Binding in the Pacific: between loops and knots

Oceania, March, 1999 by Susanne Kuchler

Pacific artworks are well known for their capacity to simultaneously contain and elicit all prior and future works (cf. Wagner 1987; Strathern 1991). As 'multiples,' artworks of this kind counterpoise the western assumption of the unique object and thus engage the conceptual frame of modernism in ways that enable us to overcome the latent opposition of western and non-western art still rampant in anthropological studies of art (cf. Gell 1998). Like Mondrian's grids, such artworks as New Ireland malanggan or Trobriand canoe-prows appear to originate from the figural, visualised as a graphic as well as a technical schema which also serves as the discursive element in art that otherwise resists exegesis (Summers 1989). This paper sets out to investigate the figural in the art of the Pacific, as it is exemplified by the design structure and 'cross-hatching' of Australian Aboriginal barkpaintings (cf. Morphy 1991), by the looped binding of netbags (MacKenzie 1991) and by my own account of the malanggan image to which I will return in this paper (cf. Kuchler 1987, 1988; Kuchler and Melion 1991).

By revealing the figural in Pacific artworks to be a material trace of alternative techniques of binding, that is of knotting and looping, I hope to shed a new perspective on what became known as the 'epidemiology' of cultural representations (Sperber 1985; Gell 1993). Following previous uses of the epidemiological model, the question driving this paper is what enables cultural representations to catch on in certain social and cultural situations and not in others. At present, we have two solutions to such a question: Sperber (1985) argued for susceptibility towards representations to be grounded in the affinity between cognitive processes governing representations and cognitive processes sustaining culture. Gell (1993), conversely, saw susceptibility to be embedded in the biographical and relational space within which technical virtuosity is selectively appropriated. Binding, in its continuous and yet varied articulation across the Pacific, serves as a perfect example to both re-examine these positions and to point to a possible resolution to the conflicting emphasis on the cognitive versus the social in the validation of cultural representations. This is because binding is not part of an esoteric knowledge technology, but is profoundly embedded in the mundane and thus habituated space within which knowledge is externalised; in addition to its embeddedness in the mundane, binding is uniquely bringing to bear upon material affective, personal, as well as mathematical and thus cognitive attitudes and concepts which amplify ways of thinking. Rather than assuming that the figurative expresses ideas which are already existing, could it be that its transmission has a dynamic which creates a lasting difference in culture and society?

RETHINKING 'TEMPLATES'

It has become common practice to describe the figural element of art in the Pacific with the term 'template' (cf. Morphy 1991; Scoditti 1990). 'Templates' are taken to capture the technical and material means which secure the generativity and reproductivity of artworks and to involve geometric and mathematical specifications of some kind, such as the graphic layout and geometric design of 'fore- and 'back-ground' in Australian Aboriginal barkpainting, or the mathematically precise refiguration of the body in Kula canoe-prows. The problem with the term template is that it is drawn from mechanical modes of reproduction, notably the printing press and as such embraces notions of linear, homogeneous, separate and local frames of space-time symptomatic of Newtonian physics. The mechanistic world-view, however, is at odds with the 'organic' description of space-time which appears adequate in capturing Melanesian conceptions of events as inseparable, observer contingent and process dependent, and as framed by non-linear, heterogeneous, multi-dimensional space-times (cf. Munn 1986; Strathern 1990).

Indeed, such an 'organic' view of the universe is not just an adequate description of Pacific concepts of space-time, but given validity in the West with the advent of Einstein's relativity theory. Einstein's world broke up Newton's universe of absolute space and time into a multitude of space-time frames each tied to a particular observer, who therefore, not only has a different clock, but a different map. Quantum theory, moreover, demanded that we stop seeing things as separate solid objects with definite locations in space and time. Instead, they are delocalised, indefinite, mutually entangled entities that evolve like organisms (cf. Ho 1998, 44; Barrow 1992; Wassmann 1994).

The inadequacy, and should we say 'datedness', of the term template and thus of existing descriptions of the figural in art in terms of a mechanistic description thus hardly needs further elaboration. It suggests that the formal properties of artworks are fixed by a technical code which is learned as an aspect of esoteric knowledge, and implies in its mechanical description an ego-centric and anthropomorphic spatial cognition that is at odds with its conception in culture (cf. Wassmann 1994). Yet what term, and what set of assumptions, could replace this obviously misleading term? This question was raised also by the evolving New Genetics which found itself unable to comprehend the structure of DNA as a dynamic and evolving, 'organic' system as long as it relied on the notion of template as descriptive vocabulary. In our search for a new model, we may consider following New Genetics which recently began to look towards the science of topology, a branch of mathematics which developed as computing allowed for the visualisation of the behaviour of non-linear, organic space-time. The conceptual key to topology is the geometric constancy of objects under deformation which topology sees best exemplified by the behaviour of the knot.