A PICTORIAL DEVICE:
THE DYNAMIC ACTION OF WATER IN A FEW DEPICTIONS OF RAIN ANIMALS
Renaud Ego

Introduction

In the Brandberg, in Namibia, some paintings depicting rain animals were made on walls which are periodically bathed by rainwater. Can this positioning, in the path of the flow of rainwater, and the resulting deterioration of the images be considered accidental?

I would like to present a series of observations on some paintings depicting rain animals in the Brandberg, taking into account the role that water-flow may play in them. Not having had the opportunity to carry out a methodical field-study, in this article I shall merely put forward a few hypotheses on the basis of a restricted corpus of works. These remarks, like these hypotheses, follow the approach that I adopted in "San: Art rupestre d'Afrique australe" (Ego 2000), and originate in substantially the same view of a phenomenology whose genesis I would like to present briefly.

The analysis of San rock art largely originates in cultural anthropology founded on the anaysis of the systems of thought and the ways of life of the descendants of the creators of the paintings. In this regard, the corpus of accounts and myths collected by Wilhelm Bleek at the end of the 19th century plays a predominant role, as do the anthropological studies carried out throughout the last century among the Kalahari San. It is essentially in the double mirror provided by the testimony of a few descendants of the creators of the paintings, and by the observation of societies which may be culturally similar to theirs that analysis of San rock art has been carried out, as if this detour was the best access route. This, for example, is what feeds David Lewis-Williams' approach. Being opposed to the empiricism which, in his opinion, predominated for a long time and which "looking only at the 'obvious' surface, sees a principally narrative art", he set out to seek "the cultural content of the art [...], the shared, transcending beliefs and values on which individual artists drew and which made their
handiwork intelligible to the entire community" (Lewis-Williams 1983,6).

It would be absurd to deny that this detour has been fruitful - there are too many publications that display its richness and, doubtless, help to understand better certain motifs in San art. But nevertheless this approach remains a look in a mirror: the works are always considered secondary, like the passive illustrations of a culture. Can one postulate in this way that they are exactly appropriate to the culture that bears them? Is one not running the risk of turning them into the redundant manifestations of other forms of cultural activity? In this contextual approach, rock art is rarely seen as a possibly autonomous phenomenon, and as the territory where its own language is forged. In this way, the question of the difference that constitutes a visual language is relegated to the background. It still needs to be posed, and that is precisely what is undertaken by a phenomenology of the art.

An approach of this kind first necessitates a return to the walls, the places where the "works" occur (indeed, returning to the things themselves and describing them was Husserl's first instruction in phenomenology). Then it applies itself to analysing what makes the art an act, and first and foremost the act of being "worked". What are its techniques, its materials, its tools, how does it occupy the wall space, how does it interact with its relief, etc, what is the internal organisation of its figures, what a composition can one see? In short, everything that makes a painting or an engraving into an event and an advent in which the singular language of a "work" is expressed and devised. The work of art works through the work put into its production.

Its meaning is fully incorporated into its form. As Bachelard proposed, at the start of his "Poétique de l'espace" in which he began the study of the images in a poem, those "sudden relief(s) of the psyche", "one has to be present, present at the image in the moment of the image" (Bachelard 1957:1). In the same way, one has to experience with one's sight what is enacted and an act in a parietal work, as closely as possible to the conditions in which its visual essence liberates the potential of a work. That is, through looking. Hence, I would like to describe and try to present what is at issue - what is at play - in a few paintings of rain animals.

The Rain and its depictions in the art of San

Water is the condition of all life. In the form of rains, it marks the rhythm of the passing seasons, determines animal migrations and the blossoming of berries and citrus fruits. No society has ever been able to rid itself of meteorological fluctuations, or of the management of its water resources. A fortiori, societies established in desert or semi-desert areas. This was the case with the nomadic hunters and gatherers who periodically frequented the Brandberg and perhaps even settled there about 3000 or 4000 years ago. Although we do not know with any certainty to which ethnic group these hunters and gatherers belonged, nevertheless we know that they were culturally close to the San.

A diversity of embodiments

The themes of water and rain, like the creatures that symbolised them, were central to the San's system of thought and graphic representation. Hence, among the accounts collected by Wilhelm Bleek from their last descendants, several stories describe the rain or the capture of rain animals (D. Bleek 1933a,b). In the same way, a number of paintings feature a whole imaginary bestiary in which we can discern the different bodies given to the rain in painting or engraving, without any of them ever coinciding with a real animal, although its incarnations are always inspired by them. It has thus been established that the rain bull is a composite creature which, in a fantastic depiction, incorporates the physical characteristics and the life habits of animals such as the hippopotamus, for example, or, as Sven Ouzman showed for Thaba Sione, the rhinoceros. Similarly the rain serpent, one of whose distinctive traits is the pair of ears that adorn its pictorial representations, has the general appearance of a real snake, and shares its life habits (Hoff 1997). Serpents, hippopotami, rhinoceroses, giraffes or even what sometimes looks like a bull in the fresco of Bamboo Hollow, in the North of Drakensberg: the rain animal has a changeable body that borrows physical traits successively or simultaneously from these animals. It is a composite creature which
corresponds to the models that inspired it in a whole range of ways which are sometimes not visible. Hence, when Jospeh Orpen showed Qing the reproduction of a painting of the capture of an animal that looked like a rhinoceros or a hippopotamus, the young man answered that, despite appearances, "that animal which the men are catching is a snake" (Orpen 1874: 10).

