'Robert Powell Himalayan Drawings'
The exhibition
'Robert Powell Himalayan Drawings' at the Völkerkundemuseum
of Zurich University is Powell's first retrospective anywhere and his
first major presentation in Europe. It displays an interesting selection
of the work of the Australian. The 142 exhibits of watercolours, pencil
and ink drawings document Powell's twenty-five year exploration of the
Himalayas, concentrating mostly on the vernacular architecture of Nepal,
but also of India, Pakistan, and China.
* By PAOLA VON WYSS-GIACOSA
After the completion of his studies
in architecture in Sydney and of some construction projects in Europe
and the Near East in the early 1970s, Powell travelled to India and, from
there, to the Himalayan region. By a fortunate coincidence, he was in
the vicinity of Ladakh, an enclave of Tibetan culture in the highlands
of Kashmir, in the early years of the opening of the region to Westerners.
Prior to Powell's first visit in 1975, Ladakh had rarely been represented
by artists from outside the region because of its relative inaccessibility.
Inspired by Bernard Rudofsky's influential publication Architecture
without Architects (New York, 1964), the Australian immediately
began a broad visual documentation in watercolours and ink drawings of
the indigenous architecture and the bare, far-flung landscape in which
it is embedded. He was fascinated by the Ladakhi builders' ability to
turn the natural impracticalities of a site to advantage.
On the one hand, Powell's works are executed in the classical
sense, depicting the buildings as sculptures in their natural, rough setting.
On the other hand, they are also very detailed and accurate architectural
drawings with an ethnographic content and a high documentary value, often
including the ground plan and elevation of an edifice. Though people are
absent in Powell's works, footpaths and irrigation canals, piles of stones,
stakes and stupas strung together with prayer flags bespeak a human presence.
In these early drawings Powell already goes beyond the mere 
reading of the architectural surfaces and shows Ladakhi buildings as objects
of meditation and contemplation as well as of education. The emphasis
is put on the atefactual; each detail contains the identity of the whole,
revealing internal and indigenous ways of seeing, making, and acting in
this extreme, northwestern periphery of the Tibetan world.
reading of the architectural surfaces and shows Ladakhi buildings as objects
of meditation and contemplation as well as of education. The emphasis
is put on the atefactual; each detail contains the identity of the whole,
revealing internal and indigenous ways of seeing, making, and acting in
this extreme, northwestern periphery of the Tibetan world. Powell's second approach to documenting Himalayan cultures
in drawings came at the end of the 1970s. Having to wait for a visa for
India, he undertook an excursion to the 
North West Frontier Provinces of Pakistan. Hge first visited the Kalash,
a pre-Islamic mountain people in the borderland with Afghanistan, who
integrated him into village life. He was particularly interested in local
religion and its effect on the construction of holy places, in their symbolic
ornamentation and in the magical painting of the Kalash.
North West Frontier Provinces of Pakistan. Hge first visited the Kalash,
a pre-Islamic mountain people in the borderland with Afghanistan, who
integrated him into village life. He was particularly interested in local
religion and its effect on the construction of holy places, in their symbolic
ornamentation and in the magical painting of the Kalash. Powell then travelled to the neighbouring Swat district,
where Islam had already made substantial advances in influencing the ancient
beliefs and their material expression. The wood carvers of Swat are renowned
for their work, mostly executed in cedar. As a member of an Italian research
team of the Istituto Italiano per il medio ed estremo Oriente (ISMEO)
in Rome, Powell set out to document the architecture of the wooden mosques
in northern Swat, then threatened by the arrival of cement construction
in this remote area of northern Pakistan. Powell's documentation is valuable
in preserving their images. Only a few of these drawings were published
in Italian scholarly journals. The series of drawings of the mosque of
Gabral Jaba (a highland mosque in Swat), on display in Zurich, shows the
fusion of more recent Islamic ideas and the original local religious traditions
of the indigenous mountain people.
In the beginning of the 1980s, the circumstances somewhat
changed for Powell; he went on to live in Kathmandu and later even took
a studio in Nepal's capital city. Until then, he had been a travelling
artist who carried all of his equipment in his luggage and had been forced
to produce work of the smallest sizes. Now firmly settled, he was able
to plan larger formats, making sketches in front of the objects and finalizing
the works in the studio. Nepal having been a closed country up to the
early 1950s, scientists from all sorts of fields had arrived once it was
opened, and Kathmandu had become a vibrant and cosmopolitan place. Powell
became acquainted with restorers, social anthropologists, and archaeologists,
who introduced him to their disciplines and projects. He thus got to know
and document the unique artistic tradition of the Kathmandu Valley and
the Newari culture dominant for centuries. Using precise measurements,
he created complex ink-drawings and watercolours of the palatial 
Nepalese architecture. Powell depicted every detail of Newari craftsmanship
in these works: the reliefs, the artfully carved columns, and wooden windows
as well as the large bricks, which have been moulded to standard since
the end of the nineteenth century. He often introduced an imaginary viewpoint
in his drawings, thereby constructing a reality and creating a view that
no photograph could capture.
