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

Dark continents explored by women 201
the assumption that the further one goes back—historically,
psychologically or aesthetically—the simpler things become; and that
because they are simpler they are more pr<strong>of</strong>ound, more important and
more valuable. 3
Almost fifty years later Kirk Varnedoe wrote:
this new work aspired to overcome a perceived alienation between
modern art and society at large…. <strong>The</strong> new artists and their supporters
spoke <strong>of</strong> future art becoming, as Primitive art had been, more integrally
engaged with broader systems <strong>of</strong> nature, magic, ritual and social
organisation. 4
Typically socio-political issues and their relation to representation do not form part <strong>of</strong> art
historical accounts. When they do, as in Art in America 5 and October, 6 it is readily
assumed that the ‘naming’ <strong>of</strong> imperialism and its cultural manifestations will somehow
reinscribe the disavowed ‘other’ in the map <strong>of</strong> western knowledge. What these arguments
do not consider is the different epistemological status, or rather ‘the absence <strong>of</strong> a text that
can “answer one back” after the planned epistemological violence <strong>of</strong> the imperialist
project’. 7 Frantz Fanon too points out the fallacy underlying the attempted incorporation
<strong>of</strong> the colonial subject as a speaking subject into an economy <strong>of</strong> western dialectics. 8 Its
positioning as ‘antithetical’ proposed by Sartre and others presupposes a consciousness <strong>of</strong>
self which remains denied and prohibited in the dominant (Hegelian) tradition <strong>of</strong> western
thought.
Here again we move on slippery terrain. To take Spivak literally would mean to
concede that the colonized subject can meet the ‘epistemological violence’ with nothing
but silence. 9 Obviously this would only be the case if one assumed that the episteme
stayed in place untroubled (which neither Spivak nor Fanon do). If deconstruction
concerns itself with the ‘troubling’, the displacement and undercutting <strong>of</strong> an imaginary
stability <strong>of</strong> relation—between subjects and between subject and object—it has to consider
the fixity set out in the discourses <strong>of</strong> primitivism. And what makes any straightforward
notion <strong>of</strong> critique so difficult in this respect is the necessity for a double inscription <strong>of</strong>
both a position <strong>of</strong> authority from which the utterance is made (to affirm a position from
which the ‘other’ can speak) while attempting to shift the parameters <strong>of</strong> a discourse
demanding such positioning. From colonial discourse analysis to feminist writing, to
critical art practices, strategies oscillating between essentialism(s) and different kinds <strong>of</strong>
deconstructive work testify to the complexity <strong>of</strong> these issues. In the present context our
interest lies with instances where, however momentarily, a crisis is induced in accepted
patterns <strong>of</strong> differentiation and identification.
<strong>The</strong> work <strong>of</strong> Astrid Klein 10 presents a particular enquiry into the possibilities and
limitations <strong>of</strong> articulating such a gap, a moment <strong>of</strong> splitting and uncertainty between what
is ‘seen’ and how it is (comes to be) ‘known’. <strong>The</strong> installation Endzeitgefühle
(‘Apocalyptic Feelings’) confronts the spectator with a huge photograph (390×550 cm)
which by its mere size would seem to impose a powerful message. However, any attempt
to establish the stable equivalence <strong>of</strong> a sign is immediately frustrated. Black silhouettes <strong>of</strong>
dogs bound across the scene, but it is not known where they come from nor where they