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Primitivism Revisited: After the End of an Idea

African Arts, Spring, 2008 by Natasha Becker

December 16, 2006-January 27, 2007 Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

In 1984 William Rubin, art historian, curator, and director of the Museum of Modern Art's department of painting and sculpture, organized "Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern" in New York. The exhibition traced the formal relationships between Western art and African, Pre-Columbian, Native American, and Oceanic art. The show was highly controversial and received solid criticism from the art community, in particular African art historians, for applying a notion of "primitivism" to non-Western art--evident in the description of African objects as "primitive" and "tribal" while Western art objects were described as "modern".

More Articles of Interest: "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art. (Museum of Modern Art, New York); From form to platform: the politics of representation and the representation...; An Adieu to Cultural Purity; Identity exhibitions: from Magiciens de la terre to Documenta 11; Identity roller coaster

This event was important in stimulating critical thinking, research, and teaching in the United States on the problematic history of Western artistic engagement with the traditional arts of Africa, Oceania, and Native America and the function of concepts of "primitivism" as a tool in the work of twentieth century Western artists such as Picasso and Gaugin. Because this encounter took place at the height of Western colonialism, a number of racial, political, and representational issues came into play. The criticism generated by the Rubin show was incisive and since then art institutions such as MoMA have steered clear of the issue.

"Primitivism Revisited: After the End of an Idea" at Sean Kelly Gallery reexamined Rubin's historical exhibition in an attempt to directly address his now-controversial views. The exhibition combined critical thinking about African art history generated since the 1980s with contemporary exhibition practices to take on the question of the place of traditional African art today.

The exhibition was curated by eighteen graduate students of Susan Vogel, professor of African art at Columbia University and founding director of the Museum for African Art in New York. Over the Fall 2006 semester the students participated in a course on African art at Columbia, which was also called "Primitivism Revisited." In collaboration with Chelsea art dealer Sean Kelly, they reviewed the history of Rubin's show, conceptualized themes, selected works, planned exhibition layouts, installed the final show, and produced a catalogue. Professor Vogel facilitated discussions and debates and, along with Sean Kelly, sourced art work, but the outcome of the exhibition ultimately belongs to the student curators.

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Together they created an exhibition showing classical African art from Mali, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia, among others, juxtaposed with a range of contemporary art by artists including Robert Mapplethorpe, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Marina Abramovic, Carolee Schneeman, Los Carpinteros, Alfredo Jaar, Elizabeth Peyton, Ann Hamilton, Yinka Shonibare, Gavin Turk, and Thomas Ruff.

On the whole, the exhibition was presented very well: conceptually and technically effectively installed. The student curators worked in pairs to create several thematic exhibitions, spread throughout the space of the gallery: "Primitivism: Then and Now," "Constructing Culture,' "A Different Affinity;' "Feitico, Fetisso, Fetish" "Limits of Looking" "Imagining Another" and "Manufacturing Authenticity." Various traditional and contemporary art objects, mounted on walls, pedestals, in glass cases, and on the floor, were assembled within these themes to suggest new pairings of contemporary and "primitive" art. Susan Vogel, in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, states that "If current contemporary art has any resemblance to Africa's classical art (and most does not) it is in artistic practice--not in form--and the parallels may be quite accidental."

"Primitivism: Then and Now," curated by Risham Majeed and Margot Norton, was an exploration into the history of the notion of primitivism in the West. A timeline mapped out some of the major events within this history, such as the founding of the British Museum in 1753, Picasso's visit to the Ethnographic Museum in Trocadero in 1907, the 1914 exhibition "Statuary in Wood by African Savages: The Root of Modern Art" at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery in New York, William Rubin's 1984 "Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern" at MoMA, and so on. Beneath the time line, African art objects such as an Ethiopian cutting board and Songye, Dan, and Pende style masks were displayed. The inclusion of Luba style sculpture and Kota style reliquaries, for example, showed the eminence of and preference for such work in the West because their geometry and abstract styles corresponded to modernist preoccupations at that time. Contemporary work, such as David Doris's color photographs of quotidian African objects--a tray of eggs with red chilies positioned on top of the eggs to protect them from thieving spirits--connected a contemporary aesthetics of the everyday with the Yoruba assemblage ritual aale. This is the first exhibition space the viewer encountered on entering the gallery and it provided a powerful historical contextualization for the rest of the show.

Primitivism Revisited: After the End of an Idea

African Arts, Spring, 2008 by Natasha Becker

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