Untitled Document
Paris - The
Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art can't be accused of being an ordinary
place with a predictable program. Ensconced in a modern glass jewel box of
a building on Raspail Boulevard, it's an institution where up-to-the-minute
art can encompass everything from Matthew Barney's sculpture to robotic toys
to Issey Miyake's knife-pleated dresses.
Even
so, the current exhibition, "Yanomami: Spirit of the Forest," is quite
a reach. The most complicated project undertaken by the foundation, the multimedia
show transports visitors to the Brazilian Amazon, where — against all
odds — the Yanomami Indians maintain their traditional lifestyle as hunters
and gatherers whose visionary leaders invoke powerful spirits by inhaling yakoana,
a hallucinogenic powder. The foundation's eclectic display of photography, video,
film, painting, sculpture and acoustical installations by an international slate
of artists presents sights and sounds of this ancient, primal culture.
Visitors
get their first glimpse of it in a series of dramatic black-and-white portraits
of the Yanomami by Claudia Andujar, a French-born photographer who has lived
in Brazil since 1956. In an adjacent gallery, German artist Wolfgang Staehle's
digital video of the village of Watoriki, shot over a 24-hour period, is projected
as a three-screen, wraparound landscape. Nearby, a darkened room comes alive
with sounds of the Amazonian jungle recorded by Stephen Vitiello, an American
who lives in New York.
With
birdcalls and insect choruses still in their heads, visitors wander off into
Japanese designer Naoki Takizawa's corridor of colored light and forest-like
imagery, projected on circular mirrors and reflected on surrounding spaces.
Then comes French conceptual sculptor Vincent Beaurin's environment of glittery,
yellow and black objects, meant to represent animal ancestor spirits and crystallize
Yanomami cosmology.
But
even in this highly imaginative terrain, the next gallery takes most people
by surprise. Here they bump into an enchanted forest of giant eyeballs by New
York artist Tony Oursler. The eyes are so big — each is a resin sphere
about 6 feet in diameter — and they are placed so close together that
visitors must wend their way through them and consider one at a time. That means
gazing into a video projection of an enormous blinking eye, overlaid with dreamlike
footage of tropical verdure or drawings of animals.
Part
travelogue, part social history, the show, which runs through Oct. 12, is mostly
a mind-bending journey to the shamanistic culture of Indians who live in the
forest that stretches across northern Brazil and southern Venezuela. In Brazil,
the Yanomami population of about 12,500 constitutes the country's largest indigenous
community to have preserved its traditions.
But
not without a struggle. The Yanomami had almost no contact with outsiders until
the 20th century, but then missionaries, gold prospectors and road builders
arrived, bringing contagious diseases and wreaking havoc on the environment.
In 1992, an international campaign to save the Yanomami persuaded the Brazilian
government to set aside 37,000 square miles of forest as a private reserve.
Some
of the works on display, produced before the exhibition was conceived, deal
with this history and provide a backdrop for newer artworks. In "The House
and the Forest," a two-hour documentary film made in 1994 by German artist
Volkmar Ziegler, Yanomami men construct a communal dwelling and lament the effects
of outside encroachment. "River-Crossing, Kashorawëtheri," a
suite of 15 black-and-white photographs shot in 1978 by Lothar Baumgarten, also
of Germany, follows a group of Yanomami on an arduous journey through a forest
and across a waterway.
But
most of the pieces were commissioned last year by the foundation as part of
a collaborative experiment.
"This
isn't an exhibition about the Yanomami. It's an exhibition with the Yanomami,"
says foundation director Hervé Chandès, who organized the show
with French anthropologist Bruce Albert. The goal was not to do an ethnographic
show, to romanticize the Yanomami or to portray them as exotic "others,"
Chandès says. Instead, the artists were asked to explore connections
between their creative processes and those of Yanomami shamans.
In
addition to sponsoring the exhibition and publishing the catalog, the foundation
is financing a project that will produce a comprehensive map of the Yanomami
territory. Made with satellite technology, the map is expected to expand Yanomami
knowledge of their land and help them make better use of it.
EXHIBITION'S
ROOTS
The
show began several years ago, when Chandès came across two of Andujar's
portraits in a Belgian magazine. "I found them absolutely fantastic,"
he says. Determined to present an exhibition of her work, he contacted Andujar
through Albert, who has worked with the Yanomami since 1975 and has a long-standing
relationship with the people of Watoriki.
But
when Andujar and Albert met with Chandès in Paris, a different exhibition
began to take shape. "We talked about shamanism, which Bruce believes is
the basis of Yanomami culture," Chandès says. "And then there
was this question of images. We live in a society full of images. For the Yanomami,
images come from inside and are often created by language." In the end,
he says, "we tried to do something unique, not present the clichés
or an idea of the past."
Chandès
and Albert drew up a list of 12 artists, including four who had already worked
in the area: Andujar, Ziegler, Baumgarten and Rogerio Duarte do Pateo, a Brazilian
anthropology student and filmmaker. The others were invited to travel individually
to Watoriki, where 11 shamans serve the community. Five of the artists —
Staehle, Vitiello, French photographer Raymond Depardon, American video artist
Gary Hill and Argentine painter Adriana Varejao — accepted the invitation.
