Aesthetic Ethnography

By Karl F. Volkmar, NEW ORLEANS ART REVIEW

With the sympathetic understanding of the insider and the objectivity of the ethnographer, artist Willie Birch furthers the social documentary tradition of photographers Helen Levitt, Roy de Carava, and Robert Frank. Birch is also different in that he presents his drawings as expressions of the vitality of the people of New Orleans sans the implicit social criticism of the photographers. In his reinterpretation of the genre subject that first came into prominence in seventeenth century painting in the Netherlands, the small size typical of genre is translated into the epic scale of public murals in these drawings that celebrate the life of the people of New Orleans living, or who did live before Katrina, in the Treme District of the Big Easy. The sympathy between Haarlem and Treme goes beyond the simple representation of ordinary people doing everyday things in their respective environments to embrace the idea that the nature of an ordered existence reflects the essential and moral character of those represented. This moral character is expressed not only in the regularity of their activities but also in the notion that regularity and ordinariness represent a harmony in tune with a natural order and a common humanity. If in the case of the Netherlands the formal organization of compositions and the arrangement of the representational details within those compositions may be read as metaphors for a moral order reflecting class and cultural values and identity, so might one understand the formal and narrative elements in Birch’s Celebration drawings as the expression of the identity and character of the people of Treme. What makes Birch”s work even more significant is the fact that he is of and lives in the world presented in these works. And for those of us who are familiar with Birch”s earlier work with its mixture of anger and irony and understanding, these drawings represent an interest in the daily lives of the subjects and how they have adapted to their physical and cultural environment.

Two Women is an example of a work that seems simple enough at first glance. One woman sits on the front stoop of her home reading a newspaper. Another woman talks on the telephone. What could be more unassumingly everyday? Yet from the perspective of social history such activities are fraught with significance in their subversion of stereotypes held by outsiders for the woman reading is keeping up to date with what is happening in the world and the woman talking over the telephone is maintaining social ties. In addition to these social themes there are a variety of formal patterns throughout the drawings that vie with the narrative subjects for our attention. These patterns may be as simple as those of the parallel lines and shapes of the stoop steps, the cast iron railing with its vertical struts, and the simulated patterns that suggest text in the newspaper being read. More complex patterns are seen in the arabesques of the grillwork door, the floral ornament of the reading woman”s dress, the diagonal lines and diamond shapes of the chain link fence and gate between the two homes, the cross-lathed wooden screen above the fence and gate and behind the telephoning woman”s head, and the repeating shapes of the lathe-turned spindle posts supporting the porch railing of the house next door on the left and the telephone talker”s porch on the right. Other patterns are evident in the long stripes and flowers on the dress of the woman on the right and the alternating darks and light other neck.

The insistent nature of these patterns suggests that they have a significance of their own that is more than merely formal or descriptive. Although the patterns are descriptive and result from the design or construction of physical things, they also seem to have an existence independent from those things. As we search our memory for similar phenomena the rich decorative practices of traditional African art come to mind. The Nankani of the Western Sudan, where men do the building and women do the painting, are known for the elaborate and colorful exterior ornamentation of their homes. The Hausa of Nigeria sculpt elaborate patterns out of adobe on the facades of their homes, patterns imbued with spiritual power or signifying social status. Patterns and juxtapositions of patterns can be in woven and printed textile and engraved and the like.

Do we go too far in suggesting a connection these two phenomena: the patterns in this drawing and the patterns in traditional African architecture and textiles? Birch tells us through the medium of the brief texts that accompany some of the drawings that he was influenced by the African art that is called Egyptian and that the light that surrounds the figures represents an emanation of spiritual energy. Slowly awareness begins to develop that perhaps we are seeing two neighbors! The cross-lathed screen behind the head of the woman with the telephone on the right is also seen at the end of the porch of the house next door in the vignette on the left. And if one looks carefully, just above the top of the chain link fence, one can see a vague shadowy shape on the further side of the cross-lathed screen that may be the head of the woman talking on the telephone. This combining of two views of the same venue serves as a way of representing the different behaviors of two individuals living in close physical proximity to each other yet able to maintain the intimacy of private spaces at the same time.

In Barbershop we find ourselves inside rather than outside and within a male tonsorial world. The barber wears a knitted skullcap that signifies his conscious identification with his African roots as he carefully sculpts the hair of the customer following the natural texture of the hair. As in any barbershop jars and tubes and bottles of chemicals used to control and change and enhance one”s hair are arranged along shelves and cabinet tops. A few words are legible here and there, words like Cool and Black that tell us that the chemicals compounds in these containers are designed specifically for the needs of African hair. As we look carefully we discover a challenge the artist has posed for us by the inclusion of the reflection of the foreground barber and customer in the mirror along the back right wall. The relationship between the reflected image and the physical space of the shop itself is as puzzling as the relationship between real and reflected in Edouard Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere. One response is to understand the mirror image as the reflection of what appears to lies to the left of the vertical florescent tube. More careful examination discovers differences that belie this facile reflective sympathy. The space to the left of the vertical tube could be a wall perpendicular to the back wall, a reading that is reinforced by the perspective drawing of the shelves behind the barber; or it could be another bay for another barber divided by the dark shelves, an interpretation that is supported by the perspective drawing of the horizontal florescent light and shelf above that is continuous with the drawing of the light and shelf and jars on the left side of the vertical light tube. The effect is an ambiguous as that in Manet”s famous work.

