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ERRINGTON, Shelly. What Became Authentic Primitive Art (1994)
ERRINGTON, Shelly. What Became Authentic Primitive Art (1994)
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Shelly Errington
University of California, Santa Cruz
The category "Primitive Art" was invented at the turn of the 20th century
gained acceptance as "art," and, with it, monetary value, in the first half o
century-an inspiration to avant-garde artists, a pleasure to avant-garde co
tors. By mid-century, it had begun to enter the mainstream of established
got its own museum in New York in 1954, when the Museum of Primitiv
was founded-funded by Nelson Rockefeller and containing largely his col
tion. For about thirty years interest in "Primitive Art" grew. Public accept
of it became more widespread; galleries selling it flourished; scholarly int
in it increased, and many new studies were made; curatorial interest grew
new exhibits were installed. In 1984, Primitive Art seemed at the peak of
acceptance and validation, and with no fewer than five major exhibi
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 Metropolitan Museum 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
valorization of 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
201
Figure 1
Museum view. Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Gallery of
Oceanic Art of Melanesia, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Wing. (Until 1991,
the name was The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of Primitive Art.) Reprinted by
permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. ? The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
The term "metamorphosis," I think, seems entirely too gentle for som
the transformations that have taken place. While acknowledging the imp
Malraux's writing on the topic, I want to distinguish here between art by
priation (rather than by metamorphosis) and art by intention.' Art by inte
was made as art, created in contexts that had a concept of art approxima
what we now hold: paradigmatically, the kinds of objects created in the I
renaissance as art. Art by appropriation consists of the diverse objects th
came "art" with the founding of public fine arts museums at the end of th
century. More and more objects gained status as art during the 19th centu
entered the museum; one thinks especially of religious objects, like Byzan
icons and Christian triptychs, but there were many more.
It is true, but obvious, that the objects in the Rockefeller Wing are "ar
appropropriation." To say so only begins to open up the topic. What coun
a work of art? What attributes of the uncountable objects that humans hav
predispose them to being selected as "art" objects? And how are these obj
transformed by display, framing, and other practices into "art" objects?
Of all that forms an integral part of a whole (stained glass, frescos); of all that
cannot be moved; of objects such as sets of tapestry which are difficult to display;
and, chiefly, of all that the collection is unable to acquire ... From the eighteenth
to the twentieth century 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 transport and difficult to display. It is
no mean feat to transport 30-foot carved poles from Irian Jaya to New York, and
it requires a collector or museum both wealthy and determined enough to do it.
To become "art" these portable objects must be displayed, and to be displayed
they must be accommodated in a suitable space. Art was invented simultane-
ously with collecting, and the two are inconceivable without each other. The
market for monumental pieces is exceedingly limited, even if people praise
them extravagantly as magnificent art. (Whose living room could accommodate
an Olmec head-even if it could be bought?)
Objects selected for display are best made of durable materials if they are
to last. (If they are made of precious materials, like ivory or gold, all the better.)
Many potential pieces of Primitive Art, made in the mainly tropical climates
from which such pieces are drawn, are composed of soft materials or a combi-
nation of soft and hard materials: flowers and woven palm-leaf offerings, bas-
kets, bamboo, and bark-cloth. The more ephemeral material aspects of these
items tend to disappear before they turn into "art." Those made of a combination
of soft and hard parts are likely to lose the soft one, with profound epistemologi-
cal and aesthetic consequences.
