Hiller - The Myth of Primitivism. Perspectives on Art - Esoteric Online

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<strong>The</strong> resurgence <strong>of</strong> the night-mind 119 In his sculpture his assertion that the souvenirs and trophies <strong>of</strong> other cultures function only as art, that they discard their former roles when displayed in a western art or anthropological museum, is central to his approach. <strong>The</strong> religious, magical, and totemic function <strong>of</strong> idols, gods, and other sacred beings is rendered null and void, he maintains, irrespective <strong>of</strong> whether they are the products <strong>of</strong> our forefathers in classical antiquity or <strong>of</strong> our relatives in other societies. 19 For Baselitz, the elongated form and roughly hewn surfaces <strong>of</strong> his sculptures betray their origin in single tree-trunks, which he has rapidly hacked with saws and adzes, leaving the traces <strong>of</strong> the tools apparent on the surface. To Baselitz, this crude handling, resulting in only a rudimentary indication <strong>of</strong> facial features which he sometimes further elaborates in paint, represents a spontaneous raw mode <strong>of</strong> working far removed from that <strong>of</strong> the tribal craftsman whom he regards as a highly gifted and sophisticated artist. What is primitivist in his sculptures stems from a method <strong>of</strong> approach which is in fact more akin to a rough whittling in a vernacular idiom than to the skills employed on tribal artefacts: any affinities that occur on a formal level with non-western carvings are no closer nor more meaningful than the parallels that might be drawn with Romanesque jamb figures. In either case it derives from the nature <strong>of</strong> the given material; any additional connection is specious. Baselitz thus construes primitivism in terms <strong>of</strong> the techniques displayed in three-dimensional image-making. It is to him an inherently sculptural question, not one relating to subject or extra-aesthetic function. If Fetting’s savages or Hödicke’s Goddess Kali reveal no more than jejune fantasizing by the artist, Malcolm Morley locates these figures in the realm in which they now have most resonance: the nursery. Whether inspired by the droll if kitsch splendour <strong>of</strong> those souvenirs which provide the prototypes for his gaudy inhabitants <strong>of</strong> the rococo desert <strong>of</strong> Arizonac, or by the opulent charm <strong>of</strong> the frontier spirit which is transformed into Christmas Tree—<strong>The</strong> Lonely Ranger Lost in the Jungle <strong>of</strong> Erotic Desires, he elicits a sense <strong>of</strong> delight that is rooted in the childish, not the childlike. Where once the savage and the child were linked on account <strong>of</strong> their purported innocence and simplicity, neither can be so conceived now. Child psychology has made the childish far more pertinent and significant than the
<strong>The</strong> myth <strong>of</strong> primitivism 120 7.2 Malcolm Morley, Arizonac (1981), 203×266.5 cm (Saatchi Collection, London). childlike, which was once the recipient <strong>of</strong> so much sophisticated acclaim and connoisseurship. If the childish has its ludicrous as well as its charming facets, so too do adult fantasies. Cradle <strong>of</strong> Civilisation with American Woman superimposes a Trojan horse and a fractured archaic household god on to the kind <strong>of</strong> idyllic beach scene that bedecks travel brochures and posters. Suspended on the picture surface, wrenched out <strong>of</strong> the space in which the remainder <strong>of</strong> the world resides, these images become no more than figments <strong>of</strong> the imagination, the exotic spice that adds ‘culture’ to what might otherwise be for the holiday-maker a purely hedonistic experience. <strong>The</strong> deliberative nature <strong>of</strong> Morley’s technique, its detachment, and the constant disruption <strong>of</strong> the seamlessness <strong>of</strong> his visions by a humour that ranges from the wry to the caustic and the whimsical invest his version <strong>of</strong> primitivism with great richness. He exposes the trite, sham, and casual ethos <strong>of</strong> much <strong>of</strong> this vogue by embracing and utilizing it in precisely those terms, as souvenirs or frivolous playthings. Kirk Varnedoe has made the suggestion that the present counterpart <strong>of</strong> the early twentieth-century avatars <strong>of</strong> primitivism is the graffiti artist. 20 If graffiti ever played a disruptive anarchic role within the fine arts it was in the work <strong>of</strong> Dubuffet in the 1940s. By contrast, Haring’s decorative doodles, to which that writer appears to be alluding, are the antics <strong>of</strong> a fully socialized artist, one who moves comfortably from the surfaces <strong>of</strong> his canvases to those <strong>of</strong> the gallery walls to those <strong>of</strong> imitation Greek urns and T-shirts. <strong>The</strong>re is nothing abrasive, disquieting, or transgressive in these squiggles spewing forth over every available surface. Ironically, it is Jean-Michel Basquiat, no longer a graffiti artist in
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PART I Contents List of</st
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Illustrations Display case, Berlin
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10.2 A blend of sa
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Display case, Berlin Ethnographical
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little pictures inserted me neatly
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10 Christian Metz (Fall 1985) ‘Ph
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assumptions of the
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PART I
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Outsiders or insiders 19 Th
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Outsiders or insiders 21 content it
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Outsiders or insiders 23 honoured i
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Outsiders or insiders 25 If the con
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Outsiders or insiders 27 of
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Outsiders or insiders 29 free-range
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Editor’s introduction The
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10 Art and meaning SIGNE HOWELL In
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Art and meaning 181 which the sculp
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Art and meaning 183 overall social
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Art and meaning 185 woven into syst
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Art and meaning 187 anthropologists
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Art and meaning 189 and visited Mus
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Art and meaning 191 ultimate ‘oth
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Art and meaning 193 10.5 Jah Hut me
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Art and meaning 195 The</st
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Art and meaning 197 without models
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11 Dark continents explored by wome
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PART IV
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14 Unsettled accounts of</s
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15 Locality fails IMANTS TILLERS Al
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16 Aboriginal representation and ki
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17 Born from sharp rocks Edgar Heap
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Notes on contributors 294 P.S.122.
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Index aboriginality, as Australian
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Brecht, Bertholdt 53, 56 Breton, An
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Index 300 Eurocentrism 14-15, 21, 8
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Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 99, 144, 240
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School Museum Committee 204 mutilat
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Index 306 ‘soft
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Tower monument 126 technology, and
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