Nepalese architecture. Powell depicted every detail of Newari craftsmanship
in these works: the reliefs, the artfully carved columns, and wooden windows
as well as the large bricks, which have been moulded to standard since
the end of the nineteenth century. He often introduced an imaginary viewpoint
in his drawings, thereby constructing a reality and creating a view that
no photograph could capture. He also dealt with cultures located in the western and northern
mountain regions outside the Kathmandu Valley. For the social anthropologist
Michael Oppitz, whom he had met upon his arrival in Nepal, Powell documented
the material culture of the Magar, a shamanistic mountain tribe in the
vicinity of the Dhaulagiri range. The Magar ink-drawings are precise representations
of objects of specific ethnographic interest. Isolating them from their
context and singling them out on a sheet of paper, Powell intensified
their material presence. Unlike corresponding photographs, which cannot
but catch everything upon which they are focused, Powell's drawings stringently
omit anything secondary.
In 1992, Powell began working as draughtsman in the ancient
kingdom of Mustang, north of the Annapurna range, in collaboration with
a team for High Mountain Archaeology funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(DFG). Inspired by the garish colourfulness of Mustang architecture, after
a decade in Nepal, Powell changed his technique. He created large formats
and experimented with new techniques in watercolour based on very fine
outlines in pencil. Focusing on the ritual significance of the buildings'
chromatic ornamentation, Powell drew only the facades, cutting them out
from their surroundings. He organized the elements flatly, without perspective,
placing everything well inside the rectangle of the paper. By carefully
aimed use of details and montage, he created images far removed from a
representation of the day-to-day world, while simultaneously preserving
all of the traces and signs of everyday actions over the passage of time.
Powell's watercolours are, in his own words, 'an imaginary documentation'.
One large pencil drawing in the Völkerkundemuseum depicting
Grain Drying Racks in Gyalthang represents Powell's latest work in the
Sino-Tibetan border country in the north of Yunnan, China. The Zurich
exhibition spans an arc that encompasses not only the work of a quarter
of a century but also, geographically, covers the largest mountain range
on earth from west to east. It also includes various objects, such as
shamanic paraphernalia from the Magar area, carved wooden toolboxes from
North Pakistani Swat, as well as thread-crosses and Sago Namgo
earth door, sky door structures built on the skulls of a ram and a dog
from Mustang. These exhibits enter into a fascinating dialogue
with Powell's drawings:
The Magar drumsticks and the wooden armguard allow a direct
comparison between the material object and its visual documentation. The
visitor may appreciate how powerfully drawing can convey the physicality
and material presence of an object. At the same time, the two beautifully
worked woodcarvers' toolboxes lent by the Lindenmuseum, Stuttgart, are
impressive examples of the craftsmanship documented in Powell's Gabral
Jaba series. The Sago Namgo, closing the doors of the earth and sky to
harmful spirits from these regions, and the thread-crosses, entrapping
evil influences like spider webs, emphasize Powell's concentration on
the religious aspects of Mustang architecture.
Seeing and then drawing and photographing
are conceptualizing and interpretative acts. A picture is not independent
of reality. It is, however, autonomous and obeys the logic of compositional
thought. For Powell, photography will always be a research tool, an auxiliary
activity to his vocation as a draughtsman and never an end in itself.
The exhibition in the Völkerkundemuseum Zurich poses the question
as to what can today be the function of ethnographic drawing, in particular,
and of documentary illustration in general. Is drawing obsolete as a means
of representation, or does it still have a potential that no other medium
has? How does it relate to photography, which began its march to ascendancy
in ethnographic documentation over a hundred years ago? Should documentary
drawing, besides committing a similarity with the depicted, be mimetic?
Can it go beyond being veristic and in such transcendence capture hidden
layers of reality? *
Wangchuk's
House, Saspol, Kashmir, India Wooden
Arm Guard, northern Magar, West-Central Nepal
Mihrab
Details, Mosque at Gabral Jaba, Swat,
North-West Pakistan
North-West Pakistan
The catalogue
accompanying the show, also entitled 'Robert Powell Himalayan Drawings'
(ed. Michael Oppitz), is a voluminous publication with more than two-hundred
pictures and eight articles addressing various aspects of Powell's work.
It assembles contributions by some renowned specialists in the fields
of art and architecture, social anthropology and ethnography, Tibetan,
Islamic, Indian, and Nepalese Studies, as well as general history of the
Himalayan region. The exhibition lasts till 3 March 2002.
Paola
von Wyss-Giacosa, (Lic. Phil. I) is a lecturer in social anthropology
(Technology and Ergology) at Zurich University. She has particular interest
in the study of early ethnographic illustrations within visual anthropology
and is currently working on seventeeth- and eighteenth-century illustrations
in travel literature, concentrating mostly on India.
E-mail:
von_wyss-giacosa@bluewin.ch