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

Editor’s introduction
<strong>The</strong> concept <strong>of</strong> the ‘primitive’ in European thought begins with an interest in discovering
the origins <strong>of</strong> human society; this leads to proposals <strong>of</strong> evolutionary models <strong>of</strong> social
development which position the west as the most advanced instance. To conform to this
model, distant societies whose pasts are as long as our own are imagined to be unevolved,
static, natural (organic), and simple. By making the assumption that the cultures <strong>of</strong>
peoples designated ‘primitive’, ‘marginal’, or ‘underdeveloped’ are virtually changeless,
it becomes possible to see them as typical <strong>of</strong> what has been lost or superseded by ‘us’ in
our supposedly more rapid evolution at the centre. Societies geographically distant from
Europe (located at the centre <strong>of</strong> its own myth) come to be seen as temporally distant, that
is, typical <strong>of</strong> earlier stages in human development. In this way, the far-away is
transformed into the long-ago.
For modern western artists, the evolutionary model that assumes the further back one
goes in time the simpler things become (and the simpler, the more pr<strong>of</strong>oundly unified)
and the primitivist fantasy that the far-away is the same as the long-ago, have been major
investments. ‘One’s position’, as Guy Brett emphasizes, ‘is always a product <strong>of</strong> the
historical process.’ <strong>The</strong> chapters in this section <strong>of</strong> <strong>The</strong> <strong>Myth</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Primitivism</strong> reveal an
additional theme visible within the myth once its intricate historical links with racism,
imperialism, evolutionism, and nostalgia are excavated, and that is the disquieting
relationship between primitivism as an ideological construct and a mythic modernism,
progressive, universal, and homogeneous.
Jill Lloyd examines in depth the ‘ethnographic’ still lifes <strong>of</strong> Emil Nolde, unmasking a
series <strong>of</strong> contradictions, discrepancies, and gaps which these paintings depict, and
because <strong>of</strong> which they have been marginalized within the discourse <strong>of</strong> modernism
presented as a ‘unitary, revolutionary phenomenon’ instead <strong>of</strong> the ‘forward- and
backward-looking’ tendency it in fact was. This mythic modernism has a symbiotic
relationship with primitivism, and dismantles itself as soon as the myth <strong>of</strong> primitivism is
dismantled. ‘Modernism’ can then be seen as an ideological construct, like ‘the primitive’
which modernism situates oppositionally.
Guy Brett points to something <strong>of</strong> this sort when he reveals that ‘having identified so
strongly with the formation <strong>of</strong> modern art in this century, and the ongoing explorations <strong>of</strong>
the avantgarde’, he has also ‘identified with the myth <strong>of</strong> primitivism’. Yet there is value
in ‘some <strong>of</strong> those expressions <strong>of</strong> early twentieth-century art in which the primitive and
the modern are most closely entwined’ and ‘one feels the sharpest sense <strong>of</strong> the internal
contradictions <strong>of</strong> western society…. But for this to become clear one has to recall the
period before ‘modernism’ became part <strong>of</strong> <strong>of</strong>ficial western culture and power, an
instrument <strong>of</strong> state policy—when it stood against the consensus. And also, we need to
investigate a notion <strong>of</strong> the primitivist impulse broader than that suggested by
the…fixation on Picasso’s discovery <strong>of</strong> African masks.’
In the modern period, the arts <strong>of</strong> Europe’s ‘others’ enlarged western concepts <strong>of</strong> what
art is, the many forms it can assume, and the diverse roles it can play. But however much