The Ground in Motion

A drapo is not a mosaic, and this museum does not call it one.

It is built the way a mosaic is built. Tens of thousands of discrete components, each individually set, each anchored by its own stitch, forming a whole on a surface. That is the operative condition of the definition this museum works to, and a drapo satisfies every word of it.

Then it fails the definition on a single term, and the term is fixed. A mosaic is fixed twice over: each component is fixed to its ground, and the ground is fixed to a wall, a floor, a vault. A drapo is fixed once. The sequins are held; the cloth is carried.

That is why these nine flags hang in a museum of mosaic. Not as a lesser cousin and not as a curiosity. Seeing what mosaic cannot do is how a person finds out what mosaic is, and there is no better instrument for it than an object that meets the definition in every particular except its footing.

What a flag is for

A drapo opens a ceremony.

Alfred Métraux described the sequence from fieldwork in the late 1940s. The flags are kept in the sanctuary with the other objects used in worship. They are brought out at the start of a service, or when a great lwa takes one of the congregation. Two ounsi go in to fetch them, escorted by the laplas, who carries a sword. Nancy Josephson, who has written the standard book on the artists, puts the function in one line: the flags mark the boundary between sacred and secular, and unfurling them is a call to order.

So a drapo is the first thing anyone sees and the first thing that moves. It is made to be walked with, dipped, turned, and raised, and every sequin on it sits at whatever angle the stitch and the slack of the cloth give it. Under a bare bulb or a torch, that surface refuses to hold still. It flares along the fold facing the room and goes dark along the fold turning away, and the image gathers and scatters again with each step the carrier takes.

Byzantine gold is the other end of the same problem. Gold tesserae are bedded at slight, deliberately irregular angles so that the wall itself appears to be the source of light, a radiance with no sun behind it. That light moves too. It moves because the viewer moves, walking the nave while the wall stays where it was mortared, and it will keep moving that way for as long as the building stands.

Both surfaces are alive. The difference is who does the walking.

And what the flag announces is arrival. A spirit comes by mounting a practitioner, who gives the body over to it. The object and the rite share a condition, and it is precisely the condition mosaic is defined against.

Five grounds

The exhibit takes its name from a word doing five jobs at once, and only the last of them is the one that matters.

The first is the mosaicist’s. Every mosaic needs a ground before a single piece can be placed — the prepared bed that receives the components and holds them. Marble wants mortar; a fresco wants plaster; a painting wants gesso. What a drapo wants is cloth, stretched taut on a frame while the work is done and then released. The ground is the whole difference between these nine objects and everything else this museum collects.

The second is the picture’s. Ground is also what a figure stands against: the field, the part that is not the subject. In flatter work that field is where an artist economises. Here nobody economises. Every one of these nine is worked to its own edge, the field carrying as many components as the figure standing in it, sometimes more. Figure and ground are made in one operation, because each shape is cut out by the shapes around it and there is no working the first without working the second.

The third is the earth. Terrain, land, the ground underfoot and the ground a stone comes out of. This is the sense the other galleries in this museum are built on, and it is worth carrying into this room, because the objects here reach the same idea by a different route.

The fourth belongs to the rite. In a Vodou service the vèvè is drawn on the ground of the peristyle floor, in cornmeal or ash, and the spirits are called down onto it. The prepared surface is the invitation.

The fifth is the title. Rachael Que Vargas states it in a sentence: in most religious experience the ground gives way beneath you, and the intensity of it throws you off balance. A spirit arrives by mounting a person, who gives the body over. The footing goes. It goes for the practitioner in the peristyle, and it went for the object the moment somebody made a picture out of set components and then declined to fasten it to anything.

A mosaic cannot lose its footing. A drapo has none to lose.

One stitch at a time

The older method is the simpler one to describe and the harder one to do.

The design goes onto cloth stretched on a wooden frame. Then the sequins go down face up, one at a time, each pierced and tacked by a bead or a stitch that becomes part of the picture. Early flags used the technique sparsely, in scattered constellations across an open field. Haitian artists call that seme grenn — sowing seeds. Ceus St. Louis, working in the Bel Air neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, was the first to abandon the open field and cover the whole surface, and covering the whole surface is what every flag in this room does.

