Paradigm Shifts in the Western View of Exotic Arts
Esther Pasztory
What exactly do we mean when we say "the West"? We generally refer to a geographic
area the core of which is Europe and North America after the sixteenth century.
Sometimes we add Australia and less frequently Latin America. (Latin America is seen
to be some kind of a mixture of the West and the Nonwest.) Usually, we include the
Classical Antiquity of Greece and Rome, but not the European Middle Ages, or ancient
Egypt and Mesopotamia. The epicenter of the "West" is actually even smaller, being
limited to the civilization of western Europe and some of the U.S.
Non-geographically, the "West" is also the concept of a scientific and technological
culture that has come to colonize the "Nonwest"—politically, economically, militarily
and ideologically—over the last four centuries. The West has had a dominating world
discourse for so long because its scientific and technological approach revolutionized the
relationship of humans to nature and to one another. This is what we call "modernity".
The concept of modernity is confused in the West because aspects of industrial culture
are indissolubly blended with western ideological values. Nonwesterners easily take
apart what they see as a more or less neutral modernity (cars and cell phones) from
western beliefs. To put it another way, modernity happened in the world in western
clothes—it could have happened in another guise, perhaps East Asian, and that would
have been another story. (1)
Modernity sowed the seeds of globalization, and globalization has resulted in the
emergence of the Nonwest away from the actual and ideological domination of the West.
For example, today, China's relation to Africa is as, or more important than, it's relation
to the West; and the world watches more Indian Bollywood films than American
Hollywood ones. Nonwesterners are relating to each other without the mediation of the
West.
This essay is about some of the shifting western attitudes towards nonwestern arts and
cultures especially in the last century. Until fairly recently, the West looked on the
Nonwest as exotic—that is, as something not quite normal from its point of view,
alternating between admiration for or denigration of it. Despite the patronizing tone of
much western commentary, the West appears to have needed its idea of the Nonwest in
order to define its own identity as always in opposition to it. As a result of this,
westerners have not wanted to obliterate nonwestern culture; on the contrary, many
idealistic westerners have tried to encourage native arts and cultures to remain native
(i.e. exotic), while simultaneously modernizing them to fit into the present world. They
saw nonwesterners as potentially split between "authentic" native and modern aspects,
which is ironic because they have been unable to see themselves as split between their
modernity and westernness. I will discuss this western process of "nativization" in the
second half of this essay.
Modernization has progressed so far in the arts that many of the works of
nonwesterners are indistinguishable from the works of western artists, thus wiping out
the difference between west and Nonwest entirely in this realm. The West/ Nonwest
dichotomy is, therefore, in the process of ceasing to exist in the twenty-first century. Yet
the story of the paradigm shifts of how this came about is worth telling.
Exoticism has been a part of the West at least since Herodotus' Histories in which, to
the Greeks, the Egyptians were a mysterious, ancient civilization who did everything in
reverse, the Scythians bloody barbarians, the Persians contemporary powers to emulate
and beware of, and the Chinese perhaps only an indirect myth. (2) The West, in the form
of Classical Antiquity, was then at the very edge of a great world Oriental system and its
reaction to others was both to criticize and to admire. To them, the Orient was the
equivalent of the Nonwest. The word "Orientalism," as Said and others use it, is a
western denigrating attitude towards the Orient as a place of tyranny, irrationality,
laziness, effeminacy and unchanging-ness. (3) Paradoxically these negative traits can
also be seen as positive in reaction to the West's own sense of its mechanical rationality,
lack of spirituality, creativity and a human dimension. Both types of Orientalism were
current in ancient Greece. Primitivism, a denigrating and/or admiring attitude to less
developed small-scale societies, was particularly evident in ancient Rome whose military
was conquering "barbarian" tribes throughout Europe and the Near East. Tacitus in
particular praised the barbarian Germans for their bravery, loyalty, and honesty despite
the poverty of their culture and in contrast to the soft and corrupt Romans. (4) These
ambivalent attitudes to foreign and exotic peoples from Classical Antiquity were passed
on in later European culture with the admiration of these texts, especially from the
Renaissance of Early Modern times to the present.
It is not my aim to recite the long history of exoticism in the West, but merely to point
out its existence prior to the eighteenth century when modern attitudes emerged.
Generally, the earlier centuries up to the sixteenth and seventeenth saw other peoples
through the lens of religion, dividing the world into Christians and heathens. There was
little interest in the heathens' art in as much as the concept of "art" had not even been
formulated in the West. Strange objects had curiosity value and along with fossils, bones
and shells they found their way into curiosity cabinets as individual oddities. The gods of
other peoples were represented in engravings as Christian devils. In some seventeenth
century prints of the Aztec patron god Huitzilopochtli, the image resembles neither
Aztec gods nor Aztec style but the devil. (5) In the religious view of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, all nonwestern images were evil heathen idols and devils.
