For a second example of what I’ve termed the ‘zero degree’ of artistic meaning, as well as how this zero degree gains content, consider the astonishing drawings in the sand made by some Aboriginal groups in central and southwestern Australia. The artistic practice of drawing in the sand ranges from small, impromptu illustrations accompanying oral story-telling to large (six to eighteen feet in length) depictions of totemic animals rendered with parallel wavy lines and concentric circles. (McCarthy p. 32) The larger drawings are the work of many hours and illustrate the places, travels, and incidents of ancestor beings in Dreamtime, the timeless time of mythic, ancestral events.
The classic account of such sand drawings was of those from the Aboriginal Walbiri (or Warlpiri) group given by the anthropologist Nancy Munn. Walbiri women practice a distinctive genre of sand drawing characterized by “the rhythmic interplay of a continuous running graphic notation with gesture signs and a singsong verbal patter.” (Munn, p. 59) The drawings consist of a small lexicon of lines and enclosures; each item has a range of possible meanings that are specified contextually in use.
Among the women’s stories are accounts of dreams, which use a smaller range of elements that are also painted onto women’s bodies; these figures are often elongated to fit onto body parts, especially shoulders and breasts, surrounded by additional lines, or subjected to further decorative elaboration. (pp. 103-09) [
By contrast, much of the graphic design accompanying men’s story-telling of mythic travel uses marks of tracks indicating particular species-ancestors, lines for paths, and circles for places. (pp. 119-28) These circle-line designs are used also on boards and stones. (p. 136)
Likewise in partial contrast to women’s drawings, the men’s particular designs are typically part of a ritual context of communicating with ancestors and are closely associated “with a single ancestor and the songs detailing the events of his track” (p. 145). The associated designs and songs are “treated as complementary channels of communication; each is a repository of narrative meaning, and the production of one may evoke the other.”
These design elements are further incorporated into “aspects of men’s ceremonial drama, and to forms of ceremonial paraphernalia” (p. 183). In the ceremonial dramas, decorated men represent the ancestors in a camp, travelling along a track, or coming into a camp. Thus the dramas are structured by the same site-path/camp-track framework that is utilized in the designs themselves. (p. 185)
Munn ends with some general remarks about the sand drawings, their connection with stories, and their incorporation into broader frameworks, including the differing and complementary roles of men’s and women’s arts and lives, and ultimately the function of such meaning making. The visual elements and their uses exhibit “a high degree of repetitiveness”, which allows them to be key agents of a “connective” in “the dynamic through which such forms come to penetrate the imaginations of members of a community”. For both men and women, the designs and their incorporation into broader patterns of meaning cover individuals’ bodies, extend them, and connect them with the outer, social world, itself ultimately conceived as a part of a mythic cosmos. (pp. 215-17) Her conclusion is that the “visual forms are “multivocal” condensation symbols that can project an image of dynamic society unity in microcosm”. (p. 220) Part of the philosophical will be to make sense of how it is that visual artworks can so much as come to accomplish this.
References:
Frederick D. McCarthy, Australian Aboriginal Decorative Art (1962)
Nancy Munn, Walbiri Iconography (1986)