What Became Authentic Primitive Art?
Author(s): Shelly Errington
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 9, No. 2 (May, 1994), pp. 201-226
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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What Became Authentic Primitive Art?
Shelly Errington
University of California, Santa Cruz
The category "PrimitiveArt" was invented at the turn of the 20th century and
gained acceptance as "art,"and, with it, monetary value, in the first half of the
century-an inspirationto avant-gardeartists, a pleasure to avant-gardecollectors. By mid-century, it had begun to enter the mainstreamof established art. It
got its own museum in New York in 1954, when the Museum of Primitive Art
was founded-funded by Nelson Rockefeller and containing largely his collection. For about thirty years interest in "PrimitiveArt" grew. Public acceptance
of it became more widespread; galleries selling it flourished; scholarly interest
in it increased, and many new studies were made; curatorialinterest grew, and
new exhibits were installed. In 1984, Primitive Art seemed at the peak of its
acceptance and validation, and with no fewer than five major exhibits of
PrimitiveArt 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 permanentcollection installed in the Rockefeller Wing of
the MetropolitanMuseum of Art, which had opened just two years before; and
finally, the Museum of Modern Art's major and controversial production
"Primitivism" in 20th Century Art. But the seminars, catalogues, critiques,
reviews, and general publicity attending the conjunction of so much Primitive
Art in the winter of 1984 revealed that the notion "Primitive Art," and the
valorizationof what was pronouncedto 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,"disputthe
notion that "authentic"primitive people live as they have lived for cening
untouched
turies,
by Western civilization or history. The idea that authentic
Primitive Art consists of objects made by "untouched"cultures for their own
uses ratherthan for sale to "outsiders" and that these objects are pure in their
form and content, uncontaminatedby Western influence, has been thoroughly
CulturalAnthropology 9(2):201-226. Copyright ? 1994, American Anthropological Association.
201
202 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
criticized by Fabian (1983), Clifford (1988), Price (1989), Torgovnick (1990),
and many others. Through such critiques, received notions of "authenticity"
have been thoroughly discredited, and "primitivism" has been exposed as a
Western ideological construct.
Considerablyless attentionhas been paid, however, to the thirdword in the
term"authenticPrimitiveArt."Among the infinitude of objects consideredboth
"authentic"and "primitive,"only some of them were selected as "art"objects,
their legitimacy institutionalized, and their monetary value as art established.
To consider this issue requires a shift in focus from primitivism to art-to the
deep schemata concerning "art"that inform the selection of some objects, but
not most, to be designated (primitive) "art,"and to the legitimizing museum
processes that, in effect, pronounce them to be art.
The Primitive Art in the Michael Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art is what Malraux would call "art by metamorphosis" (1949).
These artifacts began their existences as many different things-from ceremonial clubs to ancestraleffigies, from door lintels to kava bowls. Their uses and
functions in their contexts of productionwere various, but they were not "art,"
as they became in the Met. They have been moved great distances-from New
Guinea, or Mesoamerica, or Africa-and have come to rest in New York City.
Once in New York, they have continued their peripatetic existence. Over a period of decades, they have moved, some literally and some metaphorically,out
of the American Museum of NaturalHistory on the west side of CentralPark,
down to Midtown on 54th Streetto the Museum of Primitive Art, and then up the
other side of the parkto the Met. These spatial movements parallel andhelp constitute their movements across categories.
In what follows, I will examine what became "Authentic Primitive Art,"
using the Rockefeller Wing as a point of reference (see Figure 1). The Rockefeller Wing-the contents, its history of collection and exhibition, and its current
installation-is paradigmaticof the meanings and fate of Authentic Primitive
Art. For one thing, the objects in it exemplify and help constitute what I call
High PrimitiveArt, the "authentic"Primitive Art that is valorized and exhibited
in majormuseums and that commands the highest prices at auctions and in galleries. For another,the foundingof the Museum of Primitive Art in 1954 andthe
opening of the Rockefeller Wing in 1982, both of which contained the same core
collection, span the thirty-oddyears in which Authentic Primitive Art was most
accepted and valorized as a category of objects in museum exhibitions and in
scholarship. This period can be seen as ending in 1984, when the Museum of
Moder Art's show "Primitivism"in 20th CenturyArt provoked so much controversy that the erosion of the validity of the notion of Authentic Primitive Art
became problematic, even to a general audience.
Art by Intention and Art by Appropriation
The vast majorityof objects found in fine artsmuseums were not createdas
"art,"not intended by theirmakersto be "art":they were originally otherthings.
Andre Malrauxaddressesthis fact, writing that many of the objects we count as
WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 203
Figure1
Museum view. Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Gallery of
OceanicArt of Melanesia,The MichaelC. RockefellerMemorialWing.(Until 1991,
the name was The Michael C. RockefellerWing of Primitive Art.) Reprintedby
permissionof the MetropolitanMuseumof Art, New York. ? The Metropolitan
Museumof Art.
"art"required a "metamorphosis" in order to become "art"(1949). These objects are counted as "art"because they were claimed as such at certainhistorical
moments.
The term "metamorphosis,"I think, seems entirely too gentle for some of
the transformationsthat have taken place. While acknowledging the import of
Malraux's writing on the topic, I want to distinguish here between art by appropriation (ratherthan by metamorphosis)and art by intention.' Art by intention
was made as art, created in contexts that had a concept of art approximating
what we now hold: paradigmatically,the kinds of objects created in the Italian
renaissance as art. Art by appropriationconsists of the diverse objects that became "art"with the founding of public fine arts museums at the end of the 18th
century. More and more objects gained status as art duringthe 19th century and
entered the museum; one thinks especially of religious objects, like Byzantine
icons and Christian triptychs, but there were many more.
It is true, but obvious, that the objects in the Rockefeller Wing are "artby
appropropriation."To say so only begins to open up the topic. What counts as
a work of art?What attributesof the uncountableobjects thathumanshave made
predispose them to being selected as "art"objects? And how are these objects
transformedby display, framing, and other practices into "art"objects?
204 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
What Counts as a Work of Art?
The assemblage of so many masterpieces in a museum, Andre Malraux
wrote in Museum without Walls, conjures up in the mind's eye all the world's
masterpieces."How indeed could this truncatedpossible fail to evoke the whole
gamut of the possible?" he asks."Of what is it [the museum] necessarily deprived?"He answers:
Of all thatforms an integralpartof a whole (stainedglass, frescos);of all that
cannotbe moved;of objectssuchas sets of tapestrywhicharedifficultto display;
and,chiefly,of all thatthe collectionis unableto acquire... Fromtheeighteenth
to thetwentiethcenturywhatmigratedwas the portable.[Malraux1949:16]
Relative to portability is size. Too small, and the item becomes insignificant. Too large, and it becomes costly to transportand difficult to display. It is
no mean feat to transport30-foot carved poles from IrianJaya to New York, and
it requiresa collector or museum both wealthy and determinedenough to do it.