A major paradigm shift occurred in the eighteenth century that can be described as
"schizophrenic": the simultaneous view that nonwesterners were both greater than and
lesser than westerners, i.e., "noble savages." This was the result of the de-emphasis of
religion, in particular Christianity, in philosophy and scientific thought, and (one might
say) the concurrent mystification and deification of art as a universal phenomenon. The
word "aesthetics" was coined by Baumgarten in 1750 to describe this newly
conceptualized realm of human activity. (6) Creativity in the arts had become the
mysterious work of "geniuses," and the modern concept of art, as something material
but transcendental, was born.
Most cultures do not have a word for this western concept of "art" and often someone
from our culture invented one for others. For example, the Chinese and Japanese words
for art were created by the American Ernest Fenollosa, who admired everything Oriental
in the 1870's in Japan. (7) Along with other eighteenth century views of human
activities, the arts and aesthetics were seen as universal. The devilish idols of the past
century had become the works of art and a steady stream of travelers went East and
West to search them out to illustrate and publicize in books.
New explorations were undertaken in the eighteenth century. However, this time the
paradigm was not the bloody conquest of Mexico and Peru, as it had been in the
sixteenth century, but the sexual welcome of South Sea Island women. The newly found
natives were friendly, and these explorations raised questions about the nature of man
in the state of nature, that is, in contrast to the prohibitions and inhibitions
characteristic of civilized western life. As early as the sixteenth century Montaigne
audaciously presented the New World cannibal as superior to the Frenchman—
following, of course, the time honored device of Tacitus. (8) Primitivism and
Orientalism began full force in the eighteenth century. Nonwesterners were still
considered to be bloody, lazy and promiscuous, but these qualities were excused and
admired on the grounds of greater naturalness and honesty in their life than in life in
the West. The eighteenth century was the time of the Marquis de Sade, whose violence
was accepted as a part of human nature. (9) Overall, the eighteenth century was positive
towards others while the nineteenth was somewhat more negative. The twentieth has
been remarkably positive. The history of Primitivism and Orientalism is one of
ambivalence over or undervaluation, depending on what the West looks for as a
corrective in itself. Only rarely, if ever, is the nonwestern other seen for what it is.
The center of both Primitivism and Orientalism was and is Paris. It is here that
Bougainville brought the news of the friendly Tahitian women (10); that Montesqieu
wrote the Lettres Persanes (11); that Picasso discovered African art; and the first exhibit
of nonwestern contemporary art, Les Magiciens de la Terre, was held in 1989. (12) A
secondary center is London, with the exoticism of Captain Cook (13) and Sir Richard
Burton (14); the influential art of Henry Moore; and Third Text, the journal of
contemporary nonwestern art established in 1987. (15) Much of the rest of Europe
followed these developments with some time lags.
The effect of these primitivist tendencies on the arts of the West was very pronounced.
We generally consider neoclassical art as cloyingly western, but around 1800 those
simple, imaginary Greek forms had the power of the primitive. Like Picasso's African
masks, the directness of Classic art annihilated the baroque and rococo styles of the
previous century. The starkness of David's Oath of the Horatii (1784) was a revolution
in its time. By 1900, the Neoclassic lost its force to shock and destroy and stronger
measures were needed to reveal the primitive inside the civilized western soul.
The creation of Modern art with the inspiration of primitive art was a complex process
that abandoned the western tradition of mimetic art for a new conceptualism. This shift
was clever and necessary in that, by 1900, mimetic representation was taken over by
photography and film media. The conceptual language of Modern art came closer to the
rest of the world whose art had always been less mimetic. Modernism was thus
potentially global from its inception.
Fig. 1: Indian woman with Franz
Boas and George Hunt holding up a blanket
The overvaluation of the nonwestern in modernism helped to maintain the necessary
fiction that these cultures have continued to exist in more-or-less unchanged form from
their primitive Edens to the present time. Gauguin's glorious painted Tahiti (c.1890 to
1900) was a far cry from the real poor and decrepit Tahiti that he actually visited, being
that it was neither fully native any more nor quite western. People in the West wanted to
know how the natives had lived and not how they live today. Anthropologists like Franz
Boas used blankets to cut out all signs of modern life in their nostalgic ethnographic
photos. (Fig.1) (16) Modernization came to different parts of the world at different times
and in different ways, but the consistent aim of many westerners was to prolong the
traditional as long as possible and to record it in its last gasp. (So long, of course, as
headhunting and human sacrifice were given up.) The western search was for a pure and
uncontaminated exotic culture—uncontaminated by us—that could be voyeuristically
experienced. It is what the Native American artist Jimmie Durham calls the search for
"virginity." (17) The art collected, exhibited, and studied by us had to be similarly
authentically traditional. During much of the twentieth century, many westerners, often
art teachers, sought to revive the declining native arts in commercial workshops. While
ostensibly for the benefit of the natives, this obsession with maintaining their
authenticity was a desire on the part of westerners to maintain an "other" outside of
themselves. Psychologically it can be said that this was to justify the existence of a
hidden nonwestern "id" in rebellion against a western "ego", a split within the western
self. Originally primarily an attitude of the elite intelligentsia, these ideas have filtered
down via Hollywood films to a larger public. Nevertheless, modernist art (along with its
primitivism) remained an elite taste in the West, and actual nonwestern art had an even
smaller audience.
