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17‘PRIMITIVISM’, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND THE

CATEGORY OF ‘PRIMITIVE ART’

Fred Myers

In Sydney, Australia, in 1992, in a district nearthe old Rocks area now incorporated into atourist district, the sign on the gallery doorreads ‘Aboriginal and Tribal Art Museumand Shop’. Inside, the objects range from NewGuinea baskets and wood sculptures andAboriginal boomerangs to bark and acrylicpaintings. In 1994, Sotheby’s catalog for theirauction of ‘Tribal Art’ in New York changed thename it was using for its title, after protestfrom Indigenous Australians, from ‘Churinga’(a word referring to sacred objects of Aboriginalpeople in Central Australia and specifically toone of the most important items in this sale) tothe more general ‘Tribal Art.’

Objects do not exist as ‘primitive art’. This isa category created for their circulation, exhibi-tion and consumption outside their originalhabitats. To be framed as ‘primitive art’ is toresignify – as both ‘primitive’ and as ‘art’ –acts that require considerable social and cul-tural work, and critical analysis of theseprocesses has fundamentally transformed thestudy of art. In this chapter, I trace how theanalysis of this process has taken place interms of discourse, semiotics, and especiallysocial life. Consideration of the circulation,exhibition, and consumption of objects – partic-ularly of what Webb Keane (2005) has called ‘thepractical and contingent character of things’ –shows how their materiality matters: theobjects in question under the sign of ‘primitiveart’ are more than mere vehicles for ideas. Theyare, as Keane notes in following Peirce’s under-standing of signs in contrast to the usual

Saussurean one, vulnerable to causation andcontingency, as well as open to further causalconsequences.

Critics have been drawn to the constructionsof primitive art; they recognize that the displayand circulation of objects through this registerhas been a significant form of social action, dis-tributing value to cultural products. In turn, thematerial form of these objects shapes their semi-otic constructions; for example, certain objects –especially the portable objects of ‘primitive art’,such as small carvings – can be more readilycirculated, recontextualized, and reappropri-ated than others – such as cave paintings.

By the 1970s, as scholars recognized that thecategory ‘primitive art’ was problematic asan analytic frame, substitutes for the categoryhave been sought – ‘nonwestern art’, ‘tribalart’, ‘the art of small-scale societies’, and so forth(see Anderson 1989; Rubin 1984; Vogel 1989).Nonetheless, the category persists within asignificant market for objects, even as debatesabout the category continue to inform theoriesof material culture. The interest in ‘primitiveart’ has shifted to the problem of ‘primitivism’itself – emphasizing the categories of the Westand the meanings they attribute to objects fromelsewhere and also (but less obviously) to theways that particular material objects instigateideological effects (see Baudrillard 1968). In thischapter, I first argue that the existence of thecategory ‘primitive art’ as a framework for thecuration of material culture is part of a taxo-nomic structure (Baudrillard 1968; Clifford1988) shaped by an ideological formation. Alongwith this first argument, however, I wish to

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develop a second point through the notion of‘objectification’, attending to the ways in whichmaterial qualities of objects suppressed withinthis categorical formation may persist and havepotential for new readings and alternatehistories.

PRIMITIVISM

The construction known as ‘primitivism’ hasbeen considered by a wide range of scholars, inthe past and in the present, and its origins havebeen found by some in the classical period(Lovejoy and Boas 1935; Gombrich 2002)1 and byothers more meaningfully in the concern of theEnlightenment to reconstruct the origins ofculture shaped by a reaction against classicism(Connelly 1995). However they differ amongthemselves, the argument of these works is thatparticular attributes of objects are valorized asan alternative to that which is more refined,more ‘developed’, more ‘learned’ or ‘skilled’.Thus, the ‘primitive’ is a dialogical category,often explicitly a function of the ‘modern’ (seealso Diamond 1969); the current consideration ofthe category is inextricably linked to controver-sies about cultural and ideological appropriationlaunched from postmodern and postcolonial cri-tiques. These critiques seek to identify the func-tion of the category as part of Western culture.

As Clifford (1988), Errington (1998), andPrice (1989) have shown, there have been sig-nificant consequences of this formation.2 Formuch of the twentieth century, ‘primitive art’defined a category of art that was, more or less,the special domain of anthropology – a domaindifferentiated from the general activity of ‘arthistory’ by virtue of being outside the ordinary,linear narratives of (Western) artistic ‘progress’in naturalistic representation. Primarily, there-fore, non-Western and prehistoric art, ‘primi-tive art’ (later to become ‘tribal art’, the ‘art ofsmall-scale societies’, and even ‘ethnographicart’) was most obviously within the purview ofanthropological study and was exhibited inethnographic or natural history rather than ‘fineart’ museums. One consequence of this place-ment, noted by many, has been the popularidentification of Native American cultures (forexample) not with other human creations, butwith the natural plant and animal species of acontinent – suggesting that products are partsof nature, as if they had no history. Nonetheless,many particular analyses of non-Western artsystems, the many detailed studies of local aes-thetic organization and function, have value.

Because such studies were undertaken withina division of labor between art history andanthropology does not inherently make thempart of the ‘primitivist’ ideological formationitself; essays in the well known collections editedby Jopling (1971), Otten (1971) and D’Azevedo(1973) can hardly be accused of imagining aunified ‘primitivity’. Even so, the indirectinfluence of primitivism has remained all toooften in other attempts to find local, ethno-aesthetic systems as if they were ‘uncontami-nated’, or ‘pure’ of Western influence as well as‘allochronic’ (Fabian 1983) and part of anotherera (see Clifford 1988; Thomas 1991).3

In a comprehensive survey, the art historianColin Rhodes (1995) points out that the category‘primitive’ is a relational operator:

The word ‘primitive’ generally refers to someoneor something less complex, or less advanced, thanthe person or thing to which it is being compared.It is conventionally defined in negative terms, aslacking in elements such as organization, refine-ment and technological accomplishment. In culturalterms this means a deficiency in those qualitiesthat have been used historically in the West asindications of civilization. The fact that the primi-tive state of being is comparative is enormouslyimportant in gaining an understanding of theconcept, but equally so is the recognition that it isno mere fact of nature. It is a theory that enablesdifferences to be described in qualitative terms.Whereas the conventional Western viewpoint atthe turn of the century imposed itself as superiorto the primitive, the Primitivist questioned thevalidity of that assumption, and used those sameideas as a means of challenging or subverting hisor her own culture, or aspects of it.

(Rhodes 1995: 13)

This relationality may help us to understandan extraordinary diversity of forms within theprimitive, what Connelly has called ‘the diffi-culty in discerning a rationale underlying thechaotic mix of styles identified as “primitive”’(1995: 3). Some critics have pointed out that theformulation of the primitive – as timeless,unchanging, traditional, collective, irrational,ritualized, ‘pure’ – has been configured againstthe notions of the individually heroic modernperson as ‘rational’, ‘individual’, and so on.Others have emphasized the construction of‘primitive’ expressiveness and directness assuperior to classical and learned convention.A consideration of relationality further sug-gests that the operation of this category mustbe understood within a particular structureand in relation to the properties of the objectsthemselves. A perceived (or attributed) lack of

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refinement in the manufacture of objectsmight be conducive to the common view that‘primitive’ art is more spiritual than Westernart. Conversely, others regard such objects asproviding a mere display of virtuousity andhence ‘craft’ (more material) compared to thephilosophically loaded stuff of ‘real art’ (moreideational). My aim, then, is to illuminate thelinkages between the ideological structure ofan aesthetic doctrine of Modernism and notionsof the ‘primitive’, and the materiality of theobjects of ‘primitive art’.

