The Myth of Primitivism

Susan Hiller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134980383
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

This book explores the fusion of myth, history and geography which leads to ideas of primitivism, and looks at their construction, interpretation and consumption in Western culture. Contextualized by Susan Hiller's introductions to each section, discussions range from the origins of cultural colonialism to eurocentric ideas of primitive societies, including the use of primitive culture in constructing national identities, and the appropriation of primitivist imagery in modernist art. The result is a controversial critique of art theory, practice and politics, and a major enquiry into the history of primitivism and its implications for contemporary culture.

PART I

Editor’s introduction

All known human societies seem to formulate ideas of the ‘other’ in order to define and legitimate their own social boundaries and individual identities. The category of the ‘other’ includes the inhabitants of the realms of supernatural beings and monsters, the territories of real or imaginary allies and enemies, and the lands of the dead—places far from the centre of the world, where one’s own land is, and one’s own reality. The ‘other’ is always distant as well as different, and against this difference the characteristics of self and society are formed and clarified.¹ In the west, this frame of reference has been complicated by a history of expansion and conquest which inscribes the relationship between centre and periphery in economic and political terms.

The west’s drive to conquer and exploit the lands of others has fused myth, history, and geography and has projected European speculations and fantasies about the ‘other’ on to real other peoples; primitivism and cultural colonialism are two elements in this fusion. Cultural colonialism, in Kenneth Coutts-Smith’s analysis, is an ideology that extends the idea that spoils of war might include art objects along with other valuable goods as proof of conquest and territorial sovereignty, to the appropriation and incorporation into the body of European culture of ‘the diverse cultures of the whole world and of all history’. The assimilation takes place on western terms. Nothing indigestible is consumed; no ideas or information that would shift or dissolve ‘our’ preconceptions about the makers of those ‘other’ cultures nourish this body.

The enlargement of European aesthetic horizons in the modern period through the importation of visual ideas originating (mainly) in Africa and the Pacific, suggests an increasing recognition by artists that the artistic resources of those lands and peoples were just as available for exploitation as their mineral and agricultural resources. Although exoticism was a theme in European art beginning in the early nineteenth century, and the anti-intellectualism and emotional intensity sought by Romantic artists were often inspired by scenes of distant, exotic cultures, the style of these poems or paintings was never foreign to Europe. But in 1905, according to Vlaminck (who takes credit for being the first European to find African sculpture ‘profoundly moving’ and to launch its vogue as ‘art’), Picasso became the first artist to appreciate ‘what one could gain [my emphasis] from African and Oceanic arts, and he… gradually introduced those qualities into his paintings and in this way started a movement, the novelty of which led people to believe it was revolutionary’.² Vlaminck, in fact, attributes to Picasso the real ‘discovery’, the useful insight that African art could prove a source, a resource for western artists. This ‘moment of discovery’, itself mythic, binds together the imperialist conditions of possibility with the appropriative strategies of modernism.

Coutts-Smith suggests that ‘subjective mental territory’, the foreign land of dreams, psychopathology, fantasy, and magic, once located conceptually at the very margins of our known world, have been colonized, too, as part of the process of European expansion, absorbed into art, and brought inside the extended body of western culture for digestion. David Maclagan’s question, ‘Outsiders or insiders?’, proposes a hall of mirrors where the art of ‘endogamous primitives’ is caught, ambiguously located in the ideological spaces of our culture. ‘It is essential to bear in mind that the main body of this work was produced within a specific timespan—the period roughly 1880 to 1930…it was “produced” in the sense of being collected, analysed, and published for the first time’ during the same period as the great public ethnographic collections were first formed and later began to emphasize the aesthetic rather than the ‘barbarous’ values of ‘primitive art.’ The production of the category ‘outsider art’ as an artefact of our culture recalls Graeburn’s definition of ‘primitive art’: ‘The concept of primitive art is a Western one, referring to creations that we wish to call “art” made by people who in the nineteenth century were called “primitive” but in fact, were simply autonomous peoples who were overrun by the Colonial powers.’³

Western artists have enriched their repertoire by drawing upon the resources of a range of ethnological, archaic, or ‘outsider’ styles, all of which have been seen as raw, truthful, and profoundly simple, a set of projections which is the precondition for the validation of these exotic influences. Ethnographic art, in particular, has ‘helped the (Western) artists to formulate their own aims, because they could attribute to it the very qualities they themselves sought to attain.’⁴

Daniel Miller’s provocative suggestion that primitivism is essential to western art’s self-definition because art has been given the impossible task of being a ‘fragmented comment upon the nature of fragmentation’ leads (again) to the ‘moral dilemma posed by primitivism’ in relation to the context in which it operates as an effect of the imperialist history of the west, ‘namely racism.’

But the investigations of the Black Audio/Film Collective into the ‘fictions’ of British national identity ‘produced through the excesses of colonial fantasy’ are poised as a countermemory, a revoking of the oratorial, curatorial, art historical ‘we’ and ‘they’ of colonial discourse. This is an encounter with Europe’s myth of primitivism from its ‘other’ side, from a place where the static, ritualized identities of myth are relinquished and its fixed map of privileged territories and positions is redrawn.

NOTES

1 See Jonathan Friedman (December 1983) ‘Civilizational cycles and the history of primitivism’, Social Analysis 14:31–50, for a schematic analysis.

2 Quoted in Michel Leiris and Jacqueline Delange (1968) African Art, London: Thames & Hudson, p. 8.

3 Nelson Graburn (ed.) (1976) Ethnic and Tourist Arts, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, p. 4.

4 Robert Goldwater (1967 [1938]) Primitivism in Modern Art, revised edn, New York: Random House, Vintage Books, p. 253; this remains the classic work on primitivism in art.

