THE PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF BATESON’S UNDERSTANDING OF “ART” PROCESS

We turn now to examine Gregory Bateson’s understanding of “the aesthetic,” artistic process, and artistic appreciation in various writings.

A progressive series of developmental changes will be seen. Dates of publication and writing sequence indications are from Rodney Donaldson’s definitive bibliography in A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson 1991a, 314–35).

1925 (with William Bateson) “On Certain Aberrations of the Red-legged Partridges”

Bateson’s first published work (1925), a collaboration with his father, is little more than the record of a possibly influential experience that may help to explain later emphases. It concerns a number of instances of aber-rant plumage in partridges shot in areas of England, Switzerland, and Italy. Gregory, aged twenty-one, sent by his father to examine the Swiss birds, produced a very detailed and systematic description supported by photographs. In this description he shows awareness of symmetry and of systemic influences in the coloration of plumage. The “discussion”

section, perhaps written by William Bateson only, speculates on possible genetic influences, suggesting “wave-motion” as contributing to the banding or barring of feathers. There is no specifically aesthetic content.

1932b (written 1930) “ Social Structure of the Iatmul People of the Sepik River”

This is the text of Gregory Bateson’s Masters thesis, published in the journal Oceania, the record of his first anthropological expedition to the tribal communities on the Sepik River in New Guinea. He found the Iatmul people to have a particularly “high” culture and comments that

“almost everything is ornamented.” This is the first evidence of interest in “decorative art”: There is “richness of artistic production,” “grotesque fancy,” “with few exceptions every object made by the Iatmul is orna-mented,” possibly because useful objects were frequently given as ostentatious ceremonial gifts. Some of the “art,” Bateson notes, has reference to totemic ancestors so he was already aware of the contex-tual nature of artistic practice. However, in his later recollection of Sepik culture (notably in “Arts of the South Seas” [1946c] below), he shows a much more sophisticated understanding of the importance of artistic process.

1936a Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View

Gregory Bateson’s first book, the product of his years of anthropological study in New Guinea, contains little significant reference to art, aesthetic process, or natural beauty. There are descriptions of ceremonial dress, masks, buildings, and dances but these are analyzed in terms of ritual and social function only. The 1958 epilogue to the second edition

re-interprets much of the material in terms of cybernetics but, again, there is no overt emphasis on the aesthetic. Lipset (1982, 140) notes, however, some “aesthetic inclinations” that “broadened [Bateson’s] approach” to Iatmul society. In the opening paragraphs of the book Bateson notes the contrast between artistic and scientific approaches to writing accounts of societies. He contrasts the functional school of Radcliffe-Brown and Mali-nowski with the work of travelers such as Charles Doughty and the

“splendid representations of our own culture in such novels as those of Jane Austen and John Galsworthy.” Bateson’s own desire to describe the Iatmul society completely and in detail included, significantly, his aware-ness of the importance of ethos: the emotional tone of the society and the feelings of people that underlie this.

1942a (With Margaret Mead) Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis Mead and Bateson, newly married, spent most of the time between 1936 and 1939 in the study of indigenous societies in Bali. The first period was spent in the mountain village of Bayung Gedé followed in late 1937 by a stay in the lowland village of Batoean, where a commu-nity of Brahman and casteless artists, primarily painters, lived. In this latter period of study they commissioned and purchased a collection of over twelve hundred paintings (Geertz 1995, 1). The product of the whole period of study included more than twenty-five thousand still photographs, twenty-two thousand feet of film, and eleven hundred carv-ings of “small kitchen gods.”

The choice of such an innovative method reflects three concerns.