MOMA EXHIBITION: THE‘PRIMITIVISM’ DEBATE

Much of the linkage between Modernism andthe category of ‘primitive art’ was illuminatedin the body of critical response to the New YorkMuseum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition‘“Primitivism” in Twentieth Century Art: theAffinity of the Tribal and the Modern’.4 Theterms of the ‘primitivism’ debate as it developedin the art world should be understood initiallyas manifesting criticism of the famous Museumof Modern Art (MOMA) and its ideologicalconstruction of Modernism. In marking off‘capital M’ Modernism, following Blake andFrascina (1993), I mean a particular aestheticdoctrine rather than the whole of what Ishould call modern art. (This is frequentlyidentified with the doctrine of ‘Modernism’that, in Clement Greenberg’s famous (1965)formulation, strips away everything ‘nonessen-tial’ to an artistic medium.)5

I have found it useful to distinguish twosignificant strands in the ‘primitivism’ critiques.By and large, critics of the varieties of what theysee as a ‘primitivist fantasies’ paradigm havedrawn on the Foucauldian association of power/knowledge to give theoretical shape to theirefforts to discern the imposition of meaningand values on Native peoples. Those followingthis strand of analysis, best known throughSaid’s Orientalism (1978), have emphasizedhow being represented as ‘primitive’ traps orsubjectifies Others and has defining power (asdominant knowledge) over their identities. Theexemplary case for such formulations has beenthe display of cultures in the museum or exhi-bition, a situation where local (‘primitive’,‘Native’, ‘indigenous’) voices – if not entirelyabsent – were more muted. Indeed, a good dealof the recognition and criticism of these con-structions follows from the emerging indige-nous political project that involves critiques of

the binding doctrines of ‘authenticity’ andcultural purity (see, e.g., Ziff and Rao 1997;Karp and Lavine 1991).

The second strand has drawn inspirationfrom the postmodern attack on the doctrine andpractice of Modernism itself (its structures andcodes) as a formation of hierarchy and exclu-sion that subordinates or manages cultural ‘dif-ference’ that might be threatening to the valuesit instantiates (see Clifford 1988; Foster 1985; fora more general consideration of postmodernism,see Connor 1989). Not only does this variant ofcriticism manifest the struggle within art theoryitself, about what ‘art’ or good art is, about whatis ‘art’ and ‘non-art’ (Danto 1986). The significantinsight of postmodern criticism has also beenthat art theory is not neutral and external, thatformalist definitions of material culture as ‘art’are themselves part of culture. They are projectedand circulated as part of cultural struggle, asdefensive responses to a surrounding context –to the threat to ‘art’, for example, of theatricality,entertainment, kitsch, and mass culture – threatsspecifically addressed in such well knownformulations as those of Clement Greenberg(1961), Michael Fried (1967), and TheodorAdorno (1983).

It might well be argued that such formalismplaced materiality itself (the quality of the‘thing’, its very ‘thingness’) – its irreducibility tosimple ideas – in the foreground, thereby con-trasting with older views of art as the expressionof ultimately immaterial intentions, meanings,and values. The rise of Formalism owed a greatdeal, historically, to the perceived need to sus-tain a place for ‘art’ after the rise of photographyas the medium of naturalistic representation.In this regard, Roger Fry’s (1920) theorizationof ‘significant form’ rather than content as thebasis of true art provides an important precursorof the theory and rescue work of later Modernistcriticism, such as Greenberg’s.6

In the criticized definitions of ‘art’ – definitionswhich are regarded by critics as sharing theKantian ideal of aesthetics as somehow distinctfrom practical reason and morality – art is qual-itatively superior (if not transcendent) to othercultural forms. Critically oriented postmoderntheorists, such as Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster,and Craig Owens, as well as more straight-forward sociological critics such as PierreBourdieu (1984), asserted that art’s defensivestrategy of self-definition (art’s autonomy fromother spheres of culture) was not simply a neu-tral fact, but was a form of cultural productionitself – an exclusionary, boundary-maintainingactivity, a hegemonic exercise of power throughknowledge.

‘PRIMITIVISM’, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND THE CATEGORY OF ‘PRIMITIVE ART’ 269


From this point of view, the deployment of‘primitivism’ was criticized – or deconstructed –precisely as a relational operator of Modernismitself. The art historian and critic Hal Foster(1985) argued that ‘primitivism’ (the frame-work through which certain cultural projectswere experienced and understood) was aninstrumentality of Modernist cultural forma-tion, in the service of sustaining and producinga Western identity as superior. The sense ofcultural hierarchy and exclusion as defensivestrategies underlies much of the critical workof the 1980s and 1990s, and gives weight toFoster’s characterization of it as ‘fetishism’ –that is, something made by people that appearsto be independent of them and to have powerover them, hiding its own source in the subjectof whom it is really a part.

MOMA EXHIBITION: THEUNANTICIPATED CRISIS

OF PRIMITIVE ART

Even in the more controlled domains, however,since those material qualities that are suppresseddo persist, objects bring the potential for new real-izations into new historical contexts (see, e.g.,Thomas 1991).

(Keane 2005)

The contest of positions and ideas, however,was not a disembodied one, abstracted inspace and time. It had everything to do withthe cultural power of a particular institution –New York’s Museum of Modern Art – to defineartistic merit and value, and the struggle ofthose outside it – women, minorities – to estab-lish a framework of recognition of their workand that of others who believed themselves tobe excluded by MOMA’s doctrines.

It should be clear that the dominant notion of‘art’ that came under criticism was the notionof an aesthetic experience constituted throughthe disinterested contemplation of objects as artobjects removed from instrumental associations(see Bourdieu 1984). This notion of the aestheticwas entirely compatible with the formalistemphasis of prevailing art discourses at the time,although the implicit hierarchies of value wereat this time becoming the subject of challenge.Critics approached the MOMA show ongrounds of the inapplicability of the Modernist,formal concept of ‘art’ itself as appropriate foruniversal application as a framework for inter-preting or evaluating the value of materialculture. They portrayed the exhibition not so

much as a simply mistaken ethnocentricmisrepresentation; rather, it was seen as activelyconstituting in its poetics a hegemonic ideolog-ical structure. The inspiration for such an analy-sis of the exhibition should ultimately be tracedto Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) influentialbut now somewhat eclipsed discussion of thebricoleur and ‘the science of the concrete’. Thecurator/bricoleur takes his or her elements fromthe world’s material culture and recontextual-izes their sensible or material properties byplacing them within an exhibition or installationas a larger whole, itself standing indexically andiconically for the world outside it. From thisrecontextualization emerges a particular for-mation of ‘primitive art’ reflecting, instantiating,and ‘naturalizing’ the codes of modernism. That‘challenge’ is possible, critical and/or political,suggests the instability of any such structure,its inability to hold the objects’ material quali-ties to its singular ordering. Indeed, while theemphasis of Formalism might be seen as givinggreater value to material form than to inten-tions, meanings, narratives, or other less mate-rial dimensions of the art work, since only themateriality within the art work was admitted toconsideration, other qualities of the object couldbe made to challenge the structure.

The critiques of the MOMA show had prece-dents. Work that indicated this relationshipbetween aesthetic theory and politics – e.g.,Guilbaut’s How New York stole the Idea of AbstractArt (1983) or Barthes’s (1957) essay on theMOMA’s early ‘Family of Man’ exhibition –informed their discussion of an ideology inwhich art practices and objects were made torepresent a generic but problematic ‘humanity’.The ‘primitivism’ debates pursued a series ofquestions about the complicity of Modernism –a supposedly progressive, emancipatory aes-thetic doctrine – with projects of colonialistand imperialist hegemony. They implicatedModernism as an ideological structure in whichvalue is constructed or denied through repre-sentation. That this ideological structure wasembodied in the institution of MOMA – aninstitution with massive cultural authorityand connection to collectors and dealers – wascentral to its effectiveness, far beyond anythingthat might have been produced, for example,through the discourse of anthropologists.Enacted within a controlled domain, this exhi-bition was a high stakes cultural performance ofthe relationship between the West and the Rest.

