Rediscovering Ritual: a catalogue essay
The Gifts project by Clare Whistler was part of the Utopia Treasury exhibition at Somerset House in London. This essay was published in the catalogue, alongside contributions by the director Peter Sellars and the composer Jonathan Dove.
Where do you still hear words from the dying that last, and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring? - Walter Benjamin
What was the first artistic act? Was it a scratch on bone, a stroke of yellow ochre, or the outline of a hand on stone? In the early 20th century the anthropologist Henri Breuil argued that the first cave paintings of the Paleolithic era arose not from an artistic impulse but a desire to master nature through ritualistic representation. To draw a hunter on a wall was to send out an alternative self to hunt and gather: the image became the event, attaining a quasi-magical significance which certified man's power over his prey. Yet at some point, ritual became art.
The philosopher Yuri Borev claims that the ‘ritualistic-magical attitude' shifted to the ‘artistic-aesthetic attitude’ when man had secured his social status and safety, at which point the immediate need for survival gave way to a desire for self-expression. Whereas Borev’s theory centres upon the male protector and provider, the scholar Ellen Dissanayake has argued that the artistic impulse evolved from the way a child learns from its mother. As tempting as it might be to theorise, it is impossible to pin down the moment when ritual morphed into art. All we know is that at some point the first artist moved away from the palimpsestic layers of cave paintings, finding a space to make their own mark.
Clare Whistler's Gifts tap into the earliest source of art: ritual. Clare first encountered the ritual gifts of an egg, coal, yew, salt, candle, bread, coin and a silver ring at her son's christening, introduced to the practice by a friend from Yorkshire. Although the tradition was specific to a particular community, something about it immediately made sense. The idea of giving a child a series of symbolic objects to secure their passage into the world exemplifies the primary rationale for ritual: a way of imposing structure upon unstable events, inventing actions which go beyond mere 'fight or flight'. The logic of ritual transcends context, creating reverberations which extend beyond the confines of time and empirical reality. As such, it provides the perfect starting point for an artwork.
Since its heyday in the 1960s, performance art has had a close relationship with ritual; both practices are a way of imbuing an action with unique significance, worthy of being ‘performed’ rather than simply completed. The blood-soaked performances of the Vienna Actionists in the 1960s enacted the frenzied savagery of Dionysian sparagmos (the act of tearing apart), and Robert Wilson's symbolic performance of his own birth, Baby Blood (1967), was another violent assault on artistic criteria. By referencing sacrifice, sparagmos and rites of passage, these performances drew upon ritual as a way of ‘making strange’, attempting harness the power of bygone beliefs – that's partly what makes them so shocking, their sheer incongruity. Artists such as Joan Jonas practiced a more integral approach to ritualistic performance art, inventing a system of symbols which became a way of life. Basing her work on an intense interrogation of different cultures and folklore, Jonas explored the symbolic potential of objects including mirrors, masks, folding fans and blackboards. Joseph Beuys went one step further, using art as a means of ritualistic self-healing. Dressed in a signature costume of jeans, felt hat, and fishing vest he assumed the role of artist-shaman, using the most unlikely materials (most notably, fat and felt) to access a world beyond the range of sensory perception.
There is something isolating about the idea of the artist as a magus, alone in their ability to transcend everyday reality. Under Clare's jurisdiction, each Gift undergoes a type of transubstantiation from object to art – however, there is no sense of worshipping at the altar of the artist. Her presence as host could hardly be more different from Marina Abramovich's The Artist is Present at MoMa in 2010, where each visitor was granted a few minutes sitting opposite the artist. Clare is more generous to her guests. Although we come to her for artistic alms (‘bread witnesses with the possibility of being fed’), she refuses to pose as a beneficent giver or guru. Instead, we are the ones who activate the artwork.
In Egg (2005), a dozen guests arriving at Keats House in Hampstead were invited to break and separate eggs, the binding agent for the performance to come. In Coal (2007), participants revealed invisible messages by holding strips of paper over a coal fire, and were given black books to write their memories of the performance. In Bread (2012), final fulfillment (the eating of the piece) could only be achieved once the object had been fully excavated and analysed by the audience: the soft centres of loaves were torn out to make ‘bread shoes’, or ritualistically hollowed out with forceps and filled with iron nails. The book for Bread describes the pockets of air which expand within the densely packed nexus of a loaf, those spaces for interpretation which are integral to each Gift. Those spaces can only be filled if the recipient accepts the Gift wholeheartedly and makes it their own.
By consuming each crumb, we become custodians of Clare’s artwork. Although visual documentation and text provide an essential record of the performances, their manifestation exists solely in the mind of the witnesses. As such, each Gift is acutely aware of its own erasure, the spaces between each performance which can only materialise in memory. Clare has described the Gifts as ‘an experience of making outside the economies of audience, performer and ticket’ – a risky business in a money-minded art market. As the boundaries between benefactor and recipient blur beyond recognition, we might well ask, qui bono?