The first was a very real prioritizing of the visual: their conviction was that it is seeing behavior, seeing what people actually do that can cross cultural boundaries and result in learning. Their second concern was linked to this. They were anxious to avoid the distortions inevitable when attempting to translate knowledge of the culture into Western terms by means of language. Believing that it is “types of behavior” that embody the abstraction that we call “culture,” Bateson and Mead were attempting to get their understanding across the barrier of cultural boundaries by using an almost entirely pictorial method. The third reason for adoption of the photographic method was that they wished to obviate any change of perspective and cultural understanding that might be acquired by themselves as observers in the course of fieldwork. The photographs themselves would be the field notes. Mead had written in their funding application to the Social Science Research Council: “The camera will neither be naive at the start nor experienced at the end of the research.”

The photographs were not intended to be aesthetic, though many are beautiful (Sullivan, 1999, 4,16).

Balinese Character was published in 1942. It contains, carefully and systematically selected, one hundred full-page plates containing a total of 759 photographs, all of Balinese people exhibiting “behavior.”

Though there is a separate description of Balinese culture (by Mead) and a further “Ethnographic Note,” the photographs (taken by Bateson) are accompanied only by his brief factual notes.

The large collection of paintings by native artists made by Bateson and Mead at this time shows an amalgam of traditional Balinese styles and Western influence. Mead (1995 [1972], 229) noted that many of the resi-dent Europeans were artists, dancers, or musicians. She claims that these people were interacting with the Balinese artists, introducing new mate-rials and themes, encouraging and criticizing the native artists and, thus, raising standards of execution and appreciation. These Western painters had been resident in Bali for some years. While encouraging the native painters to produce work for sale to tourists and other visitors to Bali, they had taught occidental techniques and ideas of design to them.

This pictorial emphasis in their methods of research suggests that Bateson and Mead were already aware that culture could be communi-cated more successfully by means of artistic process than in language, even when the form of the art product is in transition. The pictures and other artworks may have revealed and explained aspects of the Balinese culture to Mead and Bateson themselves. However, it seems Bateson and Mead attached little importance to the collection because all but one of these twelve hundred paintings remained in their packaging for many years and there is no record of either Gregory or Margaret producing work specifically related to the collection. Hildred Geertz (1995, viii) comments that when Margaret Mead first showed the paintings to her in 1972 they were still packed in their original wrappings: copies of the London Times from April, 1938. The intervention of World War II and the almost simultaneous birth of their daughter Mary Catherine may well account for the long-term shelving of their intentions for these paint-ings. Mead (1995, 235) lists the paintings with other “new kinds of samples” made available by the richness and diversity of Balinese culture.

They attended twenty birth feasts, experienced and recorded the entry of little girls into trance states on fifteen occasions, collected six hundred carvings of kitchen gods from one village to compare with a similar collection from another village. They purchased paintings by a hundred Balinese painters including forty examples of one artist’s depictions of his own dreams.

One painting that did not remain in its packaging was given by Gregory to his mother and recovered by him after her death. This painting, taken from his wall, was the example he presented to the 1967 conference on “Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art,” (2000, 128–56) discussed in chapter 5.

1944d “Form and Function of the Dance in Bali”

In “Form and Function of the Dance in Bali,” which Bateson coauthored with Claire Holt in 1944 (though the observations must have been made before the outbreak of war in 1939), the analytical emphasis is on the relationship of the “peculiar character of the dance to the character of the people concerned and to the whole pattern of their culture.” The material is almost entirely descriptive, the dances are regarded as cultural expression, to be compared and contrasted with the dances of other cultures. The author’s interest is in skills (the dancers are trained from early childhood), in motive and purposes (many dances are performed as offerings to the gods), and in style (there is striking angu-larity in the motions and gestures, great precision in performance).

Although it is noted that these characteristics are common to Balinese pictorial and plastic arts also, there is no suggestion that the dance is a significant art form; it is simply described as behavior expressing cultural characteristics.

1946c “Arts of the South Seas”

This article is a review of an exhibition, Arts of the South Seas, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In terms of aesthetic and artistic awareness, it is very different from any previous Bateson statement. There is a new emphasis on the importance of aesthetic process for enabling cross-cultural understanding and a new depth of analysis.

