Category Archives: Modern Primitive

explorations of the connections between traditional and modern art

Why Body Painting? — 4: Radical Act — The essential celebration of our humanity / the ultimate modern art

by Christopher Agostino. 11/29/2011

Traditional Significance: in cultures with profound traditions of bodypainting it is a celebration of the beauty of the human form. Among the Southeast Nuba the most elaborate painting is reserved for the young men in their prime health and youthful vigor. In the highlands of Papua New Guinea the brightly colored body-decoration presents a heightened self-image, an idealized form beyond the individuals’s daily persona.

Primal Transformation: anthropologists now point to the use of symbols and the beginnings of art as the igniting evolutionary spark of modern humanity, the defining impetus of the final great leap from animal to human— we are the symbolic species. And, as likely as not, that first act of art was to paint ourselves.

Radical Theory: to paint a body today is a profound expression of that which makes us human, transcending the boundary of our physical, animal form through the act of making ourselves into art, into the essential celebration of our consciousness — reaching back to our origins through the most traditional of all art forms while startling the modern viewer with the acknowledgement of our naked identity as human animals.

Traditional celebratory bodypainting from Papua New Guinea

Why does a painted, naked body evoke such a response? How can the most ancient of art forms be so surprising today?

I venture to say that a painted, naked body would be more disturbing in effect on an unsuspecting viewer than a body merely naked. A naked body is more readily comprehensible and our reaction more easily determined, or perhaps pre-determined, depending on the brand of morality we bring to the occasion. A fully painted body is less easily definable. It is both naked and clothed, both primitive and civilized—evoking the quality of “disturbing strangeness” as described by Freud, an uncomfortable reaction to “the return of what we have driven back” as we moved from tribal to modern culture. As relayed by Michel Thévoz, Freud was talking about why a member of modern society reacts so strongly, so negatively, to the painted faces of “primitive” people. I think there is an additional element of confusion, an additional uncertainty in how to react, when that unsuspecting modern viewer is confronted by a live example of full fine art bodypainting, because in addition to an apparent return to the primitive (a naked painted body) there is also the apparent elevation to higher culture (as that body has become art).

To continue in an overreaching, radical vein, I can make the argument that bodypainting is today an art form which is capable of fulfilling the quest of the artists 100 years ago who threw out the academic conventions to create “Modern Art” in order to re-establish the ability of visual art to challenge society, compel emotional response and shock the viewer into paying attention—in order to return art to it’s original function, the function art has in primitive cultures, of defining our humanity and raising individual and social consciousness.

—————————————————————————

So to bring this back to the question “why body painting?”, as in “why do I paint bodies?” The simple answer is because its effective. To think that bodypainting presented in a modern context is capable of functioning in the same revolutionary way as the radical art of the early modern artists is not to say that I paint bodies in order to be the next Picasso. I do however find that artistic bodypainting (and facepainting, for that matter) have an effect on consciousness in a local, immediate sense both for the person you paint and for the people that see them. When you paint someone at an event, it injects a quality of magic, of mystery, into our modern civilized lives. In returning a glimpse of the primitive, it allows for questions about human identity and the permanence of form, and in that way it touches upon the original, transformative power of art.

the real thing

the student work

Learn more at my Body Painting Page https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/body-painting/

And read the related post:

is a painted body naked?  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/04/15/is-a-painted-body-naked/

Related articles

Face and Body Art International Convention — FABAIC 2011: Pt. 1 Classes and Bodypainting Preparations

My demonstration model, painted for the Dayglo and Metallics class at FABAIC 2009

Getting set for FABAIC in Orlando this week. I have two classes to teach, sponsored by Kryolan:

Kids always rememberthe day when their paremts got painted

Facepainting Adults – the How and the Why

Looking at the roster of classes, I wanted to offer something that was less of a “how-to” class and more of a “why” class. The twenty year success of my New York company has depended in large part on our development of adults as participants. At our Bronx Zoo concession and all of our events we put a big effort into getting the adults to sit down and get painted along with their kids. Getting adults involved increases your income potential – but more than that, it elevates your act. It’s the adults that book the parties, if you get them involved and give them a fantastic experience they remember you and the bookings come. Painting adults is an opportunity to show off, draw a crowd and generate excitement. This is a workshop in how to get the adults to get painted, what to paint on them and why you want to do it.

painting adults gives you a chance to show off, people will notice their faces more than the kids you paint.

Whenever possible, paint Grandpa, the birthday boy loves it

Metallics, Interferenze and Dayglo  —Specialty Makeups to add instant pop to everyday faces – Hands-on Class

A hands-on and very practical class in how to use specialty makeups from basic application and tricks of technique to design concepts like how to get the most out of your metallics, how to make Dayglo designs look good in regular and UV light and how to get the maximum effect with minimal makeup expense. I’ll demonstrate some real special uses such as Dayglo bodyart design for club events – though the primary focus will be on how to incorporate specialty makeups into regular face and body designs and everyone will get a chance to paint and try products. For this class I will be painting a model beforehand as a menu of techniques and effects, then I’ll use that model in the class to describe application methods, demonstrate some of those ideas live and then let everyone get their hands on some product and try it on each other. Bring your painting tools.