The similarity between Birch’s Barbershop and Manet’s Bar is only one of several traditional art references. If the presence of the mirror connects the artist with the Western European art history, the drawing of the figures and artist’s use of dark and light in the representation of cloth and skin suggests other associations. The juxtapositions of dark and light tones in the jacket and trousers of the barber and the large cloth covering the seated figure of the customer are as much shapes within patterns reinforced by lines as they are modeling of volumes in the illusionistic tradition of Western art. The transformation of modeling using value gradations into abstract patterns or lines and shapes can be found in Egyptian painting, the transition from Hellenistic naturalism into Early Christian, Byzantine, and Medieval painting in the West, and in the evolution of Buddhist imagery from Ghandara through Central Asia and into China.

In Birch’s drawings the use of modeling to represent the forms and flesh of hands and heads has been generalized into planes and shapes, creating an effect analogous to the carved abstractions of figures in traditional African sculpture. Is there some deeper significance here beyond the merely formal and representational? Henry Louis Gates tells us that, in traditional African art, there is no such thing as simply art for the sake of art. In African art, appearance is inseparable from social usage. Ellen Dissanayake explains how art as purely personal expression is unique to modern Western tradition. If it is reasonable to look at Birch”s celebration drawings from these perspectives one might suggest that the patterns and activities are signs of continuity between the people of New Orleans and their African roots and the adaptation rather than adoption of aspects of European tradition much as a storyteller will employ rhythm and meter and intonation to embellish the story being told.

Pattern, repetition, and abstraction enliven the drawing titled Evoking the Orishas. The energetically dancing woman with her angular limbs and complex costume is framed by the more stolid figure of a woman on either side. Behind these three figures stands a row of women and men dressed in long white robes. The flatness and vertical linear rhythms of these background figures echo the Theodora and Justinian mosaics of Ravenna Italy’s Byzantine art. The dynamic positioning of the dancer in her swirling movement is iterated in the patterning of pavement stones arranged in rhythmic patterns: curving, undulating, expanding, intersecting, interpenetrating, overlapping rhythms emanating from the movements of the dancing form. Those of us who have danced enthusiastically can attest to the sense of being possessed and how the world around us swirls and turns as we dance in our exuberance.

Orishas, traditional Yoruba spiritual forces or beings, have survived in the spiritual practices collectively known as voudou in which traditional spiritual practices and beliefs are couched in nominally Christian form. The ancient spiritual practice of ritual bathing and laving with water also survives in the Christian practice represented in Baptism. Although the tradition of river baptisms has been generally discontinued for practical as well as health reasons, it has been replaced by immersion in tanks of water in which the cleansing role of water is maintained and the tank itself serves as symbolic coffin alluding to the spiritual death and symbolic resurrection/rebirth signified by the ritual of baptism, an idea iterated in the shroud- like wrapping of the baptismal initiate.

The inclusion of practices from different cultural traditions raises an important consideration with respect to identity when Birch expands his pictorial expression of this phenomenon in Easter Bunnies and Generation Now: Brothers. In Easter Bunnies the artist juxtaposes different ways of marking the Easter holiday. On the left is a white woman dressed in exuberant spring finery with her floral print dress and floppy brimmed bonnet decorated with flowers standing next to a sporty convertible filled with Easter eggs and other goodies in front of an elaborate carriage in one of the narrow streets of the French Quarter. On the right a young girl dressed in billowing dress decorated with ribbon roses along the lower hem stands in center foreground with her mother, dressed in dark pants suit, sunglasses, and holding a camera, standing soberly to the side and back as if to not wanting to draw attention away from the young miss. The young girl and her mother stand in a rigorously constructed landscape drawn using almost perfect linear perspective, the sidewalk flanked with the undulating boughs of live oak trees on the left and the simple geometry of cottages on the right marking the center axis. What is the artist’s intent in placing these two scenes side by side for this is different from the apparent intentions in Two Women and Barbershop? Could the exuberant spring accoutrement of the woman in the left be the expression of the idea of Easter as the Christianized ancient pagan celebration of spring as time of fertility and renewal and the young girl and her mother on the right the more serious, Christian narrative of death, resurrection, and the possibility of salvation?