To become "art"these portable objects must be displayed, and to be displayed
they must be accommodated in a suitable space. Art was invented simultaneously with collecting, and the two are inconceivable without each other. The
market for monumental pieces is exceedingly limited, even if people praise
them extravagantlyas magnificent art.(Whose living room could accommodate
an Olmec head-even if it could be bought?)
Objects selected for display are best made of durablematerials 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 combination of soft and hard materials:flowers and woven palm-leaf offerings, baskets, bamboo, and bark-cloth. The more ephemeral material aspects of these
items tend to disappearbefore they turninto "art."Those made of a combination
of soft andhardparts arelikely to lose the soft one, with profoundepistemological and aesthetic consequences.
It was standardpractice among art dealers in the 1920s to strip African artifacts of their soft and fibrous parts, renderingthem starkly "modem"looking
and preserving or creating a particularaesthetic (see Rubin 1984). One type of
piece often treatedthatway is the "reliquaryfigure"from Gabon. The Centerfor
African Art in New York displayed several of these pieces in the 1984 show African Masterpiecesfrom the Musee de L'Homme,including one thatretainedits
"basket decoration." The catalogue points out that "we usually see Kota reliquary 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 spiriteddefense of the aesthetic of the basket, featuringthe "complex texture of twisted leather thongs and basketry [which] gives the base a restless vitality and interest," and the "feathers attached to the back of the head [which]
furtheranimateand complicate the figure's shape and texture,"ending the para-
WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 205
graph with the wishfully triumphantproclamation that a "simple, minimal object has become a composite form-playing shapes, colors, and textures against
each other"(Vogel and N'Diaye 1985:148, item 66).
Maybe. But I suspect that, in spite of the restless vitality of rafia, the hierarchy of permanencewill continue because it is overdetermined.Soft materials
deteriorate,requiringspecial care (the few masks with leafy bases shown in the
Rockefeller Wing are grouped together in temperature-controlledcases); they
may look messy on a coffee table; their commodity value, as well as their display value, is lessened if they deteriorate.
Perhaps most deeply, there is an unstated and largely unconscious link in
the West between the permanentand the civilized, the durable and "high"civilization and arts, made explicit, handily enough, by Sir Kenneth Clark in Civilisation (1970). He regards the urge toward permanence and the (alleged) correlative urge towardmaking objects of permanentmaterials to be a hallmarkof
the civilized. According to Clark,civilized societies show themselves to be such
by locating themselves within history, partly by making objects that endure:
Civilizationmeanssomethingmorethanenergyandwill andcreativepower....
How can I define it? Well, very shortly,a sense of permanence.The wanderers
and invaders were in a continual state of flux. ... And for that reason it didn't
occurto themto buildstonehouses,or to writebooks.... Almostthe only stone
buildingthathas survivedfromthe centuriesafterthe Mausoleumof Theodoric
is the Baptistryat Poitiers.It is pitifullycrude.... But at least this miserable
constructionis meantto last. It isn'tjust a wigwam.Civilizedman,or so it seems
to me, mustfeel thathe belongssomewherein spaceandtime;thathe consciously
looks forwardand looks back. [Clark1970:16-17]
In a few sentences he equates civilization, sedentary existence (read: agriculture rather than hunting, gathering, or nomadic pastoralism), permanent
structures (and by extrapolation other objects that are made to last-not wigwams!), and a sense of history, of locating oneself in time. Although the objects
in the Rockefeller Wing would probablybe dismissed out of hand by Clark and
by most art historical students under the sway of the Italian renaissance-indeed, that was partof the problem the Rockefellers had in getting Primitive Art
into the Met in the first place-it is no accident that the ones chosen here are
among the most enduring.They are at least on the road to permanence, which is
more thancan be said about a piece of music or a sand-painting,or even a basket
or an intricately woven leaf and flower offering.
The importanceof portability and durabilityas criteria of art is confirmed
if we look at the practices that have produced"modern"forms of non-Western
arts derived from prior, evanescent art-forms. One example is that of Navajo
sand-paintings.Navajos made intricatedesigns in the sand, which, in the course
of the curing ceremony, were sat upon and stepped on, hence erased. In the
course of this century, various people had the idea of preserving the designs,
first by painting them, and eventually by applying sand to a board with a thin
coating of glue. At thatpoint the designs became both durableand portable,able
to be moved to new locations (collected and sold) and hung on walls as "art"
206 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
(Parezo 1983). Something analogous happened among the AustralianAborigines, who draw ancestraldesigns in the sand, paint them on bodies, and paint and
incise them on bark,rocks, and a few other materials. Only those on permanent
materials(rocks and bark)arekept between ceremonies, often hidden from view
in caves and other secret stashing-places. For a number of decades bark paintings stood as "Aboriginalart"and were sold as such in shops in Sydney and Canberra. But Aboriginal art really gained a market and a place in the world art
scene when Aborigines began painting ancestral designs in acrylic on canvas.
(See Williams 1976, Sutton 1988, and Morphy 1991.)
Art by intention-those objects, paradigmatically framed paintings, that
were created in order to be sold, collected, and hung on silent walls-is also
portableby intent. Its portabilitygreatly facilitates its collectability and its ability to be commodified. Durability also makes its collection, display, and commodification more convenient than would otherwise be the case. (One need not
ask which came first, art's durability or its commodifiability, to acknowledge
the convenient correlation.)
Primitive Art, then, is usually the size and durabilitythat money can transport, dealers can store, and collectors can conveniently display. Thus a hierarchy of Primitive Art substances emerges, in which Benin bronzes, ivory masks,
and hardwood sculpturalforms predominateover ritual figures made of leaves,
disintegrating fabric, deteriorating tapa cloth, fraying baskets, breakablepottery.
Framing "Art"
Art by intention is framed, literally or figuratively. We owe the literal
frame, which is derived from the wooden triptych,to the Renaissance invention
of portable, salable canvases thatneeded protection. The literal frame increases
the portability, durability, hence commodifiability, of the object.2
The 18th century took the idea of framing furtherthan the literal frame by
distinguishing "art"from "craft"and separatingthe "fine arts"into five types:
painting, sculpture,architecture,music, and dance.3M.H. Abrams traces the social practices in the 18th centurythatseparated"art"from life, ending in Kant's
articulationof the theory of the purely aesthetic object with no useful function
but to be contemplated (1985). By the end of that century, then, all five "fine
arts"became useless, contemplatableobjects and requiredthe frame-whether
a picture frame, a pedestal, or a stage-to function as a boundarybetween the
piece of "art"and the world, setting off artfrom everyday life, from social context, and from mundaneutility. The framepronounces what it encloses to be not
"real"life but something different from it, a representation of reality. Thus, at
the end of the 18th and first partof the 19th century,music and dance, which are
activities, were turnedinto "aesthetic"objects by framing them (by the stage or
platform) and separatingthem from the audience, who then contemplatedthem
as distant spectacles, as the art connoisseur contemplated the painting on the
wall. The audience does not participatein the performancebut only views it.
WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 207
Art by appropriation,by contrast, is not born in a frame, so to speak. It becomes "art"by being framed, by being removed from a context of use and performance. Here it is worthremarkingthat, although not all humansocieties have
produced what I would call art (at least when being meticulous, I would prefer
to confine the wordto objects conforming to the clusterof associations andpractices articulatedat the end of the 18th century in Europe), all human cultures
have what Cassirercalled "symbolic form":artifacts,activities, or even aspects
of the landscape that humans view as densely meaningful (1955). Further,human beings have several sensory capacities: we see, hear, taste, smell, touch,
and have "haptic"or "kinesthetic" empathetic capacities. Very few symbolic
forms are cast in a single sensory medium: an audience hears drumbeatswhile
looking at maskeddancersand perceiving their movements with kinesthetic empathy; people doze and smoke clove cigarettes and munch on snacks while sitting in front of shadow puppets and hearing gamelan music. Only mechanical
reproductionallows us to separateour sensory modalities and utilize a single capacity to listen to a symphony while we wash dishes. But some of the multiple
media in which non-mechanically-replicated symbolic forms are cast are temporally evanescent; sounds, smells, tastes, muscular exertion, and kinesthetic
empathy do not last. Masks and all the rest of these objects slough off their evanescent performancecontexts on the way to New York, retainingonly the durable partthatcan be set aside in a frame or on a pedestal. By the time they become
Primitive Art, then, the mask and the ancestorfigure look a lot more like "sculpture"than like something that needs a performanceto activate its meanings.
Sculptural Qualities
Even now, painting and sculpture stand as the epitome of "fine arts" for
both museumcuratorsand museum-goers-in spite of the eclectic and universal
natureof artin the late 20th century. Certainlyat the time thatPrimitive Art was
being discovered or invented at the turn of the 20th century, prior to Duchamp,
Cristo, and suchlike, the two forms were paradigmatic.Painters and sculptors
were the ones who discovered Primitive Art and used it for inspiration.
Regardedas a deep schema, paradigm, or patternratherthan as an already
obvious object, a "painting"is a portable, flat, four-corneredthing with some
iconic content. Such objects are relatively rare in the history of the world. Persian miniatures and Japanese and Chinese brush-paintingsand screens are the
closest candidates to approximate this schema outside the Western tradition,
and it cannotbe an accident thatthose items have long entereddealershipcircles
as "high"forms of non-Europeanart.
The peoples of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas-the regions that produced what became Primitive Art-created very few objects correspondingto
that schema. They did produce, however, three-dimensionalobjects in durable
materials that can be grafted fairly easily onto the schema of sculpture, the second paradigmaticform of fine art. It can be no accident that the vast majority of
objects exhibited in the Rockefeller Wing and other fine artsmuseums can pass
for (and "pass as") "sculpture."
208 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Iconicity
A feature of both painting and sculpture in the Renaissance canon was a
special form of iconic signification. The Italian renaissance reinvented and rationalized a certain type of iconic signification, perspectival illusionistic realism, what Summers calls "opticalnaturalism"(1987), or the geometrical representation of virtual space. Consideredin the context of the history of the world,
optical naturalismis a peculiar type of iconicity: it attempts to depict precisely
the way something looks.4Between the 15th and 18th centuries, optical naturalism emerged and crystallized as part of the definition of "art"in Europe. In the
19th century, objects that had a recognizable iconic content but yet fell short of
the optical naturalismachieved in academicpainting were called "primitive"including everything from the Italian "primitives"(primitive because prior to
the full rationalizationof perspectivaltechniques), to the Douanier Henri Rousseau (primitive because not academicallytrained), to Japaneseprints (primitive
because not sufficiently optically, perspectivally realistic). What eventually became Primitive Art in the 20th century was simply grotesque in the 19th. The
niche of the primitive in art was occupied by others.
That space began to be occupied by l'art negre (African art) at the turnof
the 20th century, when the Renaissance canon appearedto collapse completely,
admitting as art the "distortions"to optical naturalismrepresented by cubism
and African masks. Curiously enough, it did not collapse entirely. A vitiated or
updatedversion of optical naturalismremaineda partof the criterion of what is
allowed to count as art:that is iconicity, pure and simple. Objects from Africa,
Oceania, and the Americas that resemble something recognizable-most notably, a person, a person's face, or an animal-are more likely to become Primitive Art than are objects that are "decorated,"even beautifully, but have little or
no iconic content.5
The criterion of iconicity intrudedlegally in the 1930s, concerning more
thanjust Primitive Art, accordingto an anecdote that appearsin Russell Lynes's
Gold Old Modern (1973). It seems that the Museum of Modern Art was trying
to import abstractEuropean sculpture for a show on modern art. But as Lynes
explains, according to Paragraph1807 of the Tariff Act and a definition made in
1930, sculptureto be importedas "art,"ratherthanas eitherraw materialor utilitarianobjects (on which there was a 40 percent duty), had to be "imitations of
naturalobjects, chiefly of the humanform... in their trueproportionof length,
breadthand thickness"(Lynes 1973:138). Apparentlysculpturesby Giacometti,
Arp, Miro, and other modernist artists at the time did not qualify. The previous
year the museum had had a similar problem with Primitive Art, but in that case
it was compoundedby the fact that several of the items were declared utilitarian
or worse.6
Iconicity remains an unstatedand even repressed criterion for the identification of what counts as art. This is still the case today, even after the advent of
objets trouves, abstract expressionism, and so forth. The catalogue Masterpieces of Primitive Art, published when the Museum of Primitive Art collection
moved into the Met, for instance, is organized by dividing the objects into faces,
WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 209
figures, animals, and abstractions (Newton 1978). This organization asks the
viewer to see these objects as representations,as though these objects' meanings
lay primarily in their iconic content-revealed especially in the residual category, "abstractions."Or note the two-page spreadin the New YorkTimesMagazine of September20, 1987, advertisingan exhibit at the Centerfor African Art,
New York, by its sponsor Philip Morris.It asks, "Whatare you looking at?"and
features five pieces of Primitive Art selected from one hundredin the show; all
five are clearly recognizable as sculpturalanthropomorphicfigures.
Iconicity is the hidden specter thatcontinues to hauntPrimitive Art: it is not
absolute, but it lurks at the edges of collecting and categorization. Much commentary on non-Western arts, for instance, calls them "stylized" or "abstract,"
termsthat make sense only if one imagines thatthe naturalor obvious way to depict the world is in a style of optical naturalism.This observation is as trueof anthropologists as it is of art historians and museum curators,with very few (but
enlightening) exceptions. I offer two illustrations.
