OOO

 

Ashaninka (Campa) Indian, various materials on drywall, 17"x11"

I've been thinking about randomness recently, and surrealism. Fact #1 is that it's impossible to consciously act random. Why would you even want randomness? Well, randomness is organic, it seems to replicate the processes of nature, while conscious composition seems laborious in comparison. The unconscious is, per the surrealists, and Sigmund Freud, where the truth and the essence of being is situated. Fact #2 is that computers are better equipped to act in a random fashion. They are also better in rational thinking, compared to us subjective creatures. Do computers have consciousness, and thus an unconsciousness then? What I want to know is if the randomness of computers would act according to the same set of laws (as in fractal theories for example) as an organic entity would act. Aretribve  there hidden esoteric forces at play as a result of humans creating technology in their own image? These mystic attributes are surely unintended by the creators of technology (AI included.) The above image is a work still in progress. It was formed as a byproduct of a stencil I made to start off the Top 100 2023. I made about ten variations of this image, using the positive or negative stencil in the processes. 

Happy Holidays by the way. The newest painting is unrelated to that but I was thinking about the Trinity in painting this. Shown are a woman with two children who are depicted on the back cover of the album Indiens et Animaux Sauvages d'Amérique du Sud.  They are from the Wayapi tribe who live in the Amazon region in Brasil, illustrating the Top 100 track Yopanama.

Wayapi Indians, oil on canvas, 12"x12", 2023

Top 100 2023

 

Ashaninka (Campa) Indian, print, a/p, 18x12 each

While the Top 100 2022 is up at the Top 100 Archive & Studio gallery, I'm experimenting with stencils and hope to come up with a concept for the Top 100 2023. I've been working with stencils a lot lately and I feel like creating the top 100 as an edition this year. The stencils could then also function to paint the full Top 100 as a mural, I don't know. It may be too ambitious to create 100 matrices (stencils) but I'll keep experimenting and thinking until I have a solid concept. A recording of a group of Campa women resides at #1 in the current top 100 for the time being. If I were to use this print, I probably dedicate to a recording made by Gerald Weiss in 1963 of a female Ashaninka solo voice, that is also in the list. I've painted the image before. I now learned that Ashaninka and Campa are the same people living in Peru in the Upper Amazon border region with Brazil.

Albania and Ashaninka, numbers 7 of 2021 and 66 in 2020.

Albanian mourners, Spiro Shetuni

The song illustrated in the above painting is one of several for which I could find not a whole lot of information about. The song title is Lamento de Albania which I found on the collection La voz humana en la musica parte 1. It's a Spanish language website and was compiled by the Argentinian Carlos Reynoso, professor of Anthropology at the the University of Buenos Aires. His liner notes to the Albanian recording are short; A funeral song by a group of about 12 women. The song is syllabic, it does not have words. "A collective clamor organized according to a strophic structure" is how Reynoso described it. The source is the Institute of Popular Culture of Tirana. No date. So I looked up the Institute of Popular Culture of Tirana. The Institute does not exist anymore, not using that name anyways but it lead me to the name Spiro Shetuni, "the West's foremost authority on the subject of Albanian music." Shetuni is an Albanian American whose nationality is Arumanian (I had to look that one up too, the term designates Eastern Romance people, and their language). He moved to the United States in 1992 and was for a period employed at the Ohio State University. Between 1993 and 2000 he taught a course called An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples. This at exactly the same time I was at OSU. I was a grad student there between 1994-1997. I stayed on as a lecturer and Gallery assistant until 2011.  I wish I knew then what I know now and I certainly would have taken this course. In 2005 I organized an exhibition of record sleeve collections and did come in contact with Margarita Mazo, a professor in the cognitive music department. Mazo had recorded Old Believers: Music of the Nekrasov Cossacks, a cd on Smithsonian Folkways that I owned a copy of and that was in the Top 100 at the time. I had never heard of Shetuni then let alone met him (he had already moved to South Carolina anyways.)

Back then I was in middle of compiling a cd with examples of cry singing, mostly funeral laments. Throughout the world existed (still exists but disappearing) this practice of mourning through song and I had gathered examples from Ireland (where it's called keening to Papua New Guinea, and everywhere in between. Albania was not included in that collection but had I known the existance of this recording I would have certainly included it on the cd, and would have contacted Shetuni in the process.