Sometimes questions of ethnic identity can get caught up in arguments involving ideas of cultural purity, acculturation, and assimilation. The purists may condemn those who have adopted the behavior and values of the majority culture as a rejection of traditional identity and perhaps even self-hatred while the acculturated may accuse the purists as being unrealistic. In Generation Now: Brothers Birch seems to quietly address this problem and suggest a solution. Whether one consciously adopts traditional dress and practice against the background of nature or copies the ways of the other, both are brothers within the same family of roots and problems, each following their own way with everything to gain by staying together and everything to lose by falling apart. While the man on the left looks back to the past, the man on the right participates in the now of the majority culture in which he lives and holds the future that is his child in his lap. If only they could understand the deep roots of their connectedness they could learn so very, very much from each other.

The fatal consequences of choosing sides and falling apart are presented in Black Man Sleeping under Cannon and Magnolia. Across the street stands the Cabildo with the Basilica of Saint Louis to the right. Here is someone who has fallen out of the care of the family. A homeless man sleeps in the middle of the day at the base of large cannon, beneath a large magnolia tree within the grounds of Jackson Square. What more relaxing thing could one imagine than sleeping on the grass in the shade of a tree in the middle of a park on a hot summer day? Here is someone whom the tourists visiting the French Quarter turn away from and whom the charity of the Church does not reach. The sleeping body is wrapped in cloth like the swaddled figure being baptized. And his body too is surrounded by an aura of light that reminds us that this man is a brother too.

Birch’s inclusion of homosexual African-Americans shows his humane objectivity and tacitly disavows any special problem that gays may pose for heterosexual African- Americans. On this special day these men express their identification with their shared African heritage by dressing as they know themselves to be in terms of their sexual preferences. Their selection of costume whether it is leather and boots, traditional African women”s dress, or regular street clothes on this day of celebration is the expression of their sense of themselves. To make the problem even more exasperating, on the right two men are sitting on the one-step stoop in acceptance of each other despite the superficial difference of being white and black for they share the inner identity of being gay that is neither a question of ethnicity nor of race. Or is it that they share a deeper, common humanity that underlies all apparent superficial differences of gender identity or sexual preference or skin color or culture. Birch seems to be saying that prejudice is prejudice whether based on economic status, gender identity, ethnic identity, or race and the natural right to freedom is inherent in each of us. And that these men celebrate their freedom to be who they are at least on this one day.

The dynamic celebrations of individual lives, special seasons, and communities are another subject represented in this series of works for these are the celebrations of existence and the cultural glue that binds together the individuals within a community. Juxtaposed images, dynamic patterns, multiple viewpoints, and varied axes of symmetry in works like Cutting the Body Loose simulate the movement of the procession and the dynamic experiences of music and the passage of time in living life. In A Birthday Celebration for Louis a young man dances and postures in front of a band while bowing in homage to a concatenation of brightly patterned, colorfully decorated umbrellas to honor and evoke the spirit of legendary jazz musician Louis Armstrong. Musicians and spectators gather to honor the spirit of Martin Luther King in Martin Luther King Day Parade as enthusiastically as the orishas are evoked. Carnival Time presents the celebration of the ancient Roman Saturnalia surviving in its Christian form of Mardi Gras with the practice of turn-around and role reversal as the social society of Zulu mimics the stereotypes of appearance and behavior thus gaining power over them much as the kayaker maintains control by countering the will of the rushing river and the shaman directs supernatural forces into healing energy. These social societies continue the timeless practice of secret societies everywhere that celebrate the development of individuals through life stages within a specific cultural community and provide for individual spiritual and material needs.

In Super Sunday (Here come the Indians), a tall brick column in the center mirrored in the architecture to the left and the right quietly accents the vital energy of the Mardi Gras Indian precession and the slower rhythms of the shapes and forms of the observers standing around. The costume of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition has been adapted from Native American dress but a deeper motivating force emanates from the social clubs with the concomitant dancing and music that has its deep roots in African experience. And here both participants and spectators are surrounded with auras of light signifying their spiritual energies.

The celebration of freedom continues throughout the year as parades and events express the spirit and sense of identity of the community. Whether it be A Sunday Neighborhood Parade or A Labor Day Parade, Super Sunday or Free to Be, as formal as Carnival or as spontaneous as the invigorating secular baptism of an August Day when children play in refreshing water spraying from fire hydrants, the celebration of life goes on in planned and unplanned events in the lives of the people of New Orleans. The exhibition as a whole with its linear arrangement of images is like a grand processional celebration that passes before our eyes as we circumambulate through the rooms in a way that evokes memories of fresco cycles of late medieval and renaissance painting and contemporary time-based media productions like Bill Viola’s Going Forth By Day. Like an ethnographic male griot Birch tells the stories of the people of New Orleans and the life they live with a great energy and an élan that is both joyous and sublime. Let us hope that this exhibition is not a requiem for the people of Treme and their rich cultural traditions and celebrations in the aftermath of the great flood.