ANIMISM, SHAMANISM, AND ART BRUT - PART 1

(NOVEMBER 1, 2024 - JANUARY 4, 2025)

In the Afro-Brazilian religions and their mythology, the poet discovers what constitutes the very motor of poetic creation: magical, mythical thought that harms logical certitudes and the obvious principles of causality.  The marvelous in the raw state is in tune there with daily life, myth is still fecund there as is magic-the common denominator uniting the wizard and the poet-still operates there at an unconscious level. 

-‘When the Poet Meets the Ethnologist: The African Religions of Brazil’ from Catalog Benjamin Peret et les Amériques.

Animism is based on the belief that every living thing has a soul.  Animism is a cultural baseline of spirituality linking all humanity together in a necessary awareness of being an active part of life on earth.  Animism is not about Religion, but rather a free-form spiritual impulse of connectivity.  It is about the human participation in Nature and Place on an intimate level.  Historically we were another part of Nature and thus privy to its healing and destructive forces.  Eating, birthing, treating illnesses and wounds, hunting, and coping with natural and unnatural death formed the matrix of our human journey and how we strive to stay in balance.

Though our roles in life transformed and diversified through time we always made some kind of art to comment on, engage with, or energize our lives.  Much of this art expressed and still involves the human relationship with animism.

This is not shamanism.  Animism provides the universe in which shamanism exists.  Animism is the basis for universal spirituality, but real shamanism is very specific to the primary cultures it serves.  We are all born potentially animistic, but we can only be recognized or initiated by certain specific cultural protocols into shamanism.

All artists can be animistic by nature or choice, but very few, if any, can be called actual shamans. Animism is not a process or performance of intention as art is, whereas shamanism is a learned and experienced series of protocols enabling the participant to enter a spirit or ancestral world to work to calm or retrieve displaced or unhappy souls as well as other profound healing services.  Shamanism is a recording of the botanical history of local Place.  Shamans learn to control their own processes in service to their community whether in real time or in an astral reality.  This cannot be improvised by someone ignorant of or outside the wellsprings of traditional knowledge.

In our two previous exhibitions: Transcendants I and II, we were concerned with visionaries, spiritualists, mediums, seers and occultists who, because of their absence from the mainstream art world, were largely ghettoized from full recognition of their geniuses by the art world canon.  In this new exhibition we take the discourse back to roots.  Animism provides an umbrella under which can be seen art rising from basic spiritual roots necessitated by survival.

This exhibition begins to explore a wide variety of artworks, from animistic works by contemporary global non-mainstream visionary artists juxtaposed with actual artworks (primarily with masks) made by or for animists and shamans from Eskimo and Inuit, Indonesian, Siberian, Himalayan and other sources. 

There will be work by artists, occultists and empathic beings who consciously make work driven by animistic observations and thinking. There will also be a feature of sculptures from the African diasporic cultures of the Americas including Jesse Aaron, Lloyd and Vincent Atherton, Bessie Harvey, and Woody Joseph.  Also presented will be Vichai Chinalai, William Fields, Guyodo, Solange Knopf, Davood Koochaki, Stéphanie Denaes Lucas, Olga Karlíková, Franck K. Lundangi, M’onma, J.B. Murray, Bobby Ngainmijra, Shinichi Sawada, Imam Sucahyo, Andrey Tischenko, Gregory Van Maanen, Ghyslaine and Sylvain Staëlens, and Charles Willeto.

For further information please contact info@cavinmorris.com or call us at 212-226-3768.

ANIMISM, SHAMANISM, AND ART BRUT - PART 1

We are pleased to put the first part of this large exhibition on line now. There will be at least one more part very soon.

Masks
Alaska, Point Hope Chin Labret, Eskimo Shaman's Mask, 18th/19th Century
Wood, caribou teeth
9.5 x 6 x 2 inches
24.1 x 15.2 x 5.1 cm
M 651

Masks
Alaska, Yupik Shaman's mask representing Tunghak, spirit that regulates
the supply of game and lives in the Moon, from Sabotnisky area,, c. 1890 - 1900
Polychrome wood, feathers
11 x 6 x 4 inches
27.9 x 15.2 x 10.2 cm
M 648

Masks
Alaska, Yukon River Delta, Shaman's mask, collected by Joseph Chillberg , c. 1890
Polychrome wood
8 x 5.25 x 2.5 inches
20.3 x 13.3 x 6.4 cm
M 649

Masks
Alaska, Yukon River Basin, Shaman's Bird Mask, 19th Century
Polychrome wood, pigment, pyrite inlay, four original feathers with paint
14 x 12 x 4 inches
35.6 x 30.5 x 10.2 cm
M 652

Vincent Atherton
Spirit Figure (two pieces), 1996
Cedar
17 x 11 x 10 inches
43.2 x 27.9 x 25.4 cm
ViA 35

Jesse Aaron
Untitled, n.d.
Carved wood
25.5 x 9.5 x 6.5 inches
64.8 x 24.1 x 16.5 cm
JSA 5