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17 ‘PRIMITIVISM’, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND THE CATEGORY OF ‘PRIMITIVE ART’

Fred Myers

In Sydney, Australia, in 1992, in a district near Saussurean one, vulnerable to causation and the old Rocks area now incorporated into a contingency, as well as open to further causal tourist district, the sign on the gallery door consequences. reads ‘Aboriginal and Tribal Art Museum Critics have been drawn to the constructions and Shop’. Inside, the objects range from New of primitive art; they recognize that the display Guinea baskets and wood sculptures and and circulation of objects through this register Aboriginal boomerangs to bark and acrylic has been a significant form of social action, dis- paintings. In 1994, Sotheby’s catalog for their tributing value to cultural products. In turn, the 1994 auction of ‘Tribal Art’ in New York material form of these objects shapes their semi- changed the name it was using for its title, after otic constructions; for example, certain objects – protest from Indigenous Australians, from especially the portable objects of ‘primitive art’, ‘Churinga’ (a word referring to sacred objects such as small carvings – can be more readily of Aboriginal people in Central Australia and circulated, recontextualized, and reappropri- specifically to one of the most important items ated than others – such as cave paintings. in this sale) to the more general ‘Tribal Art.’ By the 1970s, as scholars recognized that the category ‘primitive art’ was problematic as Objects do not exist as ‘primitive art’. This is a an analytic frame, substitutes for the category category created for their circulation, exhibition have been sought – ‘nonwestern art’, ‘tribal and consumption outside their original habi- art’, ‘the art of small-scale societies’, and so forth tats. To be framed as ‘primitive art’ is to be (see Anderson 1989; Rubin 1984; Vogel 1989). resignified – as both ‘primitive’ and as ‘art’ – Nonetheless, the category persists within a acts that require considerable social and cul- significant market for objects, even as debates tural work, and critical analysis of these about the category continue to inform theories processes has fundamentally transformed the of material culture. The interest in ‘primitive study of art. In this chapter, I trace how the art’ has shifted to the problem of ‘primitivism’ analysis of this process has taken place in itself – emphasizing the categories of the West terms of discourse, semiotics, and especially and the meanings they attribute to objects from social life. Consideration of the circulation, elsewhere and also (but less obviously) to the exhibition, and consumption of objects – partic- ways that particular material objects instigate ularly of what Webb Keane (2005) has called ‘the ideological effects (see Baudrillard 1968). In this practical and contingent character of things’ – chapter, I first argue that the existence of the shows how their materiality matters: the category ‘primitive art’ as a framework for the objects in question under the sign of ‘primitive curation of material culture is part of a taxo- art’ are more than mere vehicles for ideas. They nomic structure (Baudrillard 1968; Clifford are, as Keane notes in following Peirce’s under- 1988) shaped by an ideological formation. Along standing of signs in contrast to the usual with this first argument, however, I wish to 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 268

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develop a second point through the notion of Because such studies were undertaken within ‘objectification’, attending to the ways in which a division of labor between art history and material qualities of objects suppressed within anthropology does not inherently make them this categorical formation may persist and have part of the ‘primitivist’ ideological formation potential for new readings and alternate itself; essays in the well known collections edited histories. by Jopling (1971), Otten (1971) and D’Azevedo (1973) can hardly be accused of imagining a unified ‘primitivity’. Even so, the indirect PRIMITIVISM influence of primitivism has remained all too often in other attempts to find local, ethno- aesthetic systems as if they were ‘uncontami- The construction known as ‘primitivism’ has nated’, or ‘pure’ of Western influence as well as been considered by a wide range of scholars, in ‘allochronic’ (Fabian 1983) and part of another the past and in the present, and its origins have era (see Clifford 1988; Thomas 1991).3 been found by some in the classical period In a comprehensive survey, the art historian (Lovejoy and Boas 1935; Gombrich 2002)1 and by Colin Rhodes (1995) points out that the category others more meaningfully in the concern of the ‘primitive’ is a relational operator: Enlightenment to reconstruct the origins of The word ‘primitive’ generally refers to someone culture shaped by a reaction against classicism or something less complex, or less advanced, than (Connelly 1995). However, they differ among the person or thing to which it is being compared. themselves, the argument of these works is that It is conventionally defined in negative terms, as particular attributes of objects are valorized as lacking in elements such as organization, refine- an alternative to that which is more refined, ment and technological accomplishment. In cultural more ‘developed’, more ‘learned’ or ‘skilled’. terms this means a deficiency in those qualities Thus, the ‘primitive’ is a dialogical category, that have been used historically in the West as often explicitly a function of the ‘modern’ (see indications of civilization. The fact that the primi- also Diamond 1969); the current consideration of tive state of being is comparative is enormously the category is inextricably linked to controver- important in gaining an understanding of the sies about cultural and ideological appropriation concept, but equally so is the recognition that it is launched from postmodern and postcolonial cri- no mere fact of nature. It is a theory that enables tique. These critiques seek to identify the func- differences to be described in qualitative terms. tion of the category as part of Western culture. Whereas the conventional Western viewpoint at As Clifford (1988), Errington (1998), and the turn of the century imposed itself as superior Price (1989) have shown, there have been sig- 2 to the primitive, the Primitivist questioned the nificant consequences of this formation. For validity of that assumption, and used those same much of the twentieth century, ‘primitive art’ ideas as a means of challenging or subverting his defined a category of art that was, more or less, or her own culture, or aspects of it. the special domain of anthropology – a domain differentiated from the general activity of ‘art (Rhodes 1995: 13) history’ by virtue of being outside the ordinary, This relationality may help us to understand linear narratives of (Western) artistic ‘progress’ an extraordinary diversity of forms within the in naturalistic representation. Primarily, there- primitive, what Connelly has called ‘the diffi- fore, non-Western and prehistoric art, ‘primi- culty in discerning a rationale underlying the tive art’ (later to become ‘tribal art’, the ‘art of chaotic mix of styles identified as ‘primitive’ small-scale societies’, and even ‘ethnographic (1995: 3). Some critics have pointed out that the art’) was most obviously within the purview of formulation of the primitive – as timeless, anthropological study and was exhibited in unchanging, traditional, collective, irrational, ethnographic or natural history rather than ‘fine ritualized, ‘pure’ – has been configured against art’ museums. One consequence of this place- the notions of the individually heroic modern ment, noted by many, has been the popular person as ‘rational’, ‘individual’, and so on. identification of Native American cultures (for Others have emphasized the construction of example) not with other human creations, but ‘primitive’ expressiveness and directness as with the natural plant and animal species of a superior to classical and learned convention. continent – suggesting that products are parts A consideration of relationality further sug- of nature, as if they had no history. Nonetheless, gests that the operation of this category must many particular analyses of non-Western art be understood within a particular structure systems, the many detailed studies of local aes- and in relation to the properties of the objects thetic organization and function, have value. themselves. A perceived (or attributed) lack of 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 269