Bill Holm, retiredcuratorof the BurkeMuseum in Seattle, for instance, has
written a useful book on how designs are made and applied by stencil to items
like blankets, totem poles, hats, bracelets, and so forth, in Northwest Coast
American arts. In a section called "Degree of Realism," he divides designs into
three types, depending on whetherthe animal partsremain of a piece, very little
distortedor separated("configurative"),or are distortedand split somewhat, but
still recognizable ("expansive"),or finally are "so distorted it that it is difficult
or impossible to identify the abstractedanimal or the exact symbolism of the
parts" ("distributive") (Holm 1965:13). Holm's categories may be useful for
some purposes, but even to raise "degrees of realism" as an issue suggests that
readers share an implicit notion that art is primarilymimetic. His categories, in
turn, are loosely based on Boas's classification in Primitive Art (1955[1927]),
which divided Northwest Coast art into "symbolic" (because it stood for or referred to something outside itself) and "decorative"(which he characterizedas
"meaningless,"because it did not apparentlyrefer to something outside itself).
Here is a second example. In the 1984 exhibition "Primitivism" in 20th
CenturyArt at the Museum of Modern Art (hereafter, MoMA) in New York,
Giacometti's Tall Figure (1949) was juxtaposed with an elongated figure from
Nyamwezi, the label claiming that both of them "rejected realism." The label
makes no sense as a historical statement:how could one of the pairreject realism
when its makers never tried to achieve realism in the first place? The only way
that sense can be made of it is if we recognize the implicit assumption, a very
deep one in Western art-thought, that art seeks to make optically naturalistic
copies of "reality."If some African artifactis really art, it also, ipso facto, seeks
to imitate reality. If it does not, it must be because the artistrejected his self-evident mission "rejectingrealism."
In short, the naturalisticprejudice-the idea that art (whether flat or in the
round) is made meaningful by resembling something in the world and that it
strives to do so in a way as optically realistic as possible, even if it does not always achieve it-is very deep. In the 19th century, at least a degree of optical
210 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
naturalism formed the explicit or implicit criterion by which a non-European
image or artifact was judged to be art at all and, if it was, its quality or type. In
the 20th, anthropomorphicand recognizable objects are chosen as artover those
that are not: a mask, with eyes and mouth, is more paradigmantically"primitive
art"than is a slit gong or a kava bowl, however ritually meaningful they might
have been and however smooth, elegant, and therefore "modem" their lines.
I think it possible that the domination of the mimetic theory of meaning
within the discipline of art history-that something means by representing
something outside itself and that its mode of reference is iconic, which in turn
constitutes the object as a mere representationor model of the world ratherthan
as partof the world-is due to the dominanceof Renaissance studies within the
Anglophone world, especially as formulatedby Panofsky (1955). Meaning, he
wrote in his well-known article on the subject, can be preiconic, iconographic,
and iconologic. Paintings' iconic contents, in turn, are illustrations of prior
texts. And yet, if an object's meaning is signified otherwise than through the
iconic function, the whole method of interpretation,taught to generations of art
history students, collapses. Thus one might explain the difficulty of conventional arthistory as a discipline in dealing with 20th-centuryWestern arts, preRenaissance arts, and non-Western arts generally, all of which may have iconic
content but very few of which imagine themselves to be primarilyabout mimesis.
In any case, the mad search for iconic meaning in Primitive Art was
broughthome to me in December 1984 when I took the docent tourof the Rockefeller Wing and the docent and I came upon a horizontally long object with a
beakof sorts.7 This, the docent said, was a "butterflymask."Their artis very sophisticated, she said, but it is entrenched in traditionalwisdom. This butterfly
mask is well carved and painted, and we thinkit was used in initiationrites in the
spring.Why, she asked rhetorically,is it in the shape of a butterfly?She said that
we do not know, but thinks that it might have been to welcome spring.
I objected that it has a beak; how do we know it is a butterfly?
That is not all there is to it, she continued: its intention was not to make
something look like a butterfly:their artis conceptual, it is about invisible concepts. For instance, she said, moving to a case with a carvedmale andfemale figure from Dogon, this is a primordialcouple (.. . and note the long, cylindrical
slender shapes characteristicof the style of the western Sudan). The man carries
a quiver, and the woman has a baby on her back. That shows that he is the progenitor, she the nurturer.Moreover, his hand is holding his penis and his other
armis aroundher. They had no writing, but by means of such statues they were
able to express invisible concepts like the cooperation between the sexes.
I wondered what spring was like in the Sudan,8and what sorts of concepts
were not invisible, but even that was way aheadof me. That first object did not
look like a butterflyto me; in fact, I was not sure it was a mask. It remindedme
of the old joke, "if I had some ham, I could have some ham and eggs, if I had
some eggs": if it is a butterfly, it is a splendid example of a butterfly mask, if it
is a mask. But then again, perhaps it is a bat, and then what would one make of
WHATBECAMEAUTHENTICPRIMITIVEART? 211
it? And why, I wonder, does it have a beak? Unless the beak really represents a
penis, in which case it is well on its way to being a visual representationof the
invisible concept of "the cooperation between the sexes." This mask (if it is a
mask) is a particularlybeautiful and well-executed carving of a butterfly with a
beak; conversely and alternatively, it is a singularly poor rendition of a bat.
Higher Realities
In a witty passage that addresses the question of what becomes Primitive
Art, ArthurDanto explicitly rejects the idea that formal qualities alone make an
object into art.To make this point he imagines two tribes, the Pot People and the
Basket People, who make identical pots and baskets. But Pot People invest pots
with a great deal of meaning, which Danto writes about with ingenious and
amusing detail. "Lying at the cross point of art, philosophy, and religion," he
concludes the passage, "the pots of the Pot People belong to Absolute Spirit.
Their baskets, tightly woven to insure sustained utility, are drabcomponents in
the Prose of the World"(Danto 1988:24). The opposite is trueof the Basket People, of course. In sum, "artifacts" consist of "objects whose meaning is exhausted in their utility.... They are what they are used for, but artworkshave
some higher role, putting us in touch with higher realities; they are defined
through their possession of meaning" (Danto 1988:31).
Happily for Danto's point, a very large proportion of the objects in the
Rockefeller Wing have "ceremonial"uses in their original contexts, such as ancestor poles from the Pacific, totem poles from the northwest coast of America,
and masks and reliquaryfigures from Africa. Objects such as these have "uses"
and "functions"in their own societies, but those functions are outside our experience of usefulness and can therefore be grafted onto the sacred-useless category of art with more ease than can objects like cooking pots or grain grinders.
Everyday functional items are for the most part left out. (Of course there is an
occasional exquisite ladle, reminiscent of a Brancusi in its radical simplicity.)
Here is a selection of labels from artifacts in the Rockefeller Wing:
The Asmatcelebrateddeathwith feasts and ritualsthatboth commemorated
the
deadandincitedthe living to avengethem.
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 ancestorcults. Large containers often with a horse's head
and tail are used to hold sacrificial meat duringannualceremonies commemorating
the Dogon myth of creation."
Nowhere is the complexity and variety of Kuba design more apparentthan 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 "intendedto shatter the
skulls thus not only causing death but insulting the sacred part of the body."
212 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
From the Solomon islands, "the finest examples of shell-work are certain ceremonial shields, a small number of which were made in a brief period in the 19th
century."