The counts are worth stating because they are not intuitive. Georges Valris, watched at work by a reporter in 1996, was putting roughly twenty thousand sequins and beads into a three-foot square, and taking about ten days over it. He sews with fine fishing line rather than cotton or polyester, for longevity. That is a decision about how long an object should last, made by a man being paid by the piece.

Around 1990 the medium acquired a second technique, and it came in from outside. Myrlande Constant had spent years in a Port-au-Prince factory making beaded wedding gowns for export, where the working method is tambour: the cloth is stretched on a drum-tight frame and beads are laid down from the reverse, so the maker works blind and turns the cloth over to see what has happened. She left the factory and turned the technique on drapo. Density went up, scale went up, and narrative arrived — several figures, a whole ceremony, a story rather than an emblem. Constant’s own verdict on where it ended is the sharpest thing anyone has said about the form: the works are no longer the dimensions of flags, and they deserve another name, because they are not flags.

Both techniques are in this room, and one object shows the mechanism outright. The backing satin on the Maxon Scylla is thinner than on any other flag here, and in raking light the stitching reads through it. Every sequin on the front is held by its own thread, and the whole figure can be read from behind in nothing but thread.

Six artists

Eight of these nine flags carry a name, and no two of them work alike.

Roudy Azor (b. 1980, Port-au-Prince) was one of the first men to work in the technique Constant brought into the medium. He trained in her studio, and left it to form his own at the age of eighteen, in 1998. Marilyn Houlberg met him through Constant. Two flags here are his, and they show the range that technique made available: the small Atibon Legba, a single figure at devotional scale, and the large La Sirene Marassa Dossou, three figures and their attributes across most of a metre. His subjects run well past the familiar lwa into ones the market rarely asks for — Gran Naloumba, Aizan, Loko Atisou, Agaou Potocoli. Nothing he has said about his own work has been published anywhere. He is the youngest artist in this room and the least heard from.

Georges Valris (b. 1950 or 1953, Cavaillon) works the older way: flat sequins, sewn face up, on a large ground, in an atelier with assistants he trains. He came to it after basket-making, factory work, and a stint as a stevedore on a cruise ship. He is a practising Catholic who is not a houngan, and he makes angels and saints alongside the lwa, a range the flat sequin technique carries without strain. His Erzulie La Flambeau travelled with Afro-Atlantic Histories to Washington, Los Angeles, and Dallas. The two flags here are his Adam and Eve, and a ceremony dense enough that the objects in it can be counted and the rite still cannot be named.

Eveland Lalanne (also Eviland; Port-au-Prince, 1939–2003) did something with an ordinary material that nobody else did. Where the convention is to anchor each sequin with a small round seed bead, Lalanne used a bugle bead — a long tube — so that the anchors themselves accumulate into a texture. Josephson describes the result as a frosty, muted ground. His Marassa Trois hangs here with exactly that surface. Josephson ranks him with Antoine Oleyant and Roland Rockville as the masters of the genre.

Maxon Scylla ran Antoine Oleyant’s studio. Oleyant is the founding figure of the modern field, the first drapo artist to reach a wide public, and he died in 1992 at thirty-eight; Scylla, his brother-in-law, kept the studio going and then opened his own. His Damballa-Bossou is the smallest flag in the room and the one that carries the most: a horned figure whose torso divides into two serpents instead of legs, so that two spirits occupy one body and the join happens at the hips.

Pascale Monnin (b. 1974, Port-au-Prince) and Reynold Clérisier made the cat. Monnin trained in Geneva in painting, printmaking, and sculpture, returned to Haiti in 1994, and is the person who brought Vodou art into her family’s gallery in Pétion-Ville. Clérisier first showed there in 1991 and has spent thirty-five years working beadwork outside the flag format, on secular subjects among them cats and lizards. No spirit appears on this flag, and none is missing from it.

One flag carries no name. It was bought off the wall of the Hôtel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, the gingerbread hotel that sold Haitian art to its guests for most of a century, and the record stops there. The museum prints that rather than artist unknown, because the gap has a shape and the shape is informative: every other flag here came from the person who made it, and this one came from a hotel.

