Body painting. It has to be considered to be one of the oldest forms of art. Way before people covered themselves in clothes, they clothed themselves with pigments. Basically bright mineral paints that temporarily embellished the skin and the use of flora and other mother nature “ready- mades” – to quote Duchamp- to create exotic, to us, head pieces and body accessories. There is precedence to the current interest of the work of Hans Silvester.
Man Ray. "Man Ray's photographic series, Noire et blanche, 1926, consists of more than twenty photographs of a pale-faced, female model holding a darkly stained African mask. Most of the photographs draw our attention to similarity in the shape of the model's face and the shape of the mask, and contrast between the model's paleness and the mask's darkness. The first photograph from the series was published in Vogue magazine and Variétés magazine during the 1920s. However, the series did not gain attention in the art world until the 1980s, when scholarly and critical interest in primitive art redeveloped within the contexts of postmodernism and post-colonialism, for example, in the scholarship of Marianna Torgovnick." Read More:http://web3.unt.edu/honors/eaglefeather/wp-content/2009/08/Weston-Charisse-080609-FINAL.pdf image:http://thepagansphinx.blogspot.com/2010_03_14_archive.html
In the 1920′s and 30′s African ethnology was “de rigeur” in France. Under the aegis of a love for the wild and primitive- ethnographers were like celebrity explorers even though it was junk science- there was a kind of snobbish negro-mania under which was tossed such diverse and marginally related phenomena like Jazz, American minstrel shoes,Josephine Baker, prize fighting and primitive art including masks of which the surrealists, notably Breton was a collector. Africa was also a motif in Man Ray photographs of models with African artifacts.
---Although the origins of this astonishing tradition have been lost over the years - the Surma and Mursi spend much of their time involved in tribal and guerilla warfare - their homeland is a hotbed of the arms and ivory trades. Fifteen tribes have lived in this region since time immemorial, and many use zebra skins for leggings, snail shells for necklaces and clay to stick their wonderful designs to their heads. As they paint each other's bodies and make bold decisions about their outfits(all without the aid of mirrors), it seems that the only thing that motivates them is the sheer fun of creating their looks, and showing them off to other members of the tribe. As a celebration of themselves and of their stunning environment, this is truly an African fashion parade like no other. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-516490/Out-Africa-The-incredible-tribal-fashion-inspired-Mother-Nature.html#ixzz1InHsFfkU
To call this purely decorative is to miss the broader context. The Western world is accustomed to viewing images of tribal peoples with elaborately painted bodies or with lips and ears adorned, and to us disfigured by rings and studs. To Westerners these “decorations” are usually perceived to be at the level of an aesthetic visual display,which confirms stereotypes and represents a “savage” or “wild” and primitive version of commercial cosmetics . However, these body painting or body art representations actually encode vital, and often profound social and cosmological information. multi-sensory meanings are embedded within the act.
Take puberty rites. After a moral lesson by the elders, jewelry is worn in the skin as a sign the lesson has penetrated as well as a symbol of penetration in the sexual act. Often face painting involves a variety of designs according to the event. Young men, may decorate their faces with pigments from a tree or vegetation. When they go fishing or hunting they use pigment that is aromatized to decorate their faces with fish or animal motifs. The central purpose of the decoration is to attract the opposite sex, and secondly to attract something to eat.
Susan Sontag on Leni Riefestahl:The first photograph was taken in 1927 when she was twenty-five and already a movie star, the most recent are dated 1969 (she is cuddling a naked African baby) and 1972 (she is holding a camera), and each of them shows some version of an ideal presence, a kind of imperishable beauty, like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's, that only gets gayer and more metallic and healthier-looking with old age. And here is a biographical sketch of Riefenstahl on the dust jacket, and an introduction (unsigned) entitled "How Leni Riefenstahl came to study the Mesakin Nuba of Kordofain"—full of disquieting lies. - Fascinating Fascism Read More:http://denmarkvesey.blogspot.com/2007/12/leni-fiefenstahl-africa.html
Hence this facial painting of the provide us with a notion for looking beyond the body decoration as being purely aesthetic. To start with, the designs painted are often aromatic, and they convey olfactory, as well as visual, messages.So, it is not possible for a photograph, or video to legitimately do these designs honor, on account of their olfacto-visual nature. These body decorations, however, are often not only multi-sensory in themselves, they also encode multi-sensory meanings.In their cosmology, life on earth is produced through the medium of different colour energies emanating from the sun. Each colour may have distinct relational values such as yellow for male fertiity, and red, with female fertility, blue with values of transition and communication; and so on.
So, there is an extensive use of color symbolism, both in material culture and in the relation of colors with actions and concepts. For example, the color in the feathers of the head-wear often represent male power and divine communication, whereas the act of procreation will be represented by other color arrangements. But, these colour symbolism are rarely purely visual. They are synaesthetically integrated into a larger system of sensory symbolism involving temperatures, flavours, odours, sounds and tactilities. For example, in the case of a particular tune played on instruments by young men, the odor of the melody can be male, with a given color and tempeature-hot, hot hot- etc. The vibrations may carry an erotic message to a particular girl. These synaesthetic associations among other sensory stimuli mean that colors inevitably evoke a range of other sensory perceptions within a rich visual, audible field that encompasses the five senses.
