Vodou Things: The Art of Pierre Barra and Marie Cassaise. By Donald J. Cosentino. Folk Art and Artist Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. 72 pp. 54 color. Cloth $22.50.
Haitian Vodou Flags. Folk Art and Artist Series. By Patrick Arthur Polk. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. 72 pp. Cloth; $22.50.
Taken together, these two books offer an excellent introduction to the sacred arts of Haitian vodou and the global circulation of visual culture, which are inextricably intertwined. Polk's helpful book carefully explains the features of the cosmology of vodou, its principal deities, the practice of engaging these deities, and the work of the masters who create the liturgical flags used in vodou temples. Cosentino's volume is a colorful romp through the strange world of global recyclia as collected and redeployed by the bricoleur artist-priests of Port-au-Prince who send back to the first world the transformed bits of refuge that are avidly collected in New York and Los Angeles as fine art.
Both authors understand very clearly the colonial origins of vodou and its contemporary situation in the global art market. Vodou, an Afro-Atlantic fusion of the religions of African slaves brought to Haiti, indigenous Amerindian practice, and the oppressors' religion of European Catholicism, is a hybrid religion that has guided enslaved peoples through unthinkable circumstances and now thrives on the outer rim of global capitalism. As Cosentino suggests, vodou is a religion of the marketplace, a religious economy that manages relations between human and divine in the practical machinery of petition and favor.
But the squalid circumstances of life in Haiti urge the restlessly entreprenurial bricoleur to seek out additional sources of income. This is where the surplus wealth of Americans comes in: an international market in folk or outsider art has sought out Haitian vodou for its unique properties-as artifacts of everything first-world life isn't.
The art world of modern Europe and America has long done this. One need think only of the nineteenth-century romance for Japanese decorative art in Paris and London, or Picasso's intensive study of African sculpture. The fascination with Haitian vodou objects or Native American artifacts is a latterday example of western capitalist countries commodifying the cultures they first colonize. The impulse to transform sacred practice into aesthetic form is one way of skimming a third-world or colonial culture, of treating a society as a surface from which to pluck works of art as if they were flowers blooming in mud. Polk even examines how one Haitian artist, Yves Telemak, accommodates this process: he signs those flags which he sells to art collectors and tourists, since this enhances their monetary value and collectibility, but refuses to sign those flags which are destined for use in the ounfò or temple. It is hard to blame the image and object makers for pursuing commercial patronage. After all, it is just another form of commerce in a world that was already a market before capitalism arrived. And foreign art collectors pay well.
Moreover, the objects gathered by museums and collectors are visually stunning. The excellent ethnographic work of scholars such as Cosentino and Polk, both folklorists at UCLA, in these two illustrated books of a series edited by Michael Owens, Jones, recovers the original context of the objects for readers. As a result, we learn that the flags, altars, and sculptures are documents of a world that Americans, having been tutored by popular film and comic books to regard "voodoo" as a grisly practice of black magic, generally do not understand.
Certainly the singular beauty of "vodou things" encourages outsiders to sever them from their host culture and import them as aesthetic objects meant to be collected, displayed, and contemplated. But one can lament this process of desacralization only so far. Cultural borrowing, tourism, and trade are as old as humanity. Human cultures are not islands of purity, but complex histories of borrowing and interaction. The task of understanding ought to be what Cosentino and Polk undertake: to examine with care the local culture that produces artifacts while situating this production within the larger rhythms of circulation and consumption that bring that culture to those of us who read books and go to museums. If my introduction to the intricate world of vodou begins with touristic awe before strange-looking things, so be it. What matters is the journey of encounter that follows.
Cosentino is especially mindful of the fact that he himself, as folklorist, wayward intellectual, postmodern, post-Catholic, American art lover, is part of the very story he tells. His consciousness is no less hybrid than the culture he studies. The reader is thankful for his ethnographic savvy as he presents a meandering narrative over which irony reigns. I doubt the telling could work honestly any other way.
Polk points out that the very flags that grace the liturgics of vodou services were first inspired by the elaborate banners used by French colonial forces in Africa during the eighteenth century. The names of deities and the nomenclature of vodou itself bears the traces of French influence enfolded with African indigenous religions. And the iconography of the flags and altars is a pastiche of Roman Catholic, Masonic, African, and indigenous American motifs.
As odd as it may all look to many Anglo-Americans, this visual style anticipates the emergent visual regime of transnationalism and the global culture of capitalism. Page through a travel magazine next time you're in an airliner, and see if you don't recognize the commercial pastiche of diverse cultural appropriations. The difference, however, is only the god whose altar the clutter decorates.
David Morgan, Valparaiso University