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What Became Authentic P5imitive A5t? Autho5(S) !"#$%&'(#)'%*+$"',$-(%./-)-$-0'%*/$1 *+$"2/3456%7"'889%://-,;$2, 72+/('6%<+8$+/#8%*,$"/2=282;9>%?28@%A>%B2@%C%3D#9>%EAAF5>%==@%CGEHCCI .+J8-4"'K%J96%&8#(LM'88%.+J8-4"-,;%2,%J'"#8N%2N%$"'%*)'/-(#,%*,$"/2=282;-(#8%*442(-#$-2, 7$#J8'%OPQ6%http://www.jstor.org/stable/656240 *(('44'K6%CFREERCGGA%EG6GE Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Blackwell Publishing and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cultural Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org What Became Authentic Primitive Art? Shelly Errington University of California, Santa Cruz The category "Primitive Art" was invented at the turn of the 20th century and gained acceptance as "art,"and, with it, monetary value, in the first half of the century-an inspiration to avant-gardeartists, a pleasure to avant-gardecollec- tors. By mid-century, it had begun to enter the mainstreamof established art. It got its own museum in New York in 1954, when the Museum of Primitive Art was founded-funded by Nelson Rockefeller and containing largely his collec- tion. For about thirty years interest in "Primitive Art" grew. Public acceptance of it became more widespread; galleries selling it flourished; scholarly interest in it increased, and many new studies were made; curatorialinterest grew, and new exhibits were installed. In 1984, Primitive Art seemed at the peak of its acceptance and validation, and with no fewer than five major exhibits of Primitive Art on show that winter in New York:Northwest Coast Art at the IBM gallery; Ashanti Gold at the American Museum of Natural History; African Masterpieces From the Musee de L'Homme at the newly established Museum of African Art; the permanent collection installed in the Rockefeller Wing of the MetropolitanMuseum of Art, which had opened just two years before; and finally, the Museum of Modern Art's major and controversial production "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art. But the seminars, catalogues, critiques, reviews, and general publicity attending the conjunction of so much Primitive Art in the winter of 1984 revealed that the notion "Primitive Art," and the valorizationof what was pronounced to be "authentic"Primitive Art by various authorities, had become far more controversial than the casual admirer of Primitive Art might have imagined. Most critiques focused on reexamining the issue of "authenticity,"disput- ing the notion that "authentic"primitive people live as they have lived for cen- turies, untouched by Western civilization or history. The idea that authentic Primitive Art consists of objects made by "untouched"cultures for their own uses rather than for sale to "outsiders" and that these objects are pure in their form and content, uncontaminated by Western influence, has been thoroughly CulturalAnthropology 9(2):201-226. Copyright ? 1994, American Anthropological Association. 201 202 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY criticized by Fabian (1983), Clifford (1988), Price (1989), Torgovnick (1990), and many others. Through such critiques, received notions of "authenticity" have been thoroughly discredited, and "primitivism" has been exposed as a Western ideological construct. Considerablyless attentionhas been paid, however, to the thirdword in the term "authenticPrimitive Art." Among the infinitude of objects considered both "authentic"and "primitive,"only some of them were selected as "art"objects, their legitimacy institutionalized, and their monetary value as art established. To consider this issue requires a shift in focus from primitivism to art-to the deep schemata concerning "art"that inform the selection of some objects, but not most, to be designated (primitive) "art," and to the legitimizing museum processes that, in effect, pronounce them to be art. The Primitive Art in the Michael Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is what Malraux would call "art by metamorphosis" (1949). These artifacts began their existences as many different things-from ceremo- nial clubs to ancestral effigies, from door lintels to kava bowls. Their uses and functions in their contexts of production were various, but they were not "art," as they became in the Met. They have been moved great distances-from New Guinea, or Mesoamerica, or Africa-and have come to rest in New York City. Once in New York, they have continued their peripatetic existence. Over a pe- riod of decades, they have moved, some literally and some metaphorically,out of the American Museum of Natural History