EXERCISES FOR A NOBLE SAVAGE

Cecilia Caballero Contemporary Art | 2018

EXERCISES FOR A NOBLE SAVAGE: FROM TOLLER DICKAUTER TO LEONEL LUNA

At the beginning of the century, different currents of thought -in a Europe that wanted to abandon Victorian correction and discover the landscape as a new space to explore and enjoy- find in naturalists, architects and decorators the affection for vegetal ornaments and everything that brings back to us at least some part of what “civilization” was overrunning in its industrial outburst.

This new sensibility coexisted with the revival of pagan movements, orientalisms and mysticisms brought from the East, which offered a new air to anyone who was searching for new ways to change society from the individual and not from power. While one era refused to disappear, clinging to empires, another one was being born from its own core.

Austria was, for a while, centre for many of these new ideas and tendencies: philosophers like Wittgenstein opened up different universes of thought, creators like Schöenberg and his dodecaphonic music rewrote what was considered music until then, doctors like Freud and his colleagues unraveled the mysteries of the unconscious, while others, like Wilhelm Reichstag and his “Gestalt”, sought the very limits of perception. These events took part in the middle of a Europe that crawled into a fratricidal war.

On this side of the world, more exactly on the north confines, the last exponents of aborigine natives gave their final steps on the soil that was being devoured by landlord greed. It is there where a Swiss man, who was following the steps of a Polish monk, found the primal nature common to all men.

Toller Dickauter arrived to Argentina in 1937, only ten years after monk Martin Gusinde rescued the memory of the last natives from Tierra del Fuego for posterity.

Through the monk’s collecting work, Toller found what he interpreted to be the primal natural goodness of man which, sadly, we were losing. Determined to test human nature’s indomitable spirit in its habitat and with no more elements than what nature provided him, he performed one of the first anthropological field experiences of his time, abandoning all contact with civilization, wearing merely guanaco pelt and hunting for food, sheltered from inclement weather in a hut that the natives had taught him to build. 

There, he starts applying early concepts of Reich’s Gestalt and Otto Rank’s, Freud’s colleague, to his principle of the “here and now”, that would subsequently be a part of the ideas that Alexander Lowen would use to establish the basis of Bioenergetics.

This experience was partially registered by photographer Eime Michalsen who would learn to fly with famous pilot Gunter Pluschow, noted for taking the first air-views of Ushuaia and its surroundings, apart from flying over the south range and the Patagonian glaciers where he would finally lose his life.

His practice, which didn’t last more than three years, during which more than half of the time he didn’t have any contact with other villagers, ended up with Toller being imprisoned in Chile for slaughtering and devouring sheep from surrounding farms.

Once imprisoned and sent to Dawson Island (noted detention camp for Selknam natives and political prisoners during Pinochet’s dictatorship), it was determined that the person in question was not a “savage” but a foreigner; therefore, his forced shipping into English ship Dover, which sailed on to Plymouth port from Punta Arenas, was decided.

Already in the height of World War II, the English disembarked Toller in Tangier -where they had a layover- North-African territory occupied by the Generalísimo Franco’s troops at that time.

When the war was over, Tangier became an international city under joint administration of several countries until the beginning of the 60s, when Morocco takes definitive possession. Toller would remain there for the rest of his life.

Tangier, an open city during the immediate postwar, turns out to be the ideal place for libertarians from all across Europe and young Americans who found in that landscape a multicultural and relaxed ambient where political intrigues, drugs and sexuality were not tied to a single moral or government.

It would be scenario for personalities such as Luchino Visconti, Tennessee Williams, poets and writers like Truman Capote, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles and another young poet like Allen Ginsberg, who would take Toller’s tenets to the American west coast, where “being a savage at least for once in one’s life would open the doors of perception”.

Words that would later find a voice in a musician who had read Ginsberg, called Jim Morrison, and that would later take him to Mexico searching for the magic of the nagual.

Carlos Castaneda, an anthropologist and writer, whom millions read but nobody knew, also picks up in “The Teachings of Don Juan” some of Toller’s legacy.

It’s in California where Toller Dickauter’s notes ended up, taken to Palo Alto by the last of his assistants, Jason Day, after his death in 1973.

Another anthropologist, Twitcher Hall, would develop what would later be known as proxemic therapy. Colleague and important influence for Marshall McLuhan and for Burkminster Fuller, he would coin the term “tensegrity” (development for the application of laws of physics of fractal structures) which Castaneda would use for the exercises that his Shaman would teach in his books.

These concepts proved to be very important for the creators of Neurolinguistics Programming (PNL), Bateson, Bander and Grinder, big admirers of the Don Juan saga.

Nowadays, alternative therapies, open-air life, healthy nutrition habits, incorporation of yoga and other forms of postural asanas define the relationship between our body and the context we inhabit. Confidence in ourselves and in others, the sharing of a range of common values aside from prejudice, are the heirs to something that we haven’t completely lost, something that is still there, that is not outside nor in the others, but in ourselves.

That is why, since ancient times, we try to find the way to recognize us, prove us, test us, exceed us, to take control of our destiny, from which we systematically desert.

We seek in each other what we are not and, like a mirror, what we get is an inverted image of what we want.

We seek for the noble savage, that other one that inhabits us and longs to be discovered, domesticated, transformed to emerge as a new being.

Art is partially an exercise, a practice that gives back to us some of what we are. The result always turns out to be a blurry reflection, suggested, an approximation, or more questions.

From its practice arises the possibility to find the answers.

Leonel Luna, May 2018