Worship by Ken and Kate Baynes (review)

364 Books single Trobriand shield ; several general essays on art and culture, and some very interesting accounts of indigenous aesthetic judgements in specific cultures. But while it provides interesting reading, the book suffersgreatly from a lack of firm editorial direction. It covers too many different areas without the benefit of an attempt at overview or synthesis. The ‘Introduction ’, which might have discussed the relative advantages and shortcomings of the various approaches or have commented specifically on the development of scholarship in the area as a whole, sidesteps these issues (which are absolutely begged by the twenty-four essays) and wastes itself on skeletal summaries of the various texts, almost entirely without synthesis. The individual texts are further introduced, usually by two paragraphs: the first still another disappointing summary of the text to follow, the second (and usually more lengthy), a somewhat irrelevant biographical sketch of the author. As a result. the book is little more than a bound collection of reprints from learned journals. Since specialists in the field will already be familiar with most of the texts and such a book must be addressed largely to students and the general public, the ‘neutral’ editing severely limits its usefulness . Further, some of the texts (cf., those by Devereux, Mead. Levi-Strauss and Kavolis), although intrinsically of great interest, have only a tangential relationship to primitive art per sr and seem inappropriate in so specialized a book. David Stout has observed (p. 31) that writers in various disciplines ‘have continued to proffer interpretations of primitive art, most of them inaccurate and some of them ridiculously ethnocentric . . .’. This description, unfortunately, suits some of the essays in this collection. Attempts are made to define such terms as Art, Creative Process, and other such magnificent abstractions, yet many of these attempts, even as regards basic assumptions, are strangely naive. After an involved discussion of artistic creativity, Warncr Muensterberger , for example (p. lo), concludes that ‘the strangely fascinating heathen images of Rurutu or Bougainville or the Ba-Songe are perhaps typical and expressive works of art of the respective peoples in just the same way as the Greek spirit, or even the Greek ideal of beauty, speaks to us through the Venus of Milo. . .’. The most germane essays in the book seem to be those which stress analyses of art and aesthetics within their original contexts (cf. the studies of Child and Siroto, Forge, Crowley, Fernandez, Thompson, and Davenport)and which seem best to avoid many of the ethnocentric cliches so common in the earlier literature on primitive art. But the basic fault of this book lies not so much in the individual essays (which after all were written for other contexts) as in its conception: it neither gives a sufficiently comprehensive survey of the whole field nor penetrates any single aspect in enough depth to warrant its title. Worship. Ken and Kate Baynes. Lund Humphries, London, 1971. 96 pp., illus. f2.50. Reviewed by: Walter Gaudnek” Worship is the third book in the Arts and Society series initiated by the Welsh Arts Council. It aims at creating a greater insight into the relationship between art, life and religion among the general public and to involve analyses at many different levels. As an ultimate goal it seeks to contribute to an effective introductory understanding of the social function of art. To deal with the subject of the relationship between art and religion throughout the social history of man and to attempt to explore the enormous richness of this topic for the benefit of art’s role in the world today is quite a laudable undertaking . Therefore, the people who made this effort possible are to be congratulated. The established international modern art scene of the Western world has long pretended that a deep involvement of contemporary man with religion no longer exists. In the U.S.A., for example, the art establishment has taken almost no notice at all of the fact that highly charged and intense religious movements are spreading on the college campuses throughout the entire country. Neither have the authors of this book. The authors, unfortunately, have come up with a truly bad book. The poor balance between text and illustrations irritates...