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ART THAT HEALS
The Image as Medicine in Ethiopia
Jacques Mercier
The Museum for African Art, New York,1997. Distributed by Prestel Verlag, Munich and New York. Translated by Dominique Malaquais and Vincent J. Errante. 128 pp., 66 b/w & 62 color photos, bibliography. $49.95 hardcover, $28.50 softcover.
Reviewed by Z. S. Strother
Scroll translation by Solomon Hailemariam
In Art That Heals, anthropologist Jacques Mercier describes Ethiopian healing scrolls as "hinge objects." The product of one of the great melting pots on the planet, where Africa, the Middle East, and Europe converge, the scrolls provide "an opening into a number of currently essential questions that demand intercultural exchange" (p. 118). Merrier argues that objects like the scrolls have taken on new urgency because of the broadening of Western medical practice and the revolution in communication media, which has saturated our society with images to the point where the exclusive claims of language on thought have been challenged (p. 11). He places the scrolls at the center of two of the most compelling debates of our time:
"Can one cure with art, by making, using, or looking at it?" (p. 9) and "What can the image, or the plastic expression of a subject, supply that language cannot?" (p. 11).
The first section of the book introduces the subject of art and therapy and the problems of translation. Chapter two ("History") does double duty. Its primary mission is to remind readers that the West does have a history of healing images. "In Western society long deeply Christian, therapeutic images have essentially been holy images" (p. 16). It also gives a fast, even impressionistic rendering of the complex matrix from which Ethiopian scrolls emerged, including NeoPythagorean thought, Platonizing Hermetism, and Judeo-Christian and Islamic legends. Merrier concludes that by the tenth century a talismanic art had coalesced in the eastern Mediterranean, combining mystical forms of writing, "cosmic geometry," and the use of images of evil to repulse evil (pp. 18-19). These practices were by no means unique to any one religion or place.
Henri Maldiney gives a practitioner's view of the relationship of art to therapy in chapter three, "Plastic Meaning and Psychosis." He poses the question: "Does the plastic sense of the mentally ill open a path to the...