Since the inception of modernist art, Africa has been a source of inspiration for artists attempting to deviate from traditional forms of classical Western art. However, the relationship between Western modernist artists and African art is fraught with issues that stem from the colonialist era, and continue to inform the art historical dialogue of African art in the West in the post-modern age. From the two sources of Kwame Appiah’s scholarly article “Is the Post- in Post-modernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” and the insightful documentary titled “African Art”, this paper will attempt to apply theories of modernist primitivism to post-colonialism in the post-modern art world, citing specific examples of art, and also address overarching questions of ideology and cultural superiority that stem from these sources and the trajectory of Western appropriation of African art.
To understand the deeply ingrained presence of primitivism in modern art and its subsequent continuation as a complex issue in post-modernist art of the post-colonial era, it is necessary to understand the origins of African influence on Western modernism. The notion of a Primitivist view of Africa in Western thought stems from the colonial era, when European nations dominated African and Eastern cultures politically, and ideologically categorized these cultures as inferior. To quote scholars Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten on the term, “The relation is one of contrast, of binary opposition to the ‘civilized’…Within the context of modernism, ‘primitivism’ is an act on the part of artists and writers seeking to celebrate features of the art and culture of peoples deemed ‘primitive’ and to appropriate their supposed simplicity and authenticity to the project of transforming Western art.”[1] This ideology of the West as a dominant and superior culture, manifested itself in several ways, especially in the advent of modernist painting. Because the cultures of Africa were considered “primitive,” the arts of those cultures acted as a fantasy in the Western imagination. Pablo Picasso’s reaction to these “curios” he encountered in the early 20th century illuminated the Orientalist relationship between the West and Africa during this time. In his imagination, African art was made from a savage culture, and this gave it an inherent truth or simplicity. Picasso even went so far as to claim the African masks he saw had magical powers in their detachment from “civilized” Western culture, and believed that in its origin from a “less developed” culture, African art could help the Western artist to access some deeper and truer part of his spirit. It is this idea of African art as “exotica” from a civilization developmentally behind the West and the view of these art objects as mysterious and dark “fetishes” that one can see the superior position the Western modernist artist took as they essentialized African culture.
“Demoiselles D’Avignon” shows Picasso’s interpretation of the “primitive” female, showing the racial “other” as prostitutes, brazenly taunting the viewer with their overt sexuality. The females are rendered rather grotesquely, and the manner in which Picasso renders them as “savage” is via the utilization of the African mask, which perpetuates the stereotypical view of the women of other cultures as, “impure, degenerate, and corrupting”.[2] Much more could be said on the anxieties about “primitive” cultures that are expressed in this painting, but it is more productive to this argument to investigate the ways in which Picasso’s modernist “primitivism” has persisted and progressed in the development of a Western understanding (or misunderstanding) of African art in the post-modern age, and how that ideology is also beginning to be questioned and transformed. The essentializing view of modernist “primitivism” has persisted in post-modern age of art exhibitions, but in slightly different ways. While African art is still misunderstood and essentialized, it is now done so with less overt racism, and more through the persisting opinion of Western art critics and curators of the superiority of the artistic traditions of the West, and their inability to situate Western culture as the “other” and truly understand and represent the cultural context from which an African art object came. The film “African Art” investigates these issues in the context of the 1985 MOMA exhibition titled “ ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,” a show which became a critical point for discourse regarding the position of African art in the Western art world. Though the show attempted to equalize the two artistic traditions, the implicit assumption of Western superiority was still very much present, mainly in the decontextualization of the African art objects. The example of a carved antelope headdress from a small Mali village is cited as emblematic of the problems with the “Affinity” show. The object was placed in the traditional Western setting, behind glass and softly lit, but this context could not be further from the intention of the carvers from this village, where the headdress has a specific and defined social function and rich cultural heritage. To include it in this show, in this way, is not only presenting the African art as irrelevant aside from its ability to inspire the superior Western artist, but also misrepresents and ignores the meaning of it from the original context. The presentation of this piece speaks to the common occurrence in Western thought to disregard art from other cultures except for their aesthetic nature, which is to miss the significance of that art in its original country of origin, and to essentialize their cultural product to whatever meaning the Westerner can find visually, not anthropologically.
Kwame Anthony Appiah takes an exhibition from a few years later, in 1987, which was titled “Perspectives: Angles on African Art”, and held at the Center for African Art in New York as a starting point for his argument regarding the enduring presence of a Western superiority towards African artists and art objects. Appiah uses one specific piece from this show to prove his theory that post-colonialism does not negate colonialist ideologies in the same manner post-modernism negated tenets of modernist art that artists found obsolescent in the contemporary world. A small wooden sculpture is described in the exhibition catalog as “neo-traditional,” in its depiction of Western clothing and technology, but has nothing to do with post-modernism as it is understood by the rest of the art world. Appiah negates Max Weber’s theory that humanity has progressed to an era of “rational modernism” and instead acknowledges the contradictions inherent in this representation. He argues that “neo-traditional” simply means post-colonial art, created by the racial ‘other’ for Western consumption, and that this sculpture in many ways perpetuates colonialist thought.
There are many lingering questions about the state of post-colonial ideology in the West’s understanding of African art. Some African cultures chosen for exhibition in these shows do not even have a word for “art” as the West knows it, which is illuminating of the Western tendency to use the “other” as a way to define our own culture. Any changes in cultural perception of African art, and the attempt to rectify the Western history of colonialism is still using the subject as a way to affirm a progression to Weber’s “rational modernism,” and is not about African art itself.[3] In reality, there are too many variables to define another culture outside of their original context, and even today the understanding of African art has fallen into the dualism of either ethnocentric misunderstanding or exoticising primitivism. Unless the art world can place the West as the “other” and truly begin to understand the cultural context from which these art objects came, we will fall into the trap of perpetuating colonial ideology, even in the post-modern era.
[1] Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighton, “Primitive,” from Critical Terms for Art History, Nelson and Schiff, Eds., Chicago (1996): 170.
[2] Anna C. Chave, “New Encounters with Les Demoiselles D’Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of Cubism,” Art Bulletin (December 1994): 606.
[3] Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Post-modernism the Post- in Postcolonial?,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter, 1991): 343-344.
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