The terms"ceremony,""ritual,""rite,""initiation,""sacred,""sacrificial,"
"ancestor,"and "totemic"occur again and again in Rockefeller Wing labels; the
objects chosen for display are overwhelmingly "ceremonial"objects. If something apparentlyutilitarianis displayed, such as a bowl, it is almost inevitably
a "ceremonialbowl," as likely as not used by high-statuspeople. I was interested
to note that the museum labels and the catalogue of MoMA's 1984 "Primitivism" in 20th CenturyArt" show even used the completely discreditedterm"fetish." (Curiouslyenough, a very similar figure to the one in the Primitivismshow
labeled a "fetish"appearedin the show going on concurrentlyat the Centerfor
African Art;but there it was called an "oath-takingfigure.") Nowadays, I would
have thought,the termis confined to departmentstores, such as a display I came
upon in Gump's in San Francisco selling "Zuni Fetishes-In The Traditional
Fetish Style." Ritual objects, high status, and rarity all tend to imply each other
in the labels of High Primitive Art.
There is no reason to suppose that these labels are incorrector even really
misleading-although these days anthropologistsseldom use termslike totemic
ancestor cults, as though what totemic means and what ancestor cult means
were transparent,which they are not. My point, rather,is that these objects are
drawn overwhelmingly from the realm of the "sacred" as contrasted to the
"secular,"a Durkheimiandichotomy that, once more, has little currencyin modern anthropology.Then, too, the lack of culturalspecificity of the labels, the use
only of English-languageterms(ritual,ceremony, initiation, etc.) andthe failure
to explicate the purposes and sociology of these "ceremonies" (initiation into
what? by whom and for whom? ritualin orderto do what?) leave the casual visitor with the distinct impression that "PrimitiveMan" is obsessed with ritualor,
at least, that Primitive Art expresses higher realities.
Part of the reasoning that underlies the selection of ritual objects as art
ratherthan more mundaneitems, it seems probable, is the 18th-centurydistinction between mere craft and high art. Applied to the selection of non-Western
objects, the distinction between high art and utilitariancraft tends to mean that
obviously functional items (especially if they are undecorated)do not qualify as
art. It was gratifying to see the distinction between art and non-art spelled out
explicitly at the Field Museum in Chicago. An exhibit case near the entranceto
the ethnographic rooms I saw in 1986 (since removed) was divided into three
sections: "Art,"featuringa decoratedritual object; "Decorative Art,"featuring
a decoratedbowl; and (miserable thing) "Non-Art,"featuring a ratherstraightforward-lookingundecoratedstone ax. "Art"was described like this:
Art objects differ from society to society, but they tend to be concerned with
making visible the supernaturaland the intangible. In so doing, art may render
more manageable some of the terrors and uncertainties of life.
WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 213
The selection of ritual objects over utilitarianones as Primitive Art is undoubtedly multiply determined.For one thing, ritual use links an object to the
transcendent,a way that art in general (not just Primitive Art) is validated rhetorically. For another,art and craft were separatedfrom each other at the end of
the 18th century, and anything with an immediately obvious utilitarianuse runs
the risk of being categorized as mere "craft,"whereas objects used for ceremonial purposes from other traditions,by contrast, appearnonutilitarianto us and
are more likely to be regardedas transcendent,therefore making them into the
category "art."And finally, the talk about "higherrealities" shades off into the
talk that has been characterizedas "primitivism."
One of the most common ways we talk about Primitive Art is by talking
about the primitive, a word and concept that has different valences in different
eras. In her book Primitive Art in Civilized Places (1989), Sally Price asks,
"How do we talk about primitive art?"and, in a chapter she calls "The Night
Side of Man," states thatthe notion that "PrimitiveMan"fears the elements and
terrifying spirits is very deep in arttalk aboutPrimitive Art. I do not doubt it-in
fact, evidence to that effect crops up everywhere-but it is also worth noting
that art talk about "the primitive"is not monolithic. Many of the quotations in
Price's book are drawnfrom the writings of people whose sensibilities concerning "the primitive"were formed between the two world wars, when most of Africa and Oceania was still colonized and when the notion of Primitive Art was
still being formed and institutionalized in museum shows. This view of Primitives-that they fear the unknown, and throughtheir art they both express their
superstitions and exorcise their demons-has its origins, I believe, in 19th-century horror at the grotesque pagan rituals that were observed among the colonized. It is probably very basic to the invention of the non-Western artifact as
art; it was there at its inception, when Pablo Picasso was inspired not-he insisted (at least in this quote)-by these objects' formal characteristics but by
their magical power. He says:
They were againsteverything-againstunknownthreateningspirits.... I, too, I
amagainsteverything.I, too, believethateverythingis unknown,thateverything
is an enemy! ... women, children . .. the whole of it! I understood what the
Negroes used their sculptures for. ... All fetishes . . . were weapons. To help
people avoid comingunderthe influenceof spiritsagain, to help thembecome
independent.Spirits,theunconscious... theyareall the samething.I understood
why I was a painter.All alonein thatawfulmuseumwith the masks... thedusty
mannequins.Les Demoisellesd'Avignonmusthavebeenbornthatday,butnotat
all becauseof the forms;becauseit was my first exorcismpainting-yes absolutely! [Malraux1976:5]
The view that Primitive Man is obsessed with fear and irrationalsuperstition and that their arts express it is reflected in the following passages by Kenneth Clarkand by Thomas McEvilley, which Price quotes. Juxtaposingpictures
of the head of the Apollo Belvedere and something labeled merely "African
mask," Clark makes this comment in his book Civilisation:
214 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
An even more extreme example comes to mind, of an African mask that belonged
to Roger Fry. I remember when he bought it and hung it up, and we agreed that
it had all the qualities of a great work of art. I fancy that most people, nowadays,
would find it more moving than the head of the Apollo of the Belvedere. Yet for
four hundredyears after it was discovered, the Apollo was the most admiredpiece
of scupture in the world....
Whatever its merits as a work of art, I don't think there's any doubt that the
Apollo embodies a higher state of civilization than the mask. They both represent
spirits, messengers from another world-that is to say, from a world of our
imagining. To the Negro imagination it is a world of fear and darkness, ready to
inflict horrible punishment for the smallest infringement of a taboo. To the
Hellenistic imagination, it is a world of light and confidence, in which the gods
are like ourselves, only more beautiful, and descend to earthin order to teach men
reason and the laws of harmony. [Clark 1979:2, quoted in Price 1989]
Lest one imagine that this view of Primitive Art, and with it Primitive Man,
is completely outdated, it is worth reading McEvilley's 1984 critical review of
the 1984 MoMA exhibit "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art. In it McEvilley castigates Rubin and Varnadoe, the curators responsible for the show, for appropriating these artifacts as art rather than what they "really" are, religious artifacts;
he suggests that they should have been provided with ethnographic context that
reveals them as such. He tells us what he thinks Primitive Man's religion is in
this remarkable passage:
In their native contexts these objects were invested with feelings of awe and dread,
not of aesthetic ennoblement. They were seen usually in motion, at night, in closed
dark spaces, by flickering torchlight. Their viewers were under the influence of
ritual, communal identification feelings, and often alcohol or drugs; above all,
they were activated by the presence within or among the objects themselves of
the shaman, acting out of the usually terrifying power representedby the mask or
icon. What was at stake for the viewer was not aesthetic appreciation but loss of
self in identification with and support of the shamanic performance. [McEvilley
1984:59, quoted in Price 1989]
Nonetheless, it is my impression that this strand of primitivism is not the
most prevalent one in the United States in the 1990s, in which the voices promoting Primitive Art (and of course its descendants, ethnic arts and tribal arts of
various sorts) sound increasingly New Age. The more dominant primitivism in
popular culture in the late 20th century, it seems to me, is a much softer primitivism. Rather than imagining drug-besotted natives dancing around flickering
fires and terrified of the spirits, it imagines an ecologically conscious people living in harmony with nature and, sometimes, worshiping their version of the goddess. I call this version New Age primitivism. It is practiced by people who visit
Egyptian and Mesoamerican pyramids and Stonehenge in order to collect the
cosmic rays that gather there, and by those who conduct rituals in the kivas of
Pueblo Indians in the Southwest (much to the latter's annoyance), and so forth.