on the west side of Central Park, down to Midtown on 54th Street to the Museum of Primitive Art, and then up the other side of the parkto the Met. These spatial movements parallel andhelp con- stitute their movements across categories. In what follows, I will examine what became "Authentic Primitive Art," using the Rockefeller Wing as a point of reference (see Figure 1). The Rockefel- ler Wing-the contents, its history of collection and exhibition, and its current installation-is paradigmaticof the meanings and fate of Authentic Primitive Art. For one thing, the objects in it exemplify and help constitute what I call High Primitive Art, the "authentic"Primitive Art that is valorized and exhibited in major museums and that commands the highest prices at auctions and in gal- leries. For another,the founding of the Museum of Primitive Art in 1954 and the opening of the Rockefeller Wing in 1982, both of which contained the same core collection, span the thirty-oddyears in which Authentic Primitive Art was most accepted and valorized as a category of objects in museum exhibitions and in scholarship. This period can be seen as ending in 1984, when the Museum of Moder Art's show "Primitivism"in 20th CenturyArt provoked so much con- troversy that the erosion of the validity of the notion of Authentic Primitive Art became problematic, even to a general audience. Art by Intention and Art by Appropriation The vast majorityof objects found in fine artsmuseums were not createdas "art,"not intended by their makersto be "art":they were originally otherthings. Andre Malraux addresses this fact, writing that many of the objects we count as WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 203 Figure1 Museum view. Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Gallery of OceanicArt of Melanesia,The MichaelC. RockefellerMemorial Wing. (Until 1991, the name was The Michael C. RockefellerWing of Primitive Art.) Reprintedby permissionof the MetropolitanMuseum of Art, New York. ? The Metropolitan Museumof Art. "art"required a "metamorphosis" in order to become "art"(1949). These ob- jects are counted as "art"because they were claimed as such at certain historical moments. The term "metamorphosis,"I think, seems entirely too gentle for some of the transformationsthat have taken place. While acknowledging the import of Malraux's writing on the topic, I want to distinguish here between art by appro- priation (ratherthan by metamorphosis) and art by intention.' Art by intention was made as art, created in contexts that had a concept of art approximating what we now hold: paradigmatically,the kinds of objects created in the Italian renaissance as art. Art by appropriationconsists of the diverse objects that be- came "art"with the founding of public fine arts museums at the end of the 18th century. More and more objects gained status as art during the 19th century and entered the museum; one thinks especially of religious objects, like Byzantine icons and Christian triptychs, but there were many more. It is true, but obvious, that the objects in the Rockefeller Wing are "artby appropropriation."To say so only begins to open up the topic. What counts as a work of art?What attributesof the uncountableobjects thathumans have made predispose them to being selected as "art"objects? And how are these objects transformedby display, framing, and other practices into "art"objects? 204 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY What Counts as a Work of Art? The assemblage of so many masterpieces in a museum, Andre Malraux wrote in Museum without Walls, conjures up in the mind's eye all the world's masterpieces."How indeed could this truncatedpossible fail to evoke the whole gamut of the possible?" he asks."Of what is it [the museum] necessarily de- prived?"He answers: Of all thatforms an integralpart of a whole (stainedglass, frescos);of all that cannotbe moved;of objectssuch as sets of tapestrywhich are difficult to display; and,chiefly, of all thatthe collectionis unableto acquire ... Fromthe eighteenth to the twentiethcentury what migrated was the portable.[Malraux 1949:16] Relative to portability is size. Too small, and the item becomes insignifi- cant. Too large, and it becomes costly to transportand difficult to display. It is no mean feat to transport30-foot carved poles from IrianJaya to New York, and it requiresa collector or museum both wealthy and determinedenough to do it. To become "art"these portable objects must be displayed, and to be displayed they must be accommodated in a suitable space.
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