A horse raid,
Comanche rock art, La Vista
Verde site, New Mexico. Photo
used with permission of
Severin Fowles.
One final
aspect of the subject of motion in rock art involves the motions that created
the imagery in the first place. Severin Fowles, the chair of the American
Studies Department and an Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department of
Barnard College, Columbia University has investigated exactly that in Comanche
petroglyphs in the Rio Grande river canyon in northern New Mexico.
Drawing of the panel,
Comanche rock art, La Vista
Verde site, New Mexico. Photo
used with permission of
Severin Fowles.
In an area
with a large quantity of pecked rock art the imagery identified as Comanche is
composed of faint scratches. "The
Comanches scratched rather than pecked their images, however, presumably
because the performed gesture was as, or even more, important than the icon
produced. The pecked horse may look like a horse in the end, but the process of
pecking - of repeated staccato impacts - does not have any quality of the horse
about it. The Comanche horse icon, on the other hand, was composed of arcing
lines that move in a very horse-like way across the rock surface. This is
nicely depicted in Figure 3a, which documents a horse raid in progress. One
could call the horses scratched on this panel stylized, or even abstract, but
only when referring to the icon left behind. During the process of creation -
during the image's performance - the artist would have been representing the
horse and its characteristic galloping motions quite faithfully, very much as a
Chinese calligrapher might seek to mimic the flight of geese in the movement of
his wrist as he painted lines on parchment. Figure 3b offers another example of
a horse raid in progress. The original, like so many others, is barely visible
in the field. However, in the sea of arcing lines, one senses again that it was
the repetitive hand motions that would have most palpably signified the
movement of the horses and the impressive size of the herd. A successful
Comanche raid in which many horses had been captured was being recollected and
reenacted through iconographic performance. From a Comanche perspective, these performances
need to be understood as an extension of the Plains Sign Language (PSL)
tradition, in which the Comanches were renowned participants." (Fowles
2013: 74-5)
Lines of motion from the panel,
Comanche rock art, La Vista
Verde site, New Mexico. Photo
used with permission of
Severin Fowles.
In other
words, the viewer, recognizing the imagery, mentally associates with it the
motions that go along with its creation. We can picture a Comanche warrior
telling the story of the horse raid described by Fowles (above) making a wavy
motion with his hand and arm to illustrate how the herd of horses ran, and that
the curved lines of the backs of the horses illustrated in the rock art panel
also convey this motion.
In the
vernacular of modern art this would be called "performance art", the
image is only a remaining vestigial record of the gestures/performance that
were the point in the first place. The modern beginnings of performance art
were influenced by Jackson Pollock whose "drip" paintings could be
seen as a record of all of the motions he made to produce them. "Bolstered by photographs of Jackson
Pollock in his studio, moving dance-like around a canvas on the floor, artists
began to see the artist's creative act as equally important, if not more so, to
the artwork produced. In this light, Pollock's distinctive drips, spills, and
splatters appeared as a mere remnant, a visible trace left over from the moment
of creation." (Spivey 2019)
Eventually,
of course, "performance art" evolved to the stage where it was only
action or situation or action with no physical remaining vestige, but that
development goes beyond the scope of my discussion here. What I believe Fowles
is saying, and certainly what my point is here, would relate to the early
stages where there is a physical remnant of the performance, in this case the
Comanche rock art panel of a horse raid. Had the imagery been the only important
goal, then why would they not have made the lines deeper, more permanent and
visible. Of course, such light scratching is more visible when freshly
produced, but soon weathers to the state we now find it in. It does not appear
to have been consciously produced primarily to be a perpetual record. In Fowles
words: "the rock art's illegibility
becomes, paradoxically, its greatest virtue. Simply put, it would be very
difficult to argue that these images were created in order to be viewed, after
the fact, by and audience (archaeological or otherwise)." (Fowles
2013:72)
Comanche rock art, La Vista
Verde site, New Mexico. Photo
used with permission of
Severin Fowles.
So, here we
seem to have a probable case of gesture recorded in rock art. Does this apply
everywhere, to all rock art? Most certainly not, indeed, most petroglyphs were
created with lines of varying depth to be a long-lasting record or image. But
Fowles has illustrated that, at least in this case, it may just be, as he put
it "indeed the primary 'image', we
propose, was not the scratched icon left behind, but instead the gestural hand
and body movements of the rock art as a performative event." (Fowles
2013:67)
NOTE: I wish to thank Severin Fowles, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University, for providing me with the illustrations, his paper, and the permission to use them.
REFERENCES:
Fowles,
Severin, and Jimmy Arterberry
2013 Gesture
and performance in Comanche Rock Art, pages 67-82, in World Art 2013,
Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, UK.
Spivey,
Virginia B., Dr.
2019 When Art
Intersects With Life, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/global-culture/conceptual-performance/a/performance-art-an-introduction.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment