Der Mond als Schuh: Zeichnungen der San The lunation as Shoe: Drawings of the San edited by the agency of Miklos Szalay Zurich: Scheidegger and Spiess.

Der Mond als Schuh: Zeichnungen der San

The lunation as Shoe: Drawings of the San edited by the agency of Miklos Szalay Zurich: Scheidegger and Spiess, 2002309 pp parallel German/English sentence 3 maps, 80 b/w illustrations, 229 colour plates, 34 colour illustrations. 6500 [euro]

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

The work includes articles by well-known authors upon San ethnography, all of whom have used the material deduceed by Bleek and Lloyd to enable stone 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 hundred Some of this material has implications for our use of the interpretative frameworks provided according to the "trance hyopothesis" model originating with David Lewis Williams's research onward 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 personality in the rock art. unless in no instance in the essays in this tome is a direct connection made between the ethnographies aggregateed by Bleek and Lloyd and the iconography of San defence art. Most of them retread old-fashioned ground, with very little fresh being added to the scholarship in succession Southern African rock art or San ethnology.

That the essays in this work do not address, even briefly, the drawings and watercolors by dint of Dia!kwain, /Han#kasso, !Nanni, Tamrne, /Uma, and Da is therefore not particularly surprising. These drawings and paintings made upon paper, as both Miklos Szalay and Janette Deacon point abroad are different from the stone art for which the /Xam and !Xun were famous. The pencil drawings and watercolor paintings were made by the agency of /Xam adults and / Xun children, none of whom appears to have been in any way accomplished in any "traditional" media hindrance alone these Western "art" media. It is curious that nobody here noted the contrast between the formal stylizations in the drawings and paintings from the late-nineteenth century San artists patronized on Bleek and Lloyd and the observational naturalism of the real protection art. In addition, the distinct difference in name between the drawn copies of San refuge art images and the watercolors according to the named San artists goe 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 the pair Bleek and Lloyd's writings and in the notations at the authors of the main division the drawings are treated as indexical for words, for things that are of ethnographic interest. one of the images are maps, spatial renderings conceptually completely outside of San painting traditions. The animal imagery by way of Dia!kwain and /Han#kasso has a vague relationship to the images of animals from the refuge shelters of the Drakensberg, further it is stylistically naive. This is uniform more the case with the works according to !Nanni, Tamme, /Uma, and Da, which, however ethnographically and iconographically interesting they may be, remain children's drawings. It appears 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 a certain number of of its lack of coherence. Each image is currented with a caption that identifies its author, date, size, and medium. onward each drawing, Bleek or Lloyd has written notes in / Xam (or / Xun) and English, with numbers identifying the separate components of the image. These have been translated (by Megan Biesele) from the/Xam (or /Xun) into English and German. upon exhibition, such images are assumed, like all "art" and in spite of labels and topics to be able to communicate visually, without textual intervention, and they cessationed up in the book in exactly the same bind. thus the ethnography (text) tells us who the artists were, in what manner they came to make works forward paper, and how the works were discovered again, still not how to make feeling 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 ne for the images, and the expiration products.