 

The image of the wailing Albanian women I found in Death Rituals in Albania: An Anthropological Review by Gentian Vyshka and Bardhyl Cipi, published on Antrocom an online journal of Anthropology in 2010. Vyshka and Cipi used the 1985 photo courtesy of the Albanian Film Archive, Tirana.The caption reads: "The wailing ritual and laments in Southern Albania are led from a professional mourner, a woman that might be not a relative of the dead, and hired for that function." The caption also reaffirmed me that I was painting Albanian women. I had started this painting already without some of the context and I was not sure if all 8 individuals were women. I've painted half the photo, the four people on the left in the picture.

Ashaninka Indian, Josefat Roel Pineda

The Ashaninka songs, at #66 in the Top 100 2020 was also part of the Top 100 2019. In 2019, while painting the illustration, I did do some contextual research as to what I was listening to. The track Ashaninka songs are actually two short songs that appear on a project initiated by Mickey Hart (of the Grateful Dead) for the Library of Congress called Endangered Music Project. The first cd of which is called The Spirit Cries: Music from the Rainforests of South America and the Caribbean (Rykodisc 1993). The sections on the cd involving the Peruvian Indians Shipobo and Ashaninka were recorded in 1963 and 1964 by Enrique Pinella and Josefat Roel Pineda. I may assume that Pinella, a Peruvian avant-garde composer, was responsible for the Shipobo recordings and Pinella for the Ashaninka but I can't be sure. The otherwise well documented CD does not distinguish. While writing about bot sets of recordings last years I spoke about Pinella and omitted Pineda. Now, while focusing on the Ashaninka only, I'm reversing this and chose a portrait of Pineda to include in the drawing of an Ashaninka woman. The woman I depicted is anonymous, as are the performers of the Ashaninka songs. The photo source I used comes from the Goteborg Ethnographic Museum and I found it on a Brazilian website documenting Amazonian tribes. I could not find photographs made by either Pinella or Pineda during their field recording sessions in the Amazon region of Eastern Peru. I commented in the text on the Ashaninca last year on the tattos seen in older, vintage, photographs of many Ashaninka women. Beautiful face tattoos that have now been replaced by face painting. Talking about tattoos: I can't get this image out of my head of the tattoos on the back of Grimes, the partner of Elon Musk. She covered her back in abstract, very expressive white marks resembling doodles or scribbling, or the style of Antonin Artaud's drawings or Alberto Giacometti's. I saw it on the Daily Mail this morning. They probably put it up to feed the disgust people have for the ultra-rich extravagant escapades. To shock their viewers. I found the tattoos rather impressive. Easily one of the best non-tribal or ceremony related tattoos I've ever seen.

 

Peruvian Indians

Shipibo Indian, Peru
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Asháninka (Campa) Indian, Peru
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

The sources for both paintings here are two photographs by Charles Kroehle and were taken in 1885 and 1888 in the Amazon forest region of Peru. One is labeled Campa-Indian, Rio Chuchuras, East Peru the other Indien Shipivo, fleuve Pachieta, Amazonie, Perou. The tattoos on both women are very similar. I initially thought one of the two must have been mislabeled. This doesn't appear to be the case though after further research into both ethnic groups. The Asháninka tattoos are strictly linear while the Shipibo have further design elements. I assume the tattoos are ceremonial and depict the origin of the world, the people, their ancestral spirits. I want one! Charles Kroehle (German, 1876-1902?) is considered a pioneer of the photography of Peruvian Indians. One thing is strange though in the data found and that is that if the date of birth is correct and the date of the photos are correct he was nine and twelve years old when taking these photographs? He died of an arrow wound that did not heal right. The two photographs illustrate two songs in the Top 100 that were recorded by Enrique Pinello, a Peruvian ethnomusicologist and composer. The two tracks, Shipibo Song and Ashaninka Songs, appear on the CD The Spirit Cries: Music of the Rainforests of South America and the Caribbean, compiled by (Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart and part of the Endangered Music Project series of the Library of Congress. The recordings were made in 1964 (much later than the photos,) the singers are not named. The Shipbo, now known as the Shipibo-Conibo people (a merging of two cultures,) live along the Amazonian Ucayali river and are known for their waeving and pottery. Both feature designs similar to the tattoos seen in Kroehle's photographs. Recent photographs, there are many, as the culture is very popular, do not show tattoos. Today's music is very much of the same tradition as the recordings of 1964, and (I assume) how it sounded in 1888. The Asháninka, or Campa Indians live nowadays scattered throughout the Amazon region that borders Brazil. No tattoos in current pictures either but they do paint very colorful lines on their faces.