The work in Bali in the late 1930s appears to have convinced Bateson and Mead that the transmission of understanding of one culture to members of a different one is enhanced by pictorial illustration of behavior. They had, however, related this only to the academic and scien-tific project of anthropological study. Nevertheless, Bateson had benefited from the years of working with Mead both in Bali and in America during much of the war. Mead’s remarks in Blackberry Winter (1995, 209, 224) show that, from her perspective, when they first met, Bateson had been “floundering methodologically” and by the time they reached Bali, both in their early thirties, Mead was feeling that she had

already completed a lifetime of work but Gregory felt that his life’s work still lay ahead.

As noted in chapter 1, between the years in Bali and 1946 Gregory Bateson engaged in cultural studies (including film analysis), the training of military personnel, propaganda, and some active war service in Ceylon, India, Burma, and China. This had, most importantly, been followed by the Macy Conference on “Cerebral Inhibition” with its atten-dant introduction to the ideas of cybernetics, the second conference on

“Teleological Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems,” and, during the period of this exhibition, the third on “Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems.” The massive and increasing tensions between American and European cultures must have made Bateson aware of the potential results of failure to understand other peoples. Not least, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the prospect of an arms race with the USSR must have made him aware, for the first time, that our whole civilization and possibly the future of our species were under threat.

The Arts of the South Seas exhibition consisted of art objects collected by anthropologists and others from North Queensland, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, New Guinea (the Fly and Sepik river regions), New Britain and New Ireland, the Solomon and Admiralty Islands, Polynesia, and Micronesia. There was also some Maori material and several exhibits from Easter Island.

Bateson saw the necessary criteria for the exhibition’s success to be (1) whether the spectator could know what the art objects were, (2) whether “some feeling for the emotion” invested by the makers was conveyed, and (3) whether the totality of the exhibition was successful in conveying a “whole aesthetic experience” that would be consonant with

“what, if anything, the exhibit says.” Bateson asks if the exhibition “makes sense,” which, he suggests, is about coherence in such aspects as sequence and lighting that could enable “meaning” to be transmitted. He recog-nized that the exhibition as a whole had “form”: in fact, a structure of climax. Containing many works of art, it was a work of art itself. Bateson’s emphasis on coherence is interesting and I expected to find further devel-opment of this theme in his later consideration of aesthetic matters. In fact, I have found no further mention of coherence though, clearly, the term is closely linked to other key themes that he was later to develop:

integration, relatedness, context, nonduality, and monistic unity.

The art, claimed Bateson, depicted the ethos of each culture. Indi-vidual exhibits showed particular characteristics, such as the “assertive art” of the Sepik River peoples. Here Bateson had a rich store of personal

knowledge and experience to utilize. Now seeing what he had previously called “decoration” as real art, he found “an immanent totemism,” which conveyed the integration, through time, of the people and their myth-ical ancestors: the “crocodiles, weevils, and ancestors with noble noses are the people who made them.” Meaning is transmitted because there is identification of totemic creatures with the human artist and the admirer of the art. Such meaning seems to emerge from the integration of the present life of the people with their historic or mythical past. He wrote: “The people will state this even more clearly than the Americans can tell you what their own eagle stands for. They will say that the bird is

‘Our warfare. Our anger.’” This is significant as the first clear example of Bateson’s later emphasis on the integrative and engaging functions of artistic process. This art, he wrote, depicts the tribal community process, its reliance on genealogy: The names of living persons are the names of the art objects. “The positive assertion, which equates the self with a tradi-tional ego ideal, is the basis of the art.” None of this had occurred to him when writing Naven. Bateson also saw new importance in the fact that for the Sepik River people the art, always produced by men, is kept and used within the ceremonial house, which is itself thought of as feminine. He is recognizing here a cybernetic nesting of systems, though he is not yet calling these systems “mental.”