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refinement in the manufacture of objects the binding doctrines of ‘authenticity’ and might be conducive to the common view that cultural purity (see, e.g., Ziff and Rao 1997; ‘primitive’ art is more spiritual than Western Karp and Lavine 1992). art. Conversely, others regard such objects as The second strand has drawn inspiration providing a mere display of virtuousity and from the postmodern attack on the doctrine and hence ‘craft’ (more material) compared to the practice of Modernism itself (its structures and philosophically loaded stuff of ‘real art’ (more codes) as a formation of hierarchy and exclu- ideational). My aim, then, is to illuminate the sion that subordinates or manages cultural ‘dif- linkages between the ideological structure of ference’ that might be threatening to the values an aesthetic doctrine of Modernism and notions it instantiates (see Clifford 1988; Foster 1985; for of the ‘primitive’, and the materiality of the a more general consideration of postmodernism, objects of ‘primitive art’. see Connor 1989). Not only does this variant of criticism manifest the struggle within art theory itself, about what ‘art’ or good art is, about what MOMA EXHIBITION: THE is ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ (Danto 1986). The significant ‘PRIMITIVISM’ DEBATE insight of postmodern criticism has also been that art theory is not neutral and external, that formalist definitions of material culture as ‘art’ Much of the linkage between Modernism and are themselves part of culture. They are projected the category of ‘primitive art’ was illuminated and circulated as part of cultural struggle, as in the body of critical response to the New York defensive responses to a surrounding context – Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition to the threat to ‘art’, for example, of theatricality, ‘“Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art: the entertainment, kitsch, and mass culture – threats Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern’.4 The specifically addressed in such well known terms of the ‘primitivism’ debate as it developed formulations as those of Clement Greenberg in the art world should be understood initially (1937/1961), Michael Fried (1967), and Theodor as manifesting criticism of the famous Museum Adorno (1983). of Modern Art (MOMA) and its ideological It might well be argued that such formalism construction of Modernism. In marking off placed materiality itself (the quality of the ‘capital M’ Modernism, following Blake and ‘thing’, its very ‘thingness’) – its irreducibility to Frascina (1993), I mean a particular aesthetic simple ideas – in the foreground, thereby con- doctrine rather than the whole of what I trasting with older views of art as the expression should call modern art. (This is frequently of ultimately immaterial intentions, meanings, identified with the doctrine of ‘Modernism’ and values. The rise of Formalism owed a great that, in Clement Greenberg’s famous (1965) deal, historically, to the perceived need to sus- formulation, strips away everything ‘nonessen- tain a place for ‘art’ after the rise of photography tial’ to an artistic medium.)5 as the medium of naturalistic representation. I have found it useful to distinguish two In this regard, Roger Fry’s (1920) theorization significant strands in the ‘primitivism’ critiques. of ‘significant form’ rather than content as the By and large, critics of the varieties of what they basis of true art provides an important precursor see as a ‘primitivist fantasies’ paradigm have of the theory and rescue work of later Modernist drawn on the Foucauldian association of power/ criticism, such as Greenberg’s.6 knowledge to give theoretical shape to their In the criticized definitions of ‘art’ – definitions efforts to discern the imposition of meaning which are regarded by critics as sharing the and values on Native peoples. Those following Kantian ideal of aesthetics as somehow distinct this strand of analysis, best known through from practical reason and morality – art is qual- Said’s Orientalism (1978), have emphasized itatively superior (if not transcendent) to other how being represented as ‘primitive’ traps or cultural forms. Critically oriented postmodern subjectifies Others and has defining power (as theorists, such as Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, dominant knowledge) over their identities. The and Craig Owens, as well as more straight- exemplary case for such formulations has been forward sociological critics such as Pierre the display of cultures in the museum or exhi- Bourdieu (1984), asserted that art’s defensive bition, a situation where local (‘primitive’, strategy of self-definition (art’s autonomy from ‘Native’, ‘indigenous’) voices – if not entirely other spheres of culture) was not simply a neu- absent – were more muted. Indeed, a good deal tral fact, but was a form of cultural production of the recognition and criticism of these con- itself – an exclusionary, boundary-maintaining structions follows from the emerging indige- activity, a hegemonic exercise of power through nous political project that involves critiques of knowledge. 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 270

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From this point of view, the deployment of much as a simply mistaken ethnocentric ‘primitivism’ was criticized – or deconstructed – misrepresentation; rather, it was seen as actively precisely as a relational operator of Modernism constituting in its poetics a hegemonic ideolog- itself. The art historian and critic Hal Foster ical structure. The inspiration for such an analy- (1985) argued that ‘primitivism’ (the frame- sis of the exhibition should ultimately be traced work through which certain cultural projects to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) influential were experienced and understood) was an but now somewhat eclipsed discussion of the instrumentality of Modernist cultural forma- bricoleur and ‘the science of the concrete’. The tion, in the service of sustaining and producing curator/bricoleur takes his or her elements from a Western identity as superior. The sense of the world’s material culture and recontextual- cultural hierarchy and exclusion as defensive izes their sensible or material properties by strategies underlies much of the critical work placing them within an exhibition or installation of the 1980s and 1990s, and gives weight to as a larger whole, itself standing indexically and Foster’s chracterization of it as ‘fetishism’ – iconically for the world outside it. From this that is, something made by people that appears recontextualization emerges a particular for- to be independent of them and to have power mation of ‘primitive art’ reflecting, instantiating, over them, hiding its own source in the subject and ‘naturalizing’ the codes of modernism. That of whom it is really a part. ‘challenge’ is possible, critical and/or political, suggests the instability of any such structure, its inability to hold the objects’ material quali- MOMA EXHIBITION: THE ties to its singular ordering. Indeed, while the UNANTICIPATED CRISIS emphasis of Formalism might be seen as giving greater value to material form than to inten- OF PRIMITIVE ART tions, meanings, narratives, or other less mate- rial dimensions of the art work, since only the Even in the more controlled domains, however, materiality within the art work was admitted to since those material qualities that are suppressed consideration, other qualities of the object could do persist, objects bring the potential for new real- be made to challenge the structure. izations into new historical contexts (see, e.g., The critiques of the MOMA show had prece- Thomas 1991). dents. Work that indicated this relationship between aesthetic theory and politics – e.g., (Keane 2005) Guilbaut’s How New York stole the Idea of Abstract The contest of positions and ideas, however, Art (1983) or Barthes’s essay on the MOMA’s was not a disembodied one, abstracted in early ‘Family of Man’ exhibition (1957) – space and time. It had everything to do with informed their discussion of an ideology in the cultural power of a particular institution – which art practices and objects were made to New York’s Museum of Modern Art – to define represent a generic but problematic ‘humanity’. artistic merit and value, and the struggle of The ‘primitivism’ debates pursued a series of those outside it – women, minorities – to estab- questions about the complicity of Modernism – lish a framework of recognition of their work a supposedly progressive, emancipatory aes- and that of others who believed themselves to thetic doctrine – with projects of colonialist be excluded by MOMA’s doctrines. and imperialist hegemony. They implicated It should be clear that the dominant notion of Modernism as an ideological structure in which ‘art’ that came under criticism was the notion value is constructed or denied through repre- of an aesthetic experience constituted through sentation. That this ideological structure was the disinterested contemplation of objects as art embodied in the institution of MOMA – an objects removed from instrumental associations institution with massive cultural authority (see Bourdieu 1984). This notion of the aesthetic and connection to collectors and dealers – was was entirely compatible with the formalist central to its effectiveness, far beyond anything emphasis of prevailing art discourses at the time, that might have been produced, for example, although the implicit hierarchies of value were through the discourse of anthropologists. at this time becoming the subject of challenge. Enacted within a controlled domain, this exhi- Critics approached the MOMA show on bition was a high stakes cultural performance of grounds of the inapplicability of the Modernist, the relationship between the West and the Rest. formal concept of ‘art’ itself as appropriate for William Rubin, the curator of the exhibition, universal application as a framework for inter- had gained his reputation as a Picasso expert. preting or evaluating the value of material Not surprisingly, Rubin organized the exhibit culture. They portrayed the exhibition not so around his understanding of Picasso, owing 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 271

