In this chapter, I would like to continue to explore some of the untapped potentialities of Lévi-Strauss's thought for an understanding of art, and more specifically certain forms of avant-garde art. The question at the core of this chapter may be summed up as follows: to what extent may avant-garde art be seen to function mytho-poetically? The precise meaning of this question will become apparent in what follows. In very broad terms, what I designate here by ‘mytho-poetic function’, following a view that is implicit in Lévi-Strauss's works but not theorised as such, is a boundary-marking function, one that is at the very core of the way in which we create an order of the world around us.

To explore this mytho-poetic function of art, I would like to turn to a series of three key essays that I have so far only touched upon: ‘Indian Cosmetics’ (1942), ‘Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America’ (1963a: 245–68; 1958: 269–94) and ‘A Native Society and Its Style’ (chapter xx of Tristes Tropiques). These essays, written in the 1940s, deal with a topic seemingly far from that of mythical thought, a form of body painting practised by the Caduveo, a population from the Matto Grosso region of Brazil. As we shall see, however, they are crucial for an understanding of the mytho-poetic function and indeed of Lévi-Strauss's aesthetic thought in general.