1
Some general observations on the problem of cultural colonialism

KENNETH COUTTS-SMITH

Traditionally, historians of culture in general and art critics in particular have tended to base their analyses and their theoretical platforms upon the assumption that art somehow represents the embodiment or the concretization of basic values and fundamental truths that exist somewhere outside of history, beyond social mutation, external to political and economic reality.

The complex of ideas that is clustered around the interrelated notions of the essential spirituality of art, the sublimity of the creative experience and the passion of genius, has served as a central nexus in the vast majority of thinking concerning matters of aesthetics since the inception of that area of enquiry as a specific discipline down to the present point in time. The validity of this position is, however, currently being severely questioned; though from the great majority of published art criticism in specialist books, in art journals, and in catalogue prefaces, it would not seem that our discipline has yet begun to take much note of a major shift in focus that is now occurring in the broad spectrum of world culture.

The present commentator himself is no longer able to accept the idea of the extra-historicity of art and the notion that artistic events take place in some manner in a continuum that is divorced from social and political dynamics. It also appears evident to him that when (in the vast majority of instances) we speak of a world-wide ‘high’ culture, a significant part of which is formed by the whole spectrum of the fine arts, we are actually speaking of a tradition that is largely restricted to the European cultural experience. Even a cursory glance at recent issues of the various ‘international’ art journals, or at museum and major exhibition catalogues, whether they emanate from Europe, from North America, Latin America, Soviet Russia, India, Japan or wherever, reveals a homogeneity of thought which fails utterly to question the Eurocentricity of most contemporary artcritical assumptions.

The two phenomena, the notion of the extra-historicity of art and the Eurocentric bias of our thinking on culture, are not merely in a clear reciprocal relationship but would seem to be mutually dependent one upon the other. In the present writer’s opinion, they would also appear to be central aspects of a total attitude towards art which cannot, in clear honesty, be defined as anything less than cultural colonialism.

These observations, however, can only serve at this point in time as a sketch outlining the problem in broad strokes and thus attempting to define the general areas in which research and analysis are indicated. This specific enquiry is currently of an extremely pressing nature for obvious moral as well as historical reasons; but the scope of the question is very wide and far-reaching, penetrating as it does into every corner and crevice of our cultural superstructure, into every assumption and belief that helps to support our identity and self-esteem, into every facet and aspect of life that we regard as justifying our individual roles and activities.

In the broadest sense, what we regard generally as culture, and specifically as art, is the continually mutating end-product of a process that is basically mythic in nature, that is to say, a process in which beliefs and asumptions gain substance, become validated. But the dynamics of culture do not only lead in this way towards the fluid identification of a collective identity within a society, they also tend towards the freezing of concepts supportive to the interests of a dominant minority within that society.¹ Ideas which are at first the products of historical necessity are thus transformed into absolutes that are cited in justification of attempts to arrest the historical process, to maintain the status quo.

The need to examine our present cultural assumptions in the light of the above contention cannot be emphasized strongly enough. It would seem that in the present majority view, there is hardly a single facet of that complex structure which we refer to as ‘high’ culture that is understood to remain conditional upon historic necessity; rather, the whole cultural superstructure appears to be generally regarded as constituting a self-enclosed system obedient only to the exigencies of ‘art history’—a different matter altogether. The discipline of art history has never, until now (excepting in the work of isolated individuals regarded, institutionally, as tangential), been required to submit itself to the historical rigours of social and political fact, but has been nourished in the main on poetic insight and metaphysical speculation.

Art history has been, since its inception in the late Renaissance, ultimately little more than a scholarly elaboration of myths inescapably engendered by the twin concepts of the essential sublimity of the creative process (which logically defines art as an experience located in the sphere of the ideal rather than the actual) and the centrality of style (which predicates the sequential development of an art whose central subject-matter is restricted to its confrontation with previous art rather than with real experience taking place in history).

The notion of the extra-historicity of art is, however, clearly a false one—not even, but especially—in terms of the class which not only defends this idea, but also raises it to an ideological imperative. The bourgeois insistence upon the idealist nature of the whole creative process can be seen to serve, on the one hand, as justifying the view held by that class that its understanding of the individualistic, competitive, and acquisitive nature of man is not a class-view but an absolute human condition, and, on the other hand, to obscure the almost total appropriation of ‘high’ culture as both the private property and preserve of a privileged group and as the spiritual vindication of their continuing economic and political domination.

Enough has been written elsewhere upon the question of a dominant class appropriation of cultural institutions to dispense with arguing this point in the present context: it is hoped that it will be here accepted that the possession of a broad culture and of a liberal-humanist education is not merely the privilege of the bourgeoisie but that it also comprises the structure of the code signals by which individual members of the class recognize each other and consolidate their own private identities. The institutions in which the transference and acquisition of cultural property take place are set up in such a manner as to perpetuate existing class privileges and to restrict the entry of extra-class individuals to those whose status is considered in terms of necessary recruitment, that is to say, as candidates for indoctrination into the bourgeois value system.

It might be stated that it is not our purpose here to consider the still-existing, though possibly eroding, bourgeois class dominance other than where class hegemony relates to colonialist assumptions. But this finally would be a meaningless statement since it is not possible to separate either, historically, the development of bourgeois consciousness from the development of colonialism, or socially, the bourgeois value-system from racist and imperialist assumptions of superiority. Very little that...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• PART IV
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS