Introduction to Semiotics of Cultures, 2010

Claude Lévi-StraussArts

Vesa Matteo Piludu

University of Helsinki

Art

Lévi-Strauss was strongly interested in art

He mentioned how his father was a painter and even the huncle

Reference to Poussin, Clouet, Ingres, Max Ernst

Deep love for Wagner, considered a mythologist

Debussy, Richard Strauss

Art is difference

If the humans are different, is for their art

Cultures has styles

Each culture has a style, as art

The art is able to express feelings, that its impossible to express into other languages: is not object of translation

New York Museum of Natural History

Magic place were the tree speaks

Lévi-Strauss and Boas

Lévi-Strauss was impressed by the art of the Kwakiutl

Boas answered: “they are Indians like the all the others!”

Boas

Franz Boas was part of the scramble for artifacts that took place during the great age of museum building in the US and Europe from c. 1875 to 1930. The visual representation of ethnological artifacts was an important part of early academic research. To illustrate the artifacts he had acquired for the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin and the American Museum of Natural History, Boas included 173 figures and 26 plates in his book: The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island (1909).

Other classic: Primitive Art (1927), the path breaking book by Boas in which his analysis of symbolism and style shatters the colonialist racism of his age

George Hunt

The collector of the majority of Kwakwaka'wakw artifacts in the world's museums (including those illustrated above) was George Hunt (1854 - 1933) Hunt (K'ixitasu') was the son of an English fur trader at Fort Rupert and his Tlingit wife, Mary Ebbetts (Ansnaq), daughter of Chief Tongas from Alaska.

Hunt spoke Kwakwala and he learned how to render it in phonetic writing. For most of his life, Hunt worked as an informant, translator and collector for outsiders who came to Tsaxis including Israel Powell, Jacob Adrian Jacobsen, Franz Boas and Edward Curtis.

George Hunt Family with Franz Boas (right), Tsaxis, 1894. Photo: Pennsylvania Museum (O. C. Hastings)

Kwakiutl Transformation Mask, ca. 1880 Cape Mudge, Vancouver Island, British Columbia

Kwakiutl masks

Raven mask

The raven mask (left) collected at Tsaxis in 1901 by George Hunt was used to perform the Hamatsa dance, an important part of the Winter Ceremonial described in detail by Franz Boas.

Due primarily to Hunt and Boas, the American Museum of Natural History in New York has the world's largest and finest collection of Kwakwaka'wakw objects

The Way of the Masks

Lévi Strauss: Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1982, The Way of the Masks, University of Washington Press, Seattle

through the years, my sentiment ... was undermined by a lingering uneasiness: this art posed a problem to me which I could not resolve. Certain masks, all of the same type, were disturbing because of the way they were made. Their style, their shape was strange, their plastic justification escaped me....

Myths and Masks

Myths and Mask correlated

Looking at these masks, I was ceaselessly asking myself the same questions. Why this unusual shape, so ill-adapted to their function?

Why the bird heads which have no obvious connection with the rest and are most incongruously placed? Why the protruding eyes, which are the unvarying trait of all the types?

Finally, why the quasi-demonic style resembling nothing else in the neighboring cultures, or even in the culture that gave it birth?

Masks with earthquakes,Systrum and Egyptians

"The Kwakiutl linked the Xwéxwé masks with earthquakes. Their dance, wrote Boas, "is believed to shake the ground and to be a certain means of bringing back the hamatsa," that is, the new initiate to the highest ranking secret society, the Cannibals.

During initiation, the novice became ferocious and wild and ran in the woods: the objective was to bring him back to reintegrate him in the village community. This association of the Xwéxwér; (or Swaihwé) with earthquakes...

throws a curious light on the symbolism of the sistrums carried by the dancers... I draw attention to the way Plutarch explained the role of sistrums among the ancient Egyptians: "The sistrum ... makes it clear that all things in existence need to be shaken, or rattled about, and never to cease from motion but, as it were , to be waked up and agitated when they grow drowsy and torpid."

Artist

Half scientist (categories)

Half magician (creation from nothing, savage bricoleur mind)

He is not only able to represent the world, but also to recreate it in arts

This creations helps the humans to understand and to have an emotive connection with the world’s spectacle

Art object

Material object, with a surplus of knowledge and aesthetical pleasure

Illusion that hit light intelligence

Link between present and past