Der Mond als Schuh: Zeichnungen der San.

Der Mond als Schuh: Zeichnungen der San

The Moon as Shoe: Drawings of the San edited by Miklos Szalay Zurich: Scheidegger and Spiess, 2002.309 pp., parallel German/English text, 3 maps, 80 b/w illustrations, 229 colour plates, 34 colour illustrations. 65.00 [euro].

This book is the result of a project mounted by Miklos Szalay to publicize a collection of drawings by Dia!kwain, / Han#kasso, !Nanni, Tamme, / Uma, and Da, San artists who worked in the home of two ethnographers/linguists, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, in the suburb of Mowbray in Cape Town in the late nineteenth century. These drawings and paintings by named individuals, reproduced in full-page color plates, were the central focus Szalay's project. They were exhibited at the Volkerkunde Museum at the University of Zurich (September 2002-January 2003) and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town (April-June 2003) alongside "response" works by contemporary artists Frederick Bruly Bouabre and Keith Dietrich as a postmodern exercise in interpretation

The book includes articles by well-known authors on San ethnography, all of whom have used the material collected by Bleek and Lloyd to enable rock art studies to progress beyond the descriptive and into a serious dimension of iconographic analysis. The essays here are enlightening for the nonspecialist, in that they address issues of San1 social organization, religion, history, and folklore recorded in the Bleek household in the late nineteenth century. Some of this material has implications for our use of the interpretative frameworks provided by the "trance hyopothesis" model originating with David Lewis Williams's research on rock art. For example, a number of the essays point to the existence of transformations from animal to human, and vice versa, in San folklore and spiritual ontology, and to their possible presence in the rock art. But in no instance in the essays in this volume is a direct connection made between the ethnographies collected by Bleek and Lloyd and the iconography of San rock art. Most of them retread old ground, with very little new being added to the scholarship on Southern African rock art or San ethnology.

That the essays in this book do not address, even briefly, the drawings and watercolors by Dia!kwain, /Han#kasso, !Nanni, Tamrne, /Uma, and Da is therefore not particularly surprising. These drawings and paintings made on paper, as both Miklos Szalay and Janette Deacon point out, are different from the rock art for which the /Xam and !Xun were famous. The pencil drawings and watercolor paintings were made by /Xam adults and / Xun children, none of whom appears to have been in any way accomplished in any "traditional" media let alone these Western "art" media. It is curious that nobody here noted the contrast between the formal stylizations in the drawings and paintings by the late-nineteenth century San artists patronized by Bleek and Lloyd and the observational naturalism of the real rock art. In addition, the distinct difference in style between the drawn copies of San rock art images and the watercolors by the named San artists goes unremarked.

These "works" acted as a means of conveying information to the inquiring Bleek and Lloyd, who wrote the artist's explanations of these drawings onto the paper of the drawings themselves. In both Bleek and Lloyd's writings and in the notations by the authors of the book, the drawings are treated as indexical for words, for things that are of ethnographic interest. Some of the images are maps, spatial renderings conceptually completely outside of San painting traditions. The animal imagery by Dia!kwain and /Han#kasso has some vague relationship to the images of animals from the rock shelters of the Drakensberg, but it is stylistically naive. This is even more the case with the works by !Nanni, Tamme, /Uma, and Da, which, however ethnographically and iconographically interesting they may be, remain children's drawings. It seems, therefore, that the historical weight of interest that these drawings carry has imbued them, nkisi-like, with extraordinary powers of attraction.

The book's genesis as an exhibition catalogue may explain some of its lack of coherence. Each image is presented with a caption that identifies its author, date, size, and medium. On each drawing, Bleek or Lloyd has written notes in / Xam (or / Xun) and English, with numbers identifying the separate elements of the image. These have been translated (by Megan Biesele) from the/Xam (or /Xun) into English and German. On exhibition, such images are assumed, like all "art" and in spite of labels and texts, to be able to communicate visually, without textual intervention, and they ended up in the book in exactly the same bind. So the ethnography (text) tells us who the artists were, how they came to make works on paper, and how the works were discovered again, but not how to make sense of them. It does not explore links between image and Bleek and Lloyd's handwritten notes, nor between the expectations of the Europeans who provided the materials, the script, and the need for the images, and the end products.

It is here that the contributions by Bouabre and Dietrich, two contemporary African artists, have their full impact. These two artists have reacted directly to the works, using different means of interpretation and thus intervention. Brief explanations of the two artists' working methods accompany illustrations of their response-works. Bouabre selects parts of images and attaches some fantastical, some absurd, but always personal verbal responses to the images (in French). He thus shows a postmodern disregard of the author: The images suggest things to his imaginary (in the Lacanian/Freudian sense), already preconditioned. He superimposed text on both drawing and script: Text supersedes handwritten script, however, and exerts its hierarchical superiority. It evokes the superimpositioning used in rock art to give renewed power to images. Dietrich, on the other hand, operates without text. His are naturalistically painted icons for objects from San territories, plants, artifacts, remnants, painted with a dispassionate gaze in watercolor. Their naturalism surpasses anything in San rock art, but nevertheless references its mimetic side. The style and the isolation of the images also invokes taxonomic watercolors of the nineteenth century imperialist enterprise and so also those responsible for the demise of the artists.

This book does not make a major contribution to the study of San rock art except by making public and more readily available material that might be used in reading aspects of San rock art. None of the writers examines the problematic issues that the book throws up and that have been raised in this review. However, it provides some useful synoptic ethnological texts on San and the Bleek archives and reproduces--without irony--images by San artists working in the suburban spaces of nineteenth century Cape Town (Mowbray), whose enigmatic qualities become clear as one pores over one image after another.

1. Throughout this book the term "San" is used as a collective name for the various ethixic groups who were the first inhabitants of Southern Africa. These groups include the / Xam and /Xun, from whose ranks came the authors of the drawings reproduced in the book. Some prefer the term "Bushman," but the debate on this nomenclature is still open.