This agenda came to its florescence in the theoretical attitude of what is now called
Poststructuralism. In their most influential work, Anti-Oedipus (1972), Deleuze and
Guattari idealized a new humanity that would live in a semi-schizophrenic mental state
not governed by a (western, oedipal) ego but instead consisting of equal yet partial
psychic elements supposedly characteristic of the non-rational world view of
nonwestern peoples. (18) They compared the hierarchic structure of the ego psychology
of western culture to fascism, and they imagined that the nonwesterner lived a more
open and complete psychological life. Roland Barthes idealized the traditional Japanese
ethos and aesthetic in the nineteen sixties in similarly glowing terms as if it still existed
unsullied in his time, despite the thousands of Japanese cars rolling out of modern
factories. (19) He admired the Japanese for being non-mimetic in their representations
and for revealing the artifice behind representation in such cases as bunraku puppetry
(1970).
This Poststructuralist primitivism came out of Paris, the deep wellspring of exoticism in
Europe. Its immediate antecedent was structuralism, associated with Claude LévyStrauss and derived from his 1940s trip to the Amazon and the encounter with
threatened, vanishing cultures. The original French title of this account, Tristes
Tropiques (1955)—translated as A World on the Wane (1961) in the first English
edition—expresses all this guilt and nostalgia towards the nonwestern other. (20) Such a
Primitivism was a part of the cultural revolutions of 1968 both in the US and Europe.
The various interlinked utopian issues of free sex, "back to the land," and altered states
of consciousness were all revolts against capitalist western cultures. Much
Poststructuralist thinking, such as Deleuze and Guattari, were inspired by the events of
'68.
How did this Orientalism-Primitivism come to another shift ? It was not by the West
and least of all by the U.S. It was demolished brick by brick by nonwesterners. While the
West was imagining and emulating nonwesterners, they were critically evaluating the
West and adapting facets of that life that they found useful. A wonderful 1945 painting
by Omar Onsi from Lebanon shows a clutch of black-clad Lebanese women staring at a
western painting of female nudes in an exhibition. (21) All this time the West has been
watched and continues to be watched as eagerly as the West once examined others. This
process is of course as old as contact. The Plains Indians adapted the horse and weapons
of the white man in the eighteenth century. The anthropologist Giancarlo Scoditti told
me sadly that the Kitawa Islanders where he did his fieldwork gave up their pottery for
plastic containers. When he remonstrated with them in the name of beauty and
tradition to keep the pottery going, they argued that plastic is more durable,
unbreakable and in all ways superior to their pottery. Was he trying to keep a superior
material away from them? It is we who live in a world of myth while nonwesterners are
often remarkably pragmatic.
Fig. 2: Untitled [Man Leaning on Radio],
Seydou Keita
These "primitives" didn't just adapt the horse and plastic, they also adapted the camera
for their own purposes as a superior way to make images. The best known native
photographer is Seydou Keita of Mali, who got a camera as a gift in 1935 and used it for
snapshots while he made a living as a carpenter (Fig. 2). (22) He became a professional
photographer in 1964, at about the time when, he said, his people began to lose their
ancestral culture. By that he meant that people began to wear western clothes and
wanted to look as modern as the figures in western magazines. He had props like
bicycles and radios in his studio as well as costumes and accessories his clients could
choose for their photos. Bamako inhabitants were photographed by him with sewing
machines, radios or sometimes simple details like gloves or handkerchiefs. Of no
interest to the West at the time, Seydou Keita's photographs were suddenly appreciated
in the 1980s in Paris, and in 1991, he had a major exhibition. So much acculturation
would have been considered a sign of inauthenticity in the past and seen as a regrettable
development.
But between 1950 and 1980, the "authentic" nonwestern native disappeared all over the
world. Even the most remote Amazon villagers had access to camcorders and made
applications to fund their own survival from granting agencies. (23) With such an inyour-face change, western taste starting in Paris and London made a major turn-around
and began accepting these arts and peoples as the new "noble savages". The
Metropolitan Museum now has nearly half a dozen Seydou Keita photos in its collection.