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much to Picasso’s own mythology – in which male heroic creativity) were a human universal the artist’s own internal history arrived at a sit- and to support the Modernist narrative of con- uation (the critique of older models and con- temporary Western art practice as represent- ventions of art) that found African art/sculpture ing the finest expression of human art. Those to exemplify formal properties important at that so-called primitive artists whose work did not time in the West. Neither Rubin nor Picasso – resemble the valued modern were not selected nor Robert Goldwater, from whose earlier for display. volume, Primitivism in Modern Art (1938), the Postmodern critics have argued for a less idea came – saw the primitive as influencing the linear, more decentered approach to ‘art’ – see- modern artist.7 The evolution of modern art, ing ‘art’ as having less unity and having multi- according to the MOMA narrative, was sup- ple histories, emphasizing a range of differences posed to be an internal dialectic of liberation as equally ‘art’. By seeming to discern ‘affinities’ from narrative content towards an emphasis on that the exhibition itself constructed, the exhi- material form. The ‘Primitivism’ exhibition’s bition naturalized the MOMA doctrine of aes- fascination – and the first section of the instal- thetics while at the same time it abstracted lation – was with the objects that Picasso and non-Western objects from whatever context his contemporaries had in their studios, what and function they might originally have had. they could possibly and actually did see – a By finding similarities where there should be brilliant, historical exploration of the specific differences, through this recontextualization traffic in culture at the time – with an explicit MOMA’s ‘primitivism’ operated, it was argued, consideration of how the particular objects to universalize the aesthetic doctrine of Western entered into art (Rubin 1984). A salient example Modernism – emphasizing the formal, material was the Picasso painting that portrayed a gui- dimensions of art objects as their central quality tar resonating with the form of a Grebo mask – and indirectly supporting a separable or autono- matching the specific mask then in his studio mous dimension of human life that was ‘art’. and its appearance in his painting. Anthropologists have been familiar with the The second part of the exhibition moved potential that cultural comparison has for ide- to ‘Affinities’, as they were called, or general ological deployment. Lacking historical connec- resemblances – pairing a prominent Western tion and context for ‘tribal’ objects, the means art work (and artist) with a non-Western (or of constructing typological similarities in the tribal) piece that presented the same formal ‘Affinities’ section were very much like those properties (according to the curator’s grouping). involved in what was called ‘the comparative Clifford and others pointed out how this instal- method.’ In the ninetieth century, in books and lation functioned ideologically. Following the exhibitions, this method of cultural compari- famous Barthes (1957) essay on the ideology of son undergirded the ethnocentric, universalist ‘The Family of Man’ – an exhibition of pho- histories of unilineal evolution from ‘primi- tographs, curated by Edward Weston and cir- tive’ (and simple) to ‘civilized’ (and complex).8 culated by MOMA in the 1950s, which saw However, at MOMA’s exhibition, ‘primitive human beings everywhere as subject to the same art’ had a different – but still ethnocentric – concerns and theme — Clifford argued that a function, departing from the ninetieth-century ‘Family of Art’ was allegorized in the MOMA’s construction of cultural hierarchy. The view of ‘Primitivism’ exhibition. Especially in the pair- art implemented by the comparison at MOMA ing of unattributed non-Western works with and more widely circulating, as Sally Price the masterpieces of named Western Modernist argued, was characterized further by what she artists, the exhibition emphasized creativity and called ‘the universality principle’ – a principle formal innovation as the gist of ‘art’ everywhere. articulated in ‘the proposition that art is a ‘uni- Ideological critiques have long been suspi- versal language’ expressing the common joys cious of ‘naturalizing’ and regard such acts of and concerns of all humanity’ (1989: 32). Not representation not as innocent errors but as only does such a principle of universality legit- attempts to provide legitimacy for current for- imate the view of aesthetics as universal, mations of power. Thus, to represent so-called innate, and transcending culture and politics – ‘primitive’ artists as having the same formal the innate taste of the connoisseur who knows motivations and interests as those said to be art (anywhere) when he or she sees it. But this central to the modern avant-garde was to assert proposition of universality is, in turn, based on that the particular art practices celebrated in another Western conceit – the notion that ‘artis- Twentieth-century doctrines (that seem conve- tic creativity originates deep within the psyche niently resonant with bourgeois experiences of the artist. Response to works of art then and celebratory of individual and especially becomes a matter of viewers tapping into the 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 272

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psychological realities that they, as fellow human A number of historians have recognized the beings, share with the artist’ (Price 1989: 32). linkages in which, for example, ‘the burden of While she was principally objecting to the sophistication’ weighing on modern artists ‘had ethnocentrism of viewers’ presuming to know necessitated their enthusiasm ‘for every primi- directly what is at stake in the objects, unmedi- tive period of art in which they could regain a ated by knowledge of their context and func- sense of seeing with the uneducated gaze of tion in the horizon of expected viewers. Price the savage and the childlike eye’ (Leo Stein, was drawing attention to another variety of quoted in Price 1989: 33). This view of primi- ‘primitivist’ representation.9 In this variant, the tive art ‘as a kind of creative expression that ‘primitive’ is more direct in expression, unmedi- flows unchecked from the artist’s unconscious’ ated by tradition or reason – the polar opposite (Price 1989: 32) has potentially difficult ideo- of the refined and inexpressive classical (see logical implications. While the implications for also Connelly 1995; Gombrich 2002).10 There is those valorizing ‘directness’ of expression or no doubt that Western artists like Picasso had refusing the conventions of the past may point their own Romantic forms of ‘primitivism’, see- in one direction, the comparison of primitive ing so-called tribal artists to be, as the art histo- art and children’s drawings that valorizes this rian Paul Wingert (1974) said, ‘more closely allied formation has also been recognized to under- to the fundamental, basic, and essential drives write some doctrines of racial inferiority. of life’ which Civilized or Western folks share but ‘bury ‘under a multitude of parasitical, nonessential desires’. TIME AND THE OTHER Along this fracture line, Thomas McEvilley criticized the exhibition for its effort to demon- strate the universality of aesthetic values. Another significant criticism of the way the The implicit claim of universality, he observed, category ‘primitive art’ operates addresses the operated in the service of placing Formalist neutralization of Time, following Johannes Modernism as the highest criterion of evaluation. To Fabian’s (1983) important discussion of allo- make his point, McEvilley invoked in positive chronic and coeval perspectives. In the former, terms another trope of ‘primitivism’ (endorsing a temporal distancing technique exemplified the opposite side of the ideological dyad) – the by some kinds of traditional ethnographic Romantic and dark Otherness of non-Western writing, non-Western people are represented art. McEvilley claimed the exhibition accom- as existing in some other time than the writer, plished its construction of aesthetic universality not as part of the same history. A coeval per- through censorship of the meaning, context, and spective, in contrast, emphasizes their copres- intention – the excessive materiality – of the ence. Some connoisseurs have assumed that exotic objects: there were – at some time – isolated cultures In their native contexts these objects were invested projecting their own ‘spirit’ or cultural essence with feelings of awe and dread, not of esthetic into their objects. In the MOMA show, and ennoblement. They were seen usually in motion, other exhibitions, Clifford (1988) pointed out, at night, in closed dark spaces, by flickering torch- the objects of ‘primitive art’ were typically light … their viewers were under the influence of identified by ‘tribal group’, implying a stylistic ritual, communal identification feelings, and often consensus, without individual authorship alcohol or drugs; above all, they were activated by (implying a collectivity), and without much the presence within or among the objects them- temporal location. When operating in the project selves of the shaman, acting out the usually terri- of defining – by contrast or similarity – ‘us’, the fying power represented by the mask or icon. ‘primitive’ and his or her objects tend not to be What was at stake for the viewer was not esthetic seen within their own histories and contexts. appreciation but loss of self in identification with The effect is to suggest that nothing happens and support of the shamanic performance. over time in these homogeneous and apparently unchanging primitive, traditional societies. Such (McEvilley 1984: 59) societies appear to exemplify Eliade’s (1959) By repressing the aspect of content, the Other is archetype of repetition in societies dominated tamed into mere pretty stuff to dress us up ... In by ritual rather than history. depressing starkness, ‘Primitivism’ lays bare the way The ‘primitivism’ debates revealed how the our cultural institutions relate to foreign cultures, opposed categories of ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’, revealing it as an ethnocentric subjectivity inflated as ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’ respectively, to coopt such cultures and their objects into itself. might regulate the fabricated boundaries (McEvilley 1984: 60). between the modern West and a supposedly 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 273

