David Beckham is only part of the modern art movement
PAUL JOHNSON
The England football captain, David Beckham, has got himself into hot water with the tabloids by adopting a weird haircut. `So, Mr Beckham,' asks one newspaper, 'should an England captain really look like a cross between a punk and a Red Indian scalphunter?' I do not recoil from this kind of selfadornment with horror, as many of my agegroup do. I recognise it as a form of art, and a very ancient form. It is likely that body art was the earliest form of art practised by the human race. Long before 30,000 BC, when we get the first paintings in caves, human beings were adorning their persons with paint and heightening the effect with feathers.
The evidence for such art has disappeared along with the bodies, but the practice survives in many societies. For something like 40,000 years, Australian Aboriginals have used body art, including painting, tattooing and scarification. Designs covered the chest, arms, shoulders, back and legs down to the knee. The forehead was also a design area. I use the past tense, though this form of art is still sometimes practised. It served two purposes. First, enhancement of attractions. A man or woman was a walking art gallery, and the art was a form of wealth as well as an expression of beauty. Second, scarring or tattooing was used to record events such as birth, marriage, the death of a wife, husband, parent or child, and other biographical landmarks. Thus the Aboriginal, especially a man, was a walking epitome of his career, just as Turkish grandees, until the sumptuary reforms of the 1840s, wore carefully designed clothes that advertised the curriculum vitae of each, for all to admire.
In many parts of Africa body art is still going strong, though the self-consciously 'modern' authorities do not like it. Among the Fulani of Senegal, young men dressed for dances. use body paint designed to display clear eyes, white teeth, huge smiles and straight noses, as well as beautifully formed limbs. As a result, these men, when painted, look like those attending a transvestite ball in San Francisco, though their adornments and clothes are emphatically masculine. In the zone between the deserts and the tropical rainforest, body art is particularly elaborate, though it is now often concealed under clothing. Around the Gongola River in Nigeria, the scarification practised by women to enhance their appearance amounts to a form of body sculpture. It involves making scores, some times hundreds, of tiny wounds in the skin and just under it, which heal to produce raised lumps of identical size and shape. They are in multiple lines, patterns and dots forming circles, triangles, pyramids and arrow-head shapes, and they cover thighs, arms, the entire area between the breasts and the pubic region (though not the breasts themselves), as well as the whole of the back and buttocks, with a special collar round the neck. A woman may well have a thousand such scars. The artwork begins at age five, and continues at intervals up to marriage. The higher-born the woman, the more elaborate forms this body art takes; for here again art is wealth.
Probably the most beautiful form of body art in history was practised by the plains Indians of North America, and it seems to me a pity that the coming of our civilisation — and, still more, modern political correctness — has virtually abolished it. There was fantastical use of feathers, as well as paint, and much of the work conveyed biographical information about battles and personal acts of heroism. The more successful the warrior, and the richer he became in consequence, the more he was adorned; so it would have seemed natural to a Sioux or Apache chief that an England football captain, to mark his rise to celebrity, should adorn himself in some distinctive fashion. If an Indian woman had taken part in battles and achieved distinction, she also advertised the fact in her personal appearance.
Then what is ridiculous in this form of art? Sir Joshua Reynolds, in one of his famous 'Discourses on Art' delivered at the Royal Academy, administered a stinging rebuke to those who laughed at non-Western forms of art, especially the body art of the Indians. He said:
If a European, when he has cut off his beard or put false hair on his head, or bound up his own natural hair in regular hard knots, as unlike nature as he can possibly make it: and after having rendered them immovable by the help of the fat of hogs, has covered the whole with flour, laid on by a machine with the utmost regularity; if when thus attired he issues forth, and meets a Cherokee Indian, who has bestowed as much time on his toilet, and laid on with equal care and attention his yellow and red ochre on particular parts of his forehead and cheeks, as he judges most becoming: whoever of these two despises the other for this attention to the fashions of his country, whichever first feels himself provoked to laugh, is the barbarian.
William Hazlitt, England's first serious art critic, quoted this passage with glee in his fine essay 'On Vulgarity and Affectation' (1821), and it is worth repeating at a time when efforts are being made to persuade or even compel archaic societies to abandon delightful and bizarre forms of body art, practised for millennia.
I think that we should apply the same kind of tolerance to our own emerging or reemerging body arts. One of the characteristics of the 20th century was its return to primitivism in art, beginning with Gauguin and continuing through the whole of the modern art movement. In the second half of the century the affluent young of the West joined the primitivist cause. Men and women took to tattooing, hitherto confined to sailors and navvies, and it is now common to find girls of gentle birth and with university degrees paying for a tattoo on their shoulder or arm, or in more intimate places. There is a certain amount of mutilation, or scarification, with rings attached to almost any part of the body, in a way I personally find horrible but for which parallels can be found in many societies. Haircuts and hairdos are spectacular, and often repellent, as they were in high society in the age of Marie Antoinette. Whether we like it or not, these are forms of art.
They are part of a much wider trend to make human beings look better, healthier, more beautiful and more striking. We diet, we jog, we exercise, we belong to health clubs which also specialise in aids to beauty. Women, if they can afford it, now undergo cosmetic surgery, not once but repeatedly, and of an ever-growing elaboration. They have it done to bottoms and breasts, arms and shoulders, as well as faces. In the last quarter-century there has been an explosion of science in the cosmetics industry, which enables women (and some men too) to transform their appearance if they are willing to take enough time and trouble, and spend enough money. The results show. There are now countless people who look younger than their age, and more handsome and beautiful — or distinctive — than nature made them. The truth is, we are living in a new age of body art, which seems set to continue and intensify. The England football captain is only one humble foot-soldier in the marching, growing army of those trying to make themselves into personal masterpieces.
Previous page