And, of course, many people who in other aspects of their lives are not particularly New Age are also deeply interested in the "primitive" and the "authentic"
and are interested in buying and collecting its tokens.
WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 215
It seems to me thatthese attitudes-the one thatviews PrimitiveMan as obsessed 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 primitivismbecause both make the
same moves thatEdward Said implied were characteristicof "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.
Formal Qualities, or Does It Look Modern?
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-historicaland art-museumcircles, one
of the most importantways of talking about, hence selecting, certain kinds of
objects over others to become Authentic Primitive Art was their "formalqualities." In practice this could not help but mean, more or less (but usually more),
how closely they approximatedthe formal qualities, the "look,"of high modernist art. The discourse of formal qualities claims these objects as valuable "aesthetically,"divorced from any of their uses or meanings in the societies thatproduced 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 paragraphto
this catalogue, James Johnson Sweeney asserts that, taking into account anything 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 tribalcharacteristicsof Negroartnorits strangenessthat
areinteresting.It is its plasticqualities.Picturesqueor exotic featuresas well as
historicalandethnographicconsiderationshave a tendencyto blindus to its true
worth.Thiswas realizedatonce by its earliestamateurs.Todaywiththeadvances
we have made duringthe last thirtyyears in our knowledgeof Africa, it has
becomean even graverdanger.Our approachmust be held conscientiouslyin
anotherdirection.It is the vitalityof the formsof Negroartthatshouldspeakto
us, the simplificationwithoutimpoverishment,the unnervingemphasison the
essential,the consistent,three-dimensionalorganizationof structuralplanes in
architectomicsequences,the uncompromising
truthto materialwitha seemingly
intuitiveadaptationof it, and the tensionachievedbetweenthe idea or emotion
to be expressedthroughrepresentation
andthe abstractprinciplesof scupture.
The artof NegroAfricais a sculptor'sart.As a sculpturaltraditionin the last
centuryit hasno rival.It is as sculpturewe shouldapproachit. [Sweeney1935:11]
A few years later, different authors emphasize the same theme. From the
catalogue for the exhibit Indian Art of the United States, MoMA, 1941:
216 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
In theory,it shouldbe possibleto arriveat a satisfactoryaestheticevaluationof
the artof any groupwithoutbeingmuchconcernedwith its culturalbackground.
A satisfactoryorganizationof lines, spaces,forms, shadesand colors shouldbe
self-evidentwhereverwe find it. [DouglasandD'Harnoncourt1941:11]
(They go on to explain that in practice, however, we are saved from many errors
by knowing something about the culture that produced the object. For a more
complete account of this exhibit, see Rushing 1992.)
An object's formal qualities (how closely it approaches a modernist aesthetic) persist as criteria that filter High Primitive Art from crafts, however
"authentic" the latter may be. Take, for instance, the two pieces of jewelry
shown in Figure 2-both of them chest ornaments,both made of gold, both from
Sumba, Indonesia. One is much more memorable as art than the other, which
looks simply like a gold chest ornament.See also the postcards in Figure 3 announcing exhibitions in one of San Francisco's "best"galleries of "artof Africa,
Oceania & the Americas." One of them construes the shield as a "canvas,"the
other concerns "the vertical" in "tribalcomposition."
A decoratedritual object that has become High Primitive Art has two relevant qualities: its participation in the sacred and its formal plastic qualities (to
use art-talk). And indeed non-Western objects entered the realm of Primitive
Art by two roads: by their formal aesthetic qualities, or by their expressiveness
of shamanistic exorcistic power. In practice, these two are often merged in the
same objects: it is no accident that the mask, reliquaryfigure, or totemic ancestor figure stand as paradigmaticexamples of the highest, most Authentic Primitive Art.
'Figure 2
Figure2
Two chest ornamentsfrom Sumba,Indonesia.Reprintedby permission
of
Musei
Barbier-Mueller, Geneva, Switzerland. Photograph by P. A. Ferrazzini.
TO
IN
WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 217
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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 surroundedit occurredin the most interesting andcontroversial
show of Primitive Art in the last several decades. It was the Museum of Modern
Art's exhibition "Primitivism"in 20th CenturyArt, 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 backwardsor
forwards. (That was not, of course, its stated intent.) It was laid out in three areas, which the visitor passed through sequentially. The first area showed what
218 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
I have called High Primitive Art-the pieces, or ones like them, that influenced
the cubists and surrealists.The second areawas a large room called "Affinities,"
where examples of Primitive Art were juxtaposed with examples of modem art;
the primitive andthe modem of each pairrevealed a presumablyremarkableand
strangeaffinity with its opposite. The last room was called "ModemPrimitives"
and consisted of the work of contemporaryWestern artists who are influenced
by the Primitive.
The exhibit's statedintent was to reveal the connections between Primitive
Art and the modernists,most especially Picasso. Enteringthe exhibit, the visitor
could read a plaque with a ratherdefensive message from William Rubin insisting thatthe exhibit was not, afterall, aboutPrimitive Artin its ethnographiccontext but about its importanceto modern art and modern artists.Rubin's qualification is, in my view, entirely legitimate, for there is no reason whatsoever to
insist that these objects must be understood within their culturalcontext if one
is interested in their meanings to cubists and surrealists. A social history of
primitivism in 20th-centuryart would have been fascinating. But that was not,
in fact, what the exhibit was about.
The first partof the show was about how the formal qualities of African artifacts made them appealing to cubists, while Oceanic artifactsappealed to surrealists. The voice-over of museum labels was insistently formalist: a Melanesian object explored "negative space" with great sophistication; another piece
revealed "frontalsymmetry."
The exhibit's middle section, "Affinities," paired various non-Westernartifacts with European20th-centuryobjects reminiscent of them in formal terms.
