5384: Review of Vodou art in London, UK (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Charles Arthur <charlesarthur@hotmail.com>

Keywords: Vodou, art, London

>From The Times newspaper


WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 18 2000
THE TIMES - VISUAL ART

The voodoo that pins you
Despite official bans, voodoo survives in full colour in Haiti, says Rhoda 
Koenig

THE term “voodoo” conjures up images of devil dolls and the walking dead, 
but the true story of this Haitian art, on show at London’s October Gallery, 
is, while less lurid, in a way more thrilling. The animistic religion was 
banned for 150 years by slave owners, and by the republic’s black rulers for 
another 150 — the former were terrified by it, the latter embarrassed. But 
the religion thrived in secret, subverting enemies it could not defy, in a 
country with so little hope of happiness in this world — Haiti has long been 
the poorest and most illiterate country in the western hemisphere.

The Catholic Church tried for centuries to drive out “vodou” (its 
supporters, says Leah Gordon, author of The Book of Vodou, are trying to 
replace the American spelling suggestive of Hollywood zombies, with the 
Creole one). In response, vodou priests incorporated the Virgin into their 
religion, making her a love goddess with a trinity of boyfriends. Her 
followers seek to please her with offerings of perfume, pink champagne, and 
her favourite cigarettes (Virginia Slims, of course).

Vodou art entered the secular world only in the 1940s, when ethnographers 
publicised it and dealers encouraged it. The latter, says Gordon, provided 
canvas for painters who before then had been decorating only temple walls. 
The directness and vigour of vodou art delighted, among others, André 
Malraux, who called it the only magical painting of the 20th century. Vodou 
artists, Gordon agrees, “represent the spirits the same way that 
14th-century Italians did the saints”. Coloured fuchsia and violet and 
turquoise, their gods of field and sea and forest float through the picture 
plane as expressively as they do through their painters’ lives.

Vodou dolls in Haiti are not named after one’s enemies and jabbed with pins: 
they sit on the altar to help worshippers communicate with the spirits. But 
they have begun to acquire a more sinister aspect. A load of unwanted Barbie 
dolls were dumped in Port-au-Prince market a while ago, and today — well, 
let’s just say that, when it comes to memories of blood-baths or a straight 
line to the unconscious, the artists of the Royal Academy have nothing on 
those of Haiti.

Catching the Spirit is on at the October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, 
London, until Nov 11 (020 7242 7367)
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