William Rubin, the curator of the exhibition,had gained his reputation as a Picasso expert.Not surprisingly, Rubin organized the exhibitaround his understanding of Picasso, owing



much to Picasso’s own mythology – in whichthe artist’s own internal history arrived at a sit-uation (the critique of older models and con-ventions of art) that found African art/sculptureto exemplify formal properties important at thattime in the West. Neither Rubin nor Picasso –nor Robert Goldwater, from whose earliervolume, Primitivism in Modern Art (1938), theidea came – saw the primitive as influencing themodern artist.7 The evolution of modern art,according to the MOMA narrative, was sup-posed to be an internal dialectic of liberationfrom narrative content towards an emphasis onmaterial form. The ‘Primitivism’ exhibition’sfascination – and the first section of the instal-lation – was with the objects that Picasso andhis contemporaries had in their studios, whatthey could possibly and actually did see – abrilliant, historical exploration of the specifictraffic in culture at the time – with an explicitconsideration of how the particular objectsentered into art (Rubin 1984). A salient examplewas the Picasso painting that portrayed a gui-tar resonating with the form of a Grebo mask –matching the specific mask then in his studioand its appearance in his painting.

The second part of the exhibition movedto ‘Affinities’, as they were called, or generalresemblances – pairing a prominent Westernart work (and artist) with a non-Western (ortribal) piece that presented the same formalproperties (according to the curator’s grouping).Clifford and others pointed out how this instal-lation functioned ideologically. Following thefamous Barthes (1957) essay on the ideology of‘The Family of Man’ – an exhibition of pho-tographs, curated by Edward Weston and cir-culated by MOMA in the 1950s, which sawhuman beings everywhere as subject to the sameconcerns and theme — Clifford argued that a‘Family of Art’ was allegorized in the MOMA’s‘Primitivism’ exhibition. Especially in the pair-ing of unattributed non-Western works withthe masterpieces of named Western Modernistartists, the exhibition emphasized creativity andformal innovation as the gist of ‘art’ everywhere.

Ideological critiques have long been suspi-cious of ‘naturalizing’ and regard such acts ofrepresentation not as innocent errors but asattempts to provide legitimacy for current for-mations of power. Thus, to represent so-called‘primitive’ artists as having the same formalmotivations and interests as those said to becentral to the modern avant-garde was to assertthat the particular art practices celebrated intwentieth-century doctrines (that seem conve-niently resonant with bourgeois experiencesand celebratory of individual and especially

male heroic creativity) were a human universaland to support the Modernist narrative of con-temporary Western art practice as represent-ing the finest expression of human art. Thoseso-called ‘primitive’ artists whose work did notresemble the valued modern were not selectedfor display.

Postmodern critics have argued for a lesslinear, more decentered approach to ‘art’ – see-ing ‘art’ as having less unity and having multi-ple histories, emphasizing a range of differencesas equally ‘art’. By seeming to discern ‘affinities’that the exhibition itself constructed, the exhi-bition naturalized the MOMA doctrine of aes-thetics while at the same time it abstractednon-Western objects from whatever contextand function they might originally have had.By finding similarities where there should bedifferences, through this recontextualizationMOMA’s ‘primitivism’ operated, it was argued,to universalize the aesthetic doctrine of WesternModernism – emphasizing the formal, materialdimensions of art objects as their central qualityand indirectly supporting a separable or autono-mous dimension of human life that was ‘art’.

Anthropologists have been familiar with thepotential that cultural comparison has for ide-ological deployment. Lacking historical connec-tion and context for ‘tribal’ objects, the meansof constructing typological similarities in the‘Affinities’ section were very much like thoseinvolved in what was called ‘the comparativemethod.’ In the nineteenth century, in books andexhibitions, this method of cultural compari-son undergirded the ethnocentric, universalisthistories of unilineal evolution from ‘primi-tive’ (and simple) to ‘civilized’ (and complex).8However, at MOMA’s exhibition, ‘primitiveart’ had a different – but still ethnocentric –function, departing from the ninetieth-centuryconstruction of cultural hierarchy. The view ofart implemented by the comparison at MOMAand more widely circulating, as Sally Priceargued, was characterized further by what shecalled ‘the universality principle’ – a principlearticulated in ‘the proposition that art is a “uni-versal language” expressing the common joysand concerns of all humanity’ (1989: 32). Notonly does such a principle of universality legit-imate the view of aesthetics as universal,innate, and transcending culture and politics –the innate taste of the connoisseur who knowsart (anywhere) when he or she sees it. But thisproposition of universality is, in turn, based onanother Western conceit – the notion that ‘artis-tic creativity originates deep within the psycheof the artist. Response to works of art thenbecomes a matter of viewers tapping into the



psychological realities that they, as fellow humanbeings, share with the artist’ (Price 1989: 32).

While she was principally objecting to theethnocentrism of viewers’ presuming to knowdirectly what is at stake in the objects, unmedi-ated by knowledge of their context and func-tion in the horizon of expected viewers, Pricewas drawing attention to another variety of‘primitivist’ representation.9 In this variant, the‘primitive’ is more direct in expression, unmedi-ated by tradition or reason – the polar oppositeof the refined and inexpressive classical (seealso Connelly 1995; Gombrich 2002).10 There isno doubt that Western artists like Picasso hadtheir own Romantic forms of ‘primitivism’, see-ing so-called ‘tribal’ artists to be, as the art his-torian Paul Wingert (1974) said, ‘more closelyallied to the fundamental, basic, and essentialdrives of life’ which Civilized or Western folksshare but ‘bury under a multitude of parasitical,nonessential desires’.

Along this fracture line, Thomas McEvilleycriticized the exhibition for its effort to demon-strate the universality of aesthetic values.The implicit claim of universality, he observed,operated in the service of placing FormalistModernism as the highest criterion of evaluation. Tomake his point, McEvilley invoked in positiveterms another trope of ‘primitivism’ (endorsingthe opposite side of the ideological dyad) – theRomantic and dark Otherness of non-Westernart. McEvilley claimed the exhibition accom-plished its construction of aesthetic universalitythrough censorship of the meaning, context, andintention – the excessive materiality – of theexotic objects:

In their native contexts these objects were investedwith feelings of awe and dread, not of estheticennoblement. They were seen usually in motion,at night, in closed dark spaces, by flickering torch-light … their viewers were under the influence ofritual, communal identification feelings, and oftenalcohol or drugs; above all, they were activated bythe presence within or among the objects them-selves of the shaman, acting out the usually terri-fying power represented by the mask or icon.What was at stake for the viewer was not estheticappreciation but loss of self in identification withand support of the shamanic performance.

(McEvilley 1984: 59)

By repressing the aspect of content, the Other istamed into mere pretty stuff to dress us up . . . Indepressing starkness, ‘Primitivism’ lays bare the wayour cultural institutions relate to foreign cultures,revealing it as an ethnocentric subjectivity inflatedto coopt such cultures and their objects into itself.

(McEvilley 1984: 60).

A number of historians have recognized thelinkages in which, for example, ‘the burden ofsophistication’ weighing on modern artists ‘hadnecessitated their enthusiasm ‘for every primi-tive period of art in which they could regain asense of seeing with the uneducated gaze ofthe savage and the childlike eye’ (Leo Stein,quoted in Price 1989: 33). This view of primi-tive art ‘as a kind of creative expression thatflows unchecked from the artist’s unconscious’(Price 1989: 32) has potentially difficult ideo-logical implications. While the implications forthose valorizing ‘directness’ of expression orrefusing the conventions of the past may pointin one direction, the comparison of primitiveart and children’s drawings that valorizes thisformation has also been recognized to under-write some doctrines of racial inferiority.