This acceptance was neither immediate nor simple. The major question was how to
classify these images—were they modern or native? An instance of this dilemma
concerned the large Australian aborigine canvases that look like modern abstractions
and would look at home in The Museum of Modern Art but when offered to museums by
donors the museums did not know where to put them they seemed to be "contemporary
art" but those curators did not want them. The curators of native art did not want them
either because they were not traditional. These objects were in a classificatory limbo for
a decade or more and their fate was uncertain. It was a fascinating cultural question as
to which side the decision would fall. There was no one centralized decision—each
institution made its own. The returns are now in: These are considered to be regional
ethnic arts, not works of mainstream modern art. The aboriginal acrylics go with the
bullroarer and the didjeridoo, not Picasso and Pollock. This protects western
modernism as unique and it places the nonwestern squarely back in Orientalist and
Primitivist territory. Contemporary artists of ethnic origin complain in vain. Here is
Rashid Araeen, a Pakistani artist living in London and one of the founders of the
journal Third Text:
"Somehow I began to feel that the context or history of modernism was not available to
me, as I was often reminded by other people of the relationship of my work to my own
Islamic tradition...Now I am being told both by the right and the left, that I belong to the
"Ethnic Minority" community and that my artistic responsibility lies within this
categorization...you can no longer define...classify or categorize me. I am no longer your
bloody objects in the British Museum. I am here right in front of you in the flesh and
blood of a modern artist. If you want to talk, let us talk. BUT NO MORE OF YOUR
PRIMITIVIST RUBBISH." (24)
Or, one could listen to the sarcasm of the Native American conceptual artist Jimmie
Durham. "Virginity and primitivity are the same value to you guys...So you have a neverending search for true virgin territory..."Untouched Wilderness"...[and] "Breaking New
Ground." (25)
Sorry, folks, the decision is, you are ethnic. This decision allows the westerner to have an
alien other and not to have to live in a relatively homogeneous world in which all
difference has been eradicated. In this contemporary nonwestern art, there is one great
plus to the westerner—one does not have to feel guilty. It was always assumed that
western influence would result in cultureless prostitutes and alcoholics out of the noble
savage because, in fact, it often did. But looking at Seydou Keita photos, the westerner is
exonerated: there are these healthy, beautifully dressed and intelligent people who are
actually enjoying western culture while they likewise seem to take pride in their native
roots. Those women in the patterned garments seem to express an African aesthetic in
modern form. How exciting.
Contemporary art outside the West was first accepted in Europe, particularly Paris, in
the form of major exhibitions in the 1980s. This was also the time when Third
Text (1987), a journal devoted to contemporary Third World art, was founded by the
Pakistani Rashid Araeen and the Nigerian Olu Oguibe, both living in London. One
obvious reason for this was that these were the locations where members of the former
colonies gravitated and where postcolonial theory became important. One could say that
Paris was the visual center while London was the intellectual locus of this trend. The
appreciation of contemporary nonwestern art was important in that it reformulated the
romantic loss notion of the Nonwest into a romantic gain. Plus ça change...
The U.S. has been slow to take up contemporary nonwestern art as a positive
development. For example, in the early 1990s there was a major African art exhibit in
London that consisted of a traditional, "classical" part and a contemporary part. The
"classical" part came to the Guggenheim Museum, the contemporary did not come at all.
Various people close to the exhibit said that it wasn't of "high enough quality." The fact
remains that except for unusual circumstances, such as Susan Vogel's Africa
Exploresexhibit of 1988 (26) or the Australian aboriginal acrylics at Asia House the
same year (27), the U.S. public has had little exposure to contemporary nonwestern art.
The U.S. has resisted the nonwestern contemporary in the museum and academy
because it destroys the illusion that pristine cultures unaffected by globalization still
exist. We need to visit another culture to rest from ours, and these contemporary artists
are in effect saying that there is no such place. In so far as globalization has been
accepted as a good or at least inevitable process, nonwestern contemporary art has also
been accepted as proof of the resilience and creativity of the nonwestern world. The new
ethos is that we all now inhabit the same world.
The West's ambivalent relationship to the Nonwest is especially evident in the area of
"art." As mentioned earlier, most cultures, including the ancient Greeks, have not had a
word for art and aesthetics, which are concepts from eighteenth-century European
philosophy. In most areas this is being rectified by westerners. The concept of art is as
much an aspect of globalization as fast food franchises and it began quite some time ago.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Ernest Fenollosa invented terms for art in both
Chinese and Japanese that have now become standard usage. Fenollosa went to Japan
after the Meiji restoration, at which time everything western was taught in the schools of
art as something modern. He advocated a return to tradition and was made curator of
the Imperial Museum. (28) Despite his love of the traditional, he urged that modern
traditional art (an oxymoron) should also simultaneously satisfy contemporary taste.
Fenollosa is the prototype of the westerner who determines what is "art" in a
nonwestern context, who is nostalgically promoting tradition while also promoting
western taste.
