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

<strong>The</strong> myth <strong>of</strong> primitivism 124
to mimicry, repetition and duplication, to transvestitism and X-rays are employed in an
effort to transform the individual into the type, or to dissolve identity—and thus
uniqueness—into a multiple persona, a genus, skeleton, effigy, or icon. Samaras’s
photographs, for example, are not a consistent affirmation <strong>of</strong> the self but a means to
subverting and disrupting identity, their bravado, opulence and narcissism
notwithstanding. Similarly, his boxes (reliquaries), chairs (thrones), and other
transformed implements use the forms, appearance, and rituals associated with fetishes
and other sacred, votive, and cult objects, together with the taboos, eroticism, violence
and ecstatic or exorcistic moods that accompany them in a novel synthesis <strong>of</strong> the tribal,
Byzantine, kitsch, and folkloric: it is at once preposterous, disturbing, and highly
effective. Bizarre mockeries <strong>of</strong> their authentic prototypes, blasphemous, irreverent,
scatological, grotesque, frivolous, or frightening, they transcend any neat aesthetic
boundaries. In the same way that superstitions and irrational, unfounded fears are <strong>of</strong>ten
impervious to rational explication, so these objects by overtly acknowledging their
fictional, artificial character go beyond it, and thereby regain something <strong>of</strong> the aura that
once attended the originals, an aura which has been dissipated or divorced by
contemporary western culture. Samaras employs his chameleon-like multiple persona
with disarming sophistry as a tool to act out and appease those fears, impulses, and
psychological needs that primitivism, along with science fiction and the childlike, were
constructed to give expression to, and to contain. In his wish to create ‘an art that would
be <strong>of</strong> wonder and horror’, that violates as it fascinates, Samaras sports with the received
notion <strong>of</strong> primitivism. His disguises, feints, and fetishes form part <strong>of</strong> a strategy aimed at
revitalizing the underlying ideas, without, however, attempting to integrate them into any
expanded rational or coherent overview.
If primitivism lies at the core <strong>of</strong> Samaras’s art, it is but one strand in the more catholic
vision <strong>of</strong> several other artists, notably Susan <strong>Hiller</strong>, Nancy Spero, and Lee Jaffe, each <strong>of</strong>
whom