It was standard practice among art dealers in the 1920s to strip African ar-
tifacts of their soft and fibrous parts, rendering them starkly "modem" looking
and preserving or creating a particular aesthetic (see Rubin 1984). One type of
piece often treated that way is the "reliquary figure" from Gabon. The Center for
African Art in New York displayed several of these pieces in the 1984 show Af-
rican Masterpieces from the Musee de L'Homme, including one that retained its
"basket decoration." The catalogue points out that "we usually see Kota reli-
quary guardians stripped of their baskets and decorations, looking abstract,
minimal, modern ... As seen here, where the bottom is inserted into its basket,
the entire reading of the figure is radically changed." The catalogue continues
with a spirited defense of the aesthetic of the basket, featuring the "complex tex-
ture of twisted leather thongs and basketry [which] gives the base a restless vi-
tality and interest," and the "feathers attached to the back of the head [which]
further animate and complicate the figure's shape and texture," ending the para-
Civilization means something more than energy and will and crea
How can I define it? Well, very shortly, a sense of permanence. T
and invaders were in a continual state of flux. ... And for that reason it didn't
occur to them to build stone houses, or to write books.... Almost the only ston
building that has survived from the centuries after the Mausoleum of Theodor
is the Baptistry at Poitiers. It is pitifully crude.... But at least this miserab
construction is meant to last. It isn't just a wigwam. Civilized man, or so it seem
to me, must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time; that he consciou
looks forward and looks back. [Clark 1970:16-17]
Framing "Art"
Wow!!! activities, were turned into "aesthetic" objects by framing them (by the stage or
platform) and separating them from the audience, who then contemplated them
as distant spectacles, as the art connoisseur contemplated the painting on the
wall. The audience does not participate in the performance but only views it.
Sculptural Qualities
Even now, painting and sculpture stand as the epitome of "fine
both museum curators and museum-goers-in spite of the eclectic a
nature of art in the late 20th century. Certainly at the time that Primi
being discovered or invented at the turn of the 20th century, prior
Cristo, and suchlike, the two forms were paradigmatic. Painters an
were the ones who discovered Primitive Art and used it for inspira
Regarded as a deep schema, paradigm, or pattern rather than as
obvious object, a "painting" is a portable, flat, four-cornered thing
iconic content. Such objects are relatively rare in the history of the
sian miniatures and Japanese and Chinese brush-paintings and scre
closest candidates to approximate this schema outside the Western
and it cannot be an accident that those items have long entered deale
as "high" forms of non-European art.
The peoples of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas-the region
duced what became Primitive Art-created very few objects corresp
that schema. They did produce, however, three-dimensional objects
materials that can be grafted fairly easily onto the schema of sculpt
ond paradigmatic form of fine art. It can be no accident that the vas
objects exhibited in the Rockefeller Wing and other fine arts museu
for (and "pass as") "sculpture."
Iconicity
it? And why, I wonder, does it have a beak? Unless the beak really
penis, in which case it is well on its way to being a visual represen
invisible concept of "the cooperation between the sexes." This mask
mask) is a particularly beautiful and well-executed carving of a butt
beak; conversely and alternatively, it is a singularly poor rendition
Higher Realities
The Asmat celebrated death with feasts and rituals that both commemorated the
dead and incited the living to avenge them.
Dogon figures with raised arms "allude to the communion between heaven and
earth. The sculptures sometimes wear pendants, representing covenant stones that
identify priests of totemic ancestor cults. Large containers often with a horse's head
and tail are used to hold sacrificial meat during annual ceremonies commemorating
the Dogon myth of creation."
Nowhere is the complexity and variety of Kuba design more apparent than in the
plush textiles that men and women of high rank wear as wrapped skirts on
ceremonial occasions.
Fijian clubs, "favored weapons in the 19th century," were "intended to shatter t
skulls thus not only causing death but insulting the sacred part of the body."
Art objects differ from society to society, but they tend to be concerned with
making visible the supernatural and the intangible. In so doing, art may render
more manageable some of the terrors and uncertainties of life.
The view that Primitive Man is obsessed with fear and irrational supersti-
tion and that their arts express it is reflected in the following passages by Ken-
neth Clark and by Thomas McEvilley, which Price quotes. Juxtaposing pictures
of the head of the Apollo Belvedere and something labeled merely "African
mask," Clark makes this comment in his book Civilisation:
Lest one imagine that this view of Primitive Art, and with it Prim
is completely outdated, it is worth reading McEvilley's 1984 critical
the 1984 MoMA exhibit "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art. In it McE
tigates Rubin and Varnadoe, the curators responsible for the show, fo
ating these artifacts as art rather than what they "really" are, religiou
he suggests that they should have been provided with ethnographic co
reveals them as such. He tells us what he thinks Primitive Man's reli
this remarkable passage:
In their native contexts these objects were invested with feelings of awe
not of aesthetic ennoblement. They were seen usually in motion, at night
dark spaces, by flickering torchlight. Their viewers were under the in
ritual, communal identification feelings, and often alcohol or drugs
they were activated by the presence within or among the objects them
the shaman, acting out of the usually terrifying power represented by th
icon. What was at stake for the viewer was not aesthetic appreciation
self in identification with and support of the shamanic performance.