Fenollosa was not unique. It was my privilege to meet James Houston, the Canadian
artist working in the 1960s who created a contemporary art movement among the
Eskimo, now called Inuit. (29) This movement and many others like it were done in
compensation of the destruction of the natives' economy as an alternative way of making
a living. These new art traditions became so integral to society that they came to
substitute old activities such as hunting. Inuit men competed in carving soapstone
figures as they had once competed in hunting seals. The city-dwelling westerners who
bought their carvings wanted traditional themes such as polar bears and seals. The Inuit
were therefore representing in art a life they were no longer living. James Houston and
other idealist/commercial advisers determined the style of the works. In 1948/49 he
made drawings for the Inuit as models for the sculptures. He exhibited the sculptures in
Montreal, creating an audience and market. Some years later he introduced
printmaking. The Inuit had made nothing like them traditionally. Although there were
small ivory figures, the soapstone carvings were entirely new. Houston went on
developing the style by selecting what he liked, which was a combination of childlike
awkwardness with a stylization reminiscent of Henry Moore. This is one of the places
where the primitive inspiration of Modern Art and the spread of modernist aesthetics
into primitive art came full circle. Henry Moore is not mentioned accidentally—he
defined Houston's Inuit aesthetics.
Fig. 3: The Enchanted Owl,
Kenojuak
Among the Inuit, printmaking became the province of women, a gender division
presumably appropriate to the primitive. The successfully selected works were religious
or quasi mythological, as can be seen on theEnchanted Owl and Perils of the Sea
Travelers in Houston's 1960 publication titled Eskimo Prints. (Fig. 3) (The owl was a
bestseller and I remember seeing it in many New York homes.) The Inuit carvers and
printmakers were professionally playing up a naivete in the name of tradition. As Janet
Berlo's article indicates, many artists were not satisfied with these parameters and made
images of modern life unlikely to sell then. (30) In the 1980s Inuit artists made fun of
the sculptural tradition by making nontraditional subjects such as stone airplanes and
mobiles with antler and whalebone details that refer to the modern world and its arts.
One would not think that traditional Australian aborigine figuration and ornamentation
would lend itself to contemporary art, but it has—at least twice. In the 1930s the
anthropologist Donald Thompson suggested transferring rock and bark paintings to
larger bark panels for commercial sale (1935–37). Kangaroos and fishermen were some
of the popular subjects, with the nice naïve/sophisticated detail of showing the internal
organs. (31) All this is similar to the Inuit situation and was sold to museums,
universities and collectors as aborigine art; as a result, aborigine "pride" took off in the
1950s and '60s.
Fig. 4: Australian Aboriginal
Painting
But the really interesting development took place in the 1960s with the work of the artist
Geoff Bardon, who saw the possibility of aborigine art writ large in modern-looking
acrylic canvases. (Fig. 4) "He provided the initial motivation, procured and organized
the materials and assisted in promoting the artists and the sale of their works. To the
aborigines Bardon was the 'painting man' and they now refer to his days at Papuynia s
'Bardon-time'. (32) Bardon was a Sydney art student who went to teach children in
Papuynia in 1971. Between 1971 and 1972, six hundred and twenty paintings were
created under his tutelage. There have been many other art "advisers" since. Bardon's
idea was that the form, abstract looking paintings in acrylics, was new—but the content
was old.
The enthusiastic literature, such as the Dreamings catalogue of the Asia House
exhibition of 1988, emphasizes the "nativeness" of the images evident in the titles and
descriptions. For example there isSugarleaf Dreaming at Ngarlu (1986): mythical
women dance and collect sugarleaf; there are two actual births and they gather
yamirlingi (well, it's an exotic word, whatever it is.) It looks like a very nice abstraction.
Some paintings are meant to be geographic or climate maps. Possum Spirit Dreaming,
one of the largest paintings at 213 x 701 cm, combines geography and story. Usually
these are too complicated and shorthand to make much sense to the westerner, to say
nothing of the fact that according to the authors not everything is divulged to outsiders.
However, the western owner of such a painting feels that he or she has a bit of authentic
and native art, as it looks like a great modern abstraction above the couch—the best of
both worlds. Jackson Pollock comes to mind looking at these convoluted dot paintings,
although instead of the free-wheeling drips the dots are precisely and calculatingly
placed. (It's okay for western art to be messy; nonwestern art has to be neat.)
In her book Contemporary African Art (1999), Sidney Kasfir has a whole chapter on
what she calls "Patrons and Mediators." (33) The most successful and colorful of "art
mediators" in Africa, according to her, was McEwen of Rhodesia in the 1960s, who
created a school of stone sculpture where actually none had been before. An intellectual
interested in Focillon and Jung, he taught the artists to explain their works in terms of
their own individuality and the collective unconscious of their Shona ethnic group.
Descriptive realism and 'academic' style were forbidden and a Henry Moorish
modernism was expected. In 1969, forty six sculptures exhibited at MOMA were billed
as "New African Art from the Central African Workshop School." Despite such attempts
to control form and content, individual native artists emerged outside the workshop and
eventually art making became decentralized.
