Popular Painting and Sculpture of Haiti
Appeal of the Creole to the Postmodern
Consciousness of Industrialized Nations

Brigitte Hecker

In this paper I will attempt to answer whether or not it can be surmised that the tendencies of industrialized societies' modernism to primitivize other cultures and to justify their absorption into a Euro-American paradigm have been shifted to, and extended by, an appetite for the Creole in postmodernism. The material culture I will examine has been part of the painting and sculpture tradition of Haiti since the opening of the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince by the U.S. painter DeWitt Peters in 1944. Commonly referred to as Haiti's "popular" or "primitive" art, these works are distinct from those of studio-trained artists, and from the art that comprises the sacred paraphernalia of the Vodou religion.

Haitian "primitive" art gained popularity among western art connoisseurs soon after the Centre d'Art's opening and became an important component of the international art market. Haitian artists living in the western hemisphere's poorest nation easily adapted their Voudou-trained artistic skills to creating works geared towards western consumption. Thus, the lure of econmic possibilities offered to Haitian artists, through commodification of their creativity, resulted in an explosion of creative expression in Western-type art media that eventually became an intrinsic part of the cutural landscape of Haiti.

Literature written about this material in the West suggests that Haiti was subjected to all aspects of the Euro-American primitivist strategy which James Clifford outlined in his "Salvage Paradigm" (Clifford 1987:121).

It will be argued here that modernist tendencies to ascribe universal value to other people's cultures and to primitivize them prevail in post-modernism. Haitian art is no longer attractive to the Euro-American, because he is searching for the purity of long lost heritage in other cultures. When DeWitt Peters "discovered" Haiti in 1944, Western appetite was already shifting from a taste for the "pure" to a taste for the "impure" that is typical of postmodernism.

In the early 20th century the cultural output of Haiti did not receive the same kind of attention as that of Native American, Oceanic or African cultures, which Europeans considered "pure;' despite the fact that all of them had been exposed to multi-cultural forces, including European thought, for centuries.1 Possibly, Haiti was excluded from the realm of the ahistorical, authentic other, because records of her visual art tradition were virtually nonexistent.2 Equally possible though, Haiti, as an obvious hybrid culture that includes substantial European elements in its composition, was not deemed "pure." In fact, when first encountering the Haitian during the United States Occupation of 1915-34, during the same period that Euro-Americans admired the perceived purity of other cultures, the white man did not romanticize the Haitian, but instead set out "to demonize ... [him], his religion, and his culture" (Hurbon 1995:197). Hollywood, for example, invented the genre of the horror movie, including the Vodou theme of zombification. In its proper context zombification reenacts the horrors experienced by enslaved Haitians, referring to the demonic characteristics of European colonizers, rather than inspiring justification for attribution of those same traits to the Haitian by the Hollywood film industry. Since the middle of the century Haitian art has enjoyed a different reputation.

I hypothesize that Haitian culture is attractive to the EuroAmerican because it is composed of strategies in cultural fabrication that resemble those of postmodernism.

Despite postmodernist society's innovations in communication technology and its ability to connect the entire world in seconds, the basis of postmodernism lies in an experience of anonymity, fragmentation, and separation. Postmodern society fails to aggregate its various components into a coherent flamework to help orient people. An individual functions as part of a society which, not meeting any of his/her spiritual needs, ceases to be meaningful.

Haitians were confronted with conditions similar to the postmodern situation when they first set foot on Hispaniola in the early 16th century. With the beginning of the slave trade in 1510, people from disparate societies (Taino Indians, Spanish and French colonizers, African slaves from various nations, predominantly Yomba, Fon, and Kongo), speaking a multitude of languages and representing a wide range of beliefs and social customs, were thrown together, forced to forge a new culture out of bits and pieces they either still had, brought with them, or remembered. The art and culture that emerged are inextricably connected to Haiti's religion Vodou, which, according to Cosentino, appears as if it were a "postmodern religion, and [had] been since the 17th century.''3

