See also:  [(art) concepts]
           [Relics]

           
Presence

"THe Powers of Presence: Consciousness, Myth, and Affecting",
by Robert Plant Armstrong, LCCN NB 1098.A753,
ISBN 0.8122.7804.6 (Univ. Penn Press, 1981, Philadelphia??).

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[P.3]

Chapter 1: The Powers of Invocation, The Powers of Virtuosity.

In all cultures certain things exist, which tough they may 
appear to be but ordinary objects, yet are treated in ways
quite different from the ways in which objects are usually
treated.

Consider, for example, a wedge-shaped stone about two inches in
length and no more than one and aquarter inches at its widest
part. The casual observer may think it to be no more than a 
stone brought to its presence shape by the natural processes
of wearing away that time brings about. More sophisticated
viewers will observe that it has been worked to such a shape.
But, whatever the case, it is un-likely that either observer
will be preared for the honors paid to such a stone in a Yoruba
village in west-central Nigeria, by a Shango priest, who will
bow before it, clapping his hands and reciting praise poems
to it. What is this thing? Is it a god? Is it a relic of some
special merit? Does it own power? Is it a work of art? Perhaps
to the questioner's great suprise, each of these answered may 
be answered afirmatively: The stone celt is in some respect
or other of divinity, meirorious, powerful, and a work of art;
or, more properly, it belongs to that order of phenomena of 
whhich what we call "works of art" are but a sub-order.

Such things as the wedge have spatio-temporal existence; they
eventuate from process of their making. They are, in these
respects, quite clearly objects. But, at the same time, 
peoples' behaviour toward them argues that they are something
more. Further, consider the instance of a drum at the court
of the king (the Asantehene) of the Ashanti people of Ghana.
The instrument is played as any drum might be, but at the same
time it si deemed to be of a sexual specificity (some are male,
others female), it is offered sacrifies, and poetry is also 
recited in its honor, the poetically established virtues 
some-how, enriching the drum itself -- as indeed do [P.4] its 
sexuality and its received sacrifices. Another instance: At a 
cross-roads outside a Yoruba village a simple mound of earth
is not a mortar pile, nor its it an accumulation of ant 
dredgings. One notes that a chicken is being sacrified to it.
Clearly this extra-ordinary treatment to accord a mere bit of
mud! Such speciality of treatment, distinguishing heese things as
exeptional among objec ts, comes about because the ends these
things serve are not those simply of the body, as the ends of
ordinary ojbects tend to be, but rather special ones. 

Indeed, the ends they serve are those of the state -- in the
case of the drum -- and of the self. In ways that have alwasy 
been most difficult to study, such thing tend to gratify the
human psyche.l Thus, the celt, investigation reveals, gains
psychologocial power because it derives from the thunder
god -- it is the essence or seed or distillate of thunder; 
the drum is in some important sense the voice of the very
soul of the Ashanti people; and the mud is a shrine to Wshu,
the Yoruba god of indetermiancy. What better place to honor
such a god than at a crossroads? One proceeds on a journey 
in greater confidencde knowing that his choice of path has 
been presided over and validated by the blessings of the
appropriate god.

Although in our culture we do not make sacrifices of blood
to such special things [ie, *art*], yet we too have analogous
"objects". To them, Americans and Europeans, and Japansese 
-- for example -- also offer "sacrifice". We may or may not
write poems to them, [NOTE: The poem based on Pollock's life] ****
but we lavish our resources upon their purchase and up-keep.
And we house them in some of the grandest structures our
culture produces, designed by our most gifted architects
and executed in the most expensive of materials. But, it is
not only the housing of such works that is expensive. There 
are also the services that they must have: Insurance, guards
to protect them against vandalism and theft, conservators
to cure them of their ills and to maintain them in the greatest
degree of health, specialists to mount them and place them in
dramatically disposed and lighted displays.




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The Usual Suspects

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