TIME AND THE OTHER

Another significant criticism of the way thecategory ‘primitive art’ operates addresses theneutralization of Time, following JohannesFabian’s important (1983) discussion of allo-chronic and coeval perspectives. In the former,a temporal distancing technique exemplifiedby some kinds of traditional ethnographicwriting, non-Western people are representedas existing in some other time than the writer,not as part of the same history. A coeval per-spective, in contrast, emphasizes their copres-ence. Some connoisseurs have assumed thatthere were – at some time – isolated culturesprojecting their own ‘spirit’ or cultural essenceinto their objects. In the MOMA show, andother exhibitions, Clifford (1988) pointed out,the objects of ‘primitive art’ were typicallyidentified by ‘tribal group’, implying a stylisticconsensus, without individual authorship(implying a collectivity), and without muchtemporal location. When operating in the projectof defining – by contrast or similarity – ‘us’, the‘primitive’ and his or her objects tend not to beseen within their own histories and contexts.The effect is to suggest that nothing happensover time in these homogeneous and apparentlyunchanging primitive, traditional societies. Suchsocieties appear to exemplify Eliade’s (1959)archetype of repetition in societies dominatedby ritual rather than history.

The ‘primitivism’ debates revealed how theopposed categories of ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’,as ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’ respectively,might regulate the fabricated boundariesbetween the modern West and a supposedly



premodern Other. In drawing attention to theneutralization of Time, and borrowing fromFabian (1983), Clifford’s criticism notes how thisOther is distanced from us by being excludedfrom contemporaneous or coeval presencewith ‘us’. The skewing of temporality involvesa chronotope that preserves the spatialized andtemporal boundaries between socioculturalworlds and people who are in fact intercon-nected. Indeed, it requires denying or repressingthe actual history of power, relationships, andcommerce that resulted in collecting the objectsin the first place. Are not such connectionsnecessary for Westerners to have gotten theobjects? And is their suppression necessary tothe functioning of the category ‘primitive art’?

For the purpose of the ‘primitivist’ alterity tomodernity, such representations were valuedfor their contrast with the modern self-conscious, dynamism and challenge of conven-tions typical of Western society and Westernart history. But for collectors of ‘primitive art’,this purity, association with ritual, and dis-tance from Western influence are precisely thesources of value. Thus, the valorized ‘primitive’usable in critique is nonetheless presumed tobe ahistorical, timeless, unchanging, authorless.These qualities seem necessary to preserve thecapacity of this formation to provide an alterityfrom the West. On the one hand, ‘primitive art’ isauthentic, expressive of the truly different Other,only when it originates outside of Western con-tact, in a precolonial past. On the other hand,such modes of exhibition efface the specifichistories and power relations through whichnon-Western objects became part of Westerncollections, available to display. Indeed, theytypically exclude the contemporary representa-tives of these cultural traditions as ‘inauthentic’.

Yet, as the critique of deconstruction pro-vides in one way, these very meanings are alsoavailable in the presence of the objects andtheir exhibition – and they provide evidence ofthe cultural work (through recontextualiza-tion itself) in which objects have often beendeployed – of remembering, forgetting, dis-membering, obviating, and displacing historiesand relationships. This is what Keane (2005)means in calling for attention to causality,attention to ‘what things make possible’ andnot just what they ‘mean’. At the same time,this quality has led to exhibitions – such as theone on Stewart Culin, an important collector ofNative American art for the Brooklyn Museum –that place the objects of ‘primitive art’ preciselywithin the interconnections of their collectionand display (Fane 1991) and also for analysisto relate the construction of exhibitions to

contradictions that, while general, are morespecific and distinctive in the historical andgeographical relationships mediated (Coombes2001).

The debates themselves had a startling effecton anthropologists. For decades, after all,anthropologists and others had labored forofficial acceptance of non-Western visual artsand aesthetics as serious and deserving objectsof consideration in the modernist canon ofvisual culture. Then, just when it appeared thatso-called ‘tribal art’ was being recognized ashaving affinity with the work of the recognizedgeniuses of modern art, art critics pulled the rugfrom under the enterprise. Even more embar-rassingly, perhaps, they did so on grounds thatanthropologists ought to have anticipated:namely the inapplicability of the Modernist,formal concept of ‘art’ itself as a universal,interpretive, and evaluative category.

In this way, there has been a deconstructionboth of the category ‘art’ and of ‘primitive art’that is perfectly summarized in Clifford’s influ-ential review in the following comments:

the MOMA exhibition documents a taxonomicmoment: the status of non-Western objects and‘high’ art are importantly redefined, but there isnothing permanent or transcendent about the cat-egories at stake. The appreciation and interpreta-tion of tribal objects takes place within a modern‘system of objects’ which confers value on certainthings and withholds it from others (Baudrillard1968). Modernist primitivism, with its claims todeeper humanist sympathies and a wider aestheticsense, goes hand-in-hand with a developed marketin tribal art and with definitions of artistic and cul-tural authenticity that are now widely contested.

(Clifford 1988: 198)

For many, this debate about ‘the primitive’was principally a debate about Modernismand modernity, against Modernism’s claim touniversality and the insistent identification ofart with formal, artistic invention. The debateshave demonstrated the extent to which non-Western practices – or more often the extractableproducts of those practices – have become oftheoretical significance for the massive andcritical debates within the art world itself con-cerning aesthetics and cultural politics (Foster1983; Lippard 1991; and see Michaels 1987).But this is not the only significance of thedebates, because – fittingly enough in a worldof globalization and boundary breakdown –the exhibition and debates provided an occa-sion for those cast into the ‘primitive’ categoryto protest and resist the ideological and practicaleffects of this representations.



UNIVERSAL ART PROCESSES?

These critical concerns about modernity anddifference, constitutive in one sense of themeanings given to ‘primitive art’, have fittedvery uncomfortably with the concomitantdebates about the question of a cross-culturaland universal aesthetics as constituted in thedisciplinary concerns of Anthropology. Theambivalence about comparison is of longstanding in anthropology, but as suggestedabove, despite their relativistic suspicion ofWestern art theory’s universality, anthropolo-gists gave little explicit attention to the powerof cultural hierarchy as an important compo-nent in the functioning of difference. 11

While known for his ‘historical particular-ism’ and insistence on relativism, the ‘father ofAmerican anthropology’ and author of the sem-inal volume Primitive Art (1927), Franz Boashimself wrote that there is a common set ofprocesses in art:

The treatment given to the subject [primitive art] isbased on two principles that I believe should guideall investigations into the manifestations of lifeamong primitive people: the one the fundamentalsameness of mental processes in all races and in allcultural forms of the present day; the other, theconsideration of every cultural phenomenon asthe result of historical happenings.

. . . So far as my personal experience goes and sofar as I feel competent to judge ethnographicaldata on the basis of this experience, the mentalprocesses of man are the same everywhere, regard-less of race and culture, and regardless of theapparent absurdity of beliefs and customs.

(Boas 1927: 1)

Brilliantly in this volume, Boas attempted todemonstrate technical virtuosity – emphasizing,thus, the materiality both of the worker’s bodyand of the object on which it works – as the vitalcore of ‘primitive art’ and art more generally.By 1938, however, Joseph Campbell notes, simi-lar passages were removed from Boas’s updatedThe Mind of Primitive Man (1938): ‘a tendency toemphasize the differentiating traits of primi-tive societies had meanwhile developed tosuch a degree that any mention by an author ofcommon traits simply meant that he had notkept up with the fashion’ (1969: 20).

It is not surprising that another component ofthe ‘primitivism’ critiques,12 the discussions ofaesthetic universality connected to the doctrineof Formalist Modernism, has cut across the oldertradition of ‘tribal art’ studies that insisted attimes simultaneously on (1) the existence of ‘art’

in all cultures and (2) their differences. This hasbeen an area of ambivalence in the anthropol-ogy of art, sustained by an inadequate reflexiveconsideration of Western concepts of art (seeMyers and Marcus 1995) and by the segregationof the market for non-Western objects from thelarger debates. I don’t mean to say that collec-tors of ‘primitive art’ were unaware of stylistictraditions and variations. (Indeed, some ofthem think they are collecting ‘masterpieces’.)However, the participation of collectors in thediscourse of ‘authenticity’ and ‘purity’ relatesto the ideological functioning of the category‘primitive art’ at another level – one in whichthe underlying forms of expression, psyche,and motivation are essentially one.

