|
ANCESTRAL REUNIONS
THE HOPI/CELTIC COLLABORATION
an essay by Zena Pearlstone
California State University,
Fullerton, Grand Central Art Center
"We see the paintings as our dances. In a way when we are painting those paintings we’re a new tribe and those paintings are our plaza and that’s where Mike and I are dancing"
Jack Dauben
"There is a spirit, the spirit of our ancestors, behind this. We felt this need to be able to dialogue across boundaries, across cultural boundaries, and then we found at the base of this whole things that we’re human."
Mike Kabotie
In 1996, Hopi artist Mike Kabotie (Lomawywesa) and Celtic artist Jack Dauben, after long artistic careers, began to paint on the same canvases. Their collaborative artworks -- intricate, poetic, and stunningly arresting--had an almost twenty year gestation period, initiated by Dauben’s magnetic attraction to Hopi art.
Dauben and Kabotie describe their collaboration as dancing, themselves as image poets, as they test the artforms of their ancestors in their search fora universal common humanity. Unlike many contemporary artists, Kabotie and Dauben have a history of, and are drawn to, collaborative work. Kabotie, who was born and grew up at Hopi, was, and continues to be, a participant in Hopi ceremonial life. In 1973 he was a founding member of the Artist Hopid, a Homodernist art movement. During the 1970s Dauben belonged to an Ohio Surrealist group, dedicated to collective writing, drawing, and painting. Both are members of cultures -- Hopi and Celtic -- where much of the activity was, and is, communal or collective. Further, some of their primary ancestral influences -- Pueblo kiva murals and Celtic rites -- are likely non-individualistic ventures. Kabotie and Dauben, in opposition to the strong Western bent toward individualistic art, find strength and meaning in building on each other’s marks and ideas.
"If we made any rule it was that we had complete freedom … to paint over my things, his things, mark on top of his marks. We’ve done that with respect and also with complete abandon" (Jack Dauben).
They speak of the twins of mythologies and there is a twinning and a twining that goes well beyond the paintings. They share ideologies and philosophies about the past and the present that allow them to merge seamlessly on canvas. Talking to them, they finish each other’s sentences, express agreement without words, and deeply appreciate each other’s humors about the joys and absurdities of life.
"Even in our activities it’s all weaving, the painting included. All of this imagery — the food, the cycles, and all of that, the numinous — in our painting activity reflects that weaving" (Mike Kabotie).
Dauben was attracted to Hopi painting when he saw an exhibit of the Artist Hopid on a trip to Hopi in 1977 and then specifically to Kabotie’s work. The two artists met briefly in 1980, and got to know each other when Dauben moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1987. Although always aware of his Celtic roots and a follower of André Breton’s writings about Gaulish art, Dauben was spurred towards his artistic ancestry through the Hopis. He was moved to make ancestral paintings of his own, partially through noting that nineteenth and
twentieth century European and American artists were frequently influenced by the art of other peoples but seldom by their own artistic past.
"It’s when I saw this Hopi art and understood what they were doing, it popped into my head that I could do the same thing…. but I didn’t want to just emulate ancient Celtic art…. I wanted to see if I could speak that language, and I found that I could" (Jack Dauben).
In 1987 both Dauben and Kabotie were living in Flagstaff. The two shared a studio at the Museum of Northern Arizona with Hopi artist, Ramson Lomatewama. In that same year, 1987, Dauben was moved to respond to Kabotie’s 1984 lithograph Rain Spirits, one of Kabotie’s Hopi "katsina song blessings," with the Celtic and preCeltic influenced The Return Journey of the Horned Serpent.
"I saw an an image of Mike’s that I liked, and just as a token of friendship, I decided to respond to that painting. I gave it to Mike" (Jack Dauben).
Ten years later, 1997, saw their first joint painting, When Hands Meet, which cemented their relationship. Their handprints, in a flat petroglyph style, touch. First Kabotie put his handprint on the canvas and then Dauben responded. It’s a joke playing off Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling panel of God and Adam but laden with meaning and symbolism. It’s "ying/yang, a spark, a Hopi friendship mark" says Kabotie.
"That painting is all about two people bumping into each other on the planet earth and getting to know each other and telling the world we did this and because of the hand prints — whether it’s European hand prints or Native American hand prints – is saying we’re here. I was here. We were here. Which is saying nothing and everything" (Jack Dauben).
The paintings are built by passing the canvas back and forth. It does not matter which one starts, and it does not matter how long either keeps the canvas or how much he adds. They sometimes paint out their own work, sometimes the other’s. They know intuitively when it is finished. The merging of their mythologies appears in The World Serpent where the Hopi feathered serpent and the Celtic horned serpent, and by extension the serpents and dragons of the world, meet.
"We talk different mythologies and different symbols and all of that and then, as we paint, different things that we talk about, they reveal themselves " (Mike Kabotie).
To Blossom, To Wither, To Blossom Again: Corn, Comets and Culture, emerged from contemporary events and the artists deeply-felt connections with
reoccurrences. When a comet was passing locally, Dauben recorded it on canvas and both marveled at its predictable reappearances. They added images of the recyclings of the earth, of the basic foods--corn and wheat -- that are tied to the yearly cycles of growth and disappearance. They thought about the recycling of people’s--Hopis and Celts among them -- ideas and consciousnesses, and they came once again to the realization that spirit and matter are one.
From the Numinous Void the Eaglet Springs is the work they find most difficult to verbalize because, even though they never begin with a theme in mind, this imagery emerged so unexpectedly. They did not set out to paint an eaglet, or anything specific, but the bird just appeared. They delighted in the pun, because the eaglet did spring from their marks --"blossomed out"-- and because the painting was done in, and is about, spring. It is also, they feel, about music and singing and flight.
"The painting sort of directs us. We don’t direct these paintings. That’s an important point to make, We’re not shoving things around, We’re more or less allowing things to shove us around" (Jack Dauben and Mike Kabotie).
Woven together in these paintings are artistic styles; diverse, but oddly similar, cultures; understandings of mythologies; philosophical thought; and the ancient with the modern. Woven together are our gifts from Jack Dauben and Mike Kabotie.
|
|
|
