Tag Archives: Africa

Why Body Painting? — 3A: Origins — Why did we start painting ourselves? Ancient bodypainting kit discovered at Blombos Cave

Abalone Shell from Blombos Cave- Credit: Science/AAAS

by Christopher Agostino

“Archaeologists in South Africa uncovered two 100,000-year-old abalone shells and assorted bones and stones that served as toolkits to make some sort of ochre-based compound. The mixture may have been used as a paint or adhesive. It’s the oldest evidence of humans making a complex compound, and even the oldest evidence of humans using containers.” – from LiveScience article (see article link below)

What I am quite willing to label as “the oldest bodypainting kit ever” was recently discovered in Blombos Cave in South Africa. 2 abalone shells with remnants of ground reddish ochre pigments that had been mixed with some kind of binding agent or liquid, found with implements for grinding the pigment and mixing and applying. Sounds like a makeup kit to me. 100,000 years old—which puts it maybe 40,000 years earlier than any other such discovery, and 20,000 years earlier than that etched ochre stone from Blombos considered the earliest existent example of symbolic art. Blombos Cave is a story in itself, and I’ll get to that below.

But first the question: if 100,000 years ago our earliest ancestors were mixing paint, what were they painting? My perspective makes me confident they were mixing pigments to paint themselves—ochre pigments like these are still used as traditional bodypaint in some places  (although ochre was also possibly used as an ancient adhesive). The anthropologists that make the case for bodyart that long ago point to evidence such as ochre pigment found on bones in burial sites, the universal use of bodyart in tribal cultures and the general rule that when humans appear in ancient art, such as rock paintings, they are depicted with markings like bodyart on their forms, or with animal masks or other transforming imagery. The ubiquitous silhouette hand images that appear in cave art around the world would have been made by placing your hand against the rock and blowing ochre pigment onto it—probably through a hollow reed, the first air-brush—that would paint your hand as it made the silhouette on the wall. One researcher found that if he took the patterns of symbols on isolated sections of a certain painted cave and transferred them to a body they would wrap around in a repeating pattern, as if the cave painter had used his own body markings as the source of the design. In The Painted Body, Michel Thévoz says that the one universal constant in pictorial art is objects painted in a symmetry that follows the morphology of the body: “It is as if the artists of the most diverse tribes and people had all proceeded by transferring onto the wall…or whatever the object being painted, a composition originally conceived as a face or body decoration.” My own view is that art is intrinsically a statement of identity, and our bodies are our most personal vehicles for self-identity, so art has always been linked directly to our bodies, to how we present our self-identity.

The second question is, why did we start painting ourselves? There is no way to know this one. Since I like stories, I think about it in those terms, but one thing to remember is that we are talking about cultural developments that would have happened over a course of many generations and perhaps thousands of years. Craig Tracy once told me a story of how he imagined bodyart may have started, with a couple of our ancestors fooling around. One gets a streak of mud on him and it strikes the other as funny so he laughs. The first one says, oh yeah and puts bigger streak on the laughing one, leading to a mud fight in which they are both laughing and all marked up. The fellows back at the cave get a kick out of it and start playing the game too.

I’ve wondered if it didn’t begin very practically, as camouflage, marking the skin to blend into the dappled forest, or striping it to hide in the grasslands. And then I can imagine how a successful hunter might stylize the markings and wear them as a status symbol, and I can see that over time leading to an establishment of symbolic skin marking as vehicles for individual status and tribal identity. Camouflage and enhancing sexual attraction are both found as reasons in the animal kingdom for creatures that alter their appearance, changing color or decorating themselves. It’s also occurred to me that as a species we humans are relatively dull looking, no spots or stripes, feathers or bright colors, and as we came to be increasingly self-aware we may have begun to decorate ourselves as an aesthetic act, and as an exploration of individuality within the group.

We really can’t know anything for sure about anything going that far back. In his writings on origins of human culture,  Joseph Campbell makes the point that so much of our theories are based on what survives  as opposed to what doesn’t—really only rocks and bones survive from truly ancient times, and only those in protected places, buried in caves. We have no surviving evidence for what art we created on wood or animal skin, or our own skin. The earliest cave wall paintings, like Chauvet Cave, are already so technically and aesthetically sophisticated that we must have done a lot of painting before painting them. 

Blombos Cave - The entrance to Blombos Cave, indicated by the white arrow, about 180 miles (300 kilometers) east of Cape Town. Credit: Magnus Haaland

As for Blombos Cave, it’s better to get the real anthropology from the real anthropologists, but from an artist/storyteller’s perspective, here is one of the most amazing stories there could be to tell, perhaps the primal story: Comparative DNA and other studies of people all over the world indicate that we are all descended from one small band of ancestors. Though there were numerous early human species millions of years ago and many migrations of such species, eventually all of those other species came to an end. All of us, all modern humans, come from one isolated group which arose in Africa, multiplied and gradually filled the world through migration. It was this one group that made the “great leap” and achieved that final spark of intelligence and consciousness that makes us who we are. Although this one ancestral group was part of a much larger population of early Homo Sapiens, about 140,000 years ago glaciers covered most of the world and massive droughts hit Africa, remaining over the course of thousands of years, until the only surviving Homo Sapiens populations were withdrawn into the few remaining habitable sites in Africa. Researchers theorize that the struggle to survive in such difficult climatic conditions accelerated the development of these ancestral humans—to survive they required greater intelligence and ingenuity, and the ability to pass increasingly complex information from generation to generation.