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premodern Other. In drawing attention to the contradictions that, while general, are more neutralization of Time, and borrowing from specific and distinctive in the historical and Fabian (1983), Clifford’s criticism notes how this geographical relationships mediated (Coombes Other is distanced from us by being excluded 2001). from contemporaneous or coeval presence The debates themselves had a startling effect with ‘us’. The skewing of temporality involves on anthropologists. For decades, after all, a chronotope that preserves the spatialized and anthropologists and others had labored for temporal boundaries between sociocultural official acceptance of non-Western visual arts worlds and people who are in fact intercon- and aesthetics as serious and deserving objects nected. Indeed, it requires denying or repressing of consideration in the modernist canon of the actual history of power, relationships, and visual culture. Then, just when it appeared that commerce that resulted in collecting the objects so-called ‘tribal art’ was being recognized as in the first place. Are not such connections having affinity with the work of the recognized necessary for Westerners to have gotten the geniuses of modern art, art critics pulled the rug objects? And is their suppression necessary to from under the enterprise. Even more embar- the functioning of the category ‘primitive art’? rassingly, perhaps, they did so on grounds that For the purpose of the ‘primitivist’ alterity to anthropologists ought to have anticipated: modernity, such representations were valued namely the inapplicability of the Modernist, for their contrast with the modern self- formal concept of ‘art’ itself as a universal, conscious, dynamism and challenge of conven- interpretive, and evaluative category. tions typical of Western society and Western In this way, there has been a deconstruction art history. But for collectors of ‘primitive art’, both of the category ‘art’ and of ‘primitive art’ this purity, association with ritual, and dis- that is perfectly summarized in Clifford’s influ- tance from Western influence are precisely the ential review in the following comments: sources of value. Thus, the valorized ‘primitive’ the MOMA exhibition documents a taxonomic usable in critique is nonetheless presumed to moment: the status of non-Western objects and be ahistorical, timeless, unchanging, authorless. ‘high’ art are importantly redefined, but there is These qualities seem necessary to preserve the nothing permanent or transcendent about the cat- capacity of this formation to provide an alterity egories at stake. The appreciation and interpreta- from the West. On the one hand, ‘primitive art’ is tion of tribal objects takes place within a modern authentic, expressive of the truly different Other, ‘system of objects’ which confers value on certain only when it originates outside of Western con- things and withholds it from others (Baudrillard tact, in a precolonial past. On the other hand, 1968). Modernist primitivism, with its claims to such modes of exhibition efface the specific deeper humanist sympathies and a wider aesthetic histories and power relations through which sense, goes hand-in-hand with a developed market non-Western objects became part of Western in tribal art and with definitions of artistic and cul- collections, available to display. Indeed, they tural authenticity that are now widely contested. typically exclude the contemporary representa- tives of these cultural traditions as ‘inauthentic’. (Clifford 1988: 198) Yet, as the critique of deconstruction pro- For many, this debate about ‘the primitive’ vides in one way, these very meanings are also was principally a debate about Modernism available in the presence of the objects and and modernity, against Modernism’s claim to their exhibition – and they provide evidence of universality and the insistent identification of the cultural work (through recontextualiza- art with formal, artistic invention. The debates tion itself) in which objects have often been have demonstrated the extent to which non- deployed – of remembering, forgetting, dis- Western practices – or more often the extractable membering, obviating, and displacing histories products of those practices – have become of and relationships. This is what Keane (2005) theoretical significance for the massive and means in calling for attention to causality, critical debates within the art world itself con- attention to ‘what things make possible’ and cerning aesthetics and cultural politics (Foster not just what they ‘mean’. At the same time, 1983; Lippard 1991; and see Michaels 1987). this quality has led to exhibitions – such as the But this is not the only significance of the one on Stewart Culin, an important collector of debates, because – fittingly enough in a world Native American art for the Brooklyn Museum – of globalization and boundary breakdown – that place the objects of ‘primitive art’ precisely the exhibition and debates provided an occa- within the interconnections of their collection sion for those cast into the ‘primitive’ category and display (Fane 1991) and also for analysis to protest and resist the ideological and practical to relate the construction of exhibitions to effects of this representations. 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 274

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UNIVERSAL ART PROCESSES? in all cultures and (2) their differences. This has been an area of ambivalence in the anthropol- ogy of art, sustained by an inadequate reflexive These critical concerns about modernity and consideration of Western concepts of art (see difference, constitutive in one sense of the Myers and Marcus 1995) and by the segregation meanings given to ‘primitive art’, have fit very of the market for non-Western objects from the uncomfortably with the concomitant debates larger debates. I don’t mean to say that collec- about the question of a cross-cultural and tors of ‘primitive art’ were unaware of stylistic universal aesthetics as constituted in the disci- traditions and variations. (Indeed, some of plinary concerns of Anthropology. The ambiva- them think they are collecting ‘masterpieces’.) lence about comparison is of long standing in However, the participation of collectors in the anthropology, but as suggested above, despite discourse of ‘authenticity’ and ‘purity’ relates relativistic their suspicion of Western art theory’s to the ideological functioning of the category explicit universality, anthropologists gave little ‘primitive art’ at another level – one in which attention to the power of cultural hierarchy as the underlying forms of expression, psyche, an important component in the functioning of 11 and motivation are essentially one. difference. There are intrinsic contradictions here, and the While known for his ‘historical particular- emerging line of cleavage only reinforces the ism’ and insistence on relativism, the ‘father of sense of the category’s instability and involve- American anthropology’ and author of the sem- ment in ideological regulation. By ‘instability’ Primitive Art inal volume (1927), Franz Boas I seek to draw attention to conflation. The himself wrote that there is a common set of anthropological sense of difference is incorpo- processes in art: rated in concerns about cultural relativism; The treatment given to the subject [primitive art] is while concerned to grant some kind of equality based on two principles that I believe should guide or equivalence among cultural formulations, it all investigations into the manifestations of life does not address the difference among cultures among primitive people: the one the fundamental in the same way as the postmodern suspicion sameness of mental processes in all races and in all of purported formal relationships between cultural forms of the present day; the other, the so-called ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ artists. The consideration of every cultural phenomenon as postmodern concern is to draw attention to the the result of historical happenings. existence of dominant Western cultural forms as ... So far as my personal experience goes and so cultural, rather than just natural and universal. far as I feel competent to judge ethnographical They deride the effacement of what must be data on the basis of this experience, the mental incommensurable differences in attempts at processes of man are the same everywhere, regard- ‘humanizing’ or ‘familiarizing’ the foreign in less of race and culture, and regardless of the terms of the dominant norm. They are further apparent absurdity of beliefs and customs. concerned with the way in which art theory (Boas 1927: 1) has tended to denying the value of popular art practice and popular culture, in so far as they Brilliantly in this volume, Boas attempted to might differ from what Modernism presented demonstrate technical virtuosity – emphasizing, as central and most valued. Skeptical of the strat- thus, the materiality both of the worker’s body egy of ‘humanism’, Clifford (1988) – and in dif- and of the object on which it works – as the vital ferent ways Marianna Torgovnick (1990) – drew core of ‘primitive art’ and art more generally. attention to these very tendencies in projects of By 1938, however, Joseph Campbell notes, sim- comparison in distinguishing a humanistic ilar passages were removed from Boas’s (1938) ethnography of ‘familiarization’ (that finds updated The Mind of Primitive Man: ‘a tendency similarities between them and us, but in our to emphasize the differentiating traits of prim- terms) from a surrealistic one that ‘subverts’ or itive societies had meanwhile developed to ‘disrupts’ the all-too-familiar categories.13 He such a degree that any mention by an author of called, famously, for attention to objects that are common traits simply meant that he had not ‘indigestible’ by our own categories, especially kept up with the fashion’ (1969: 20). ‘hybrid objects’, challenging to the frameworks It is not surprising that another component of of Western culture in ways resonant with the the ‘primitivism’ critiques,12 the discussions of historical avant-garde. aesthetic universality connected to the doctrine The primitivism debates allow us to recognize of Formalist Modernism, has cut across the older that the doctrines that view art as autonomous tradition of ‘tribal art’ studies that insisted at from other domains of social life are not times simultaneously on (1) the existence of ‘art’ ‘theories’ external to their object (see Myers and 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 275