Bateson’s developing aesthetic awareness revealed to him the impor-tance of the sequencing of experiences as the viewer passed through the exhibition. There was a progression, assisted by “vistas,” through which could be seen earlier and later stages of the exhibition, a form of cross-referencing that enabled the viewer to experience the whole sequence as a work of art itself. In a later letter (1980h) Bateson, remembering the exhibits representing cultures ranging from New Guinea to Polynesia, wrote: “There are continual cross-echoes. It is as if a vocabulary of artistic expression had been scattered over the area, and each people had built up out of this vocabulary their own syntax and their own set of things that they wanted to say.” He compared this experience to listening to a symphony, at one level of description simply a sequence of single musical sounds; at another an integrated formal experience: We “may be utterly unable to define the emotional content of these themes, still less to say . . . how . . . a given theme may gain special value . . . from its position in the sequence. . . . It is . . . this order of artistic appropriateness that makes for greatness.”

Bateson saw the exhibition as being integrated by a theme that the organizers had not recognized. This theme, he claimed, was the stages of the human reproductive process: bodily awareness, phallicism, virility,

“a period of crystalline clarity undistorted by sexual fantasy” (perhaps the experience of pregnancy?), and then parturition. Here is further evidence of Bateson’s growing awareness of the participative nature of aesthetic experience. He claims that all spectators of works of art “partic-ipate . . . in a climax form which has spatial and temporal unity, and which owes its value to rhythms inherent in the human body.” Though this understanding was questioned by the exhibition organizer, Rene d’Harnoncourt, Bateson suggests that d’Harnoncourt had, consciously or otherwise, “proposed a hypothesis about the psychological place of artistic emphases and conventions in human life”; that the art styles of the various peoples have a real subconscious reference to the physiological stages he saw in the exhibition and to the human reproductive sequence.

Possibly as a result of his recently acquired cybernetic perspective, Bateson was seeing the totality of the exhibition as a process. The form was climactic, related to human bodily rhythms and, thus, “makes sense.” It was felt, he said, as unity. This is another example of Bateson finding explanatory biological metaphors for complex processes; Margaret Mead had, at their first meeting, been impressed by his ability to move easily from one science to another, choosing analogies freely from biology, physics, and even geology when discussing problems (Mead, 1995, 209).

In his final paragraph, Bateson suggests that this exhibition has proposed “a new field of collaborative work” between “anthropological knowledge” and “artistic sensitivity,” which “might lead to some advance in our understanding of the tangled emotional themes expressed in man’s diverse artistic conventions.” We should note that, in the 1940s, it was not only Gregory Bateson who was, newly, seeing indigenous art as worthy of the aesthetic attention of westerners. The postwar period saw a general emergence of openness to valuing the artistic products of other cultures on their own terms. Nevertheless, for Bateson, this exhibition and the experience of analyzing it, was a significant step toward his even-tual recognition of artistic engagement as necessary to finding the grace that may enable ecological survival.

1949a “Bali: The Value System of a Steady State”

Bateson was displaying a more developed interest in the art forms them-selves by the time he produced “Bali: the Value System of a Steady State.”

He notes a pervasive lack of climax in Balinese music and other arts.

There is onward movement, sequence, and balance but, as in much of Balinese social life, there are no climaxes; any tendency toward an emotional peak is turned aside or neutralized in some traditional and

socially endorsed way. Much time is spent on artistic activities, mainly devoted to ritual or religious purposes. While some artistic activity receives a minimal economic reward, Bateson sees the main motivation as the activity of performance and involvement in community process.

Similarly, much effort is spent on preparing temple offerings, but there is no reward expected from the God. Bateson writes “Instead of deferred purpose there is an immediate and immanent satisfaction in performing beautifully, with everybody else, that which it is correct to perform in each particular context.” He writes, “it seems that the Balinese extend to

Similarly, much effort is spent on preparing temple offerings, but there is no reward expected from the God. Bateson writes “Instead of deferred purpose there is an immediate and immanent satisfaction in performing beautifully, with everybody else, that which it is correct to perform in each particular context.” He writes, “it seems that the Balinese extend to