MYSTERIES
Mysteries, Magic and Powers of Art
The
Healing Power of Art, Images, Talismans, Mantras and Masks
By Jacques
Mercier
Talismans"
and "fetishes" have been exciting Western curiosity for a long time: Les
Curiositez inouyes sur la sculpture talismanique des Persans
(Unheard-of curiosities in the talismanic sculpture of the Persians), by
Jacques Gaffarel, appeared in 1629, and Du Culte des dieux fetiches
(On the cult of the fetish gods), by Charles de Brosses, in 1760. The first
of these works, a popularization of erudite humanist scholarship, was part
of the movement to rehabilitate antiquity that developed after the collapse
of Christian scholasticism; the bases of the second were the belief in
progress and the slave trade. For de Brosses, African fetishes are "nothing
else but the first object that it pleases each nation or each individual to
select and to consecrate.... They are sacred objects and talismans for the
blacks, as much as gods are." He identifies this African religion with that
of "ancient peoples."
Photo:
Zahuli mask dancing, Guro people, Cote d'Ivoire.
Photo: Afro-Brazilian altar to the Yoruba creator God Oju Oxala, also known as
Obatala, as installed in 'Face of the Gods,' Museum of African Art, New York,
1993.
This opinion, restated by Auguste Comte and the proponents of evolutionism, was taken as a lasting proof for 150 years: fetishism is the most primitive form of religion; fetishes and talismans are somewhat arbitrarily chosen objects. It was another several decades before a better ethnographic acquaintance with these objects, linked to the development of a critical understanding of the workings of religion in our own, Western societies, deconstructed these ideas of fetishism and indeed of magic. Today these objects have regained their power to amaze. Their topicality signifies not a return to magic and the irrational during a period of crisis but an opening of new cultural perspectives on them. That perspective begins by taking their therapeutic function into account. Why this interest in the use of works of art in medicine? Beyond the problems internal to these therapies, and the evolution in the understanding of the work of art (notably with the introduction of the notion of the Gestaltung, the artwork's configuration-literally, the form's forming), we are led to acknowledge the existence of other events, of which the most important is the change in the status of the image. Omnipresent on screen and on paper, it rivals and even supplants speech as a medium of communication. Until now, language has classically been the medium of the cogitio, the model for understanding the unconscious, the narrative image's support. What can the image, or the plastic expression of a subject, supply that language cannot? What subject is secreted by the world of the image? Objects endowed with effectiveness and therefore with a certain autonomy, may make a critical contribution to this debate. For theoreticians of the image, the Byzantine icon is among the most seductive objects of all.
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