Fundamental to Western postmodernism is the separation of the signifier from that which it signifies. The signifier has autonomy and is preferred over the signified. When Haitians assimilate Christian saints into their religion and consequently into their art, they seem to appropriate signifiers (images of the saints as they are represented on chromolithographs), not meaning, that which those chromolithographs signify. "The chromo of Lazarus, in which he is an old man with a staff and artended by dogs, represents old Legba, guardian of the crossroads, to whom dogs were sacred in Dahomey. St. Ulrique is Agwe, god of the waters, since he holds a fish" (Deren 1953:56). Personal and communal life in Haiti is shaped by lwas (deities) and ancestors who, living below the water in Ginen, frequently visit and instruct the living through possession. Brown cites incidents in which Vodou practitioners used Christian crosses in a cemetery, reserved for the burial of Catholic nuns and priests, in Port-au-Prince, as poto-mitan, to invoke the deity Bawon Samedi (Brown 1996:21 ). In Bien Aime Sylvain's "Cemetery" (Figure 1) the specific meaning of the cross as a referent to Jesus Christ is disregarded, as it is overlaid with the symbolic function of the cross as a signifier of the cross-roads. By virtue of it consisting of a vertical pole, it signifies the emergence of the ancestors into the world of the living.

Along with the separation of signifier and signified in postmodernism comes its tendency to appropriate. According to Derrida's idea of grafting, a fragment of a text is ripped out of its original context and reinserted into a new context (Ulmer 1983:88). In Haiti the Pret-Savann, for example, takes traditional Catholic litanies and recites them to invoke Christian deities at the beginning, and in service, of Vodou ceremonies. Haitian culture appears to parallel postmodern appropriation in two ways. First, there is syncretisization of the various cultural constituents that were present in its beginning. A relatively homogenous group of Europeans and a completely heterogeneous crowd of African slaves created a new Creole language, Pidgin, and new social customs (Mintz 1992:18). According to Mintz' and Price's model of a slaveocracy, the indirect power of the enslaved would have proven more influential in this hybridization than the direct power of the colonizer, but all new culture would have emerged within the parameter of the colonizer's monopoly on power (Mintz 1992:38-39). Indeed, although elements of Vodou are Masonic (e.g., the iconography of the Gede spirits) and Catholic, the fundamental principles of Vodou have their roots in the religion of the Fon and Yoruba people of Benin, Togo, and Nigeria, with elements of the Kongo people of Zaire (Blier 1995:83, Thompson 1995:92). Secondly, there is a cultural borrowing, an appropriation of foreign elements as an addition to an established base that does not fundamentally change because of the addition. The shifting meanings of crosses in the Port-au-Prince cemetery, mentioned above, are an example of this process. Appropriation of western images could be found on the reconstructed Vodou altars represented at the "Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou" exhibition, first shown at the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles in 1996, where "Darth Vader" from the movie "Starwars" resided on a Bizango altar. Cosentino documents the use of the images of Rambo as Ogou and the Playboy bunny as a trickster figure, both on decorated vehicles called Tap-Taps (Cosentino 1988:40).

When postmodern signifiers are ripped out of their original context (which allows referring back to the context of which they were a pan of) and are inserted into a new context (which did not exist prior to the fragment's insertion), the result is a "mounted process" in which all fragments interact with each other (Ulmer 1983:88). This postmodern practice has become more real than one might imagine. "Accidents like incorrect data entries and malfunctions can alter reality and produce nonexistent identities or switch existing ones, even deleting people from the annals of the living and resurrecting the dead" (Olalquiaga 1992:15).

Correspondingly, in Haiti the meaning of signs does not seem to be stable either. The pantheon of the Vodou religion constantly changes and grows. This occurs in two ways. First, new ancestors (the newly dead) are constantly added to the pantheon and, through a gradual process of abstraction, change from ancestors to deities. They add the characteristics they have acquired during their lifetime to the pantheon as new attributes. Thus "the lwa are relentlessly, even notoriously, trendy, and none more so than Ezili Freda" (Cosentino 1988:40). In the late 1940's Hector Hyppolite painted a fashionable Ezili, wearing a bikini, by the sea. Secondly, change is brought about by the fact that, through the institution of possession, the lwas and the ancestors are given a voice. They can alter the reality of the living by instructing them with whatever they deem appropriate at the time. "Ambivalence characterizes vodou itself where nothing is ever exactly what it seems and where Iwas not only bring about change in those who invoke them but are constantly changing themselves" (Rodman 1974:68).