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The question has its roots in ritual. Whereas early ritual art evolved as a way of achieving a specific goal, action for attainment, that purpose-driven logic doesn’t quite apply to the ritual of giving. This can be seen in Potlatch, the gift-giving ceremony practiced by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast and Subarctic region. Performed on occasions of births, deaths, adoptions and weddings, a Potlatch involves a figure of high status giving away or destroying their possessions; wealth and power is measured not by the value of accumulated assets but by a willingness to give them away. The guests might be able to save face by digging deeper into their pockets or responding with a bigger bonfire of possessions, but that moment of acceptance cannot be reversed. Likewise, Clare’s contract between the giver and recipient is irreproducible – the act is so specific that to pay her back for a Gift would be an act of 'undoing', a way of turning back time.
Just as Potlatch problematises the principles of benefit and loss associated with giving, the practice also calls into question the aesthetic values related to ritual. We are used to ritual objects being sanctified by artistry, but the objects offered during a Potlatch resist aestheticisation altogether. Items such as Chilkat woven robes, Hudson Bay Blankets and Dentalium jewellery might appear aesthetically pleasing, but in this context it is their symbolic and financial value which is at stake. In the case of the copper ‘shields’ prized by the Tlingit and Haida tribes, the items exist purely to be exchanged. Valued neither for their decorative nor protective qualities, a copper held roughly the same nominal value as a slave.
The slippery contradictions of aesthetic and financial value became a type of currency in the performance of Coin (2014), where our actions made us complicit in the pursuit of filthy lucre. The coastguards cottages near Cuckmere Haven offered a space to meditate on money: tapping coppers into a tree with a hammer, paying homage to the portrait of a hedge fund manager, building coin towers like meticulous misers. Down on the beach we sanitised our hands with economic theories, soaps made by the economist Christine Kettaneh. The Gift slipped through our fingers, existing for the duration of a hot day in May.
I am lucky enough to own part of the performance: a porcelain cup and saucer bought for me by a friend at the Coin jumble sale, a gift within a Gift. You wouldn’t immediately know it was an artwork, just as someone eating a bread roll from the Blackthorn Bakery (a contributor to Bread) might not know the role it played in aiding a patient's recovery. The Gifts prove that the value of an object is established in the act of giving and receiving – a shifting exchange rate based on the way the object enters or leaves our lives. Unlike paintings, sculptures, saintly relics or ancient artifacts, a Gift is impossible to fake. It has what the philosopher Walter Benjamin considered the essential characteristic of an artwork: aura.
In his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), Walter Benjamin reestablished the idea that ‘the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of the original use value’. Art and ritual are both more and less real than everyday existence. They access something beyond the empirical: the ‘underneath’ of the Kaluli people, the Aboriginal ‘dreamtime’, the Eskimo ‘sila’ or ‘lifeforce’, Walter Benjamin’s ‘aura’. However, we are increasingly ill at ease with the belief systems of ritual. Sol LeWitt considered the conceptual artists of the 1960s as a new breed of ‘mystics’. Today’s conceptual artists are professional ironists.
In 2002, the Chapman Brothers manifested that estrangement from ritual with a hoard of totems, shields and fetishes designed for the worship of Mammon and McDonald’s. Performance art is still heavily indebted to ritual, but all too often it is used as a way of attaining quick-fix significance, easy-access ‘aura’. In 2015, PIMO Contemporary Art Festival in Shanghai presented ‘Inventing Ritual’, an exhibition which took existing works by Chinese artists and staged them as ritual objects around a gymnasium-sized hall. The artworks were then used as props in a highly rehearsed performance, implying that ritual is defined by rigidity: a set of strictly staged actions performed with reverence. Occasionally, an artist resurrects the unchecked self-belief of the 1960s performances. The Czech artist Tereza Buskova, for instance, produces lavishly staged videos and performance pieces based upon folk rituals. However, the subtlety of the symbolism is occasionally lost within the spectacle, and the performance risks becoming a type of play-acting. We need a recuperation of the art of ritual, an excavation of authenticity. That is Clare’s gift.
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The ritual of the Gifts is less about smoothing a rite of passage than producing new possibilities. In the book for Candle, an entry describes ritual as 'a husk of faith,/ or a way towards/ order, repetition, attention, presence'. The ambiguity of ‘husk’, a word signifying both a receptacle and a remnant, captures the Gifts’ complex dynamic between gain and loss, structure and meaning, loosened at the seams by strange new thoughts. That strangeness was present at the final Gift in October 2015. At the end of the day, the 30 or so guests took turns to cut a cake which measured the circumference of the table — hidden within it was a small silver ring. During the slicing and the serving we heard Clare gasp. Holding out her hand, fingers and crumbs, there it was: the ring. Reader, she received it.
For me, that moment represents the strange serendipity of the Gifts – each a microcosm of a life, contained and complete and yet a catalyst for change. Over 10 years the Gifts became a way of life, evolving particular ways of walking and eating, writing and talking, looking and seeing. They equip us with new patterns of action and ways of interpreting the world. Above all, they develop our attention to connection, those small things which interlink to create the texture of lived experience. Shoes of bread, a tree of coins. A curtain of coal, a song of salt. The things which are given, received, and come full circle.