1984:59, quoted in Price 1989]
It seems to me that these attitudes-the one that views Primitive Man as ob-
sessed with ritual and terrified of spirits, and the one that views Primitive Man
as living harmoniously with nature and as in touch with higher realities-are
each other's flip sides. Both should be called primitivism because both make the
same moves that Edward Said implied were characteristic of "orientalism": the
moves of dichotomizing, otherizing, and essentializing (1979).
It is their imagined or presumed link with the "higher" realites (Absolute
Spirit, or Cosmic Energy, or Gaia, or The Goddess) that allows some objects,
even from places far from the Renaissance in space and time, to be claimed as
art.
A great many objects and sorts of objects have been displayed, collected,
sold, and valued by individuals as Primitive Art. Historically (between the two
world wars and in the 1950s) and in art-historical and art-museum circles, one
of the most important ways of talking about, hence selecting, certain kinds of
objects over others to become Authentic Primitive Art was their "formal quali-
ties." In practice this could not help but mean, more or less (but usually more),
how closely they approximated the formal qualities, the "look," of high modern-
ist art. The discourse of formal qualities claims these objects as valuable "aes-
thetically," divorced from any of their uses or meanings in the societies that pro-
duced them. This point of view is well known and is insistently articulated in
pre-World War II MoMA exhibits of non-Western artifacts. The catalogue of
MoMA's 1935 exhibit African Negro Art was a paean of praise to the formal
plastic qualities of African (read: modern) art. In his concluding paragraph to
this catalogue, James Johnson Sweeney asserts that, taking into account any-
thing at all about the history, cultures, or contexts that produced African art is
positively dangerous-a more clear and present danger to us, since we know
more than Picasso did about African cultures:
In the end, it is not the tribal characteristics of Negro art nor its strangeness that
are interesting. It is its plastic qualities. Picturesque or exotic features as well as
historical and ethnographic considerations have a tendency to blind us to its true
worth. This was realized at once by its earliest amateurs. Today with the advances
we have made during the last thirty years in our knowledge of Africa, it has
become an even graver danger. Our approach must be held conscientiously in
another direction. It is the vitality of the forms of Negro art that should speak to
us, the simplification without impoverishment, the unnerving emphasis on the
essential, the consistent, three-dimensional organization of structural planes in
architectomic sequences, the uncompromising truth to material with a seemingly
intuitive adaptation of it, and the tension achieved between the idea or emotion
to be expressed through representation and the abstract principles of scupture.
The art of Negro Africa is a sculptor's art. As a sculptural tradition in the last
century it has no rival. It is as sculpture we should approach it. [Sweeney 1935:11 ]
A few years later, different authors emphasize the same theme. From the
catalogue for the exhibit Indian Art of the United States, MoMA, 1941:
'Figure 2
Figure 2
Two chest ornaments fro
Barbier-Mueller, Geneva,
GALLERY DEROCHE
ART OF AFRICA,
MY SHIELD IS MY CANVAS
DESIGN AND FORM IN TRIBAL SHIELDS AND WEAPONS
FEBRUARY 28 - MARCH 28, 1992
RECEPTION: THURSDAY. FEBRUARY 27, 6-8 PM
TREASURED TERRACOTTA
ANCIENT AFRICA, ASIA THE AMERICAS
APRIL 17- MAY 23; RECEPTION; APRIL 16, 6D R PM
GALLERY DEROCHE
i? ,~ ~ ~~ r:fEV~~~~~ -A~ _~ "ART OCEANIA
oF AFRICA,
& THE AMERICAS
Figure 3
Two announcements of exhibits at a San Francisco gallery. Reprinted by
permission of Gallery DeRoche, San Francisco.
A case study in High Primitive Art and the notions of "authenticity" in the
"primitive" that surrounded it occurred in the most interesting and controversial
show of Primitive Art in the last several decades. It was the Museum of Modern
Art's exhibition "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art, which took place in 1984,
organized by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe. It merged these two readings,
formalist and mystical, depending on whether one read the show backwards or
forwards. (That was not, of course, its stated intent.) It was laid out in three ar-
eas, which the visitor passed through sequentially. The first area showed what
I have called High Primitive Art-the pieces, or ones like them, that
the cubists and surrealists. The second area was a large room called "A
where examples of Primitive Art were juxtaposed with examples of m
the primitive and the modem of each pair revealed a presumably rem
strange affinity with its opposite. The last room was called "Modem
and consisted of the work of contemporary Western artists who are
by the Primitive.