Because postmodernism appropriates indiscriminately, and horizontally across cultures and vertically through time, it flattens historical time into "one eternal present that contains all pasts and futures" (Olalquiaga 1992:xiii). Reality, experienced through representations of it on TV screens, becomes so evasive "that it must be erased and renamed simultaneously time after time" (Olalquiaga ,1992:5). One could think of Haitian time as flattened out as well. The present is filled with the past and contains the future. The ancestors, because they are cared for and listened to, are ever present in the daily life of the people. And the people contain the future because they, as future ancestors, will contribute whatever experience they accumulate in the present as attributes to the pantheon when they die. Brown describes Murat Brierre's sculpture "L'Araignee" (Figure 2) as a spider whose legs are tied to the ground by ancestors emerging from below, who is pregnant with the future (Brown 1996:44).

There are other aspects of Haitian culture that look similar to postmodern practice. Like postmodernism, which deconstructs the difference between dichotomies such as culture and nature, an and science, and in general lacks "respect for all kinds of boundaries," including the boundary "between the body and electronic apparatuses," so one could assert that Vodou sees no boundary between life and death and does not distinguish between the sacred and the profane (Olalquiaga 1992:xiv). The Tap-Tap buses, used for public transportation, are a case in point. Overloaded with painted representations of lwas, to which they are dedicated, they double in function as rolling Vodou temples, simultaneously absorbing "commercial ephemera generated by the mass media of the behemoth to the north," (Cosentino 1988:41) reflecting both the Haitians' spiritual and mundane desires, without regarding them asseparate.

Just as postmodernism, with its practice of mounting unstable processes, constantly points at that which cannot be confronted, the signifier never being able to confront directly what it signifies, so Haitians value "the invisible reality ... [as] the true one - precisely because this powerful dimension is not subject to material explanation" (Anderson 1982:89). According to Brown, what is most important in Haitian cultural expression is that which pushes up from underneath the ground, that which comes from the ancestral world below the water (Brown 1996:16). In Rigaud Benoit's painting "Calice" (Figure 3) the abundant life force sprouting from a cup, doubling as a tree of life, is rooted in an ancestral spirit below the ground. Yves Michel's "Ceremonie" (Figure 4) illustrates the Fon derived practice of placing offerings in a hole in the ground underneath the poto mitan (Blier 1995:67).

Although much of Haitian cultural strategies may look very postmodern, they really are not. "Postmodernism is a state of things of western [sic] culture. It is the contemporary answer to a century worn out by the rise and fall of modern ideologies" and cannot be applied to Haitian culture without deforming it (Olalquiaga 1992:xi). "Underdevelopment creates or can create conditions that generate results superficially related to those in the hegemonic center, but ... responding to completely different needs" (Camnitzer 1994:362). Haitian artists' intentions are completely different from those of Western artists.

Much of postmodernist and Haitian an utilizes what in the West is called kitsch.4 Haitians, according to Olalquiaga's definition, are first degree kitsch consumers, meaning that they buy kitsch icons as an "indexical referent" because they are true believers (Olalquiaga1992:42). Their use of kitsch (serially produced items such as heads of plastic dolls, "condemned as gaudy" by an world standards) which Haitians do not understand as kitsch, is a form of bricolage (Olalquiaga 1992:43). They use what is called kitsch by others because they have no other choice. Kitsch is what is inexpensive and what, in this poor nation, is at hand. Postmodernists in New York buy kitsch with "an unashamed nostalgia for other times," because they want to, because they begrudge the first degree kitsch consumer the "immediacy of feeling [that] they have lost (Olalquiaga 1992:xv,43).

While in Haiti strategies that appear postmodern result in cultural wholeness, in deep meaning, the Western postmodernist arrives at no meaning at all; s/he abandoned the notion that texts contain meaning and fills the void by creating intertextuality, endless combinations of fragments with which s/he creates a sensory overload simulating saturation (Dutton 1995:39). "Kombinayzon," or "Deformasyon," mythological creatures created out of the combinations of fragments of humans and animals (Figure 5) are not welcomed in Haiti. They point to "profound confusion among the living" and indicate "the crisis that can occur in the social fundament when respect for the ancestors and confidence in their wisdom is lost (Brown 1996:28).

From its conception, popular painting and sculpture in Haiti, initiated by foreign patronage and supported by Haitians, functioned to open up a market for imports and developed the cultural identity of the colonizer. Operating separately from the Haitian Vodou generated art, the popular art initially diverted creative energy away from a furthering of an intrinsically Haitian cultural expression. In 1995 studio trained Haitian painter Paul Gardiere asserted: "The type of art-making that I do... that's a western thing .... You see, somebody who thinks strictly in terms of Vodou might be able to come up with a hole different aspect of creativity, but it's not going to look like gallery art" (Brown 1996:80).