Although I met James Houston in the 1960s I paid no attention to his chosen
contemporary Inuit collection or to what he said about it. I was primarily interested in
"authentic," archaeological and traditional art, and the problem of native contemporary
art only found me by accident in 1976. I was exploring the abandoned ruins of the
American Southwest and looking for a research topic. Spending a few days in Santa Fe, I
wandered into the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum and, before I could
respond to the works, I was buttonholed by a staff member who said quite aggressively
that I was not to expect any cute pictures of Indians performing quaint ceremonies
because Indian artists were now a part of the mainstream of modern art doing
abstractions. "But you whites won't buy the abstractions, you just want the oldfashioned ritual scenes which we won't do any more." The person was angry and I
escaped as soon as I could. I never did a project on the ruins but the dilemma of the
contemporary native artist stayed with me to the present. I eventually taught seminars
on the subject titled "Modern Art Outside the West" starting in 1995, which was the
prototype for "Multiple Modernities." (34)
I have no idea what art works I saw in Santa Fe in 1976, but American Indian
Arts Magazine illustrated the sort of work I might have seen. According to the
illustrations in the magazine, in the mid-1970s artists worked in a contemporary style
with some native elements but without descriptive realism: such as David
Paladin's Pueblo Kiva (1976) with a mask and multiple faces, and his Birth of the Sun,
with its geometrically stylized figures; or Helen Hardin's Recurrence of Spiritual
Elements (1973) and Prayers of a Harmonious Chorus (1976), with their
interpenetrating features blurring reality.
I knew nothing about the much maligned paintings of "ritual scenes" but it was not
difficult to find out that they had been encouraged by a "mediator", Dorothy Dunn in the
1930s. (35) Dorothy Dunn had a degree from the University of Chicago and founded and
ran a Studio in Santa Fe for Indians between 1932 and 1937, though as an institution it
lasted far longer and was very influential. Every Indian artist born between 1915 and
1940 was trained there or by its alumni. The mission of the school was to create art that
was as good as traditional art and also maintained the "Indian" characteristics of clear
outlines and flat colors. Backgrounds were to be flat for a "primitive" look which also
made them "modernist" to some extent. The artists were told that they needed little
training because their style was already in their "unconscious". Pena's Gourd
Dance (1939) and Tsihnahijinnie's Navahho N'Da (1938) are perfect examples of this
elegant, timeless style. There were regional variants of styles, such as the more dynamic
Kiowa styles of Oscar Howe's Dakota Duck Hunt (1947) and Buffalo Hunter (1938).
Note that all these subjects were native. And if Oscar Howe's Umine Woman
Dancer (1939) and Harrison Begay's Navaho Feather Dance (1942) remind one of
Oriental art—such as Chinese painting or Persian miniatures—that is not accidental.
American Indian art was promoted as a high art like traditional Asian art, but modern
western art was to be alien to it.
Fig. 5: Luiseño, Fritz Scholder
The reaction against this western idea of "Indianness" is something I encountered on my
visit in 1976, although by then it was not new. One of the leading figures of the reaction
was Fritz Scholder, an artist who taught at the Institute from 1964–69 and who
influenced many younger artists. (36) His view of Indian identity is cosmopolitan and
ironic. In one series of lithographs, atypical Indians are posed with Paris landmarks
such as the Eiffel tower (1976). Having come across these in American Indian Arts
Magazine, I felt that they expressed the idea that the Indian had left the reservation
behind, only people didn't know it. Later, Fritz Scholder told me that this series was
based on turn-of-the-century photos of Indians in Paris that he had come across. (37)
Indian identity remained his subject, as in the multiple Indian faces that include cigar
store Indians in one painting, or the head of an Indian with a feather bonnet as the sign
of a shopping mall called Pueblo Bonito Plaza. The real Indian is not wearing a feather
bonnet any more: he stands in front of French wallpaper (1976); in sunglasses and ascot,
he could be anyone. Ironically, this last is entitled Luiseño, the tribal group Scholder
belonged to—although he was only one-quarter Luiseño, thus raising the question of
who is biologically and or culturally "Indian" in any case. (Fig. 5) One could say that
Fritz Scholder was a sort of Seydou Keita with an attitude. Fritz Scholder didn't just
paint Indians, he was interested in many other subjects. Nevertheless, his reputation
was made as an "Indian painter," and the art world was not interested in his non-Indian
work. Like Rashid Araeen, he was unable to transcend the ethnic designation of his art
to be considered simply as a modern artist.
In every case discussed so far, the aim of the western "mediators" was to maintain native
art and identity in the face of westernization, opposing or softening colonial political
and economic forces. In a number of cases traditional art was presented as more
commercially viable because the westerner is positively interested in and looking for an
exotic native quality in what in considered nonwestern art. Nevertheless, the westerner
could not deal with native quality unless it was mediated through a cognate western
form, which was the language of modernism. This lingua franca of the twentieth century
was incredibly malleable because it had rejected academic verisimilitude in favor of
abstraction and stylization. Narrative, figurative, and totally abstract images were
possible simultaneously. The work of certain artists—Picasso, Henry Moore, Jackson
Pollock, and certain historical periods such as Persian miniatures or Medieval European
art—were mostly covertly presented as models. At the same time it was assumed that the
native artist already had such approaches inside him; they just had to be nurtured. The
mediator often "taught" by selecting what he liked and the associations he or she made
in his or her mind. At the other end, the buyers did the same in interpreting and
evaluating the art they saw.