Discovery-The excavation site at the time when the 100,000-year-old toolkits were uncovered Credit: Science/AAAS

Along one such remaining habitable place, the Pinnacle Point region of South Africa, caves (like Blombos) have evidence of a long period of human occupation which remained continuous through that difficult climactic period, and anthropologists, going back in time as they dig down through the layers of artifacts, see in this area a timeline of progressive human development from a technology equivalent to our Neandertal predecessors through to increasingly complex developments seen at this site tens of thousands of years earlier than at any other site in the world, including the earliest indications of art and symbolic activity, such as the pigment processing from 100,000 years ago.

Perhaps 60,000 years ago, as the world climate improved, this new type of human began to spread around the world, carrying with them an ability to understand and re-imagine the world through art and symbology. As an amateur folklorist I’m aware of how many underlying aspects of world cultures seem related, how many folktales touch universal themes, and I imagine that these earliest ancestors also carried with them a fundamental human culture of art, music and stories.

Ancient Tools- One of the abalone shells with the quartzite grindstone found nestled inside. Credit: Grethe Moell Pederson

Shell Toolkit- The other abalone toolkit under excavation Credit: Science/AAAS

Related articles

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

From African Masks to Abercrombie & Fitch

Abercrombie & Fitch Spring Quarterly 2000 cover, photograph by Bruce Weber

by Christopher Agostino

From early on I was taking inspiration for face designs from the makeup and mask art of other cultures. During  the summer of 1999, I was able to initiate my company of artists in this process as we painted faces in African Mask inspired styles over 8 weekends for the opening of the Congo Gorilla Rainforest exhibit at the Bronx Zoo http://www.wcs.org/ .  None of the culturally inspired faces we paint can really be “authentic,” removed as they are from the culture that gives them meaning, so taking a traditional art as source material needs to be done with an understanding that we are artists finding inspiration in a visual image and we can claim no ownership of the intrinsic cultural content of that image. During the “Congo Summer” of 1999, I sometimes questioned the propriety of my being a white American in New York painting these wonderful African images, especially on the beautiful black faces they might be said to really belong to. It’s a tricky question I frequently confront as an artist and storyteller whose work includes cultural sources, and I try to be open about it. I was very gratified once when a woman trusted me enough to ask me to paint a Maasai design on her son’s face, telling me that this was his heritage but he knew nothing about it, so she wanted me to paint him and tell him the significance of the design.

Traditional Maasai bodyart, from a photograph by Art Wolfe in "Tribes"

Photo from Art Wolfe's tribes of a decorated Maasai.

Part of the profound beauty of a painted face is that you can’t see the color of the skin beneath. All you see are the eyes — the very human eyes. My explorations into the earliest human art and cultures convince me that we all truly are one people, sharing a universal view of life and our core aspirations, originating in a single fundamental culture — which anthropologists today tell us began with a small group of modern humans in Africa and subsequently spread around the world and diversified. By using cultural images, I believe we remind our public audiences of the unity of the family of humanity.

Whereas all of modern humanity may have sprung from that one, small unified group of humans in prehistoric Africa (perhaps, scientists say, a group of as few as 600 individuals), to use the term today “African Masks” or “African Art” is an inaccurate shorthand at best. Africa is a continent of many diverse countries and ethnic groups, and the mask and body arts of these cultures vary greatly. We found a wealth of images, styles and conceptual approaches to transforming a human face in our search for inspiration as we painted faces at the zoo that summer of 1999, from the rock paintings of the San bushmen of Southern Africa through the abstract spirit masks of equatorial Africa and north to the henna designs of the Berber. I have come to see that the experimentation that summer gave my company of artists a new overall perspective on facepainting as a larger art, including a foundation in stylizing and abstracting designs that take the artist beyond realist imagery.

My photo of the Abercrombie & Fitch model before they costumed him

In October of that year, the photographer Bruce Weber saw me working in this stylized “tribal” approach as I was painting at another New York event, and he hired me to paint a group of models in Florida for the Abercrombie & Fitch Spring Quarterly 2000. The foto he chose for the cover was of a model painted in a spirit mask inspired baboon design I had been experimenting with all that summer.

And it was while I was researching the mask and sculptural arts of Africa that summer that I read about how in 1905 Africa again became a source of inspiration for world culture as traditional sculptures and masks made their way to Paris and changed the approach of a whole generation of Western artists at the dawn of the Modern Art movement. As Frank Willet states in African Art: An Introduction (Thames & Hudson,1993), when masks from Africa were seen by Picasso and Matisse, “the revolution of twentieth-century art was underway.” 