Nothing could illustrate the disparity between Euro~American and Haitian cultural presuppositions better than the incident Charles Merewether observed at the exhibition "Magiciens de la Terre" in Paris in 1989. At the exhibit a "woman had reclaimed the symbolic function ... [of one of five chairs created by sculptor Patrick Vilaire] by inhabiting it. And ....had been possessed by the spirit embodied in the chair, the Vodou goddess Ezili" (Merewether 1991 :cxiv). By reclaiming the intended function of the art object, that of embodying a spirit and a means for that spirit to make itself known through the institution of possession, the woman violated the Euro-American interpretation of its function as an art object in a museum to be contemplated from a distance.

Despite the different functions of the Vodou defined art and the popular art, the latter tradition, established in the 1950's (albeit through Euro-American patronage), by the 1990's has been around too long to not be regarded as a forum for an intrinsically Haitian cultural expression. Popular art has deeply permeated the Haitian cultural landscape; the very existence of art galleries and the visual spectacles of political murals all owe their existence to the painting tradition started at the Centre d'Art.5 Painting Tap-Taps, for example, began when first generation Centre d'Art artists repeatedly painted murals on the jeep belonging to DeWitt Peters. "The jeep invariably evoked derision in the streets from the same people who, twenty years later, would have regarded the owner of any camion or 'tap-tap' not so decorated as hopelessly out of step" (Rodman 1982:121).

What position does the "popular" art of Haiti hold in the contemporary art world as it circulates through its galleries, and how, as a fairly young tradition, does it fit into Haitian culture? According to Nelly Richard the art generated through, and for, the colonizer can now be turned on the same, serving as an instrument for decolonization (Richard 1993:455). Postmodernism's misinterpretation of Haitian culture as participating in its discourse, has created access for the artists of the periphery to the art world of the hegemonic center. Richard asserts, however, that that access denies the artists of the periphery any kind of privileged position in the an world, despite the fact that Haitians have had four hundred years of expertise in assembling meaningful culture out of fragments, on the grounds that postmodernism is not concerned with meaning (Richard 1987/88:10). But, she feels, it does offer periphery artists the possibility of subverting the postmodern discourse through a "diachronic rereading of... [their] own modernity .... to engage and debate specifically Latin American ideologies" allowing the artists to strengthen the identity of their own culture through the means of, and in the context of, the center (Richard 1993:458).

Subversion of Postmodern strategy is not the only means by which the periphery renders the colonizer impotent. Postmodern strategy backfires on Euro-America in other ways. Postmodernists find themselves in a paradoxical bind stemming from the postmodern attack on the authority of the artist or author. If postmodernists abandon the authority of the artist, disregard the cultural references a Haitian artist intends in his work, and impose, through an intertextual reading, a postmodern version of universality onto Haiti, they act imperialistically towards her culture. If they respect the authority of the author and acknowledge a difference between Western postmodernism and the 'postmodernism" of Creole societies, they again act imperialistically, because in so doing they avoid the threat of destabilization through creolization by the other, thereby maintaining their established position of power.

Ironically, the only way out of this dilemma, that Euro- Americans give up their expansionist desires and not look at the other at all, is not possible for the Western person without abandoning the self, because "vicariousness-- to live through another's experience-is a fundamental trait of postmodern culture" (Olalquiaga 1992:39). 

Endnotes 

1 The guiding notion of western connoisseurship during the modern era was the idea that cultures that were untouched by industrialized civilization represented a 'lower evolutionary stage of human development," and that those cultures had access to a universal purity and innocence which the EuroAmerican could no longer hope to attain (Dutton 1995:34). Any cultural context that would have rendered thus primitivized cultures as sophisticatedly interactive with either other cultures, including earlier, non-industrialized European culture, or with their own history, was simply ignored. "Some anthropologists would ... charge that the Camp Putnam pygmies (in Zaire) were so tainted by contact with European civilization that they could not be considered typical of Ituri Forest pygmies. But in fact there were no 'typical' Ituri Forest pygmies; like all the other groups in the forest, they had adapted over and over again to changing situations" (Mark 1995:77).