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Marcus 1995; Myers 2002). As ‘ethnotheories’ We have to admit the conclusion, distasteful to these doctrines would be cultural products many historians of aesthetics but grudgingly and linked organically to the same processes admitted by most of them, that ancient writers and of modernization they seem to oppose. Just thinkers, though confronted with excellent works of as ‘antimodernism’ has been identified by art and quite susceptible to their charm, were nei- Jackson Lears (1983) as protesting ‘modernity’ ther able nor eager to detach the aesthetic quality of and therefore part of it, so ‘primitivism’ is these works of art from their intellectual, moral, intrinsically connected to ‘modernity’ and religious, and practical function or content, or to use ‘Modernism’. an aesthetic quality as a standard for grouping the fine arts together or for making them the subject of a comprehensive philosophical interpretation. ‘MODERN ART’ (Kristeller 1951/1965: 174) In considering what is called ‘modernity’, The foregoing implies that the relationality of historians have explored what is involved in the category ‘primitive art’ finds its location the binary constructions of ‘primitive art’. The within the changing meanings and valence of consideration of ‘modernity’ stresses the gen- the category ‘art’ itself in the Western tradition. eral context of institutional separation of dis- For many people engaged with the arts, ‘art’ tinct and abstract areas of interest – of kinship, remains a commonsense category of just this politics, religion, economics, and art – taking sort; and there is held to be something essential place in the rise of capitalism’s development, a about these practices in terms of their value, line pioneered by Max Weber, or in the rise of their relation to the human psyche or creativity the nation state (Eagleton 1990). There may not or spirituality. This has not, however, been be much agreement about the timing of these merely a fact of art’s universality, and social developments as well as the definitive charac- historians of art have pursued this strangeness, terization of the separation, but most theorists the particularity of Western art’s own self- agree that there is an important difference construction, from within the tradition. The between art and these other domains, in that – research of Kristeller, Williams, and others as Daniel Miller sums it up, ‘art appears to have (Baxandall 1972; Eagleton 1990) has pointed to been given, as its brief, the challenge of con- the distinctiveness of this ‘modern’ notion of fronting the nature of modernity itself, and pro- art, one in which quite distinct kinds of activity viding both moral commentary and alternative have come to be constructed (or recognized) as perspectives on that problem’ (Miller 1991: 52, separated from other cultural activity and having my emphasis). In contrast, surely, the anthropo- something in common as ‘art’. They have logical emphasis on the social embeddedness of attempted to understand the transformations art practices in so-called ‘traditional societies’ of European social life that led to the condition is not a matter of simple difference but ends up for our (Western) particular experience of an constituting by contrast the distinctiveness of ‘aesthetic dimension’. ‘modern art’ – in which the separation of an The work of historians, no less than that of aesthetic sphere was constitutive of art and anthropologists and critics, has offered a chal- aesthetics as a particular mode of evaluating, or lenge to the universality of the concepts of art interrogating, cultural activity and its value. and aesthetics familiar to Modernism. Raymond The questions of mass culture and mass con- Williams (1977) famously outlined the chang- sumption, as well as the question of cultural ing meaning of the concept ‘art’, and its place heterogeneity (high and low culture, fine art in the history of industrialization (see also and popular or folk) are central questions Baxandall 1972). From the Middle Ages to the addressed by modern ideologies of art. A hier- nineteenth century, Williams pointed out, the archy of discriminating value is organized concept changed from a reference to ‘general through what is claimed to be a universalizing, skill’ to one of a distinct sphere of cultural, aes- interest-free judgment. What might be called thetic activity (a sphere distinguished by its ‘modernisms’, therefore, can be seen to develop combination of arts into art and by its tran- in relation to the rise of industrial capitalism in scendence of the instrumental, the merely Europe and the revolution in France in 1848 – material and mere bodily pleasure). Indeed, a condition in which art comprises an arena in the Renaissance historian Kristeller somewhat which discourses about cultural value are pro- earlier noted that there was no concept of ‘art’ duced. Thus, modernization is the basis of that embraced the quite distinct forms of paint- ‘modernism’ – an ideology that engages with the ing, music, sculpture, theater, and dance: conditions of the former. It is this dimension 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 276

