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

From primitivism to ethnic arts 141
One is amazed by the extent <strong>of</strong> the fascination with and admiration <strong>of</strong> the west for
other cultures, and the amount <strong>of</strong> effort it puts into documenting, studying,
contextualizing, and philosophizing world cultures, with an ambivalence that has been its
constant hallmark. It first builds up a complex ideological framework to look at others
and their cultures, and, by fixing them in past historical periods, rationalizes its own
position as the final link in the chain <strong>of</strong> human evolution. Hegel’s ideas provide an
extremely important framework in this respect, especially those relating to the
development <strong>of</strong> art history. I quote Partha Mitter here.
For Hegel, every nation had a preordained place in his ‘ladder’ <strong>of</strong>
historical progress and reflected a unique ‘national ‘spirit’. Hegel also
argued that each particular facet <strong>of</strong> nation or culture was interlinked with
the rest, for the national ‘spirit’ permeated all spheres <strong>of</strong> life. <strong>The</strong>
conclusion was that if we were to judge a particular type or tradition <strong>of</strong> art
we must first <strong>of</strong> all see what particular national spirit it represented and to
what particular point in history that nation in turn belonged….
Paradoxically, his dynamic principle <strong>of</strong> history, the dialectics <strong>of</strong> change,
only helped to establish a fundamentally static image <strong>of</strong> Indian art, its
immemorial immutability, its unchanging irrationality, and its poetic
fantasy, all predetermined by the peculiar Indian national spirit. It needs to
be repeated here that Hegel’s characterisation <strong>of</strong> the Indian ‘spirit’ was
not based on empirical evidence but determined essentially by India’s
temporal position in Hegelian metaphysics…. It was thus condemned to
remain always outside history, static, immobile, and fixed for all
eternity. 14
While earlier philosophers <strong>of</strong> the idea <strong>of</strong> progress thought in terms <strong>of</strong> cultures and
civilization arranged in linear order, rather than in terms <strong>of</strong> races, in the nineteenth
century racist hypotheses—partly derived from Darwin’s theory <strong>of</strong> evolution—became
increasingly common as explanations <strong>of</strong> the vivid differences <strong>of</strong> cultures on earth.
Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality <strong>of</strong> Human Races (1853–55) ‘is the source <strong>of</strong> racist
conceptions <strong>of</strong> human progress which, during the late nineteenth century, spread
throughout Western civilisation’, 15 but the idea <strong>of</strong> ‘fixity’ <strong>of</strong> certain peoples or races with
their specific cultural achievements fixed in the past, is evident in most western
scholarship, such as in Hegel’s Philosophy <strong>of</strong> History and History <strong>of</strong> Art, which have
been highly influential in the development <strong>of</strong> modern art historical scholarship. It is, in
fact, my contention that there is no essential or basic difference between liberal
scholarship, such as represented by Hegel, and explicitly racialist theories. From
Winckelmann to Creuser to Hegel to Ruskin to Fergusson, and in our present day Lord
Clark and Pr<strong>of</strong>essor Gombrich…it is the same story. It is the same grand narrative, in
which the detail and emphasis change from time to time but every chapter ends on the
same note: the west’s inherent superiority over all other peoples and cultures.
<strong>The</strong> ideas <strong>of</strong> ‘racial romantics’, such as Gustave Le Bon, for whom a style <strong>of</strong> art was
determined from the start by the unique spirit <strong>of</strong> a race, and whose special talents could
not be imitated by people belonging to a different race without exposing themselves to
grave dangers, may not be very helpful in understanding institutional racism in western