2 Early in the century the notion was that Haiti did not have any an tradition at all. As late as 1960 Courlander wrote: "An over-all impression of Haitian material culture is that artistic decoration is almost entirely absent and that the prime emphasis is on utility" (Courlander 1960: 123). The Vodou generated art: murals in ounfos, veves, drapos, and other religious paraphernalia were either hidden from view, or not regarded as art. Periodic superstition campaigns, attempts to wipe out the religion of Vodou, during which many of the sacred objects were burnt (Polk 1995:325), and the fact that "Haiti has shown little interest in her artistic heritage, neither in safeguarding it as a historical record, nor in valuing it as the expression of her people" (Christensen 1975:44), may have contributed to the perception of the scarcity of art in Haiti in the first decades of this century. In 1982 Rodman wrote: "Only after the 'renaissance' [renaissance referring to the emergence of the first Haitian painters and sculptors who, under the direction of the Centre d'Art, took up easel painting and sculpting for a foreign audience] had erupted were they [the murals on cailles, huts] noticed and photographed" (Rodman 1982:106). 

3 Donald Cosentino at an informal gathering, UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, April 12th, 1996.

4 Scrutiny of the term "kitsch," and of the segregation between liberal arts (with its "determining power of 'real' discourses ... whose autonomy and hegemony are seldom questioned") and popular culture (with its "subversive potential ... to discourses that rely ... on the promotion of class, gender, or race") are very important to this discussion, but go beyond the scope of this paper (Olalquiaga 1992:xii). It will be taken up in further research. s The formation of the 'Association des Artistes Peintres Survivant de Coup d'Etat' in September of 1994, seems dependent on the precedent of some kind of formal institution that treats art as art. The Centre d'Art was the first such institution in Haiti and spawned the opening of other galleries. The political murals, painted by the artists belonging to the 'Association,' before the return of President Jean-Bertrand Adstide in October of 1994, with their narrative intention are stylistically more closely related to the popular paintings on canvas and the mural of the Episcopal Cathedral of Sainte Triniti, than they are related to the religious murals inside Vodou temples (Brown 1996:91 ).

Works Cited 

Anderson, Michelle. 1982. "Authentic Voodoo is Synthetic," in Drama Review 26: 89-110.

Blier, Suzanne Preston. 1995. "Vodun: West African Roots in Vodou," in Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino, pp. 61-87. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

Brown, Karen McCarthy. 1996. Tracing the Spirit: Ethnographic Essays on Haitian Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Camnitzer, Luiz. 1994. New Art of Cuba. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Christensen, Eleanor Ingalls. 1975. The Art of Haiti. New York: A.S.Bames &Co.

Clifford,James. 1987. "Of Other Peoples: Beyond the 'Salvage' Paradigm," in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster, pp. 121-130. Seattle: Bay Press.

Cosentino, Donald J., ed. 1995. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

________. 1988. "Divine Horsepower," African Arts 21, 3:39-43.

Courlander, Harold. 1960. The Drum and the Hoe: Life and Lore of the Haitian People. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Deren, Maya. 1953. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co.

Dutton, Denis. 1995. "Mythologies of Tribal Art," African Arts 28, 3:33-43.

Hurbon,Laënnec. "American Fantasy and Haitian Vodou," in Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino, pp. 181-197. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

Mark, Joan. 1995. The King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Merewether, Charles. 1991. "Like a Coarse Thread Through The Body: Transformation and Renewal," in Myth and Magic of the Americas. Monterrey: Monterrey Museum of Art.

Mintz, Sidney W. and Richard Price. 1992. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. Boston: Beacon Press.

Olalquiaga, Celeste. 1992. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Polk, Patrick. 1995. "Sacred Banners and the Divine Cavalry Charge," in Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed., Donald J. Cosentino, pp. 325-347. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

Richard, Nelly. 1987/88. "Postmodernism and Periphery," Third Text, Winter 1987/88: 5 - 12.

Rodman, Selden. 1982. Artists in Tune with Their Work. New York: Simon and Schuster.

________. 1974. The Miracle of Haitian Art. New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc.

Thompson, Robert Farris. 1995. "From the Isle Beneath the Sea: Haiti's AfricanizingVodou Art," in Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald J. Cosentino, pp. 91-119. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

Ulmer, Gregory L. 1983. "The Object of Post-Criticism," in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, pp. 83-110. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press.