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of ‘modern art’ – its complex and critical responses to Aboriginal acrylic painting (Myers relationship to the concomitant ‘modern’ and 1991, 2002). emerging dominance of rational utility and money as the basis of all value – that has often shared with ‘primitive art’ an oppositional PRIMITIVISM STILL stance to the rational side of modernity. It is in this way that ‘primitive art’ has been able to operate as a basis for ‘modern art’.14 To conclude this chapter, I will remark on the Recruited in this way to the ideological pro- opportunities I have had to see this myself, in ject of ‘modern art’, a project built around the writing about the representation of Aboriginal autonomy of art as a sphere of distinct experi- culture in the critical responses to an exhibition ence, the resulting constructions of ‘primitivism’ of Aboriginal acrylic paintings at the Asia were inevitably oriented to the concerns of those Society in 1988, and to trace briefly some of the who used them. The relatively common view, trajectories set in motion by the critiques. therefore, that high art takes transcendence of In the responses to the exhibition of the fragmented, dislocated nature of contem- Aboriginal art at the Asia Society, I found (Myers porary life in the industrial era as a central con- 1991) that several evaluations suggested that the cern (see Miller 1991: 52) defines a ‘primitive acrylics offer a glimpse of the spiritual whole- art’ that functions as evidence of the existence ness lost, variously, to ‘Western art’, to ‘Western of forms of humanity which are integral, cohe- man’, or to ‘modernity’. The well known sive, working as a totality. Such meanings do Australian art critic Robert Hughes indulged not simply provide the critical opposite to such precisely in the form of nostalgic primitivism, an experienced world; rather ‘primitive art’ praising the exhibition lavishly in Time maga- and its represented reality also permits the very zine and drawing precisely on this opposition: characterization of the ‘modern’ as fragmented Tribal art is never free and does not want to be. and a sense of contemporary mass culture as The ancestors do not give one drop of goanna spit ‘spurious’ and somehow ‘inauthentic’. for ‘creativity’. It is not a world, to put it mildly, It should be clear that the signifying locations that has much in common with a contemporary of ‘primitive art’ have varied with the particular American’s – or even a white Australian’s. But it narrative of ‘loss’ presumed to have occurred raises painful questions about the irreversible with modern life. But these signifying practices drainage from our own culture of spirituality, awe, seem always to involve repressing or suppress- and connection to nature. ing part of the phenomenon. If, in a certain (Hughes 1988: 80) sense, ‘primitive art’ supposes traditionalism – which violates avant-garde requirements for In Hughes’s estimation, their ‘otherness’ occu- originality and self-creation – this opposition pies a world without much in common with has had to be repressed to capture the organic ours; the artistic values of individual creativity opposite for modern fragmentation. and freedom are not relevant. But this otherness, Thus, figures such as the ‘primitive’, the he maintained, was itself meaningful for us. ‘exotic’, or the ‘tribal’ have offered a basis for Another line of evaluation asked if they could be challenging Western categories by defining viewed as a conceptual return to our lost (‘prim- ‘difference’, but they have done so principally, itive’) selves, as suggested in the subtitle of it would appear, within the ideological function another review: ‘Aboriginal art as a kind of cos- of Western cultural systems. And it was this mic road map to the primeval’ (Wallach 1989). function – the continued support of the domi- The conventions of their differences were nant Western cultural system that in fact might also seen as morally instructive about some of limit and misrepresent the works and meanings our own associations, especially of our materi- of non-Western practitioners – which postmod- alism. In his travels to Australia during the ern theorists recognized and sought to disrupt. planning of the exhibition, Andrew Pekarik The tropes of ‘primitive art’ continued to (then Director of the Asia Society Gallery) was exercise considerable rhetorical power towards reported as saying ‘that these people with prac- the end of the twentieth century, as demon- tically zero material culture have one of the strated by the much publicized Parisian exhi- most complex social and intellectual cultures bition ‘Les Magiciens de la terre’ (see Buchloh of any society’ (in Cazdow 1987: 9). In this 1989), by the continuing boom in the sale of Romantic – and Durkheimian – construction, a ‘genuine’ African art that has not been in touch critique of Modernity, the paintings may repre- with the contaminating hand of the West or sent the worthiness of Aboriginal survival and, the market (Steiner 1994), and by the critical consequently, the dilemma and indictment of 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 277

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modern Australia’s history and treatment of the way in which local identities might lose their their forebears as less than human. integrity or have their distinctiveness subsumed within a grand narrative that does not engage their own histories. This may well be a problem POSITIONS FOR SIGNIFYING of art at the periphery of the world system. THE PRIMITIVE Thus, the exhibitions of what were called ‘Primitive Art,’ while they emphasize form – in being displayed on the usual white walls with- The construction of ‘primitivism’ has a partic- out much information other than general date ular salience for the production and circulation and probable ‘tribal identity’ – denied to these of political and cultural identities. At the same works the history and authorship which would time, recent work argues that ‘primitivism’ be part of the Western context (see Price 1989). must be studied in its particular contexts, and For Aboriginal Australian and First Nation it is increasingly realized that there is not a people in North America, ‘primitivism’ has a generic ‘primitivism’. Nicholas Thomas (1999), particular salience for the production and circu- for example, has written about the distinctive lation of political and cultural identities (see Ziff qualities of ‘settler primitivism’, which should and Rao 1997). Ames (1992), Clifford (1988, 1991) be distinguished from other operations of the and some of the essayists in Karp and Lavine trope. One might note, for example, the impor- (1991) have eloquently made this point about tance of World War I – in the United States, museums particularly. But they do so in recogni- Canada, and Australia – in leading these settler tion of the active political projects of indigenous nations to pursue more actively an identity dis- people and their representatives – in the prac- tinct from that of Europe, the role this played tices of artists and curators such as Jimmy in the development of interest in ‘primitive Durham, Jolene Rickard, Gerald McMaster, art’, and the appropriation of each country’s Fiona Foley, Brenda Croft, Tracey Moffatt, Paul indigenous arts as part of the national cultural Chaat Smith, and others – who reject the binding patrimony (see especially Mullin 1995).15 Often, restrictions of ‘authenticity’ and cultural purity the effort to escape the anxiety of European with their own insistence that ‘We are not dead, influence and to express a unique experience nor less [‘Indian’, ‘Aboriginal’, etc.].’ The fun- has resulted in an appropriation of the ‘native’, damental rejection of the category ‘primitive art’ the ‘indigene’, as a component of an authentic surely takes place in the creation of their own national culture, exhibited, sold, and collected museums by indigenous communities in North in museums and markets of ‘primitive art’. America, Australia, and elsewhere – in muse- Objects marked as ‘art’ are not the only material ums such as the newly opened, indigenously for such cultural production, but their portabil- curated and managed National Museum of the ity and circulability may allow such objects to American Indian, twenty years old as an indige- bear special weight in these desires. The work- nous institution. Indigenous people are also, ings here seem to differ from the ideological increasingly, reclaiming the objects made by function of ‘primitivism’ in the MOMA exhibi- their ancestors, through legislation relating to tion of 1984, which was concerned with making cultural property concerns such as the US Native the Other legitimate the cosmopolitan Western American Graves Protection and Repatriation (not national) construction of ‘art’ in its most Act (passed in 1990) or the Aboriginal and Torres essential form, as formal and creative, as a basic Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act of 1984. In human impulse. In processes of nation building, reclaiming objects, indigenous people resituate a central activity of modernization, distinctive the objects in their own histories, constructing a values may be imputed to the ‘native’. narrative of their presence and continued exis- Appropriation by nationalist culture represents tence as part of a world that may include other different temporal and spatial juxtapositions. cultures but also constituting themselves as This occurs both by regional transposition and a people through their claim. Indeed, the mate- also by class and gendered positioning – but it is riality of these objects enables their repa- within this range of the ideological organization triation and history to be part of their of ‘difference’ that ‘primitivism’ and modern continued presence. In July 2004, for example, art coincide. under Aboriginal heritage protection laws, an Thus, suspicion about the uses of ‘primi- Indigenous Australian group, the Dja Dja tivism’ has not been aimed only at the sup- Wurrung, created a huge controversy in seiz- posedly transcendent, autonomous aesthetic ing some 150 year old artifacts that had been domain postulated by High Modernism. It has on loan from the British Museum to an exhi- equally significant implications, however, for bition in Melbourne at Museum Victoria. The 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 278