Depleted of historicity, anything that is similar visually to anything else is indeed visually similarto anythingelse. To thatthere can be no objection. The museum'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 thirdandfinal section of the show contained the workof contemporary
Western artists who are "primitivists."The room's introductoryplaque stated
that primitivism these days is less inspired by the formal qualities of actual objects, the way they look, as it is by Primitive Man's myth, ritual, and religionhence the absence of actual Primitive objects in this room. It featured contemporarysculpturesby Euro-Americanartists with bits of feathers and other items
that signify the Primitive. The visitor could infer that the Primitive now is a
spirit or attituderatherthan the formal qualities of certain objects.
Reading chronologically and historically, a visitor strolling through 20th
CenturyPrimitivism 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 artistsin 1984. But the same stroll was also a journey throughmythical 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
WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 219
to the mythical realm of the purely authentic(the last room), where the spirit of
the Primitive, rather than simply material objects, informs the creation of art.
Read as myth ratherthan history, the sequence narratedthe story of the search
for modern art's origins, taking us away from mere form and deeper into spirit.
If the spirit of classical Greece was the worthy ancestor of Art with a capital A
in the Renaissance, the spirit of Primitive Man, this exhibit in effect said, was
the worthy ancestor of modern art in the early 20th century.
Defining Authentic Primitive Art
High Primitive Art is not a set of specific objects but a prototype that defines the term Primitive Art. Just as some linguists claim that, when we say the
word bird, we have in mind a prototype of a bird (it resembles a robin), in the
same way, I believe, when we say Primitive Art our basic prototype is High
Primitive Art. Other objects sold or exhibited as Primitive Art gain their legitimacy or fail in it by their closeness or deviation from High Primitive Art.
If the category-prototype"bird"looks more or less like a robin, what does
the category-prototype"High Primitive Art"look like? The startingpoint from
which to understandthe prototype is the fact thatobjects of a certain sort gained
legitimacy as art as partof high modernism;they migrated into the category art
due to their place in the narrativeof art history.
The highest of High Primitive Art, then, the first-tier or basic core of objects that define the prototype, consists of objects that actually did influence, or
look as if they could have influenced, the likes of Picasso and Maurice de
Vlaminck: they are African; they were "collected" by the turn of this century;
they are in the shape of a mask or the ancestralfigure, to wit, an anthropomorphic form in a certain range of size; they are made of wood; they are ritual objects ratherthan utilitarian ones (the mask, not the grain-grinder;the ancestral
figure, not the basket).
Just as the prototype bird may look a lot like a robin but is not actually any
particular collection of individual robins, the prototype High Primitive Art
looks like the kind of thing that could have influenced Picasso and Vlaminck,
but need not actually have done so; it ought to have been collected by the turn
of the century, but it may not have been. In other words, the prototype is defined
by an idea and a "look"ratherthan by any particularmaterialexemplars that fit
it.
The slippage is necessary and inevitable. For one thing, the pieces that actually 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 Picasso might have been influenced by, but are "better"than the things he looked
at or owned, are fully prototypical.
Second, whereasmany exemplarsof the prototypemay have been collected
afterthe turnof the century, it is difficult to documentthese matters,and one can
be sure that plenty of objects that have been displayed in the most prestigious
220 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
museums were made later. Fortunately,the analyst seeking to define whatHigh
Primitive Art prototypeslook like could simply look into the "Affinities"room
in the 1984 MoMA show. It contained examples of pieces of PrimitiveArt bearing a supposedly uncannyresemblanceto moder art. (Since they were selected
because they bore an uncannyresemblance to modern art,the juxtapositionwas
more canny than not.) The "Affinities" room in effect showed museumgoers
how High Primitive Art ought to look.
If the prototypeof a bird looks like a robin but is not actually a robin, some
exemplars of birds that do not deviate greatly from it consist of bluejays and
swallows; they are immediately recognizable as birds by people who know the
prototype. Second-tier High Primitive Art, the bluejays and swallows of Primitive Art, is a deviation from the prototype immediately recognizable even by
conservative collectors and curatorsas exemplars of it. The Rockefeller Wing,
in my view, displays this second-tier High Primitive Art. Geographically, the
definition has expanded to New Guinea (Asmat, Sepik) and to Mesoamerica
(pre-Columbian);the expansion in materialsis to pottery and gold in the case of
Mesoamerica, and to figures adornedwith feathers and raffia in the case of New
Guinea and the rest of the Pacific.
Another kind of object is now coming onto the market, largely since the
1970s, which is often sold as "authenticethnic art."I am thinking of the large
numbers of beautiful, finely crafted objects and textiles that have been made
available to the market in the last couple of decades due to changes in "third
world" nation-state policy towardforeign investments and internalminorities,
and due to revolutions and the displaced peoples and objects that, in desperation, they sell. These sorts of events liberate objects from the contexts that produced them. At galleries and boutiques and from private dealers, one can now
see old silks and purses and caps and elaborately worked boxes from parts of
China, where individualEuro-Americanentrepreneur-sellerscan now go; ayurvedic medicine apparatusesand chests from Sri Lanka;textiles, temple decorations, and ancestralfigures in abundancefrom Indonesia; or huge quantitiesof
old silver jewelry from Morocco, Ethiopia, and other northerlyareas of Africa.
Often these objects are not labeled as primitive-it is out of fashion to say the
wordprimitive in any context, and besides, these objects are often from "high,"
literate, hierarchical societies. The word ethnic, rather, signifies that they are
non-Western.And these objects often are not promoted as art-some are utilitarian,some consist of jewelry, and some are so far from the aesthetics of modernism that they are hardly assimilable as Art with a capital A. Objects of this
sort are sometimes labeled crafts, sometimes collectibles, but very often they
are called arts, which seems to have a different signification from the singular
word art. (The semiotic burdenborne by Primitive Art and "ethnic arts"is very
different.) Sometimes the signifying feature is that they were "handmade,"
"used,"and "traditional."But they are sold as "authentic,"a termthatis used by
one large emporium of "tribal, ethnic, and folk arts" to mean that they were
made and used "pre-1940s." One does not know, of course, when they were
made or used, but they may have come onto the marketfairly recently. I consider
WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 221
these sorts of "authenticethnic arts"to be a kind of third-tier"AuthenticPrimitive Art," perhaps the ducks and chickens-this analogy is getting a little
stretched-to the prototype.
The kinds of objects that are made for the market by ethnic minorities
within NorthAmerica, or by fourth-worldpeoples within third-worldcountries,
many of which became independentat midcentury,are currentlysold as as contemporaryethnic arts, authenticIndianjewelry, genuine Mayan folk art, and so
forth. They stand to the prototype Authentic Primitive Art perhaps as emus and
cassowaries do to the prototype bird. Objects of this sort used to be denigrated
as degenerate"touristart"but now are taking their place as legitimate forms of
arts, crafts, and decorations, and are moving into the category of contemporary
art, with named artists. (See Figure 4.)
It is worth mentioning, finally and briefly, the vast marketin kitsch, reproductions, and spinoffs of Authentic Primitive Art, although I have run out of
birds with which to compare them. These, too, could no doubt be hierarchized;
1 IFUL
BEAU
INVESTMENTS.