There are intrinsic contradictions here, and theemerging line of cleavage only reinforces thesense of the category’s instability and involve-ment in ideological regulation. By ‘instability’I seek to draw attention to conflation. Theanthropological sense of difference is incorpo-rated in concerns about cultural relativism;while concerned to grant some kind of equalityor equivalence among cultural formulations, itdoes not address the difference among culturesin the same way as the postmodern suspicionof purported formal relationships betweenso-called ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ artists. Thepostmodern concern is to draw attention to theexistence of dominant Western cultural forms ascultural, rather than just natural and universal.They deride the effacement of what must beincommensurable differences in attempts at‘humanizing’ or ‘familiarizing’ the foreign interms of the dominant norm. They are furtherconcerned with the way in which art theoryhas tended to deny the value of popular artpractice and popular culture, in so far as theymight differ from what Modernism presentedas central and most valued. Skeptical of the strat-egy of ‘humanism’, Clifford (1988) – and in dif-ferent ways Marianna Torgovnick (1990) – drewattention to these very tendencies in projects ofcomparison in distinguishing a humanisticethnography of ‘familiarization’ (that findssimilarities between them and us, but in ourterms) from a surrealistic one that ‘subverts’ or‘disrupts’ the all-too-familiar categories.13 Hecalled, famously, for attention to objects that are‘indigestible’ by our own categories, especially‘hybrid objects’, challenging to the frameworksof Western culture in ways resonant with thehistorical avant-garde.

The primitivism debates allow us to recognizethat the doctrines that view art as autonomousfrom other domains of social life are not‘theories’ external to their object (see Myers and



Marcus 1995; Myers 2002). As ‘ethnotheories’these doctrines would be cultural productsand linked organically to the same processesof modernization they seem to oppose. Justas ‘antimodernism’ has been identified byJackson Lears (1983) as protesting ‘modernity’and therefore part of it, so ‘primitivism’ isintrinsically connected to ‘modernity’ and‘Modernism’.

‘MODERN ART’

The foregoing implies that the relationality ofthe category ‘primitive art’ finds its locationwithin the changing meanings and valence ofthe category ‘art’ itself in the Western tradition.For many people engaged with the arts, ‘art’remains a commonsense category of just thissort; and there is held to be something essentialabout these practices in terms of their value,their relation to the human psyche or creativityor spirituality. This has not, however, beenmerely a fact of art’s universality, and socialhistorians of art have pursued this strangeness,the particularity of Western art’s own self-construction, from within the tradition. Theresearch of Kristeller, Williams, and others(Baxandall 1972; Eagleton 1990) has pointed tothe distinctiveness of this ‘modern’ notion ofart, one in which quite distinct kinds of activityhave come to be constructed (or recognized) asseparated from other cultural activity and havingsomething in common as ‘art’. They haveattempted to understand the transformationsof European social life that led to the conditionfor our (Western) particular experience of an‘aesthetic dimension’.

The work of historians, no less than that ofanthropologists and critics, has offered a chal-lenge to the universality of the concepts of artand aesthetics familiar to Modernism. RaymondWilliams (1977) famously outlined the chang-ing meaning of the concept ‘art’, and its placein the history of industrialization (see alsoBaxandall 1972). From the Middle Ages to thenineteenth century, Williams pointed out, theconcept changed from a reference to ‘generalskill’ to one of a distinct sphere of cultural, aes-thetic activity (a sphere distinguished by itscombination of arts into art and by its tran-scendence of the instrumental, the merelymaterial and mere bodily pleasure). Indeed,the Renaissance historian Kristeller somewhatearlier noted that there was no concept of ‘art’that embraced the quite distinct forms of paint-ing, music, sculpture, theater, and dance:

We have to admit the conclusion, distasteful tomany historians of aesthetics but grudginglyadmitted by most of them, that ancient writers andthinkers, though confronted with excellent works ofart and quite susceptible to their charm, were nei-ther able nor eager to detach the aesthetic quality ofthese works of art from their intellectual, moral,religious, and practical function or content, or to usean aesthetic quality as a standard for grouping thefine arts together or for making them the subject ofa comprehensive philosophical interpretation.

(Kristeller 1951/1965: 174)

In considering what is called ‘modernity’,historians have explored what is involved inthe binary constructions of ‘primitive art’. Theconsideration of ‘modernity’ stresses the gen-eral context of institutional separation of dis-tinct and abstract areas of interest – of kinship,politics, religion, economics, and art – takingplace in the rise of capitalism’s development, aline pioneered by Max Weber, or in the rise ofthe nation state (Eagleton 1990). There may notbe much agreement about the timing of thesedevelopments as well as the definitive charac-terization of the separation, but most theoristsagree that there is an important differencebetween art and these other domains, in that –as Daniel Miller sums it up, ‘art appears to havebeen given, as its brief, the challenge of con-fronting the nature of modernity itself, and pro-viding both moral commentary and alternativeperspectives on that problem’ (Miller 1991: 52,my emphasis). In contrast, surely, the anthropo-logical emphasis on the social embeddedness ofart practices in so-called ‘traditional societies’is not a matter of simple difference but ends upconstituting by contrast the distinctiveness of‘modern art’ – in which the separation of anaesthetic sphere was constitutive of art andaesthetics as a particular mode of evaluating, orinterrogating, cultural activity and its value.

The questions of mass culture and massconsumption, as well as that of cultural het-erogeneity (high and low culture, fine artand popular or folk) are central questionsaddressed by modern ideologies of art. A hier-archy of discriminating value is organizedthrough what is claimed to be a universalizing,interest-free judgment. What might be called‘modernisms’, therefore, can be seen to developin relation to the rise of industrial capitalism inEurope and the revolution in France in 1848 –a condition in which art comprises an arena inwhich discourses about cultural value are pro-duced. Thus, modernization is the basis of‘modernism’ – an ideology that engages with theconditions of the former. It is this dimension



of ‘modern art’ – its complex and criticalrelationship to the concomitant ‘modern’ andemerging dominance of rational utility andmoney as the basis of all value – that has oftenshared with ‘primitive art’ an oppositionalstance to the rational side of modernity. It is inthis way that ‘primitive art’ has been able tooperate as a basis for ‘modern art’.14

Recruited in this way to the ideological pro-ject of ‘modern art’, a project built around theautonomy of art as a sphere of distinct experi-ence, the resulting constructions of ‘primitivism’were inevitably oriented to the concerns of thosewho used them. The relatively common view,therefore, that high art takes transcendence ofthe fragmented, dislocated nature of contem-porary life in the industrial era as a central con-cern (see Miller 1991: 52) defines a ‘primitiveart’ that functions as evidence of the existenceof forms of humanity which are integral, cohe-sive, working as a totality. Such meanings donot simply provide the critical opposite to suchan experienced world; rather ‘primitive art’and its represented reality also permit the verycharacterization of the ‘modern’ as fragmentedand a sense of contemporary mass culture as‘spurious’ and somehow ‘inauthentic’.

It should be clear that the signifying locationsof ‘primitive art’ have varied with the particularnarrative of ‘loss’ presumed to have occurredwith modern life. But these signifying practicesseem always to involve repressing or suppress-ing part of the phenomenon. If, in a certainsense, ‘primitive art’ supposes traditionalism –which violates avant-garde requirements fororiginality and self-creation – this oppositionhas had to be repressed to capture the organicopposite for modern fragmentation.

Thus, figures such as the ‘primitive’, the‘exotic’, or the ‘tribal’ have offered a basis forchallenging Western categories by defining‘difference’, but they have done so principally,it would appear, within the ideological functionof Western cultural systems. And it was thisfunction – the continued support of the domi-nant Western cultural system that in fact mightlimit and misrepresent the works and meaningsof non-Western practitioners – which postmod-ern theorists recognized and sought to disrupt.

