For my third example of visual art, I turn to an instance of a type of mask prominent among the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly referred to as ‘Kwakiutl’) of the Pacific Northwest, the mask depicting a giant ogress named Dzonokwa (initially referred to by the anthropologist Franz Boas as Tsonō’koa, and now alternatively as Dzunukwa). Among the Kwakwaka’wakw masks are typically the property of particular clans or secret societies, and are usually worn in ceremonial dances and ceremonies generally. Such masks are also instances of another of the world’s largest kinds of visual art, those whose primary use is as a prop in a performance or action. Boas noted in 1890 that the Dzonokwa masks were among the kinds that he encountered most frequently in his years studying the arts, myths, and social organizations of the Kwakwaka’wakw. The most extended and penetrating account of the masks known to me was given by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1975. Lévi-Strauss’s analyzes the Dzonokwa masks at considerable length as part of an astonishingly wide-ranging and detailed account of Pacific Northwest masks generally. Here I restrict myself to what he says about the Dzonokwa masks. These masks are typically prominently or entirely black, decorated with black tufts for hairs, and have half-enclosed eyes. The mouth is pushed forward and rounded, evoking the ogress’s characteristic cry “uh! uh!” (Lévi-Strauss, pp. 61-2)
For Lévi-Strauss artworks generally, and so also this mask, both as a type and its instances, are unintelligible if considered by themselves. Artworks and their salient features become intelligible only if first placed in appropriate comparison classes, which permits the works and their elements to be seen as part of a nested series of broad semantic systems. Within such groups, instances and features are related as transformations and inversions of each other. He initially groups the Dzonokwa masks together with another kind of mask that he treats as the most proximal inversion of the Dzonokwa, the Xwéxwé.
These latter masks are typically predominantly white, topped with stylized feathers, and feature a hanging tongue, bulging eyes, and bird-head appendages (p. 41). Considered from “the plastic point of view”, the Xwéxwé mask is “full of protrusions” and is opposed to “the Dzonokwa mask, which is all cavities” (p. 67).
How might one move beyond ‘the plastic point of view’? What, if anything, further can be said about the artistic meaning of such works? For Lévi-Strauss further meanings are retrieved by reconstructions, from the well-documented to the speculative, of the systems of which the masks are elements. First, ethnographic observation supplies the immediate context of use of the masks in dances and ceremonies. A dancer in a Xwéxwé mask is believed to shake the ground, and so is associated with earthquakes (p. 40). The wearer of the Dzonokwa masks “wraps himself in a black blanket and sways sleepily near the door” (p. 66), behavior that is explained through consideration of the myths and stories associated with the ogress. There is no need here to summarize further Lévi-Strauss’s immensely interesting and detailed account of the semantic systems; readers (if there remain any alive besides myself) of his four-volume ‘science’ of mythology will not be surprised to learn that he relates the relevant myths first to those of neighboring groups, then to all the major groups of the Pacific Northwest, and ultimately to a system so broad that it ranges from South America to Japan and China (!). Later in the book I’ll attempt an extended account of masks as visual art and consider instances from other continents. For now I end this short post with two strictures for the philosophy of visual art: Such a philosophy must incorporate Lévi-Strauss’s findings into its account of artistic meaning, or be able to explain why such kinds of meaning should be excluded from consideration. Second, a philosophy of visual art should contain conceptual resources to aid in the interpretive task that Lévi-Strauss ignores, that is, ways of explicating the artistic meaning of single instances of artworks. I turn next to Patrick Maynard’s account of a drawing by Rembrandt to introduce this concern for particulars.
References:
Franz Boas, “The Use of Masks and Head Ornaments on the Northwest Coast of America” (1890), in A Wealth of Thought: Franz Boas on Native American Art (1995), ed. Aldona Jonaitis
Audrey Hawthorn, Kwakiutl Art (1979)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks (1982)