"Spirit Mask" inspired baboon design from that Congo Summer, 1999.

That was a spark that set me into an ongoing exploration of this linkage between traditional and modern art, primarily through a series of fine art bodypaintings in which I blend iconic modern art images with the tribal bodyart and mask images that inspired them: the “Modern Primitive” series.

The first third of my book is about the lessons I’ve learned from cultural sources. To learn about my book, and about the other books mentioned here, go to: https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/books/

For a related blog post, see: From a mask to a painted face: https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/?s=from+a+mask+to+a+painted+face

The Omo River region in Ethiopia holds several cultures that still maintain some bodyart traditions. These geometric patterns in earth tones may be so different than the facepainting most people are used to, yet they make for very pleasant looking finished faces, and I find people are very receptive to being painted in this way.

This Surma photo from the wonderful book "African Ceremonies" has proven to be a style of design that adult women enjoy wearing. In the photo on the right, I copied the pattern of the original design while altering the colors because I was painting it on a caucasian face.

The designs of Surma males are different, in this example the men have covered their whole bodies in a white clay, then scrape the design into that white base so that their dark skin shows through to make the geometric patterns. In a regular facepainting setting I can't really imitate the scraping technique, so I imitate the pattern instead.

This face painting was for a demonstration on African bodyart for a student group at Columbia University, based on a sketch of Lobi facepainting from the book "Body Decoration".

Combining imagery with a simplified "Tribal" style

Spending 8 weekends working in one style allowed for a lot of possible areas of exploration, including trying faces using just pieces of designs or patterns from African cloth and masks.

Another design from a cultural source that makes a pleasant face for an adult. The original came from one photo I saw of bodypainting among the Loma people for a girl's coming of age ceremony, in which she will be painted in plant dyes that slowly fade over a few weeks, and once they have faded she will be eligible for courtship. Again, though, I have to approach this image primarily as visual inspiration for I have no full understanding of the cultural context.

We have also had the chance to bring an "African style" to theme events at other venues, including the Coney Island Aquarium where I painted these two stylized Starfish faces.

here's my friend Kate painting during the Congo Summer event. Having 10 artists at the zoo for 8 weekends gave me the chance to invite in some guest artists like Kate to work with us and try our Transformation approach.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

Traditional Bodyart – Nuba; Sudan; Africa – 1: changing my perceptions

by Christopher Agostino

In the ’80s as I began to seek out cultural sources to better understand this art of transformation that I was engaged in I found “The Painted Body” by Michel Thévoz in the Strand bookstore. One photograph in the book stood out. The design was black and white, the gaze of the subject so direct. Most striking, it was strongly asymmetrical. Yet, still, balanced and beautiful in a way so different than any faces I was painting, or the Chinese Opera and Kabuki designs I had been studying. I wanted to learn how to paint a face like this.

Thévoz’s book remains unique in its focus more on the sociological significance and psychological underpinnings of transformational art than on its methods and practices. This photograph was only identified as “Nuba face painting, Sudan”, with no information about it in the text. It was at a place in the book exploring a subject that drew my attention because it related to what I was trying to achieve by painting people in designs from other cultures — the question of why our modern response to a painted face is fear and discomfort. He discusses Freud’s reasoning that we have “a reaction of dread at what we are nevertheless obliged to recognize as intimately our own, a reaction which in fact signals ‘the return of what we have driven back.'” Freud’s succinct phrase for this modern response to the primitive transformation: “disturbing strangeness”. To this day, I make it a point of painting at least a few faces that are disturbingly strange at even the nicest of events — it keeps people on their toes. I am glad that Michel Thévoz and Freud have given me an insight into this impulse, and I connect this photograph to that understanding.

When I first saw it, this black and white Nuba face reverberated with many connections to concepts I was trying to work out. It’s the same colors as the hundreds of KISS faces I had painted over and over on Friday and Saturday nights at Adventureland Amusement Park in the late ’70s, but it’s a KISS face as painted by Picasso. It was 30 years before I fully realized that particular connection in a design blending these two influences, but even at the time I saw that this “primitive” “tribal” face was very “modern”. As I began to do educational programs in High Schools on the history of masks and makeup, I found that these Nuba faces got a great reaction from the teens, just as the KISS faces did a decade before.

That black and white Nuba face is also so bold and so simple, another push in a direction I would pursue throughout my endeavors. And just the fact that it stood out as so very different in a book full of bizarre looking humans helped me to see that anything is possible in a facepainting design, there are no rules. That lesson has been pivotal for me.

My fascination with the bodyart of the Southeast Nuba of the Sudan only increased as I began to learn the story behind their faces, and from the initial inspiration of this one image a lot of work has flowed. The photograph in Thévoz’s, for example, was taken by Leni Riefenstahl, and there certainly is a story in that.

Search “Nuba” on this site for additional posts about this subject.

It only occurred to me as I was writing this that transforming hundreds of teens into KISS faces at an Amusement Park in 1977 may have been my first experience of tribal facepainting.

Related articles