The tropes of ‘primitive art’ continued toexercise considerable rhetorical power towardsthe end of the twentieth century, as demon-strated by the much publicized Parisian exhi-bition ‘Les Magiciens de la terre’ (see Buchloh1989), by the continuing boom in the sale of‘genuine’ African art that has not been in touchwith the contaminating hand of the West orthe market (Steiner 1994), and by the critical

responses to Aboriginal acrylic painting (Myers1991, 2002).

PRIMITIVISM STILL

To conclude this chapter, I will remark on theopportunities I have had to see this myself, inwriting about the representation of Aboriginalculture in the critical responses to an exhibitionof Aboriginal acrylic paintings at the AsiaSociety in 1988, and to trace briefly some of thetrajectories set in motion by the critiques.

In the responses to the exhibition ofAboriginal art at the Asia Society, I found (Myers1991) that several evaluations suggested that theacrylics offer a glimpse of the spiritual whole-ness lost, variously, to ‘Western art’, to ‘Westernman’, or to ‘modernity’. The well knownAustralian art critic Robert Hughes indulgedprecisely in the form of nostalgic primitivism,praising the exhibition lavishly in Time maga-zine and drawing precisely on this opposition:

Tribal art is never free and does not want to be.The ancestors do not give one drop of goanna spitfor ‘creativity’. It is not a world, to put it mildly,that has much in common with a contemporaryAmerican’s – or even a white Australian’s. But itraises painful questions about the irreversibledrainage from our own culture of spirituality, awe,and connection to nature.

(Hughes 1988: 80)

In Hughes’s estimation, their ‘otherness’ occu-pies a world without much in common withours; the artistic values of individual creativityand freedom are not relevant. But this otherness,he maintained, was itself meaningful for us.Another line of evaluation asked if they could beviewed as a conceptual return to our lost (‘prim-itive’) selves, as suggested in the subtitle ofanother review: ‘Aboriginal art as a kind of cos-mic road map to the primeval’ (Wallach 1989).

The conventions of their differences werealso seen as morally instructive about some ofour own associations, especially of our materi-alism. In his travels to Australia during theplanning of the exhibition, Andrew Pekarik(then Director of the Asia Society Gallery) wasreported as saying ‘that these people with prac-tically zero material culture have one of themost complex social and intellectual culturesof any society’ (in Cazdow 1987: 9). In thisRomantic – and Durkheimian – construction, acritique of Modernity, the paintings may repre-sent the worthiness of Aboriginal survival and,consequently, the dilemma and indictment of



modern Australia’s history and treatment oftheir forebears as less than human.

POSITIONS FOR SIGNIFYINGTHE PRIMITIVE

The construction of ‘primitivism’ has a partic-ular salience for the production and circulationof political and cultural identities. At the sametime, recent work argues that ‘primitivism’must be studied in its particular contexts, andit is increasingly realized that there is not ageneric ‘primitivism’. Nicholas Thomas (1999),for example, has written about the distinctivequalities of ‘settler primitivism’, which shouldbe distinguished from other operations of thetrope. One might note, for example, the impor-tance of World War I – in the United States,Canada, and Australia – in leading these settlernations to pursue more actively an identity dis-tinct from that of Europe, the role this playedin the development of interest in ‘primitiveart’, and the appropriation of each country’sindigenous arts as part of the national culturalpatrimony (see especially Mullin 1995).15 Often,the effort to escape the anxiety of Europeaninfluence and to express a unique experiencehas resulted in an appropriation of the ‘native’,the ‘indigene’, as a component of an authenticnational culture, exhibited, sold, and collectedin museums and markets of ‘primitive art’.Objects marked as ‘art’ are not the only materialfor such cultural production, but their portabil-ity and circulability may allow such objects tobear special weight in these desires. The work-ings here seem to differ from the ideologicalfunction of ‘primitivism’ in the MOMA exhibi-tion of 1984, which was concerned with makingthe Other legitimate the cosmopolitan Western(not national) construction of ‘art’ in its mostessential form, as formal and creative, as a basichuman impulse. In processes of nation building,a central activity of modernization, distinctivevalues may be imputed to the ‘native’.Appropriation by nationalist culture representsdifferent temporal and spatial juxtapositions.This occurs both by regional transposition andalso by class and gendered positioning – but it iswithin this range of the ideological organizationof ‘difference’ that ‘primitivism’ and modernart coincide.

Thus, suspicion about the uses of ‘primi-tivism’ has not been aimed only at the sup-posedly transcendent, autonomous aestheticdomain postulated by High Modernism. It hasequally significant implications, however, for

the way in which local identities might lose theirintegrity or have their distinctiveness subsumedwithin a grand narrative that does not engagetheir own histories. This may well be a problemof art at the periphery of the world system.Thus, the exhibitions of what were called‘Primitive Art,’ while they emphasize form – inbeing displayed on the usual white walls with-out much information other than general dateand probable ‘tribal identity’ – denied to theseworks the history and authorship which wouldbe part of the Western context (see Price 1989).

For Aboriginal Australian and First Nationpeople in North America, ‘primitivism’ has aparticular salience for the production and circu-lation of political and cultural identities (see Ziffand Rao 1997). Ames (1992), Clifford (1988, 1991)and some of the essayists in Karp and Lavine(1991) have eloquently made this point aboutmuseums particularly. But they do so in recogni-tion of the active political projects of indigenouspeople and their representatives – in the prac-tices of artists and curators such as JimmyDurham, Jolene Rickard, Gerald McMaster,Fiona Foley, Brenda Croft, Tracey Moffatt, PaulChaat Smith, and others – who reject the bindingrestrictions of ‘authenticity’ and cultural puritywith their own insistence that ‘We are not dead,nor less [‘Indian’, ‘Aboriginal’, etc.].’ The fun-damental rejection of the category ‘primitive art’surely takes place in the creation of their ownmuseums by indigenous communities in NorthAmerica, Australia, and elsewhere – in muse-ums such as the newly opened, indigenouslycurated and managed National Museum of theAmerican Indian, twenty years old as an indige-nous institution. Indigenous people are also,increasingly, reclaiming the objects made bytheir ancestors, through legislation relating tocultural property concerns such as the US NativeAmerican Graves Protection and RepatriationAct (passed in 1990) or the Aboriginal and TorresStrait Islander Heritage Protection Act of 1984. Inreclaiming objects, indigenous people resituatethe objects in their own histories, constructing anarrative of their presence and continued exis-tence as part of a world that may include othercultures but also constituting themselves asa people through their claim. Indeed, the mate-riality of these objects enables their repa-triation and history to be part of theircontinued presence. In July 2004, for example,under Aboriginal heritage protection laws, anIndigenous Australian group, the Dja DjaWurrung, created a huge controversy in seiz-ing some 150 year old artifacts that had beenon loan from the British Museum to an exhi-bition in Melbourne at Museum Victoria. The



contestation over this case exemplifies thecollision of two different regimes of value, inwhich the values created by different forms ofexchange – one in the market dominated by theWest and the other in cosmological regimes ofindigenous claims – are engaged in a ‘tourna-ment of values’ (Appadurai 1986) fundamen-tally set in motion by an insistence on coevalpresence.

THE INTERCULTURAL FIELD

Where are the ‘natives’, one must ask, in theprimitivism debates, and why do they seem tobe erased by the language of ‘appropriation’?To be sure, the recognition that non-Westernpeoples ‘had art’ did result – and not inconse-quentially – in their inclusion in the authorized‘Family of Man’. They were ‘creative’, ‘humane’,‘spiritual’. But the exhibitions promoting thisinclusion – and the success of the intensifiedcirculation of the products and images of non-Western Others – comprise a complex forrecontextualizing objects that offers opportu-nities for varying engagement. In this sense,they are sites of ongoing cultural production(Bourdieu 1993), and it is important to under-stand them in this way.