The colourful designs the Omo of Hans Silvester paint on their faces, therefore, represent only one or a partial one aspect of an intricate and integrated multisensory collection of complex of beliefs and practices. What appears as a simple and elementary pattern of visual markings designed to make an individual more appealing,actually encodes and evokes a subtle sequence of sensory associations which initiate in the brain and encompass the cosmos.
---They paint themselves or one another two or three times a day, using pigment made from earth or ground stone mixed with water. Executed quickly, the abstract, vibrantly patterned motifs reflect a sophisticated vocabulary of mark-making, finger-painting and hand-printing techniques; they extend across faces and sometimes center on a singl
ature, like a breast. They function as personal decoration, cultural expression and, when ash and cattle urine are added, insect repellent. Mr. Silvester says these people’s interest in their painting supersedes any in sculpture, mask making, music or dance.---Read More:http://northgoessouth.com/2011/01/the-african-tribes-of-omo-photographer-hans-silvester/
“Oh right, back to Ethiopia- the tribes look so interesting that sometimes you don’t even need to depict the in their environment. The way they present themselves can say a lot about them if you know how to read it. Each tribe of the Omo valley has a specific way of dressing and decorating themselves as a way to visually associate themselves with their unique customs and values. Since there are so many tribes occupying spaces close to one another, the need for visual differences to separate one from another is strong….
Mursi headdresses are made out of bird feathers. It is both a decoration and an object intimidation for neighboring enemies. The Mursi are considered some of the most feared warriors in the Omo Valley. Read More:http://www.joeyl.com/blog/page/2/
For example, at puberty some women start applying a deep red clay to their skin and hair to mark them as part of the Hamer tribe. The iron rings around the neck represent they may be a first or second wife. Scarification on a man depicts taking another’s life in tribal war, but for a woman it means she has created a new one- a sign of motherhood. ” Read More:http://www.joeyl.com/blog/page/2/ a
"I can’t help being as amazed as the first time whenever I come across Hans Silvester’s work; the energy in his images, the combinations of textures, the vibrant colours and the addition of the exotic flowers always manage to leave me speechless. The German photographer and environmental activist has travelled all around the world with his camera but he is undoubtedly specially well-know because of the way he portrayed the native paintings of Suma tribe, located in the valley of Omo river, in Ethiopia." Read More:http://www.ithunter.org/2011/03/hans-silvester-omo-valley/
ADDENDUM:
---A composite image showing Yves Klein painting the body of a woman who would imprint her body on paper or canvas for his renowned performance pieces known as Anthropometries, or visual measurements of the human body. In the 20th C., Yves Klein used the female body as his brush and created canvases of women’s imprints. Dobill’s work eliminates the mediation of the model. The audience paints the artist. While Klein objectifies the women, Dobill alienates the audience and temporarily objectifies himself.---Read More:http://hragvartanian.com/2009/04/08/thoughts-on-peter-dobill/
Man Ray’s series of photographs entitled Noire et blanche (1926) features two of the leading subjects of the early twentieth century: the image of the modern woman and the image of the “primitive,” represented here by a ceremonial mask originating from the Baule people of Africa. The woman in the photographs is Alice Prin, Man Ray’s mistress at the time who was better known as Kiki of Montparnasse. The African mask relates to the “savage” or “primitive” man and art that many visual artists associated with modernism were depicting in their work, while Prin reminds us of the fabricated beauty of the modern woman whose looks were being used to sell a wide variety of consumer goods and also were featured in new forms of mass popular culture, such as film. Later in my paper, I suggest that visual correspondence between the images of Prin and the Baule mask conflate what each signified in discourses of modernism, resulting in the woman connoting primitiveness and the mask, style and eroticism. Read More:http://web3.unt.edu/honors/eaglefeather/wp-content/2009/08/Weston-Charisse-080609-FINAL.pdf
"In other words, the text accompanying the reproduction of Man Ray’s photograph in Vogue treats the Baule mask as a sign of mankind’s past in regard to which “woman” is a conduit through which all pass as she herself advances through stages involving a transformation to whiteness to become “the evolved white creature.” At the same time, one can understand the significance of the mask as personifying Andre Breton’s concept of the savagery of images – something raw and untainted by reason; similar attributes were then being attributed to the concept of the African “savage.” 4 Although the conscious, the part of the mind governed by reason and here represented by Prin, and the unconscious, the part of the mind that is not governed by reason but emotion and desire, represented by the mask, are presented here by two separate figures, similarities in their appearance, connections between them based on Prin holding the mask near her..." Read More:http://web3.unt.edu/honors/eaglefeather/wp-content/2009/08/Weston-Charisse-080609-FINAL.pdf
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