The exhibit's stated intent was to reveal the connections between Primitive
Art and the modernists, most especially Picasso. Entering the exhibit, the visitor
could read a plaque with a rather defensive message from William Rubin insist-
ing that the exhibit was not, after all, about Primitive Art in its ethnographic con-
text but about its importance to modern art and modern artists. Rubin's qualifi-
cation is, in my view, entirely legitimate, for there is no reason whatsoever to
insist that these objects must be understood within their cultural context if one
is interested in their meanings to cubists and surrealists. A social history of
primitivism in 20th-century art would have been fascinating. But that was not,
in fact, what the exhibit was about.
The first part of the show was about how the formal qualities of African ar-
tifacts made them appealing to cubists, while Oceanic artifacts appealed to sur-
realists. The voice-over of museum labels was insistently formalist: a Melane-
sian object explored "negative space" with great sophistication; another piece
revealed "frontal symmetry."
The exhibit's middle section, "Affinities," paired various non-Western ar-
tifacts with European 20th-century objects reminiscent of them in formal terms.
Depleted of historicity, anything that is similar visually to anything else is in-
deed visually similar to anything else. To that there can be no objection. The mu-
seum's voice-over never explained what, other than the context of their display
(a possibility never admitted by the labels or catalogue), could have brought
such similarities into being.
The third and final section of the show contained the work of contemporary
Western artists who are "primitivists." The room's introductory plaque stated
that primitivism these days is less inspired by the formal qualities of actual ob-
jects, the way they look, as it is by Primitive Man's myth, ritual, and religion-
hence the absence of actual Primitive objects in this room. It featured contem-
porary sculptures by Euro-American artists with bits of feathers and other items
that signify the Primitive. The visitor could infer that the Primitive now is a
spirit or attitude rather than the formal qualities of certain objects.
Reading chronologically and historically, a visitor strolling through 20th
Century Primitivism moved forward in time, from past to present, beginning
with Picasso and friends early in the 20th century, passing through a lesson in
purely formal relations in the "Affinities" room, and ending with contemporary
primitivist artists in 1984. But the same stroll was also a journey through mythi-
cal space, one that takes us backwards through time to our origins. It moved
from a specific point in historical time, the early 20th century (the exhibit's first
part), into the realm of pure form and spirit (the "Affinities" room), and finally
to the mythical realm of the purely authentic (the last room), where
the Primitive, rather than simply material objects, informs the cre
Read as myth rather than history, the sequence narrated the story
for modern art's origins, taking us away from mere form and deepe
If the spirit of classical Greece was the worthy ancestor of Art with
in the Renaissance, the spirit of Primitive Man, this exhibit in eff
the worthy ancestor of modern art in the early 20th century.
The slippage is necessary and inevitable. For one thing, the pieces that ac-
tually influenced Picasso or hung in his living room are valuable to collectors
because of their provenance, but they may not have been the "finest" examples
of their kind; Picasso is reputed to have said, "You don't need a masterpiece to
get the idea." Nonetheless, "fine, old" pieces that also look like the things Pi-
casso might have been influenced by, but are "better" than the things he looked
at or owned, are fully prototypical.
Second, whereas many exemplars of the prototype may have been collected
after the turn of the century, it is difficult to document these matters, and one can
be sure that plenty of objects that have been displayed in the most prestigious
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~fifteen years-~" great of the far North
"Prices have increased by an average of 250% (with
highs of up to 7,500%), but Inuit art is seriously
undervalued when compared to the primitive art
of other cultures.
Prices for the best Unuit prints have been
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was sold at auction to a California collectorfor
$8,000, double its low pre-auction estimate. Also,
Kenojuak's "Enchanted Owl" (1960) soldfor a
record-breaking $14,500. Both these prints would
have soldfor a few hundred dollars in the 1960s."