The beautyand power of Eskimoartis
unmistakable.Now,the investmentpotentialis
also-beautiful.The September14,1981issue of The
offersthese bits of wisdom,writtenby
MoneyLetter
RochelleRymanof SothebyParkeBernet,about
investingin InuitArt:
.. we'reat the beginningof a burgeoningmarket,
even thoughtherehas been an unprecedented
growthin thedemandfor thiskind of art during
last ~fifteen years-~"
the lastfifteenyears.n
-~~~~~~~~the
"Priceshave increasedby an averageof 250%(with
highsof up to 7,500%),but Inuit art is seriously
undervaluedwhencomparedto theprimitiveart
of othercultures.
Pricesfor the bestUnuitprintshavebeen
astounding.Thisyear, Lucy's"LargeBear"(1961)
was sold at auction to a Californiacollectorfor
$8,000, double its low pre-auctionestimate.Also,
Kenojuak's"EnchantedOwl"(1960) soldfor a
record-breaking$14,500. Boththeseprintswould
have soldfor a few hundreddollarsin the 1960s."
"Canadian Unuitart of all kinds is now being
boughtand sold in Germany,Italy,Japan,
Sweden,GreatBritain,France,Holland and
throughoutthe UnitedStates.Thisvibrant
internationalmarketshouldensure a continued,
increasingdemand.Also,many majorEuropean^
and Americanmuseumshave begun to collect
Inuit art.
"Currentpricesstill do not reflecttheart'strue
valuefor severalreasons.Firstof all, it is
b
becomingevidentthatInuit worksare byfar the
mostsignificantprimitiveartproduced in North
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222 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
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WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 223
perhaps reproductions put out by museums would rate higher than home decorations that refer only loosely to to a generalized "primitive." Consider the text
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All these objects, their markets, their dealers, and their collectors gain legitimacy and comprehensibility by the fact that they are anchored by the prototype Authentic Primitive Art. (As the brochure in Figure 5b puts it, "Primitive
art, once fancied only by artists and archaeologists, has recently gained considerable appeal. People are realizing that objects like these can look as sophisticated as ones in sterling silver.") High Primitive Art stands to the rest of the market in primitive art more or less as Renaissance painting stands to the rest of the
art market. It invented the category. It defines the genre. It anchors the market.
Notes
1. Jacques Maquet makes basically the same distinction and acknowledges the
same source, but he calls these categories "artby destination"and "artby metamorphosis" (1979[1971], 1986). I am renamingthe 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 producedobjects that have some iconic content-that is, signs that
signify or refer to other things by resembling them, in local sensibilities. The resemblance 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 AustralianAboriginal 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 of
the Museum of ModernArt in April 1936, which explained:
Many objects ... had been refused free entrancebecause it was impossible to prove thatcertain
sculptures were not more than second replicas, or because the artist's signature could not be
produced,or because no date of manufacturecould be found, or because ancient bells, drums,
spoons, necklaces, fans, stools and headrests were considered by the examiners to be objects
224 CULTURALANTHROPOLOGY
of utilityandnotworksof art.As a resulttheMuseumwasforcedto give bond,thepremium
on whichamountedto $700. [quotedin Lynes1973:139]
7. The following conversation was recorded in fieldnotes, December 14, 1984.
8. Incidentally, I took Susan Vogel's recorded tour of the African part of the
Rockefeller Wing after finishing the docent tour. It seems that there is a rainy season in
western Sudan and that scads of little yellow butterflies appear right before it; as a
consequence, according to the tape, butterflies are associated with rain, fertility, and
crops. That appears to be the derivation of the docent's suggestion that the "butterfly
mask" may be to "welcome spring."
References Cited
Abrams,M. H.
1985 Art-as-Such: The Sociology of Modern Aesthetics. Bulletin of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences 38(6):8-33.
Boas, Franz
1955[1927] Primitive Art. New York: Dover Publications.
Brettell,RichardR., and Steven Starling
1986 The Art of the Edge: European Frames, 1300-1900. Exhibition catalogue.
Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago.
Cassirer,Ernest
1955 The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Ralph Manheim, trans.New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Clark,Kenneth
1970 Civilisation. New York: Harper& Row.
Clifford,James
1988 The Predicamentof Culture:Twentieth-CenturyEthnography,Literature,and
Art. Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press.
Danto, ArthurC.
1988 Artifact and Art. In ART/Artifact. Pp. 18-32. New York: Center for African
Art, and Preston Verlag.
Douglas, FredericH., and Rene D'Hamoncourt
1941 Indian Art of the United States. New York: Museum of Moder Art.
Fabian,Johannes
1983 Time and the Other:How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
Forge, Anthony
1973 Style and Meaning in Sepik Art. In Primitive Art and Society. Anthony Forge,
ed. Pp. 169-192. London: Oxford University Press.
Goodman,Nelson
1976 The Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis:
Hacket Publishing.
Holm, Bill
1965 Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form. Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
Kristeller,Paul Oskar
1965 The Moder System of the Arts. In Renaissance Thought, Vol. 2. Pp. 165-227.
New York: Harper& Row.
WHATBECAMEAUTHENTICPRIMITIVEART? 225
Lynes, Russell
1973 Good Old Modern:An IntimatePortraitof Museum of ModernArt. New York:
Atheneum.
Malraux,Andre
1949 Museum without Walls. StuartGilbert, trans.Bollingen Series, 24. New York:
Pantheon Books.
1976 Picasso's Mask. June and Jacques Guicharaud, trans. New York: Holt,
Rinehartand Winston.
Maquet,Jacques
1979[1971] Introduction to Aesthetic Anthropology. 2nd edition. Malibu, CA:
Undena Publications.
1986 The Aesthetic Experience: An Anthropologist Looks at the Visual Arts. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
McEvilley, Thomas
1984 "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: 'Primitivism' in 20th-Century Art" at the
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Morphy,Howard
1991 Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Munn,Nancy
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Newton, Douglas
1978 Masterpieces of Primitive Art. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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Parezo,Nancy
1983 Navajo Sandpainting:From Religious Act to Commercial Art. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Price, Sally
1989 Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Rubin,William
1984 Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction. In "Primitivism" in 20th Century
Art. Kirk Varedoe and William Rubin, eds. Pp. 1-71. New York: Museum of
Moder Art; Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.
Rushing,JacksonW.
1992 Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern: Ren6 d'Haroncourt
and "IndianArt of the United States." In The Early Years of Native American Art
History. Janet C. Berlo, ed. Pp. 191-236. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Said, Edward
1979 Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.
Summers,David
1987 The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sutton,Peter
1988 Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. New York: George Braziller
Publishers in association with The Asia Society Galleries.
226 CULTURALANTHROPOLOGY
Sweeney, JamesJohnson
1935 African Negro Art. New York: Museum of Moder Art.
Torgovnick,Marianna
1990 Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Vogel, Susan,and FrancineN'Diaye
1985 African Masterpieces from the Musee de l'Homme. New York: Center for
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Williams,Nancy
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