Bewitching

By Jeffrey T. Iverson Monday, Apr. 18, 2011
    • Yuji Ono

    Despite their macabre appearance, bocio reflect some of humankind's most common spiritual preoccupations

    For many people, voodoo (or, in west Africa, vodun) calls to mind raving witch doctors and dolls bristling with needles. But given our fascination, and voodoo's lurid position in popular culture, it is surprising that the extraordinary sculpture of voodoo's African birthplace has never been seen in a major exhibition. The omission is more remarkable given the booming interest in African and Oceanic art.

    The anomaly has been rectified by the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris, which is holding Vodun: African Voodoo until Sept. 25. The show brings together some 100 works of statuary, or bocio , born of this 1,000-year-old belief system. The bocio — the word means "empowered (bo) cadaver (cio) " in the Fon language of Benin — come from the collection of Jacques Kerchache and his wife Anne.

    To believers, bocio are mediators with the spirit world, granting supplications and conferring protection, and they are designed to impress. Sacred materials (bones, animal skulls, claws, feathers) are bound to the surface of a wooden figure with cord or cloth, then encrusted with clay, palm oil or sacrificial blood. The finished pieces exude menace, but the Fondation Cartier's challenge is to carry visitors beyond the obvious shock value of bocio and instead "illuminate their visual power and complexity," says Suzanne Preston Blier, professor of fine arts and of African and African-American studies at Harvard.

    Such was collector Kerchache's hope. He fought against the ethnographic approach French museums took to "primitive art," arguing that it should be appreciated for its universal aesthetic value. Under his initiative, the Louvre created the Pavillon des Sessions, honoring the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, in 2000. Kerchache died the following year, unable to realize plans for an exhibition of his cherished bocio , which he began to amass in the 1960s. "Jacques felt charged with a mission to see them exhibited at the highest level — not as exotic curiosities, but with nobility and respect," says Anne Douaoui, his widow.

    A tastefully restrained scenography by designer Enzo Mari furthers this goal. Individually lit bocio (mostly 50 to 150 years old) draw visitors to ponder their disturbing beauty. Letters, photos and archival film from Kerchache's African expeditions provide vodun proper context. But where the exhibit will succeed or fail is in each viewer's visceral reactions.

    The unsettling quality of bocio may lie in the fact that they are created to remedy all-too-common fears: a house catching fire, an incurable disease. They bring to mind the anxieties of our own messy, interior world and pose existential questions. "Why is it that a pig runs across the road just when I'm driving by and wrecks my car?" Blier asks. "It's addressing the difficulties in life which we had never anticipated." We can well imagine the need of vodun's early followers — inhabitants of the aptly named slave coast — for a means of coping with life's injustices.

    The great existential question — death — is addressed in the exhibition's finale. The masterpiece that Kerchache named The Chariot of Death is a double-faced Janus-like figure, holding two crocodile skulls before him by chain-link reins, placed in seeming suspension over a pool of water. It's a phantasmagorical sight, embodying humanity's eternal preoccupation with an afterlife. Just as the Egyptians depicted Ra carrying pharaohs into the realm beyond, or the Greeks showed Charon ferrying the dead across the river Styx, so here is a work both disquieting and hopeful, evoking death and renewal. In dwelling on such themes, followers of vodun — despite the sensationalist associations they have in the popular imagination — are no different from any of us.