Chapter 9 the Anti-Rhetorical Power of Representational Absence

Incomplete Figurines from the Balkan Neolithic Chapter 9 The Anti-rhetorical Power of Representational Absence: Incomplete Figurines from the Balkan Neolithic Douglass W. Bailey During the excavations of the Hamangia Culture a particular set of communities who shared similar cemetery at Durankulak on the Bulgarian Black Sea ways of living, of making objects or burying their coast, Henrie�a Todorova’s team recovered a number dead, it would have been just as feasible to use other of figurines; Grave no. 626, for example, contained figurines from other cultures in the region: from north- four (Fig. 9.1). The figurines were buried with a 20- to eastern Romania, Moldova and the Ukraine (i.e. the 25-year-old woman whose body was accompanied by Cucuteni/Tripolye cultures); from western Bulgaria, a large Spondylus bracelet, three strings of copper and Serbia, southeastern Hungary, and Macedonia (i.e. malachite beads and three fragments of finger rings the Starčevo and Vinča cultures); or from Thessalian (Vajsov 1987; 1992; 2002; Todorova et al. 2002, 62, 109). Greece. In all of these places, it is not unusual to find As with other Hamangia figurines from se�lement and figurines that have very li�le, if any, representation funerary contexts, the Grave 626 figurines are strik- of faces or even heads (Fig. 9.2). Furthermore, I could ing for the simplicity of their form and their lack of have focused on the absence of body parts other than surface treatment. Necks are long, thin, triangular and the head and face: on the absence of hands or feet, without faces or heads. On the body of one figurine, of arms or legs, of genitalia or bu�ocks. Indeed it is two horizontal and curving incised lines form a pubic impossible to find a Neolithic figurine with all of its triangle and a short vertical slit suggests that the figure body parts represented. Why is this? Why were par- is female. The other three have no sexually identifiable ticular body parts not represented? What might be the body parts, through two have small protuberances significance of not representing the head or the face? on their chests, which may be breasts, though they This paper a�acks these questions by investigating the may just as easily be men’s as women’s; indeed the representational importance of absence, by consider- potential breasts sit rather high on the chest and are as ing first the role that the process of abstraction plays much part of the shoulders or neck as they are of the in the creation of figurines, then by looking at the chest. Only two of the figurines have arms preserved; processes of cropping and disembodiment (especially one has short, thick, square-ended arms that extend in pornography), and finally by thinking about how straight out to the sides. On the other figurine, arms psychoanalysis and experimental psychology have are thinner, bent at the elbows with hands resting on examined the ways that humans construct subjectiv- the top of the abdomen. ity and engage with incomplete or unse�ling visual Like other Hamangia figurines, the examples stimuli. Finally, I will turn back to the specifics of the from Durankulak are remarkable objects and there Neolithic in southeastern Europe and examine how would be value in devoting all of the present paper to thinking about absence helps us to be�er understand the role that any one of these four figurines, or any one Neolithic figurines and to understand be�er the ways of the many others like it from this or any other con- in which Neolithic people lived in their world, thought temporary site, may have played in communities of about themselves and thought about each other. the Neolithic in the Lower Danube region (6500–3500 cal. ��).1 Here I wish to focus on one aspect of these Abstraction figurines from Durankulak: the absence of any facial detail, indeed the absence of a head. While I have To get to grips with Neolithic figurines from south- chosen to begin this discussion with an object from eastern Europe requires ge�ing to grips with a set of one particular region of southeastern Europe and constitutive processes: 1) the making of something 117 Chapter 9 are not shown everything nor are they shown the full detailing of those elements that are selected for representation. The fact that some elements are not included in a miniature object such as a figurine critically warps the relationship between the observer and the representation and, unavoid- ably, radically alters the observers’ understanding and comprehension of the object. The brevity that comes with abstract representation forces the viewer beyond the information that is provided. The abstraction of a miniature demands that the spectator draws inferences. Thus, a person who gazes at a Neolithic figurine in its museum vitrine or as it is uncovered in an excavation trench, is drawn, almost without realizing it, to think of what is not there, of what has been le� out. In the Hamangia example from Durankulak, described above, one is forced to ask: Where