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

<strong>The</strong> myth <strong>of</strong> primitivism 256
sending ‘messages to New York’ <strong>of</strong> the mistaken identity imposed on his people by the
designation ‘Cheyenne’ (a white corruption <strong>of</strong> a Lakota word), and <strong>of</strong> the identity given
by his people to the white man, ‘Vehoe’: an identity based not on racial typologies but on
the perceived similarity <strong>of</strong> his behaviour to Spider in tribal myth. In Our Language, as
many <strong>of</strong> Heap <strong>of</strong> Birds’s projects, was a collaboration, emphasizing a bond between the
self and its community that is antithetical to western aesthetics’ privileging <strong>of</strong> individual
creativity.
COYOTE BOXES WITH HIS SHADOW
Contemporary Native American art does not give us access to the innermost secrets <strong>of</strong> its
people; cultural difference, like Trickster, is elusive and not appropriable except in the
most superficial way, as evidenced by the primitivist trends in European art. Rather,
contemporary work tends to reveal more about white attitudes. Through the insight <strong>of</strong>
those who have passed through the white looking-glass, we may perceive the movements
by which our rhetoric betrays us all, and works to efface the biographical self, turning it
into an institutionalized other. Cherokee poet and artist Jimmie Durham, in referring to
the Noble Savage stereotype, perhaps echoes the thoughts <strong>of</strong> those who feel alienated
from the source <strong>of</strong> their own representations: ‘One <strong>of</strong> the most terrible aspects <strong>of</strong> our
situation today is that none <strong>of</strong> us feel that we are authentic. We do not feel that we are
real Indians…. For the most part we feel guilty, and try to measure up to the white man’s
definition <strong>of</strong> ourselves.’ 22
A laconic commentary on the stereotype <strong>of</strong> the Indian is presented in the photographs
<strong>of</strong> Richard Ray (Whitman). <strong>The</strong> artist confronts the turn-<strong>of</strong>-the-century photography <strong>of</strong>
Edward S. Curtis, whose aestheticized subjects consolidated the myth <strong>of</strong> the Noble
Savage. In accord with prevailing assumptions that the Indian was a ‘vanishing race’,
Curtis set about documenting the authentic Indian uncontaminated by white contact. <strong>The</strong>
absence <strong>of</strong> such a pure Indian signifier nevertheless compelled him, like other
contemporary photographers seduced by their fantasies <strong>of</strong> the exotic other, 23 to synthesize
his fantasy by