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contestation over this case exemplifies the 1993) have distinctive histories, purposes, and collision of two different regimes of value, in structures of their own.16 which the values created by different forms of Further, this approach redresses one of the exchange – one in the market dominated by the principal assumptions of ‘primitivism’, namely West and the other in cosmological regimes of the temporal boundary that considered these indigenous claims – are engaged in a ‘tourna- cultures to be over, lacking a future, an ment of values’ (Appadurai 1986) fundamen- assumption underlying the typical lack of con- tally set in motion by an insistence on coeval cern to include the voices or actual subjectivi- presence. ties of those from these traditions.17 In the Sotheby’s auction, with which I began this chapter, the indigenous ‘traditional owners’ of THE INTERCULTURAL FIELD the churinga attempted to bring it back – with the additional agency of the Central Land Council and the Federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs – Where are the ‘natives’, one must ask, in the through purchase, and thereby to remove it primitivism debates, and why do they seem to from the realm of art commodity and replace be erased by the language of ‘appropriation’? it within their own tradition. Although they To be sure, the recognition that non-Western failed in the attempt, because the price peoples ‘had art’ did result – and not inconse- exceeded the resources provided by the quentially – in their inclusion in the authorized Australian government, the activation of their ‘Family of Man’. They were ‘creative’, ‘humane’, agency did succeed in redefining the social field ‘spiritual’. But the exhibitions promoting this and challenging the once easy placement of such inclusion – and the success of the intensified objects within the domain of ‘primitive art’. circulation of the products and images of non- Even at the MOMA exhibition the indexical Western Others – comprise a complex for relationships of beautiful objects to their makers recontextualizing objects that offers opportu- and heirs became a basis for the extension of nities for varying engagement. In this sense, ‘native’ agency: the so-called Zuni war god they are sites of ongoing cultural production figures were withdrawn from the show when (Bourdieu 1993), and it is important to under- MOMA ‘was informed by knowledgeable stand them in this way. authorities that Zuni people consider any I wish to draw on the analytic framework of public exhibition of their war gods to be sacri- ‘recontextualization’ first offered by Nicholas legious’ (quoted in Clifford 1988: 209). As Thomas (1991; see also Myers 2001). It offers an Clifford notes, this event shows that ‘living tra- opportunity for some suggestions beyond those ditions have claims on them’ (ibid.), and a range imagined in the first round of Primitivism of recent repatriation claims have made this debates, suggestions more in keeping with the process increasingly visible. renewed approach to considerations of materi- It is just such an ‘Outward Clash’ – as Peirce ality (see Gell 1998; Miller 2005). It suggests calls it (Keane 2005) – that forces us to attend to that a larger frame for grasping ‘primitivism’ the broader materiality involved in such objects. lies in the notion of intercultural exchange and In museums around the world, what was transaction. This is a frame that can include the ‘primitive art’ is being resignified, reclaimed, sort of ‘appropriations’ that have concerned re-exhibited as the patrimony of particular critics, but the weight is placed not on the communities or peoples – bearing the trace, as boundaries but on the charged social field that well, of its history of ‘collection’ or ‘alienation’ encompasses the actors. An emphasis on ‘appro- (see Ames 1992; Clifford 1991; Cranmer Webster priation’ and the primitivizing ‘gaze’ is not 1992; Saunders 1997; Kramer 2004). Research sufficient to understand what happens materi- and writing on the nation and the native offer ally when such objects circulate into an inter- considerable insight into the problem. national art world. Scholars such as Howard In pursuit of this sort of specificity, it is Morphy (1992), Ruth Phillips (1998), Richard clearly necessary to break down the very gen- and Sally Price (1999), Chris Steiner (1994), eral notion of the ‘primitive’ that has tended to Nelson Graburn (2004), Charlene Townsend- be deployed in analyses. In part, this involves Gault (2004) and I (among others) have asked recognizing that the processes of moderniza- what actually does happen in circulation, at the tion are mediated through a range of distinc- sites of exhibition – to ask how objects, iden- tive institutions. Thus, scholars must continue tities, and discourses are produced, inflected, to track the figure of the ‘Indigenous Other’ and invoked in actual institutional settings. through the distinctive circuits of artistic, These ‘fields of cultural production’ (Bourdieu regional, and national institutions and identity, 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 279

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showing different mediations through time and decoration are objectifications of national place (Bakewell 1995; Cohodas 1999; Mullin identity, they are also objectifications of their 1995; Myers 2002; Phillips 1998; Thomas 1999). Aboriginal makers, and we need to follow out There has been a general context for revaluing the implications of their movement through a indigenous people and their products in the new system of value. In this movement, the English-speaking settler states. It has often media in which these objectifications occurred been noted that the recuperation of the indige- are a problem to be considered. Painting, sculp- nous culture in such appropriations may, how- ture, and dance may move very differently. But ever, value them only in ways defined by the at the same time, we are forced to recognize dominant culture – that is, in terms of a hege- that works of Aboriginal ‘art’ index their mak- mony that does not really accept ‘difference’ or ers and their production history, even if the that organizes difference in the service of structure of an exhibition suppresses this by another set of values. This is the effect of the labels that present only tribe and century. effort at appropriation of the indigenous – the Questions about the objects and how they got Indio – by Mexican fine arts in the service of the there are potentially present in any exhibition. revolution’s ideology of hybridization (Bakewell Recent exhibitions – like ‘Pomo Indian Basket 1995); for such work to be ‘fine art’, however, Weavers: their Baskets and the Art Market’ it could not be made by those regarded as (organized by the University of Pennsylvania artisans – and certainly not by Indios them- Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology selves. Similarly, the resignifications of the and shown at venues like the NMAI, Gustav Australian Aboriginal relationship to land Heye Center in Manhattan in 1999) and the ear- embodied in their paintings may be resisted lier ‘Objects of Myth and Memory: American within the immediate region where they live Indian Art at the Brooklyn Museum’ (1991) that (whose settlers compete for control of the land) focused on the curator Stewart Culin’s collect- or by immigrant minorities (who are threat- ing – have reclaimed these histories and ened by a special Aboriginal status), but have a personages, and the networks linking, for exam- different meaning when they are ‘re-placed’ in ple, basket makers in California and collectors in the context of emerging Australian national- the Northeast through the display of baskets.18 ism, international tourism, and the new profes- Moreover, the objectifications of national sional class that seeks to define itself. identity are both variable and contextually However, while Aboriginal producers of the limited in their stability. Aboriginal art’s status paintings – living in dilapidated and impover- as a commodity of consumption involves forms ished communities – may be stripped of their of commercial value that are potentially at odds historical specificity and their images converted with its capacity to articulate – as something to signifiers in Australian national myth, their spiritual, authentic, and attached to the land – insistence on a return of value for their paint- national identity. It was nothing short of a ings also resists this incorporation. Objects lend scandal, then, when an Aboriginal bark paint- themselves to recontextualization for an unlim- ing in the Prime Minister’s collection was dis- ited range of ideological purposes, an infinite covered to be a forgery, painted by a white number of desires, and so-called ‘natives’ person! Furthermore, these paintings – and art appropriate, too – not just commodities and itself – are not the only media in which national signifiers, but even the idea of art itself! The identity may be objectified. War memorials, claim to be making ‘art’ – contemporary art – is automobiles, heritage sites, archeological for- a vital strand of the recent movement of acrylic mations, heroes, battlefields, natural history painting and other forms of Indigenous expres- museums, symphony orchestras, and so on may sion in Australia, and significant parallels are offer very different – even competing – repre- clear in Canada – with Northwest Coast art sentations of the national self, representations (see Ames 1992) – and in the United States that may circulate within different contexts (Lippard 1991). and social formations. As a final comment, in recognition of the These constitute the very different implica- potentials of these interventions, I would like tions of what Thomas (1999) calls ‘settler prim- to reiterate what I have argued elsewhere itivism’ from a more general primitivism such as (Myers 2001), therefore, that the language of that represented in European modernist art. The ‘objectification’ – beyond the one-sided frame- whole significance of settler primitivism is that work of ‘appropriation’ – may provide greater the ‘native’ and the ‘settler’ are coeval. In this leverage in teasing out the complicated and sub- sense, settler primitivism depends on another tle intersections of relative value and interests. contingency of the materiality of things – their If the appropriations of Aboriginal painting or spatial contiguity. The instabilities and the 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 280