The giraffe and the eared snake

In the Brandberg, two creatures seem to be symbols of rain. The first is a giraffe, doubtless because its long neck makes it the most aerial of mammals, a kind of link between the earth and the clouds. In the Tsisab valley, the detail of one fresco shows two giraffes from whose necks long torrents of rain drain away, somewhat similar to what //Kabbo calls "the milk" of the "rain female", its "blood" or its "hair" (D. Bleek 1933a:309-10). In a shelter in the Ga'aseb valley, a shelter of several dozen metres contains another fresco that is remarkable for its fine execution and its complex composition. Produced with enormous care, it depicts three people approaching a giraffe, only the neck and head of which have been painted. It is crowned with a non-figurative cloud from which rain is falling. The giraffe's head crosses this curtain, and along its spine there runs a fine, undulating line similar to a lightning track or a line of potency. Three men approach it with co-ordinated gestures and an attitude of respect. They hold in their hands a long curved object (perhaps a feather) with which one of them, the nearest one, touches the rain. These feathers, the abstract space in which these people are moving without any groundline for support, the giraffe with only its neck and head depicted, all of this evokes an aerial scene, a spiritual flight within a territory of the mind. The person on the right has his torso and abdomen decorated with unexplained details, particularly a sinuous line in his stomach that looks like an intestine, but could also be a snake.

Moreover, the snake is the second rain animal represented in the Brandberg. Sometimes, its head is decorated with horns, the sign of a possible twinning of meanings with the rhinoceros with whom it shares this attribute. Most often, it is depicted in the form of an eared snake. How is one to understand this original sign? And what can these ears mean, except that the snake is listening? Diä!kwain told the following story: "Our mothers told us that when we saw that the rain seemed as if it were not falling gently, if we therefore spoke to the rain, it would not listen to us, but when it heard that we were speaking with it, then, it would sound as if the rain were angry about our speech, which it heard when we addressed it"(D. Bleek 1933a:297). So the ears could be the symbol of the rain male; a metonym for hearing, they would thus evoke the thunder that accompanies the storm, but perhaps also the rivers themselves, with their resonant flow whose sinuous path resembles the serpent's crawling.

The sign of a certain proximity of meanings, the eared serpent and the giraffe, in the
depictions found on the Brandberg, exchange some of their formal characteristics. Hence, one frequently finds the snake decorated, over all of its body, with a grid pattern, like that of the giraffe's coat, or its head has the exact appearance of a giraffe's ; conversely, the giraffe is sometimes depicted only by the sinuous line of its neck, and it is then difficult to differentiate it from a reptile.

The flowing of water

The giraffe and the eared snake are two of the bodies given to the rain in paintings. Their depictions would not differ from other paintings in which the rain was embodied - a rain bull, for example - if, in the Brandberg, certain giraffe paintings and, even more so, eared snakes, had not been produced in rain flows.

A fragmentary analysis

The presence of water flows in Namibian or South African rock art has often been pointed out, but always in terms of an accidental circumstance that led to the deterioration or even the destruction of the image. For example, at the top of Hungorob, the shelter known as "Snake Rock" is decorated with the painting of a very large snake, whose head and tail disappear in water flows. In his comment on its reproduction, Tilman Lenssen-Erz writes: "The most prominent depiction is the long and very straight snake which extends to exactly four metres. Its head is missing, perhaps having been washed away by running off water, because at its left end the snake is cut off by a flow of white sinter. At the right end of the snake, one can also see traces of a water flow which damaged the depiction" (Pager 1993: 188).

Similarly, Lewis-Williams and Dowson also write: "Rock paintings of snakes are not
uncommon. Often it is impossible to detect the head because the snake is entering or leaving a crack or step in the rock face, or even a white run left by seeping water" (Lewis-Williams & Dowson 1989: 130). In a different context, that of the engravings produced on a glacial pavement washed by the Riet River, not far from Kimberley, Thomas Dowson sketches out a brief analysis, basing himself on the formal analogies between these geometric motifs and entoptic signs. He thus proposes an interpretation in terms of trance and shamanism, while deeming completely insignificant the presence of the river and the animation of this engraved panel under the effect of floods (Dowson 1992: 48).

Hence, as far as I am aware, the flowing of water has been considered in the analysis of southern African rock art as an accidental phenomenon that is exterior to the paintings - but never as a scenographic and/or ritual factor that dictated the placing of the composition and the choice of its figures.

Next