The Death of Authentic Primitive Art

by Shelly Errington

• ISBN13: 9780520210950
• ISBN10: 0520210956
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2023-09-01
• Publisher: University of California Press

Summary

In this lucid, witty, and forceful book, Shelly Errington argues that Primitive Art was invented as a new type of art object at the beginning of the twentieth century but that now, at the century's end, it has died a double but contradictory death. Authenticity and primitivism, both attacked by cultural critics, have died as concepts. At the same time, the penetration of nation-states, the tourist industry, and transnational corporations into regions that formerly produced these artifacts has severely reduced supplies of "primitive art," bringing about a second "death." Errington argues that the construction of the primitive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and the kinds of objects chosen to exemplify it) must be understood as a product of discourses of progress--from the nineteenth-century European narrative of technological progress, to the twentieth-century narrative of modernism, to the late- twentieth-century narrative of the triumph of the free market. In Part One she charts a provocative argument ranging through the worlds of museums, art theorists, mail-order catalogs, boutiques, tourism, and world events, tracing a loosely historical account of the transformations of meanings of primitive art in this century. In Part Two she explores an eclectic collection of public sites in Mexico and Indonesia--a national museum of anthropology, a cultural theme park, an airport, and a ninth-century Buddhist monument (newly refurbished)--to show how the idea of the primitive can be used in the interests of promoting nationalism and economic development. Errington's dissection of discourses about progress and primitivism in the contemporary world is both a lively introduction to anthropological studies of art institutions and a dramatic new contribution to the growing field of cultural studies.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi	(4)
Preface	xv	(10)
A Note on Punctuation and the Primitive	xxv
INTRODUCTION TWO CENTURIES OF PROGRESS	1	(46)
PART ONE THE DEATH OF AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART	47	(112)
1. Three Ways to Tell the History of (Primitive) Art	49	(21)
2. What Became Authentic Primitive Art?	70	(32)
3. The Universality of Art as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy	102	(16)
4. The Death of Authentic Primitive Art	118	(19)
5. Authenticity, Primitivism, and Art Revisited	137	(22)
PART TWO AND OTHER TALES OF PROGRESS: NATIONALISM, MODERNIZATION, DEVELOPMENT	159	(108)
6. Nationalizing the Pre-Columbian Past in Mexico and the United States	161	(27)
7. The Cosmic Theme Park of the Javanese	188	(40)
8. Making Progress on Borobudur	228	(39)
Afterword	267	(6)
Notes	273	(12)
References	285	(16)
Index	301	(8)
Illustration Credits	309