I wish to draw on the analytic framework of‘recontextualization’ first offered by NicholasThomas (1991; see also Myers 2001). It offers anopportunity for some suggestions beyond thoseimagined in the first round of Primitivismdebates, suggestions more in keeping with therenewed approach to considerations of materi-ality (see Gell 1998; Miller 2005). It suggeststhat a larger frame for grasping ‘primitivism’lies in the notion of intercultural exchange andtransaction. This is a frame that can include thesort of ‘appropriations’ that have concernedcritics, but the weight is placed not on theboundaries but on the charged social field thatencompasses the actors. An emphasis on ‘appro-priation’ and the primitivizing ‘gaze’ is notsufficient to understand what happens materi-ally when such objects circulate into an inter-national art world. Scholars such as HowardMorphy (1992), Ruth Phillips (1998), Richardand Sally Price (1999), Chris Steiner (1994),Nelson Graburn (2004), Charlene Townsend-Gault (2004) and I (among others) have askedwhat actually does happen in circulation, at thesites of exhibition – to ask how objects, iden-tities, and discourses are produced, inflected,and invoked in actual institutional settings.These ‘fields of cultural production’ (Bourdieu

1993) have distinctive histories, purposes, andstructures of their own.16

Further, this approach redresses one of theprincipal assumptions of ‘primitivism’, namelythe temporal boundary that considered thesecultures to be over, lacking a future, anassumption underlying the typical lack of con-cern to include the voices or actual subjectivi-ties of those from these traditions.17 In theSotheby’s auction, with which I began thischapter, the indigenous ‘traditional owners’ ofthe churinga attempted to bring it back – with theadditional agency of the Central Land Counciland the Federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs –through purchase, and thereby to remove itfrom the realm of art commodity and replaceit within their own tradition. Although theyfailed in the attempt, because the priceexceeded the resources provided by theAustralian government, the activation of theiragency did succeed in redefining the social fieldand challenging the once easy placement of suchobjects within the domain of ‘primitive art’.Even at the MOMA exhibition the indexicalrelationships of beautiful objects to their makersand heirs became a basis for the extension of‘native’ agency: the so-called Zuni war godfigures were withdrawn from the show whenMOMA ‘was informed by knowledgeableauthorities that Zuni people consider anypublic exhibition of their war gods to be sacri-legious’ (quoted in Clifford 1988: 209). AsClifford notes, this event shows that ‘living tra-ditions have claims on them’ (ibid.), and a rangeof recent repatriation claims have made thisprocess increasingly visible.

It is just such an ‘Outward Clash’ – as Peircecalls it (Keane 2005) – that forces us to attend tothe broader materiality involved in such objects.In museums around the world, what was‘primitive art’ is being resignified, reclaimed,re-exhibited as the patrimony of particularcommunities or peoples – bearing the trace, aswell, of its history of ‘collection’ or ‘alienation’(see Ames 1992; Clifford 1991; Cranmer Webster1992; Saunders 1997; Kramer 2004). Researchand writing on the nation and the native offerconsiderable insight into the problem.

In pursuit of this sort of specificity, it isclearly necessary to break down the very gen-eral notion of the ‘primitive’ that has tended tobe deployed in analyses. In part, this involvesrecognizing that the processes of moderniza-tion are mediated through a range of distinc-tive institutions. Thus, scholars must continueto track the figure of the ‘Indigenous Other’through the distinctive circuits of artistic,regional, and national institutions and identity,



showing different mediations through time andplace (Bakewell 1995; Cohodas 1999; Mullin1995; Myers 2002; Phillips 1998; Thomas 1999).

There has been a general context for revaluingindigenous people and their products in theEnglish-speaking settler states. It has oftenbeen noted that the recuperation of the indige-nous culture in such appropriations may, how-ever, value them only in ways defined by thedominant culture – that is, in terms of a hege-mony that does not really accept ‘difference’ orthat organizes difference in the service ofanother set of values. This is the effect of theeffort at appropriation of the indigenous – theIndio – by Mexican fine arts in the service of therevolution’s ideology of hybridization (Bakewell1995); for such work to be ‘fine art’, however,it could not be made by those regarded asartisans – and certainly not by Indios them-selves. Similarly, the resignifications of theAustralian Aboriginal relationship to landembodied in their paintings may be resistedwithin the immediate region where they live(whose settlers compete for control of the land)or by immigrant minorities (who are threat-ened by a special Aboriginal status), but have adifferent meaning when they are ‘re-placed’ inthe context of emerging Australian national-ism, international tourism, and the new profes-sional class that seeks to define itself.

However, while Aboriginal producers of thepaintings – living in dilapidated and impover-ished communities – may be stripped of theirhistorical specificity and their images convertedto signifiers in Australian national myth, theirinsistence on a return of value for their paint-ings also resists this incorporation. Objects lendthemselves to recontextualization for an unlim-ited range of ideological purposes, an infinitenumber of desires, and so-called ‘natives’appropriate, too – not just commodities andsignifiers, but even the idea of art itself! Theclaim to be making ‘art’ – contemporary art – isa vital strand of the recent movement of acrylicpainting and other forms of Indigenous expres-sion in Australia, and significant parallels areclear in Canada – with Northwest Coast art(see Ames 1992) – and in the United States(Lippard 1991).

As a final comment, in recognition of thepotentials of these interventions, I would liketo reiterate what I have argued elsewhere(Myers 2001), therefore, that the language of‘objectification’ – beyond the one-sided frame-work of ‘appropriation’ – may provide greaterleverage in teasing out the complicated and sub-tle intersections of relative value and interests.If the appropriations of Aboriginal painting or

decoration are objectifications of nationalidentity, they are also objectifications of theirAboriginal makers, and we need to follow outthe implications of their movement through anew system of value. In this movement, themedia in which these objectifications occurredare a problem to be considered. Painting, sculp-ture, and dance may move very differently. Butat the same time, we are forced to recognizethat works of Aboriginal ‘art’ index their mak-ers and their production history, even if thestructure of an exhibition suppresses this bylabels that present only tribe and century.Questions about the objects and how they gotthere are potentially present in any exhibition.Recent exhibitions – like ‘Pomo Indian BasketWeavers: their Baskets and the Art Market’(organized by the University of PennsylvaniaMuseum of Archaeology and Anthropologyand shown at venues like the NMAI, GustavHeye Center in Manhattan in 1999) and the ear-lier ‘Objects of Myth and Memory: AmericanIndian Art at the Brooklyn Museum’ (1991) thatfocused on the curator Stewart Culin’s collect-ing – have reclaimed these histories andpersonages, and the networks linking, for exam-ple, basket makers in California and collectors inthe Northeast through the display of baskets.18

Moreover, the objectifications of nationalidentity are both variable and contextuallylimited in their stability. Aboriginal art’s statusas a commodity of consumption involves formsof commercial value that are potentially at oddswith its capacity to articulate – as somethingspiritual, authentic, and attached to the land –national identity. It was nothing short of ascandal, then, when an Aboriginal bark paint-ing in the Prime Minister’s collection was dis-covered to be a forgery, painted by a whiteperson! Furthermore, these paintings – and artitself – are not the only media in which nationalidentity may be objectified. War memorials,automobiles, heritage sites, archeological for-mations, heroes, battlefields, natural historymuseums, symphony orchestras, and so on mayoffer very different – even competing – repre-sentations of the national self, representationsthat may circulate within different contextsand social formations.

These constitute the very different implica-tions of what Thomas (1999) calls ‘settler prim-itivism’ from a more general primitivism such asthat represented in European modernist art. Thewhole significance of settler primitivism is thatthe ‘native’ and the ‘settler’ are coeval. In thissense, settler primitivism depends on anothercontingency of the materiality of things – theirspatial contiguity. The instabilities and the



tensions come from the fact that indigenouscommunities are not only contemporaneousbut also to some extent recognizably in thesame space with so-called modern ones. Whileit draws on many tropes that are familiar, set-tler primitivism has a distinctive problem ofcontext: the indigenous people cannot be fullyrelegated to prehistory as the predecessors of thesettlers. There is a basic situation of copresence,even competing claims in the land. The logic ofthe more general primitivism – through whichAfrican cultural products were conveyed – dif-fers in this regard, and is mediated through theconstructions of the nation and nationalcultures in postcolonial states.