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tensions come from the fact that indigenous Crafts Board, part of the Department of communities are not only contemporaneous the Interior. D’Harnoncourt mounted one but also to some extent recognizably in the of the first national exhibitions of same space with so-called modern ones. While Native American arts at the Golden Gate it draws on many tropes that are familiar, set- International Exposition in San Francisco in tler primitivism has a distinctive problem of 1939. D’Harnoncourt was responsible for context: the indigenous people cannot be fully other exhibitions of African art and that of relegated to prehistory as the predecessors of the North American Indians. In addition to settlers. There is a basic situation of copresence, being curator and later Director of MOMA, even competing claims in the land. The logic of d’Harnoncourt also served as art advisor to the more general primitivism – through which Nelson Rockefeller’s art collection and was African cultural products were conveyed – dif- vice-president for Rockefeller’s Museum of fers in this regard, and is mediated through the Primitive Art from its beginning in 1957. constructions of the nation and national D’Harnoncourt was closely involved with cultures in postcolonial states. one of the major academic scholars of prim- These recontextualizations – in this case of a itive art, Paul Wingert. Some important dis- hybrid formation of settler primitivism – are cussion of d’Harnoncourt can be found in not just surprising or ironic juxtapositions, but Rushing (1995). reorganizations of value. The gain in value for 6 As Torgovnick writes of the critic Roger Fry, native cultural forms should be conceptualized there was a great concern to ‘rescue art from in terms that are relevant for anthropological the morass of photographic representation theory more generally, and indeed such recon- and narrative’ (1990: 87). Fry was one of the textualizations are increasingly common in the early critical enthusiasts for what he called world. ‘Negro Art’ (Fry 1920). The rise of photogra- phy and its greater capacity for naturalistic representation is commonly perceived as cre- NOTES ating a crisis for ‘art’ and a need to ‘make it new’ by theorizing a distinctive function for 1 Gombrich wrote of ‘the preference for the it. If one account of Modernism and primitive’ as having as early an appearance ‘Primitivism’ can be traced through the col- as the quotation he takes from Cicero, lection and exhibition of African and Oceanic and sees it as an occasional and temporary art, as Rubin (1984) does and which rejection or disgust for the refined and the Torgovnick follows, another account is trajectory of mimesis. traced by W. Jackson Rushing’s (1995) Native 2 Two other important collections have fol- American Art and the New York Avant-garde lowed on the initial burst of interest in the and his depiction of the unique critical primitivism debates – Karp and Lavine contexts established in the United States in (1991) and Phillips and Steiner (1999). relation to Native American cultural prod- 3 A great exception to this preference for ucts. The edited collection, Primitivism and the pure exotic, of course, is Julius Lips’s Twentieth-Century Art: a Documentary History (1937) The Savage Hits Back, while a more (Flam and Deutch 2003), provides many of recent foray into such matters was Enid the central documents for a history of primi- Schildkrout’s and Charles Keims’s exhibi- tivism and its controversies as well as a tion of Mangbetu art (see Schildkrout and comprehensive chronology of exhibitions, Keim 1990). publications, and events. 4 A further development of these discussions 7 In Primitivism in Modern Art, published in emanated in the wake of ‘Les Magiciens de 1938, Goldwater pointed to the important la terre,’ an exhibition in Paris that attempted precedent set for much modern European to transcend some of the difficulties faced by art by the forms of children’s drawings and MOMA. other kinds of so-called primitive art, as well 5 The Museum of Modern Art’s approach is as by artists’ ideas about the nature of the set forth in Alfred Barr’s work. MOMA had creative process which lay behind those considerable influence on the recognition of forms. ‘primitive art’ as art through a series of exhi- 8 Such typological resemblance was what bitions organized especially by René Boasian anthropologists once described as d’Harnoncourt. In 1936 he was appointed ‘convergence’ or forms of independent an administrator in the Indian Arts and invention, although they functioned in the 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 281

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exhibition to indicate the universality of 12 See Dutton’s 1991 review of Price (1989) as the interest in form. For discussions of the well as the Manchester debates on aesthetics ‘comparative method’ and debates about it, (Ingold 1997). see Harris (1968) and Lowie (1937). 13 In an excellent essay, Eric Michaels 9 In this regard, there is still some ambiguity (1987) – no doubt sick of the repeated treat- in anthropological concerns about context, ment of Aboriginal painters as ‘so many which – art-oriented scholars have main- Picassos in the desert’ – argued that the tained – tend to subsume the material practices of Aboriginal acrylic painting had object to cultural meanings, claiming to see more to offer postmodern art theory than something beyond the object in itself. that of Modernism. I cannot resist pointing 10 In this form, the identification of the primi- out how these tendencies themselves draw tive with directness and expression could precisely on the tropes of the historical be mobilized to an avant-garde position avant-garde to tear away the familiar and that Gombrich delineates in Zola’s review to reveal, thereby, the world. An elegant of Manet’s ‘Olympia’, in ‘Mon salon’, in example of this is to be found in Tony which he says he asks an artist to do more Bennett’s (1979) discussion of ‘estrange- than provide mere ‘beauty’: ‘It is no longer ment’ and ‘defamiliarization’ in Russian a question here, therefore, of pleasing or of Formalism. not pleasing, it is a question of being one- 14 One must acknowledge that historians self, of baring one’s breast ... The word ‘art’ disagree in how they understand the displeases me. It contains, I do not know emergence of such a set of discursive prac- what, in the way of ideas of necessary com- tices – with art as healing and the artist as promises, of absolute ideals ... that which I heroic individual. seek above all in a painting is a man, and 15 While I want to stress the development of not a picture ... You must abandon yourself an interest in and market for ‘primitive art’ bravely to your nature and not seek to deny here, I do not mean to say that this was the it’ (Gombrich 2002: 206). first time in which the settler societies 11 Miller has insisted, for example, that the appropriated their country’s indigenous claim of art as a transcendent realm was not arts for the production of national identity. something really taken seriously by anthro- In the United States, this clearly occurred in pologists (see Miller 1991 and below), periods earlier than World War I, although whose studies have tended to emphasize something distinctive does happen then. the embedding of aesthetics in everyday life 16 I am indebted to Webb Keane for the (e.g., Witherspoon 1977). ‘The separation reminder here that part of the value of and definition of art and aesthetics as some- Nicholas Thomas’s (1991) book, Entangled thing different and particular,’ as Miller calls Objects, rests in his effort to look in both it (1991: 51), is rare in the world’s cultures. directions, at Pacific peoples’ recontextual- Much anthropological ink was spilled in izations of Western cultural objects. demonstrating the functional involvement Obviously, this is not a level political play- of supposedly artistic forms – masks, sculp- ing field. At the same time, however, it is not ture – in political and religious activities, a peculiarity of the West to resignify things. against an expectation of art for art’s sake. 17 Douglas Cole (1985), for example, At the same time, there were surely few describes a period of rapid accumulation anthropologists who wanted to claim that around the turn of the nineteenth and the communities they studied ‘lacked art’, twentieth centuries, justified in so far as since something unself-consciously called Native cultures were thought to be vanish- ‘art’ remained the sine qua non of human ing. Others have insisted on the impor- status. Consequently, an anthropologist tance of Western custodianship of objects encounters the category of ‘art’ with suspi- neglected or no longer of value in their cion and a sense of its ‘strangeness’. Indeed, ‘home’ cultures. These frameworks under- for most anthropologists, the concept of ‘art’ lie the neglect of the possible attachment would be, as it is for Miller (1991: 50), ‘sub- of these objects to living people. ject to the critique of relativism, in that it 18 The marvelous writing of Marvin Cohodas stems from an essentialist foundation – that (1997) and Sally McLendon (1993, 1998) are is, no absolute quality of the world – but has exemplary of the work on collecting that become an established perspective through has transformed the thinking about ‘primi- particular cultural and historical conditions’. tive art’. 21-Tilley-3290-Ch17.qxd 6/28/2005 9:16 PM Page 282

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