is the detail of human expression, the face, the head? Through abstraction, representational objects are made active; abstraction forces the viewers to do something that otherwise they would not do.2 Making the viewer draw inferences about what is not represented in a Neolithic figurine has important consequences for the understanding that the viewer devel- ops about the miniature, abstracted Figure 9.1. Figurines from Grave no. 626 of the Hamangia cemetery at object. The range of inferences that Durankulak. (Redrawn by Howard Mason; a�er Vajsov 2002.) any one viewer can draw are almost limitless; the only constraints come small; 2) of representing one object in another me- from each individual viewer’s particular beliefs, un- dium; and 3) of reproducing the human form. These derstandings, interests, backgrounds and desires. The are all processes of significant complexity and, having potential for an abstracted representation to stimulate wri�en about them in detail in a recent book (Bailey different inferences means that the responses and un- 2005), I will not devote space here to discussing them derstandings of an abstracted representational object, further. However, one of the constitutive processes, such as a figurine, are many. abstraction, warrants comment here because abstrac- Elsewhere, I have drawn a distinction between tion plays a fundamental role in the exclusion of a miniature object and a model and I have suggested particular features of the human body as represented that abstracted representations such as figurines do in Neolithic figurines. not present the exactitude, complete knowability or As part of the process of miniaturization, abstrac- comprehensive meaning that is inherent in a model tion demands selection; it works through the inclusion (Bailey 2005, 26–35). Models seek factual reproduc- of some features and exclusion of others. As a result, tion (for example, architects’ models or model boats) people looking at (or, just as significantly, holding) a while miniatures create a non-existent entity that is miniature object such as a figurine are cheated. They neither accurate nor faithfully representative. A model 118 Incomplete Figurines from the Balkan Neolithic proposes a single meaning and limits the range of variation that a spectator’s perception may experi- ence. Via forced inferences, any one miniature (e.g. a figurine) can create many different meanings and the reactions, all of which, within reason, are equally valid. Absence is part of the power of miniaturism to provoke multiple interpretations. In their absences, missing body parts or facial details play a paradoxi- cally strong role in stimulating the inferences forced upon a person looking at a figurine. In their absences the missing components release the viewer from the restrictions of a set meaning; the viewer is thus freed to imagine and provide his or her own feelings and emotions. These absences provide the real stimulus for thought (probably at an unconscious level), and, as I shall argue in the rest of this paper, it is in these absences that one finds the true meaning of miniature representations such as faceless figurines. Cropping and disembodiment Abstraction though miniaturization is one way in which absence comes into play in representational objects. Absence can also result from the processes of cropping, segmenting or disembodying the whole. In this section and the one that follows, I step away from the local Neolithic contexts in which this paper began and discuss representational mechanisms such as cropping and disembodiment, moving first to late Figure 9.2. Faceless figurines from Cucuten/Tripolye site nineteenth-century painting and then to debates of Dumeşti; height c. 20 cm. (Photo: George Dumitriu; concerning modern pornography before looking, in a�er Mantu et al. 1997.) the following section, at the ways in which police interview victims of child-abuse. Linda Nochlin has drawn interpretive a�ention to The process of disembodiment has similar re- the ways that the Impressionist painter Édouard Manet sults. By working with fragments of the human body (1832–83) selectively cropped many of his paintings, which have been removed from their normal contexts intentionally cu�ing off parts from bodies (Nochlin and expected scales of representation, it is possible 1994). By doing so, an arm or leg was le� truncated at to denaturalize the body and to allow it to be recon- the painting’s edge. The fragment of the whole body structed in unusual and provocative ways (Pultz 1995, which Manet represented within the physical dimen- 162). Dismemberment invites redefinition outside of sions of the painting alluded not only to the rest of the any commonly accepted understanding of the object in body (o�en a female one) but also to other worlds that a way and to a degree that can never be possible when existed beyond the boundaries of the picture frame, encountering the unfragmented whole/closed/finished worlds of sexualized bodies and body parts.

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