Negro Sculpture by Carl Einstein

Author:Carl Einstein [Carl Einstein]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789492027023
Publisher: November Editions
Published: 2014-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

MASKS AND SIMILAR PRACTISES

[See German edition]

A people for whom art, religion and morality are immediate powers, and who are dominated and encircled by such powers will make them visible in themselves. To scarify is to make one’s body the means and end of vision. The African scarifies his body and gives it a new intensity; his body in a visible way is given over to the great All and this abandonment clothes him in sensible form. It is characteristic of a despotic religion and cult of humanity which is equally forceful to have men and women transformed by the marking of their individual body into a collective body, and thereby intensify their erotic force. What, one may speculate, goes on in the mind which can conceive its own body as an unachieved work to be transformed directly? The naturalistic body is what the tattoo reinforces and the tattoo attains its perfection when it denies natural form and replaces it with a superior imaginary form. In this case the body at best becomes both canvas and clay; it becomes an obstacle which provokes the maximum creation of form. The tattoo presupposes an awareness of the immediate self and a not less strong consciousness of the objective practice of form. Here one finds what I call sense at a distance, and a prodigious gift for objective creating.

Tattooing is only a part of the objectification of oneself which consists in exercising an influence on the entire ensemble of the body, to be produced consciously in public and not only in dance for example, an immediate expression of movement, or a fixed expression such as a hair-do. The Negro defines his type with so much force that he transforms it. Everywhere he intervenes to indicate a fixated expression which one could not feign. Anyone can understand the man who feels himself to be a cat, a river, the weather, transforms himself, and the consequences thereof which he implements in his all too unambiguous body.

It is thanks to the mask that the European versed in psychology and the art of the theatre comprehends the feeling best. A human being is always changing slightly and transforms himself a little. He tries however to keep a certain continuity, to preserve his identity. The European has made of this feeling a somewhat hypertrophied cult. The African, who is less a prisoner of the subjective me, who honours objective powers, has to change in tandem with these powers as he affirms them and especially when he celebrates them with the greatest fervour. By these transformations he establishes a balance with the adoration of these powers that risks obliterating him; he takes on the god, he dances for the tribe in ecstasy and transforms himself by means of the mask into the tribe and the god. The metamorphosis permits him to grasp radically that which is essential to him; he incorporates it and in the objectification that reduces to nothing he is every individual event.

That is why the mask has

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