The context and the perception of reality between the two cultures and eras are different. Yet what brings them close is the perception of the un-real, that is of the not-visible dimensions within the everyday experience. In the Byzantine case, it was called the presence of God, or the imminent grace, in the indigenous art, it is the psyche of the place, the great spirit that suffuses the real with its own numinous presence.
In both cases, artists formulated diverse answers in various periods whose similarities we can detect and to a degree conceptualise today. The answers were always based on how the empirical form can be reduced to its archetypal idea, to an ultimate line, form or symbol, which would become the common link between the community or the tribe, the common denominator or the dreaming for the identity of the individual.
Indeed, we suggest that the artistic representation of the sacred both in the liturgical-sacramental art of Byzantium and the ecological continuum of Aboriginal art is based on what might be called homologies of abstraction. The Byzantine artist, after having being immersed in the hidden void of the divine, abstracted from all living forms and their material dimensions, something can could not be found within them materially: the sacred or sanctity, expressed through the extreme stylization of the body or the emphatical use of the most artificial colour in nature, the gold of paradise.
A mosaic from the 11th-century Byzantine monastery of Daphni, north-west of central Athens, in Greece Source: Wikipedia
In the indigenous art, what prevails is also the abstracted form, the depiction of shape but not of characteristics, against the background of the colours of the earth, brown, desert red, solar yellow, ochre and black (some of these colours also appear in Byzantine art). The indigenous artist relocates the divine space into the specificity of the given place, where all colours foreground the very energy of hidden presences, benevolent or otherwise and the painting becomes a map which the viewer must read in order to re-create the myth and its narrative.
Homologies of abstraction occur in highly complex cultural schemes, when art does not function as the photographic reflection of the real but as its skeletal x-ray, depicting the prototypal structures of its form. In Byzantine art, the hidden symmetries under the surface are the most important aspects of its special perception of vision. The Byzantine artist was the inheritor of the Greco-Roman anthropocentric representational tradition and, despite the famous iconoclastic dispute, it was almost impossible to reject the visual languages of Athens and Rome (although in the original form in Justinian’s era Hagia Sophia was almost devoid of all anthropomorphic representation.)
Indigenous art, like the Byzantine, is diverse and polymorphous. However, most of its patterns, signs, visual qualities of colours, also attempt in presenting something which is contained but is not seen within the real and the experienced. Like in the Byzantine art, they didn’t try to reproduce reality but to extract its underlying symbolic patterns as if the painter is located within the painting itself and invited viewers to enter the painting themselves.
The Byzantines employed something analogous and was called reverse perspective: the viewer and the artist are within the painting itself, they look at the painted forms from the within the painted surface, not from an external position as it happened with perspective after the Italian renaissance. What interested them is the structure of composition and the ordering of things and therefore of experiences indicated. In its most artistic perception, it had to do with the way that artists use optics and visual geometry in order to make the viewer see internally the ‘spirit’ of the scene depicted: the spirit of the ancestor or the totemic animal, or the spirit of God or of the saint.
Both indigenous and Byzantine art structured their artistic iconographies around such homologies of abstraction. Raymattja, a Yolngu teacher, wrote that “The symbolism behind the designs can be seen by someone who knows, to be in all the little details and shapes and colours of the work of art. The deepest knowledge is abstract … it cannot be put into words. (in Raymattja, ‘Talk to Language Learners at the Museum, 26. 3. 90’, in Yirrkala Museum Catalogue, Buku Larrnggay Arts, Yirrkala, 1990, no page).
Such abstraction prevails in the Byzantine iconography in its attempt to avoid ‘idolatry’ which theologically means the autonomisation of the created image. As John of Damascus says: ‘Again, visible things are images of invisible and intangible things, on which they throw a faint light. Holy Scripture clothes in figure God and the angels, and the same holy man (Blessed Dionysius) explains why. When sensible things sufficiently render what is beyond sense, and give a form to what is intangible, a medium would be reckoned imperfect according to our standard, if it did not fully represent material vision, or if it required effort of mind. (St. John Damascene On Holy Images, trans. by Mary H. Allies (London, Thomas Baker, 1898), p. 13).
Both artistic traditions avoid the central Aristotelian effect of mimetic representation: empathy. They impart their meaning as intellectual affect, especially symbolic re-enactment of a cosmic drama. The creation of the world in the Australian case, the sacrifice of the son of god in the Byzantine one. Both arts are sacramental, as they make the viewer a link of a grand drama of redemption and liberation, or participation and union. Both have an irregular understanding of space and form because of the impact of the divine proximity: condensed, distorted and compressed. The Byzantine mountains of the Paleologean period prefiguring cubism, the bark paintings from central Australia the abstract expressionism of parallel lines of the New York School.
We need fresh approaches in order to understand the commonalities of the human mind beyond the tyranny of distance the difference in historical development; we can then extend these commonalities to their social, political and cultural interactions in everyday life today. Humans have a common destiny even if they think that they are different. And despite all their differences, they think and express their thoughts and their existence in homologous ways.
University of Sydney's Professor, Vrasidas Karalis Source: Supplied
* Vrasidas KARALIS is the professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies at the University of Sydney. He has published extensively on Byzantine historiography, Greek political life, Greek Cinema, European cinema, the work of Patrick White and contemporary political philosophy. He has edited volumes on modern European political philosophy, especially on Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis. His publications include, Recollections of Mr. Manoly Lascaris (2007), A History of Greek Cinema (2012), The Demons of Athens (2014), Reflections on Presence (2916) and Realism in Post-War Greek Cinema (2016)