These recontextualizations – in this case of ahybrid formation of settler primitivism – arenot just surprising or ironic juxtapositions, butreorganizations of value. The gain in value fornative cultural forms should be conceptualizedin terms that are relevant for anthropologicaltheory more generally, and indeed such recon-textualizations are increasingly common in theworld.

NOTES

1 Gombrich wrote of ‘the preference for theprimitive’ as having as early an appearanceas the quotation he takes from Cicero,and sees it as an occasional and temporaryrejection or disgust for the refined and thetrajectory of mimesis.

2 Two other important collections have fol-lowed on the initial burst of interest in theprimitivism debates – Karp and Lavine(1991) and Phillips and Steiner (1999).

3 A great exception to this preference forthe pure exotic, of course, is Julius Lips’sThe Savage Hits Back (1937), while a morerecent foray into such matters was EnidSchildkrout’s and Charles Keims’s exhibi-tion of Mangbetu art (see Schildkrout andKeim 1990).

4 A further development of these discussionsemanated in the wake of ‘Les Magiciens dela terre,’ an exhibition in Paris that attemptedto transcend some of the difficulties faced byMOMA.

5 The Museum of Modern Art’s approach isset forth in Alfred Barr’s work. MOMA hadconsiderable influence on the recognition of‘primitive art’ as art through a series of exhi-bitions organized especially by Renéd’Harnoncourt. In 1936 he was appointedan administrator in the Indian Arts and

Crafts Board, part of the Department ofthe Interior. D’Harnoncourt mounted oneof the first national exhibitions ofNative American arts at the Golden GateInternational Exposition in San Francisco in1939. D’Harnoncourt was responsible forother exhibitions of African art and that ofNorth American Indians. In addition tobeing curator and later Director of MOMA,d’Harnoncourt also served as art advisor toNelson Rockefeller’s art collection and wasvice-president for Rockefeller’s Museum ofPrimitive Art from its beginning in 1957.D’Harnoncourt was closely involved withone of the major academic scholars of prim-itive art, Paul Wingert. Some important dis-cussion of d’Harnoncourt can be found inRushing (1995).

6 As Torgovnick writes of the critic Roger Fry,there was a great concern to ‘rescue art fromthe morass of photographic representationand narrative’ (1990: 87). Fry was one of theearly critical enthusiasts for what he called‘Negro Art’ (Fry 1920). The rise of photogra-phy and its greater capacity for naturalisticrepresentation is commonly perceived as cre-ating a crisis for ‘art’ and a need to ‘makeit new’ by theorizing a distinctive functionfor it. If one account of Modernism and‘Primitivism’ can be traced through thecollection and exhibition of African andOceanic art, as Rubin (1984) does and whichTorgovnick follows, another account istraced by W. Jackson Rushing’s NativeAmerican Art and the New York Avant-garde(1995) and his depiction of the unique criticalcontexts established in the United States inrelation to Native American cultural prod-ucts. The edited collection, Primitivism andTwentieth-Century Art: a Documentary History(Flam and Deutch 2003), provides many ofthe central documents for a history of primi-tivism and its controversies as well as acomprehensive chronology of exhibitions,publications, and events.

7 In Primitivism in Modern Art, published in1938, Goldwater pointed to the importantprecedent set for much modern Europeanart by the forms of children’s drawings andother kinds of so-called ‘primitive’ art, aswell as by artists’ ideas about the nature ofthe creative process which lay behind thoseforms.

8 Such typological resemblance was whatBoasian anthropologists once described as‘convergence’ or forms of independentinvention, although they functioned in the



exhibition to indicate the universality ofthe interest in form. For discussions of the‘comparative method’ and debates about it,see Harris (1968) and Lowie (1937).

9 In this regard, there is still some ambiguityin anthropological concerns about context,which – art-oriented scholars have main-tained – tend to subsume the materialobject to cultural meanings, claiming to seesomething beyond the object in itself.

10 In this form, the identification of the primi-tive with directness and expression couldbe mobilized to an avant-garde positionthat Gombrich delineates in Zola’s reviewof Manet’s ‘Olympia’, in ‘Mon salon’, inwhich he says he asks an artist to do morethan provide mere ‘beauty’: ‘It is no longera question here, therefore, of pleasing or ofnot pleasing, it is a question of being one-self, of baring one’s breast . . . The word“art” displeases me. It contains, I do notknow what, in the way of ideas of neces-sary compromises, of absolute ideals . . .that which I seek above all in a painting is aman, and not a picture . . . You must aban-don yourself bravely to your nature andnot seek to deny it’ (Gombrich 2002: 206).

11 Miller has insisted, for example, that theclaim of art as a transcendent realm was notsomething really taken seriously by anthro-pologists (see Miller 1991 and below),whose studies have tended to emphasizethe embedding of aesthetics in everyday life(e.g., Witherspoon 1977). ‘The separationand definition of art and aesthetics as some-thing different and particular,’ as Miller callsit (1991: 51), is rare in the world’s cultures.Much anthropological ink was spilled indemonstrating the functional involvementof supposedly artistic forms – masks, sculp-ture – in political and religious activities,against an expectation of art for art’s sake.At the same time, there were surely fewanthropologists who wanted to claim thatthe communities they studied ‘lacked art’,since something unselfconsciously called‘art’ remained the sine qua non of humanstatus. Consequently, an anthropologistencounters the category of ‘art’ with suspi-cion and a sense of its ‘strangeness’. Indeed,for most anthropologists, the concept of ‘art’would be, as it is for Miller (1991: 50), ‘sub-ject to the critique of relativism, in that itstems from an essentialist foundation – thatis, no absolute quality of the world – but hasbecome an established perspective throughparticular cultural and historical conditions’.

12 See Dutton’s 1991 review of Price (1989) aswell as the Manchester debates on aesthetics(Ingold 1997).

13 In an excellent essay, Eric Michaels(1987) – no doubt sick of the repeated treat-ment of Aboriginal painters as ‘so manyPicassos in the desert’ – argued that thepractices of Aboriginal acrylic painting hadmore to offer postmodern art theory thanthat of Modernism. I cannot resist pointingout how these tendencies themselves drawprecisely on the tropes of the historicalavant-garde to tear away the familiar andto reveal, thereby, the world. An elegantexample of this is to be found in TonyBennett’s (1979) discussion of ‘estrange-ment’ and ‘defamiliarization’ in RussianFormalism.

14 One must acknowledge that historiansdisagree in how they understand theemergence of such a set of discursive prac-tices – with art as healing and the artist asheroic individual.

15 While I want to stress the development ofan interest in and market for ‘primitive art’here, I do not mean to say that this was thefirst time in which the settler societiesappropriated their country’s indigenousarts for the production of national identity.In the United States, this clearly occurred inperiods earlier than World War I, althoughsomething distinctive does happen then.

16 I am indebted to Webb Keane for thereminder here that part of the value ofNicholas Thomas’s (1991) book, EntangledObjects, rests in his effort to look in bothdirections, at Pacific peoples’ recontextual-izations of Western cultural objects.Obviously, this is not a level political play-ing field. At the same time, however, it is nota peculiarity of the West to resignify things.

17 Douglas Cole (1985), for example,describes a period of rapid accumulationaround the turn of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries, justified in so far asNative cultures were thought to be vanish-ing. Others have insisted on the impor-tance of Western custodianship of objectsneglected or no longer of value in their‘home’ cultures. These frameworks under-lie the neglect of the possible attachmentof these objects to living people.

18 The marvelous writing of Marvin Cohodas(1997) and Sally McLendon (1993, 1998) areexemplary of the work on collecting thathas transformed the thinking about ‘primi-tive art’.



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