student work in my 2009 class

student work in my 2009 class

Bodypainting at FABAIC

Between classes, demonstrations and the jam sessions, FABAIC presents opportunities to do fully realized body paint designs and also to experiment. I bring sketches and images for more designs than I need, so I can adjust to the models I will be working with and to the time constraints. And I have learned over the years to be open to improvisation. There is less control in the painting process, and especially the photography, than I have in studio sessions at home, so I can paint more for the joy of the art than for the expectation of producing a specific fine art image. There is also an encouraging sense of camaraderie and mutual appreciation of everyone’s work. I might have felt the need to be competitive about what I painted in earlier years, but given the level of world class, award winning talent at these events I’ve come to see there is no point to that and gotten much more comfortable painting to my own artistic goals. If you are attending, I recommend that you paint someone there — paint as often as you can and don’t worry about whether or not you are “good enough”, I have found that painting in that exhilarating atmosphere is a great way to accelerate my development as a body painter.

From a fine art bodypainting I did last week, a section of design based on Mangbetu and Massai body art gave me an idea to combine it with Modern Art pictographs

a painting using pictographs by Paul Klee

At a party this past weekend I took the opportunity afforded by a girl in a blue outfit to do some color experiment with the Paul Klee and African images

I am also bringing some images from the Japanese print maker Kuniyoshi

http://www.fabaic.com/    http://www.agostinoarts.com

Modern Primitive: Why Look Back? – Part 1: To see their eyes…

Inspired by the photographs of Hans Silvester of the new styles of face art from the peoples of the Omo River area of Africa

by Christopher Agostino

While doing research yesterday for a new bodypainting project I read a passage that struck a chord, giving me a sharper insight into a theme that runs through my work. “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art is a “comprehensive scholarly treatment” published in 1984 to accompany an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art which broke new ground by exhibiting Modern Art masterpieces side-by-side with the tribal art from Africa and Oceania that was a significant source of inspiration for those early modern artists, presenting the art objects of both the “primitive” and the “modern” on equal footing. At the culmination of his opening essay in the book, exhibit director William Rubin makes this statement of his most profound, or personal, goal for the exhibit:

“In the realm of my hopes, however, there is something less explicit, more difficult to verbalize. It is that the particular confrontation involved in our exhibition [between tribal objects and modern masterpieces] will not only help us better to understand our art, but in a very unique way, our humanity — if that is not saying the same thing. The vestiges of a discredited evolutionary myth still live in the recesses of our psyches. The vanguard modernists told us decades ago that the tribal peoples produced an art that often distilled great complexity into seemingly simple solutions. We should not therefore be surprised that anthropology has revealed a comparable complexity in their cultures. I hope our effort will demonstrate that at least insofar as it pertains to works of the human spirit, the evolutionary prejudice is clearly absurd.”

My visual and performing arts have become increasingly connected to cultures distant in time, space and tradition. This research into other cultures is fascinating to me, rich in ideas and images for the artist sponge in me to absorb, but that isn’t what drives this process.

When I tell an audience a 2,000 year old tale from China of a heroic young girl as I did this afternoon, modern white guy that I am I still feel a resonance of the common humanity at the heart of the story. I feel it… and will judge my performance in large part on my perception of how well I have been able to let my audience feel it. I’ve come to see how it is the qualities in a story that touch upon the universal question of what it means to be human that make some stories survive.

The juxtaposition of the very tribal Papua New Guinea design with the New York street scene and a bag of potato chips makes this a favorite foto of mine.

When I paint a New Yorker’s face in a design from some exotic culture, that also makes a connection to our common humanity. As I have grown more aware of this, with kids I’ll talk about a more concrete, though metaphoric, connection to their unusual new face — for example, that the Kabuki Samurai design they’re wearing is like becoming a superhero; or that the wildly colorful face from Papua New Guinea is like being painted for a birthday party, it just happens to be a party on the other side of the world. This is an understanding of the effect of my work that has grown gradually, and not a political or “new age” sensibility that led me to my explorations of the primitive. I started “looking backward” to the tribal and the ancient to become a better facepainter, as a way to understand the possibilities for painting a face that had already been discovered by cultures that have done it for generations.

Now, it seems that the lesson of a couple hundred thousand painted faces over 30 years is unavoidable, for whatever culturally alien or bizarre design I paint on someone, once I am finished I always see a pair of human eyes looking back at me from within the mask. This is my visceral understanding of the common humanity we share.

Writing as he was about famous artists and art objects with a power to change perception far beyond anything I could approach, William Rubin’s statement is a stronger, more militant sentiment about the necessity and potential of this joining of the primitive and the modern to open our world view, but I can’t be the first facepainter to wonder what effect it would have on cultural/racial prejudices if we all wore painted faces, and all we could see was each other’s eyes?

Picasso's revolutionary sculpture, Guitar 1912, and a Grebo mask (Ivory Coast, Africa) that he owned. Picasso stated that in creating this sculpture he studied the mask for its use of projections for eyes, nose and mouth from a flat plane, for how those projections implied another invisible plane ( a device he used for creating the sound hole of the guitar via a cylinder) and especially the quality in such tribal art that it is not illustrating a face but "re-presenting" it — a concept that concurs with a pivotal change between the art of the 19th century and the new art of the early modernists, i.e. their use of symbols and imagery to represent subject matter and thereby add greater conceptual depth.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

Related articles