What Became Authentic Primitive Art? Author(s): Shelly Errington Source: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 9, No.

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What Became Authentic Primitive Art?

University of California, Santa Cruz

Shelly Errington

The category "PrimitiveArt" was invented at the turn of the 20th century and gained acceptance as "art,"and, with it, monetary value, in the first half of the century-an inspirationto avant-gardeartists, a pleasure to avant-gardecollectors. By mid-century, it had begun to enter the mainstreamof established art. It got its own museum in New York in 1954, when the Museum of Primitive Art was founded-funded by Nelson Rockefeller and containing largely his collection. For about thirty years interest in "PrimitiveArt" grew. Public acceptance of it became more widespread; galleries selling it flourished; scholarly interest in it increased, and many new studies were made; curatorialinterest grew, and new exhibits were installed. In 1984, Primitive Art seemed at the peak of its acceptance and validation, and with no fewer than five major exhibits of PrimitiveArt on show that winter in New York:Northwest Coast Art at the IBM gallery; Ashanti Gold at the American Museum of Natural History; African
Masterpieces From the Musee de L'Homme at the newly established Museum

of African Art; the permanentcollection installed in the Rockefeller Wing of the MetropolitanMuseum of Art, which had opened just two years before; and finally, the Museum of Modern Art's major and controversial production "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art. But the seminars, catalogues, critiques, reviews, and general publicity attending the conjunction of so much Primitive Art in the winter of 1984 revealed that the notion "Primitive Art," and the valorizationof what was pronouncedto be "authentic" Primitive Art by various authorities, had become far more controversial than the casual admirer of Primitive Art might have imagined. Most critiques focused on reexamining the issue of "authenticity,"disputthe notion that "authentic"primitive people live as they have lived for cening turies, untouched by Western civilization or history. The idea that authentic Primitive Art consists of objects made by "untouched"cultures for their own uses ratherthan for sale to "outsiders" and that these objects are pure in their form and content, uncontaminatedby Western influence, has been thoroughly
CulturalAnthropology 9(2):201-226. Copyright ? 1994, American Anthropological Association. 201

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criticized by Fabian (1983), Clifford (1988), Price (1989), Torgovnick (1990), and many others. Through such critiques, received notions of "authenticity" have been thoroughly discredited, and "primitivism" has been exposed as a Western ideological construct. Considerablyless attentionhas been paid, however, to the thirdword in the term"authenticPrimitiveArt."Among the infinitude of objects consideredboth "authentic"and "primitive,"only some of them were selected as "art"objects, their legitimacy institutionalized, and their monetary value as art established. To consider this issue requires a shift in focus from primitivism to art-to the deep schemata concerning "art"that inform the selection of some objects, but not most, to be designated (primitive) "art,"and to the legitimizing museum processes that, in effect, pronounce them to be art. The Primitive Art in the Michael Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is what Malraux would call "art by metamorphosis" (1949). These artifacts began their existences as many different things-from ceremonial clubs to ancestraleffigies, from door lintels to kava bowls. Their uses and functions in their contexts of productionwere various, but they were not "art," as they became in the Met. They have been moved great distances-from New Guinea, or Mesoamerica, or Africa-and have come to rest in New York City. Once in New York, they have continued their peripatetic existence. Over a period of decades, they have moved, some literally and some metaphorically,out of the American Museum of NaturalHistory on the west side of CentralPark, down to Midtown on 54th Streetto the Museum of Primitive Art, and then up the other side of the parkto the Met. These spatial movements parallel andhelp constitute their movements across categories. In what follows, I will examine what became "Authentic Primitive Art," using the Rockefeller Wing as a point of reference (see Figure 1). The Rockefeller Wing-the contents, its history of collection and exhibition, and its current installation-is paradigmaticof the meanings and fate of Authentic Primitive Art. For one thing, the objects in it exemplify and help constitute what I call Primitive Art that is valorized and exhibited High PrimitiveArt, the "authentic" in majormuseums and that commands the highest prices at auctions and in galleries. For another,the foundingof the Museum of Primitive Art in 1954 andthe opening of the Rockefeller Wing in 1982, both of which contained the same core collection, span the thirty-oddyears in which Authentic Primitive Art was most accepted and valorized as a category of objects in museum exhibitions and in scholarship. This period can be seen as ending in 1984, when the Museum of Moder Art's show "Primitivism"in 20th CenturyArt provoked so much controversy that the erosion of the validity of the notion of Authentic Primitive Art became problematic, even to a general audience. Art by Intention and Art by Appropriation The vast majorityof objects found in fine artsmuseums were not createdas "art,"not intended by theirmakersto be "art": they were originally otherthings. Andre Malrauxaddressesthis fact, writing that many of the objects we count as

WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 203

Figure1 Museum view. Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Gallery of OceanicArt of Melanesia,The MichaelC. RockefellerMemorialWing.(Until 1991, the name was The Michael C. RockefellerWing of Primitive Art.) Reprintedby permissionof the MetropolitanMuseumof Art, New York. ? The Metropolitan Museumof Art.

