"Jivaro" (Updated developments)

 

Jean Rouch/Jivaro woman, oil on canvas, 11x14 inches, 2021

I received my copy of Visages de Bronze in the mail the other day. The "Faces of Bronze" on the back cover made me hope the text would be in English as well as French. No such luck, it's French only. There's only a little bit of text though, so little that between my limited knowledge of the French language and Google Translate I can figure out what's in the text. I had hoped for an image of the author Philippe Luzuy inside the book but here too I was not so lucky. I just finished painting the third one of five selections from the record "Jivaro" in the Top 100. I substituted the customary portrait painting of the person responsible for the recording first with a image of the record sleeve, then with Bernard Taisant (director of the film Visages de Bronze), and now with the well known filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch. Philippe Luzuy is listed as editor on many Rouch documentary films, hence this desperate substitution. Rouch's specialty is African culture and he is known to have revolutionized the way Africans and African culture are portrayed by western institutions. Rouch thus appeared to be a positive choice for my object/subject series of juxtapositions. Rouch died in 2004 and some years after that the artist Coco Fusco, known for her work concerning racial and gender identities, a social justice warrior, told the world about how she was sexually accosted by Rouch many years earlier showing, in the process, that the object subject separation between genders, races, and cultures lingers in all its colonial forms. Fusco, who is Cuban-American, shows how exploitative power structures continue to exist. With this in mind I set out to paint a portrait of Rouch next to an image of a Shuar (Jivaro) woman who was photographed by Luzuy for Visages de Bronze. Now that I have the book I can inform you that the individual whose image I questioned last week, was, for the cover of "Jivaro" indeed photographed by either Luzuy or his collaborator Pierre Allard. The earlier image of what I believe to be the same individual was photographed during the Lewis Cotlow Amazon Expedition. The same man was simply about ten years younger when Cotlow met him and Luzuy ran into the same person. In the Luzuy/Allard photographs (I assume) the man had gained status as he is more decorated than in the earlier photographs. I read that the necklace (made from pelican bones) the Jivaro warrior is wearing in the images in Visages de Bronze and on the cover of the LP "Jivaro" is a status symbol whose right to wear is earned. From reading the book I know now too that the cover image, that I used for the first of the three finished "Jivaro" painting is not a Shuar woman (child rather) but she belongs to the Colorado Indians also from Ecuador.