Where the names came from

Drapo reached the international market in the 1970s and early 1980s, out of Haiti’s tourism economy, and Peter Haffner records the consequence that matters most to a museum wall. Artists working before the 1970s are largely anonymous. They began sewing signatures into their flags when collectors needed to tell one from another.

Every signature in this room — AZOR, VALRIS, LALANNE, RC — is there because somebody wanted to know whose work it was. That is the moment a body of work stops being production and becomes authorship, and this collection holds nine pieces of it.

Patrick Polk separates two kinds of object by where they were going. A drapo sèvis is made for use: lighter, more sparely worked, furled between services, light enough for an ounsi to parade. An art flag is made for a collector: denser, heavier, more elaborate in its central motif, its borders, and its field. These nine are art flags.

Destination is a distinction every art form has. Altarpieces were painted on contract, to specification, by workshops full of assistants, and nobody shelves them under craft. Georges Valris trains the people who work beside him and sews with fishing line so the work will outlast him. Roudy Azor left the studio that trained him to open his own at eighteen. Myrlande Constant carried a technique out of a garment factory and enlarged the form until it would no longer fit the name. These are careers, held in a medium, with positions in it.

The market left its fingerprint on the object as well as on the record, and Haffner puts it in one clause: makers added sequins and beading until the flags were too heavy for ritual use, and kept them small enough to fit into carry-on luggage. Density is what a collector paid for. Density is also what let an artist put a whole ceremony on one cloth, and the two largest flags in this room are the ones that took the offer.

Two, and also three

Three of these nine show the same pair of spirits, and in none of them do the spirits look alike.

In Roudy Azor’s La Sirene Marassa Dossou they are mermaids, tails worked in raised loops that stand off the cloth, holding a fish, a horn, and a mirror. In Eveland Lalanne’s Marassa Trois they are three young men, two above and one below and larger, on that frosted ground with a serpent running down each side. In the flag from the Oloffson they are young girls in dresses, headscarves tied with the ends hanging well down, holding hands across a pot with a bunch of bananas at their feet.

These are the Marassa, the divine twins. The tradition holds them as children who are older than any other lwa, and as two who are also three: the pair, and the child born after them, counted with them and held more powerful than both. In many houses they are served first, immediately after Legba opens the way.

Three artists working separately arrived at three different pictures, and no two of them agree on age, on gender, or on species. None of them is wrong. Neither the form nor the gender of these spirits settles for longer than one object at a time, and that is a property of the tradition rather than an inconsistency in it — which is the whole reason a room can hold three versions and gain something from each.

The collection was never built around the Marassa. It grew around Legba, who holds the gate, and the Gede, who hold the boundary between the living and the dead, and La Sirène, whose world lies on the far side of a mirror. The Marassa are what stayed.

How nine flags reached a museum in Spain

All of them came from Marilyn Houlberg.

Houlberg taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for more than twenty years, and travelled to Haiti and back throughout. She co-curated Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou with Donald Cosentino at the Fowler Museum in 1995, and went on to Haiti: Vodou Visionaries, and to In Extremis, which opened three months after she died in 2012. Rachael Que Vargas acquired all of these from her in Chicago between 1998 and 2001, some in trade for her own artwork and some by purchase.

Haffner argues that the more traceable influence of that whole scholarly circle ran not through the exhibition but through Houlberg’s own relationships with artists in Port-au-Prince, and he flags it as a subject nobody has yet examined properly. This collection is nine pieces of evidence for it. Every flag here came down that channel, and eight of them carry a name because a person went to the studio.

Two flags carry paper. A label pinned to the back of the Marassa Trois is in Houlberg’s hand; a tag safety-pinned to the cat names both its artists, and misspells both first names, which is what a collector writing down two unfamiliar names produces.

The stitching across the back of that Marassa Trois sits directly opposite Lalanne’s signature on the front, which means the signature went on after the flag was mounted to its backing — the flag was made first and signed later. Haffner’s finding about why drapo artists began signing at all, visible in one object, in the order of the stitches.

Nine flags, six named artists, one channel, and a form that meets a museum’s definition of mosaic in every particular but the one that matters most.

They were never fastened to anything. That is the argument of this room, and it is also, exactly, what they are for.