A more precise illustration of how this process of traditionalism and modernism
interacted is illustrated in the work of Elena Izcue, a Peruvian textile artist who can be
considered both a mediator and an artist in one person. (38) Izcue was interested in
incorporating ancient Peruvian art in her own primarily textile designs and in teaching
her Peruvian compatriots how to do it in an active life from the 1920s to the 1950s. In
the 1920s, she was a part of the artistic circles in Paris and studied with Leger. In the
1930s, she also exhibited her textiles in New York. In 1941, she founded a School for
Decorative Art in Lima and, in 1955, was one of the founders of the Contemporary
Institute of Art in Lima.
Elena Izcue and her contemporary critics and purchasers felt that Pre-Columbian
Peruvian motifs should inspire modern Peruvian art. When she went to Paris, a collector
friend, Rafael Larco Hoyle, sent with her an extraordinary Pre-Columbian Peruvian
textile to be exhibited there. (That "Paracas" textile is now in the Brooklyn Museum.)
Elena Izcue thus justified her own work in terms of the Paracas textile. In addition,
while in Paris, she published a book in 1926 entitled "Peruvian Art in the Schools,"
which detailed the way in which ancient native art should be used by simplifying and
stylizing native motifs even further then they already were from realistic depiction,
thereby making them contemporary. Izcue's designs on silks illustrate this process of
radical simplification. Her work and the Paracas textile were both a hit in New York in
the 1930s. Her American friend and Peruvian specialist, G.H. Means, wrote a brief
article about her in which he praised her approach and explained how traditional and
contemporary were supposed to interact from the western point of view:
"She has the ability to separate from a highly esoteric ancient model its aesthetic kernel,
and further the ability to interpret the very essence of the design in modern and
practical form...Her invariable good taste and her profound intelligence have permitted
her to take as a guiding rule the principle that nothing is more impressive than
simplicity...she strips from it [her native model] all those parts which the modern mind
would find grotesque..." (39)
Fig. 6: Ethnography, David Siqueiros
Means could have been speaking for much of the attitude of the twentieth century,
which wanted to receive a native message through a taste formed by modern art. While
this brought exotics and exotic art into the western world, it also left them in a
straightjacket in which there was little room to move. That such incorporation of the
native into the western world by stripping down was artistically sterile was discovered
sooner or later by all native artists and they moved against it. Some Inuit abandoned
bears to make stone airplanes. Native Americans in particular commented on western
and Indian ideas of "Indianness." Australian aborigines living in cities, away from their
rural cousins under the influence of mediators, began to paint the horrendous
experience of colonialism. Death in Custody (1987), by R.H. Campbell, represents the
mistreatment of aborigines.Massacre (1992), by Harry Wedge, is a similarly violent
subject but done in the dot painting style; it is an ironic comment on the nostalgic dot
paintings. Who buys such paintings? Only a sophisticated collector aware of mainstream
art could be interested. Who wants a photorealist Aboriginal painting like Road to
Redfern (1988), by Lin Onus, or a stylized figure likeWoman, by Bancroft? (40) At this
point all ethnic designations disappear and the work could be from anywhere in the
world.
Now, nonwestern artists are their own "mediators" and explore native and western
identities in one way or another in their work. I will refer to two examples by way of
conclusion. The first is from the first part of the twentieth century, David
Siqueiros' Ethnography (1939), now at the Museum of Modern Art, which shows a
Mexican peasant whose face is a Pre-Columbian mask (the wooden original is in the
American Museum of Natural History). (Fig. 6) The man looks through those unseeing
eyes out of a stylized face as if to say "the past still lives in me," i.e., you cannot destroy
the traditional because it comes back like a ghost to haunt you. This is the insight of the
first half of the twentieth century.
Fig. 7: "Self portrait: but You Don't Look Indian...",
Vivianne Gray
The second image is a sculpture by the Native American artist Vivianne Gray, in whose
figure an actual mirror forms the face. The caption says: "Self-Portrait: But You Don't
Look Indian..." (Fig. 7) As it is obvious, we only see ourselves in the mirror. The truth of
the recent past is that the more we look into alien and exotic arts the more we see
ourselves: our arts, our theories, our misinterpretations, our fantasies. Nonwestern
contemporary art is a new mirror which reflects whoever looks into it with whatever
preconceptions and theories they have at the moment. There is no ancient substratum in
it, only an eternal present.
ENDNOTES
1. The difference between the cultural evolutionary stage termed "modernization" and
the particular nature of a civilization termed "insistence" is a major topic of my book.
Esther Pasztory, Thinking with Things: Toward a New Vision of Art (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2005).
2. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincort, (London: Penguin Books, 1972).
3. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
4. Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania (London: Penguin Books, 1970).
5. Elizabeth Hill Boone, Incarnations of the Aztec Supernatural: the Image of
Huitzilopochtl in Mexico and Europe (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society,
1989).