The other three — Oursler, Beaurin and Takizawa — couldn't arrange
to go within the prescribed timetable, but they agreed to create pieces inspired
by their own research and Yanomami materials supplied by the foundation.
The
artists who went to Brazil each traveled individually and spent about a week
in Watoriki. The idea wasn't to establish an enclave of outside artists, Chandès
says, but to allow each of them to create a work based on personal experience.
The artists lived in the open ring-like structure that houses the villagers,
slept in hammocks, participated in daily activities, hiked in the forest and
observed the shamans' healing procedures. Albert and Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami
shaman and activist who speaks Portuguese as well as his native language, served
as translators and facilitators.
Offered
an extraordinary opportunity, the artists prepared as best they could. Depardon,
who has traveled widely and eagerly agreed to take his first trip to the Brazilian
Amazon, says he took a limited amount of film to force himself to be selective.
His intimate 30-minute film puts viewers in the forest with hunters and in the
Watoriki communal house with shamans, but Depardon says he kept enough distance
to avoid intruding.
'SONIC
IMPRESSION'
Vitiello,
who is probably best known for recording sounds from the 91st floor of the World
Trade Center during his 1999 residency there, says he was "stunned but
also really excited" by the invitation. . "There was no way I could
become an expert on the Yanomami in a short period of time. The best thing I
could do was go there with open ears and do the work the way I usually do, where
it's about my personal response to the sonic world," he says. "I thought
if I could learn more later, that would be great. But the immediate challenge
was really, how do I get the equipment together, how do I know I can survive
if I get stung by an insect or run out of batteries?"
Once
he got to Watoriki, Vitiello learned that the Yanomami believe in the unity
of the natural and spiritual worlds and perceive a complex web of connections
in nature. The oldest shaman explained that animal sounds have particular meanings
for his people. A woodpecker's tapping, for example, is thought to be related
to human pregnancy.
Back
home, Vitiello edited 17 hours of tape to 45 minutes for his acoustical environment,
incorporating sounds of the wind, birds, cicadas and shamans' voices and the
rhythm of daily sonic cycles. He also created a five-part headphone piece to
convey the sound of more circumscribed experiences, including a performance
by a women's chorus and a morning walk in the rain.
"I
don't want to pretend to be a spokesperson for the culture or the forest,"
he says. "This is a kind of sensory sonic impression. But the shaman said,
'This is what you should listen for, this is the kind of meaning we find in
sound.' It's not just some expert in sound standing on the edge of the forest;
it's a privileged view that we were given, even if it was very limited."
Hill,
who lives in Seattle, was also intrigued with the notion of bringing together
artist-shamans from two very different cultures. Determined to get at the heart
of Yanomami shamanistic practices, he was the only artist to try the hallucinogenic
powder. His hosts tried to dissuade him, he says, but he felt that sampling
the drug was the most direct way to gain insight.
The
result: "immense pain," "white space" and a "sound-oriented"
experience, Hill says. The effects were short-lived, and he spent much of his
time shooting 15 hours of film. But none of that footage appears in the exhibition.
Instead, he created a video installation inspired by his journey. The central
component is a two-sided screen that portrays the artist hanging upside down
and reciting a text backward. Additional images of sunlight, foliage and a rotating
gyroscope are projected on mirror-topped pedestals. Reflections of these images
swirl around the ceiling, creating a dizzying effect.
Oursler
initially resisted participating in the project. "I didn't want to be some
white guy commenting on the Yanomami," he says. "I do my own anthropology
on our culture, but there was no way I was going to be so arrogant as to do
that with another culture."
Once
Albert convinced him that the show would be an open exchange of ideas, "it
was just a question of research material," Oursler says. "I read about
their mythology and learned about the images they produce and how the shamans,
who are the official storytellers, paint with words."
Adapting
his familiar video projections of human eyes to the new work, he enlarged them
so that viewers would feel as if they are inside the eyes. Then he veiled those
images with fleeting scenes of jungle-like landscapes and animal drawings by
Watoriki youth.
For
Andujar, who works with the Yanomami as an artist and a humanitarian, the exhibition
is an opportunity to show photography that she views as "a work in progress"
and "a way of communicating with the world." She began taking elegant
portraits of the Yanomami in the 1970s but was temporarily forced out of the
area by road-building authorities who considered her a hostile witness to progress.
Her recent work takes a more expressionistic approach in scenes that suggest
the fervor of native rituals.
The
exhibition is "an honest effort made by the Cartier Foundation to create
a culturally unique portrayal of Yanomami people," she says, but it "probably
does not satisfy all. Some have looked for a more politically engaged show;
others have looked for a more substantial component of Yanomami art."
But
"art is a way of living, or life itself," Andujar says. "It's
a way of expressing oneself in a unique manner, a prophecy, a wisdom put forth
that usually carries the experience of one's culture. If the show makes others
sensitive to the way of life of the Yanomami, I believe that it has served its
purpose."