encountered the supernaturals, whose lovers they became, until the men, grown suspicious, discovered what was going on and took the supernaturals, now turned into wood carvings, as the focus of their ceremonials. And, of course, women produce men from the swell of their bellies. Male power, dependent upon ritual, a matter now jealously kept secret from women, is thus encapsulated within female power dependent upon biology; and it is this prodigious fact the paintings, packed with red, yellow, white, and black ovals (Forge found eleven of them in one small painting which was virtually composed of them) are, as we would say " about." | |
| But they are directly about it, not illustratively. One could as well argue that the rituals, or the myths, or the organization of family life, or the division of labor enact conceptions evolved in painting as that painting reflects the conceptions underlying social life. All these matters are marked by the apprehension of culture as generated in the womb of nature as man is in the belly of woman, and all of them give it a specific sort of voice. Like the incised lines on Yoruba statues, the color-ovals in Abelam paintings are meaningful because they connect to a sensibility they join in creating -- here, one where, rather than scars signing civilization, pigment signs power: | |
| In general colour (or strictly paint) words are applied only to things of ritual concern. This can be seen very clearly in the Abelam classification of nature. Tree species are subject to an elaborate classification, but . . . the criteria used are seed and leaf shapes Whether the has flowers or not, and the colour of flowers or leaves are rarely mentioned as criteria. Broadly speaking, the Abelam had use only for the hibiscus and a yellow flower, both of which served as [ritual] decorations for men and yams. Small flowering plants of any colour were of no interest and were classified merely as grass or undergrowth. Similarly with insects: all those that bite or sting are carefully classified, but butterflies form one huge class regardless of size or color. In the classification of bird species, however, colour is of vital importance but then birds are totems, and unlike butterflies and flowers are central to the ritual sphere . . . It would seem . . . that colour to be describable has to be of ritual interest. The words for the four colours are really words for paints. Paint is an essentially powerful substance and it is perhaps not so surprising that the use of colour words is restricted to those parts of the natural environment that have been selected as ritually relevant . . . |  An Abelam yam harvest ceremony spirit mask (baba) in the permanent collection of The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis
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| The association between colour and ritual significance Can also be seen in Abelam reactions to European importations. Coloured magazines sometimes find their way into the village and occasionally pages are torn from them and attached to the matting at the base of the ceremonial house facade . . . The pages selected were brightly coloured, usually food advertisements . . . [and] the Abelam had no idea of what was represented but thought that with their bright colours and incomprehensibility the selected pages were likely to be European [sacred designs] and therefore powerful.10 | |
So in at least places, two matters on the face of them as self-luminous a line and color draw their vitality from rather more than their intrinsic appeal, as real as that might be. Whatever the innate capacities for response to sculptile delicacy or chromatic drama, these responses are caught up in wider concerns, less generic and more contentful, and it is this encounter with the locally real that reveals their constructive power. The unity of form and content is, where it occurs and to the degree it occurs, a cultural achievement, not a philosophical tautology. If there is to be a semiotic science of art it is that achievement it will have to explain. And to do so it will have to give more attention to talk, and to other sorts of talk but the recognizably aesthetic, than it has usually been inclined to give. |
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| 1 Quoted in R. Goldwater and M. Treves, Artists on Art ( New York, 1945), p. 421. 2 Quoted in ibid., pp. 292-93. 3 See N. D. Munn, Walbiri Iconography ( Ithaca, N.Y., 1973). 4 Quoted in Goldwater and Treves, Artists on Art, p. 410. 5 P. Bohannan, "Artist and Critic in an African Society," in Anthropology and Art, ed. C. M. Otten ( New York, 1971), p. 178. 6 R. F. Thompson, "Yoruba Artistic Criticism," in The Traditional Artist in African Societies, ed. W. L. d'Azaredo ( Bloomington, Ind., 1973). pp. 19-61. 7 Ibid., pp. 35-36. 8 R. Goldwater, "Art and Anthropology: Some Comparisons of Methodology," in Primitive Art and Society, ed. A. Forge ( London, 1973), p. 10. 9 A. Forge, "Style and Meaning in Sepik Art," in Primitive Art and Society, ed. Forge, pp. 169-92. See also, A. Forge, "The Abelam Artist," in Social Organization, ed. M. Freedman ( Chicago, 1967), pp. 65-84. 10 A. Forge, "Learning to See in New Guinea," in Socialization, the Approach from Social Anthropology, ed. P. Mayer (London, 1970), pp. 184-86. 11 M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy ( London, 1972). 12 Ibid., p. 38. 13 Ibid., p. 34. 14 Ibid., p. 40. 15 Quoted in ibid., p. 41. 16 Ibid., p. 48. 17 Ibid. 18 Quoted in ibid., p. 57. 19 Ibid., p. 80. 20 Ibid., p. 76. 21 Ibid., p. 86. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., pp. 87 - 89, 101. 24 M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators ( Oxford, 1971). 25 Baxandall, Painting and Experience, p. 152. 26 M. G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 1 ( Chicago, 1974), p. 367. 27 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 438. 28 I am grateful to Hildred Geertz, who collected most of these poems, for permission to use them. 29 N. Goodman, Languages of Art ( Indianapolis, 1968), p. 260. 30 J. Maquet, "Introduction to Aesthetic Anthropology," in A Macaleb Module in Anthropology (Reading, Mass., 1971), p. 14. |