6. Alexander Baumgarten, Theoretische Ästhetik: die grundlegenden Abschnitte aus der
"Aesthetica" (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1983).
7. Ernest F. Henollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, an outline of East Asiatic
Design, (London: W. Heinemann, 1912).
8. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. R.A. Screech, (London: Penguin
Books, 1993).
9. Laurence L. Bongie, Sade: a Biographical Essay (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998).
10. Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde, trans. John Reinhold
Forster (London: J. Nourse and T. Davies, 1772).
11. Charles Montesquieu, Persian Letters (1721), trans. J.C. Betts (London: Penguin
Books, 1973).
12. Jean-Hubert Martin (coordinator), Magiciens de la terre (Paris: Editions du Centre
Pompidou, 1989).
13. John Gascoigne, Captian Cook: Voyager between Worlds (New York: Hambledon
Continuum, 2007).
14. Sir Richard Burton, The Arabian Nights (Garden Grove, CA: World Library Inc.,
1991)
15. Third Text, journal published in London. Rasheed Araeen editor in chief. The first
issue appeared in 1987.
16. James Clifford, Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1988) 186.
17. Jimmy Durham, "The Search for Virginity", in The Myth of Primitivism, ed. Susan
Hiller, (London: Routledge, 1991) 286–291.
18. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983).
19. Roland Barthes, Empires of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
20. Claude Lévi-Strauss, A World on the Wane, trans. John Russell, (New York:
Criterion, 1961).
21. Omar Onsi, "Young women visiting an exhibition" (1945) in LIBAN: le regard des
peintres, 200 ans de peinture libanaise (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 1989) 133.
22. Andre Magnin, Seydou Keita (New York: Scalo, 1997).
23. James Clifford, Lecture on Contemporary Brazilian Indians (New York: Columbia
University, 1998).
24. Rasheed Araeen, "From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts", in The Myth of Primitivism, ed.
Susa Hiller, (London: Routledge, 1991) 172.
25. Durham 289.
26. Susan Vogel, Africa Explores (New York: Center for African Art, 1988)
27. Peter Sutton, Dreamings: the Art of Aboriginal Australia (New York: Asia House
and George Braziller, 1988).
28. FENOLLOSA op. cit
29. James A. Houston, Canadian Eskimo Art (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1954) and
James A. HoustonEskimo Prints (Barre, MA: Barre Publishing, 1967).
30. Janet Berlo, "Drawing (upon) the Past", in Unpacking Culture, ed. Ruth B. Phillips
and Christopher B. Steiner, (Berkeley: University of California, 1999) 178–196.
31. Sutton 147.
32. Sutton 97.
33. Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, Contemporary African Art (London: Thames and Hudson,
1999).
34. The seminar "Modern Outside the West" was the reformulation of an earlier seminar
I gave in the 70s and 80s entitled "Indigenous Artist-Western Collector."
35. J.J Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1971).
36. Lowry Stokes Sims ed., Fritz Scholder: Indian Non Indian (Munich and New York:
Prestel, 2008).
37. Fritz Scholder, Personal Communication and Pasztory 95–96.
38. Natalie Majluf and Eduardo Wuffarden, Elene Izcue: el arte precolombino en la
vida moderna (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 1999).
39. Phillip Ainsworth Means, "Elena and Victoria Izcue and their Art", in
the Panamerican Union, March 1936 p. 250 (bibliography 248–254).
40. These were among many images shown to me by the specialist in aboriginal art,
Susan Zeller.
FIGURES
Fig. 1: Indian woman with Franz Boas and George Hunt holding up a blanket.
American Museum of Natural History
James, Clifford. Predicament of Culture, Harvard University Press, 1988 p.86.
Fig. 2: Untitled [Man Leaning on Radio]
Seydou Keita
1955, print 1997
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Twentieth Century AAOA Photograph Study Collection
1997.363
Fig. 3: The Enchanted Owl
Kenojuak, 1960, 24 x 26
Inuit (Eskimo) print
Houston, James. Eskimo Prints, 1967, Barre, MA p. 34
Fig. 4: Australian Aboriginal Painting
Fig. 5: Luiseño
Fritz Scholder, 1975
Heard Museum
aquatint, artist's proof, 11 x 15"
Fig 6: Ethnography
David Siqueiros, 1939
Museum of Modern Art
Fig 7: "Self portrait: but You Don't Look Indian..."
Vivianne Gray, 1989
Mixed Media 61 x 62 cm
Ryan, Allan J. The Trickster Shift.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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"Aesthetica". Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1983.
Berlo, Janet. "Drawing (upon) the Past", in Unpacking Culture, ed. by Ruth B. Phillips
and Christopher B. Steiner. Berkeley: University of California, 1999.
Bongie, Laurence L. Sade: a Biographical Essay. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
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Boone, Elizabeth Hill. Incarnations of the Aztec Supernatural: the Image of
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Forster. London: J. Nourse and T. Davies, 1772.
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Pompidou, 1989.
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