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COLONIALISM TO PRIMITIVSM 29/10/18

Nancy Spero, Rebirth of Venus (1982)


- Radical conceptional values
- Relies upon re-appropriation, victim hood, civilisation

What is Primitivism
- Arose in Western Europe 18th Century
- Post-Colonial Theory
- Colonial provide westernisation with many cultures set upon unequal powers
Primitive: Savage, Dominate Colonial subject
- Justified its apparatus of power because colonial subject seems to require
civilisation, doesn’t have a culture to justify its own, need civilisation imposed on
them forcefully

Binary construct: 2 terms wedded to each other


- Each give the opposite to other
- Without each it other, doesn’t have meaning

Adolf von Menzel, The Zulus, 1885


- Justify colonialism
Human zoo at Paris International Exhibition 1889
- Showing imperial might of countries concerned
- Diversity of the empire that lorded over these subjects
- Presented in a savage veinlet

Domesticated / Undomesticated
- Anonymous artists

Picasso – African masks to influence their own style


- More rational purer mind set
- Expressionism / Surrealism
Hiroshige The Plum Tree in Kameido, 1857
- Obeys rules and customs (foreign to westerners)
- Rely upon pre-conceived ideas

Primitivism and Modernism


Primordial / Timeless ness
Style movement in art
- Act of appropriation
- Assuming that non-western cultures are more authentic
- More radical view of the world
Primitivism and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907
Makers were unknown, not celebrated individuals
- incorporates their style into their work
- Status is enhanced through appropriating stylistic motifs
- Relationship between subject and object
Complicated value systems / power structures

Gaugin and the Exotic


How Primitivism has functioned in Modern / Western Art
- Unpolluted by civilisation (pure culture, apart from the influence of the West)
- Types of Economic system
- Occupy a purer zone (knows no evil, construct of civilisation)
Such understanding is based upon problematic (fantasy) interpretation
Inverse Racism (construct something positive about this)
- New World = Garden of Eden (existence of pure state, separate from the concerns
from social/ economic situations)
Indigenous people not knowing the slander/ vice of the world
Colonial and Colonizer

Tahiti
- Corruption of these Culture
- Social availability (sexual as well) of women, finding models easily
Undressed (fantasy that didn’t match up the reality that Gauguin saw was false)
Projection of primitive imagination/ fantasies
- Rejection of European values
- Alternative to degenerate western civilisation
- Constant desire to produce work that was un-tainted by the world (not corrupted)
Showcasing to audiences

Non-Western Artefacts
Emile Nolde, 1912
- Sacred / daily uses (imbed in a culture that uses them)
Primitive people do not have moralistic systems (nudity)

Maurice Vlaminck, André Derain, 1906 – Increase trade with African countries
Visual innovation with spiritual rebellion
From Anti-Colonialism to Post- Colonialism

Mona Hatoum, The Negotiating Table


Deluded of status, rank, property and role
- Body of a victim theatrically performed
- Presented as passive object
- Unequal power between passive / not passive, colonizer / colonized
- Vulnerable state
- Hierarchy of knowledge (subordinate other)

Primitivism and colonial power relations


Andre Derain, Bathers, 1907
- Power relations / gender and class
- Implicitly critiquing assumptions
- Provocative / evocative
- Racism interwoven into Art critiques
African physiognomy (Bulky, carved out of wood and transposed onto canvases itself)
Contrast with Venuses of the Renaissance
Between relationship of civilisation / uncivilization, nature / culture, reject / transform

Changing attitudes towards the ‘primitive’


First few decades of 20th Century – Treated as aesthetic discourse
- WW1: Initiated the shift
Trauma and bloodshed, civilisation destroying western culture
- Intensification, of the appropriation that took before WW1
Dadaism: Non-western art forms as a wrecking ball
- Challenging civilised norms
Marcel Janco, Cabaret Voltaire, 1916

Non-Western art and the canon of world art


Topographical illusions
- Challenging cultural influences in different regions of the world
- Aesthetic theologies

After WW2 – De-colonization (1980s)


- Granted independence
- Period of critical reflection
-
Post Colonialism
- (listen back to recording)
Yinka Shonibare
- Reframe the continuity of black identity in british culture

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