This is a two-part essay where I look at the characteristics of art through the lens of ritual. Part 1 gives an outline of what I’ll call the Precipitate Metaphor of art. Part 2 will look at the effects of ritual in inducing powerful trance states, which I argue is related to one dimension of art– to simulate trance states. My intention is not to give a definition of art, only a functional description that might explain some of my own mental habits when I see artworks.
The Precipitate Metaphor
Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, raises an interesting consideration of art’s origins: that the “earliest artworks originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind.” Even now, it is still widely acknowledged that there is an almost ineffable, magical quality to many famous art pieces. This uncomfortable proximity to religion, in turn, has prompted some philosophers, most notably Wittgenstein, to deride any talk of aesthetics as utterly meaningless. Along this positivist vein of thought, I will mainly speak of art in terms of its function in ritual[1].
There is no easy distinction between ancient human and animal rituals—both can be reducible to some behavior achieving a “specialized communicative function”[2]. Communicative displays, such as those used for intimidation, mating, or submission, are found in many of the animal kingdoms. These can range from subtle posturing to loud, raucous screaming, all intended to communicate the status or health of the signaling individual to a potential leader or mate. More specifically for humans, symbols of ritual are “a set of evocative devices for rousing, channeling, and domesticating powerful emotions, such as hate, fear, affection, grief”[3].
There’s one intriguing example of a ritual act having its basis in a communicative function in Kevin Simler’s article on a potential evolutionary explanation for the origin of music. He writes a great summary of Joseph Jordania’s book Why Do People Sing, in which audio-visual intimidation displays (AVIDs), a.k.a war dances, are credited with providing a primitive basis for modern forms of music. Documented in ethnographies from all over the world, from the haka of the New Zealand Māori[4] to the umzansi of the South African Zulu[5], war dances are a nearly universal type of ritual in ancient societies. These dances are speculated to once having had a special communicative ability: to scare food competitors (which may have included predators) with loud noises and sudden movements. Furthermore, the synchronized nature of the sounds and movements could have given off the impression that the group was really a single giant organism, and therefore not to be messed with. Simler has noted that at best, these synchronized performances may only explain the origin of rhythm, which is in fact a uniquely human ability, but likely not the origin of music.
Ritual and art (of which music is an example) may share many similarities, but art is markedly different. According to Dissanayake: “Like ritual, art is generally concerned with communication and can be said typically to have a social or cultural function.” We can see this dual function exhibited in ancient hand stencil art, most powerfully depicted in Cueva de las Manos or “the Cave of Hands”[6]. We can speculate that our ancestors’ handiwork (pun intended) was made not on a whim but with intention—a “high-five to the future”, so to speak. The multitude of hands on those walls also suggests it was a social activity, further demonstrating the interconnectedness of art and ritual.
If ritual is a kind of communicative activity or process, then art may be considered one of its products; like the solid precipitate formed within an aqueous chemical reaction, art is a material creation of ritual. We could call this the Precipitation Metaphor of art, which I’ll come back to in Part 2. That art is embedded in the physical world allows ritual to gain access to a sphere of human interaction that transcends space and time, thereby providing a material basis for culture. If before one had to partake in a ritual in person, like a war dance or a weather ceremony, art frees the individual to take a semblance–just a meager reminder–of the ritual experience to a distant location, or in the case of the hand-stencils, to the distant future.
The Aura
How did our ancestors experience art? Due to their rather limited means of transportation, and the inability to rapidly reproduce what they created, ancient humans had to be in the presence of original artworks. This lack of easy and rapid reproduction brings us to an important concept delineating a crucial difference between ancient and contemporary conceptions of art—the so-called “aura” of an artwork.
The aura of an artwork, a term derived from Benjamin, is characterized by its uniqueness or its special existence in time and space. From the moment of its completion, an original artwork is different from other artworks not only because of its content but also by its spatial position. Those hand paintings exist only in the Argentinian cave in the same way the original Mona Lisa only hangs in the French Louvre. One must visit them in person to reify the aura. In this abstract sense, anyone who partakes of the aura is a participant in a ritual, the ritual centered around the communication of powerful emotion such that any observer feels as though they are witnessing not just paint on a canvas but something more, a feeling akin to what Da Vinci’s admirers may have felt when they saw the Mona Lisa the first time. To link this with my discussion above, to be present in the “aura” of an artwork is to participate in a temporally extended ritual, one that does not require all participants to be present at once. No physical action is required on behalf of the individual, only some level of perception and reflection.
The onset of photography and film was, to Benjamin, the death of the aura. This death occurred slowly, beginning with the decline of what he called the “cult value” of an artwork, and culminated with the rise of “exhibition value.” The cult value of an artwork is the value derived from the hiddenness of an artwork, particularly to the extent that they must be looked for and are not immediately accessible. Similarities with mystical ritual abound in an artwork’s cult value; each artwork is sacred in the sense that each visit is a kind of pilgrimage, and the destruction of an original work is tantamount to blasphemy.
What was “exhibition value” and what roles did photography and film play in its emergence? Jos de Mul, in his paper “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination”, said, “uniqueness and permanence of the auratic object are being replaced by transitoriness and reproducibility.” Photography made it simple to capture a meadow with a simple ‘click’, a process which once took hours of painstaking labor to draw by hand. Film made it possible to capture sequences of still images and produce motion by rapidly spinning through them. For the first time in human history, modern machines made it even possible to mass-produce the images of famous but once hidden artworks. Mul writes: “in photography and film, the cult value gives way to exhibition value, which is precisely situated in the endless reproduction of the copies.” In other words, it was no longer as important for the artwork to actually be beautiful, sentimental, or even original. It just had to grab attention and keep it. How “mediagenic” an artwork was, or its potential to be quickly consumed and discarded by the populace, is what gave an artwork increased exhibition value.
I find the notions of cult and exhibition value useful on a conceptual level, but also somewhat lacking in clarity. The real difference between an original and its representation is actually one of degree and not of kind, so really, cult and exhibition value should be viewed as opposite ends of a spectrum. Consider that taking part in a religious service in person and through a screen differs by the degree of engagement, parallel to the fact that being in the presence of the original artwork is different from viewing its representation. When one is physically in church, there are a certain set of behaviors and attitudes expected of the worshipper. Emulating those same behaviors at home towards a television broadcast is noticeably less likely to induce the same kinds of experiences that one would have in church. This example, of course, could easily be extended to other kinds of rituals, like sports games or academic talks (maybe zoom classes too?). The point stands that as long as you partake of the service (by listening to the sermon, watching the game, etc.), then you’re still participating in the ritual. Likewise, as long as one perceives the aesthetic qualities of an artwork even if not in its presence, one still faintly perceives the aura.
To be continued: Part 2 will be more psychological, examining the effects of ritual on the mind. This piece is just setting the background for the next, which should be substantially spicier 🙂
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Notes and References
[1] Don’t take this to mean that I think art is meaningless; I simply think that the meaning of art is not the kind of meaning we have in mind when we say Y signifies X, or when we have to appeal to a more familiar word Y to explain an unfamiliar word X.
[2]Dissanayake 1979, 28
[3] https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2016/12/05/inside-africa-south-africa-zulu-dance-b.cnn
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI851yJUQQw
[5] http://35.161.88.15/music-in-human-evolution/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cueva_de_las_Manos
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Amanuel Sahilu