"Canadian Unuit art of all kinds is now being
bought and sold in Germany, Italy, Japan,
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throughout the United States. This vibrant
international market should ensure a continued, i
increasing demand. Also, many major European^ waS
and American museums have begun to collect Offering the largest U.S.
Inuit art. _ collection of Eskimo
"Current prices still do not reflect the art's true and Northwest Coast masks
valuefor several reasons. First of all, it is b
becoming evident that Inuit works are byfar the
most significant primitive art produced in North
America.-
THE GALLERY OF
ESKIMO ART
2665 Main Street, Santa Monica, California.
Telephone 392-8741.
Figure 4
"Beautiful Investments" advertisement for the Gallery of Eskimo Art, Santa
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f 0 <5 s 8J00:225-5592s
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E:: DrimXtlseart, tnccrrerrtcldrrnly It3tobjtctsUkrthtsclook :-rte.hnique whkhhinvotvch E.GOURDCARVINhir chi- qtZEeci.iliGedUiRCtARIGblac -- and a.r ridhIeables tid- db r sttp.
Motr r tJ tmd t l c sophisticatedl asotsin ster- rapid iqid il a dp pit. If Picas. turics, 9 rd in Pert ha-e b-cn rhite c-i-'rnof moder hhi., I8432,S49
hCatal ogue items. () From a us. shop's catalogue: "kua'ba isd, a ertolity dol.
.from G- hana . e of boe stone. " R eprinted by permission of the merican
. 2t2 o ' 00'00 2ftA- da SW way.1igl i. i 795A5 n20D w0l2ih hsrs,sir nd2 2 Si 2AT2 D S O RANtE i ex
_ ' 2 22i- W iftB: i -tcrna5 2onal2 5s iti.S22. duce thisi 2 55kin f2x finiKh.- r.
sgiventoensaraiuni A-ordii2 2oDr. d a , ss T A . E TRIBAL HANDWVOVEN Ioffertherl. thing2forless.- It's
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: design, 1 0 0 17primitive pieces are the backbone of a new sophisticated s tyle." Reprinted
~~~~~Museu7m of Natural History, New York. (B) From a mn-ail-order catalogue: "In home
Notes
1. Jacques Maquet makes basically the same distinction and acknowledges the
same source, but he calls these categories "art by destination" and "art by metamorpho-
sis" (1979[1971], 1986). I am renaming the categories out of respect for both Malraux's
and Maquet's ideas; the tenor of their writings about "metamorphoses" is entirely
different from mine, and it is just as well to keep the terms distinct.
2. The definitive social history of frames has not, to my knowledge, been written,
but see Brettell and Starling 1986 for a start.
3. The most useful account of the conceptual reoganization of the arts is probably
still Kristeller' s The Modern System of the Arts (1965).
4. The phrase the way something looks means to a rational subject in certain
conditions, as Nelson Goodman points out, not the way it looks to a drunk through a
teardrop (1976).
5. It is worth noting, in passing, that iconicity is partly in the eye of the beholder.
Many societies have produced objects that have some iconic content-that is, signs that
signify or refer to other things by resembling them, in local sensibilities. The resem-
blance may be highly conventionalized and schematic, recognizable as "resembling"
something else only to people in that culture, or it may be secret knowledge, restricted
to the initiated. Conventionalized and schematic though they be, the white spots painted
on an Australian Aboriginal woman may be "readable" to her and her clan as signifying
dappled light on water; the circles painted on Sepik River men's houses may signify
"moons" and "women's bellies." These significations have an iconic content, but it
would barely be recognized by those not clued in to the semiotic system. (See Morphy
1991 on the Yolngu of Australia, and Forge 1973 on the Abelam of New Guinea.) The
problematic of iconicity is a deep topic that has had extensive commentary. See Nelson
Goodman 1976.
6. This anecdote is told in Lynes's Good Old Modern. He quotes the Bulletin o
the Museum of Modern Art in April 1936, which explained:
Many objects ... had been refused free entrance because it was impossible to prove that certain
sculptures were not more than second replicas, or because the artist's signature could not b
produced, or because no date of manufacture could be found, or because ancient bells, drums,
spoons, necklaces, fans, stools and headrests were considered by the examiners to be objec
of utility and not works of art. As a result the Museum was forced to give bon
on which amounted to $700. [quoted in Lynes 1973:139]
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