"art"required a "metamorphosis" in order to become "art"(1949). These objects are counted as "art"because they were claimed as such at certainhistorical moments. The term "metamorphosis,"I think, seems entirely too gentle for some of the transformationsthat have taken place. While acknowledging the import of Malraux's writing on the topic, I want to distinguish here between art by appropriation (ratherthan by metamorphosis)and art by intention.' Art by intention was made as art, created in contexts that had a concept of art approximating what we now hold: paradigmatically,the kinds of objects created in the Italian renaissance as art. Art by appropriationconsists of the diverse objects that became "art"with the founding of public fine arts museums at the end of the 18th century. More and more objects gained status as art duringthe 19th century and entered the museum; one thinks especially of religious objects, like Byzantine icons and Christian triptychs, but there were many more. It is true, but obvious, that the objects in the Rockefeller Wing are "artby To appropropriation." say so only begins to open up the topic. What counts as a work of art?What attributesof the uncountableobjects thathumanshave made predispose them to being selected as "art"objects? And how are these objects transformedby display, framing, and other practices into "art"objects?

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What Counts as a Work of Art? The assemblage of so many masterpieces in a museum, Andre Malraux wrote in Museum without Walls, conjures up in the mind's eye all the world's masterpieces."How indeed could this truncatedpossible fail to evoke the whole gamut of the possible?" he asks."Of what is it [the museum] necessarily deprived?"He answers: Of all thatforms an integralpartof a whole (stainedglass, frescos);of all that be cannot moved;of objectssuchas sets of tapestry whicharedifficultto display; to and,chiefly,of all thatthe collectionis unable acquire... Fromtheeighteenth was to thetwentieth [Malraux 1949:16] centurywhatmigrated the portable. Relative to portability is size. Too small, and the item becomes insignificant. Too large, and it becomes costly to transportand difficult to display. It is no mean feat to transport30-foot carved poles from IrianJaya to New York, and it requiresa collector or museum both wealthy and determinedenough to do it. To become "art"these portable objects must be displayed, and to be displayed they must be accommodated in a suitable space. Art was invented simultaneously with collecting, and the two are inconceivable without each other. The market for monumental pieces is exceedingly limited, even if people praise them extravagantlyas magnificent art.(Whose living room could accommodate an Olmec head-even if it could be bought?) Objects selected for display are best made of durablematerials if they are to last. (If they are made of precious materials,like ivory or gold, all the better.) Many potential pieces of Primitive Art, made in the mainly tropical climates from which such pieces are drawn, are composed of soft materials or a combination of soft and hard materials:flowers and woven palm-leaf offerings, baskets, bamboo, and bark-cloth. The more ephemeral material aspects of these Those made of a combination items tend to disappearbefore they turninto "art." of soft andhardparts arelikely to lose the soft one, with profoundepistemological and aesthetic consequences. It was standardpractice among art dealers in the 1920s to strip African artifacts of their soft and fibrous parts, renderingthem starkly "modem"looking and preserving or creating a particularaesthetic (see Rubin 1984). One type of piece often treatedthatway is the "reliquaryfigure"from Gabon. The Centerfor African Art in New York displayed several of these pieces in the 1984 show African Masterpiecesfrom the Musee de L'Homme,including one thatretainedits "basket decoration." The catalogue points out that "we usually see Kota reliquary guardians stripped of their baskets and decorations, looking abstract, minimal, modern ... As seen here, where the bottom is inserted into its basket, the entire reading of the figure is radically changed."The catalogue continues with a spiriteddefense of the aesthetic of the basket, featuringthe "complex texture of twisted leather thongs and basketry [which] gives the base a restless vitality and interest," and the "feathers attached to the back of the head [which] furtheranimateand complicate the figure's shape and texture,"ending the para-

WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 205

graph with the wishfully triumphantproclamation that a "simple, minimal object has become a composite form-playing shapes, colors, and textures against each other"(Vogel and N'Diaye 1985:148, item 66). Maybe. But I suspect that, in spite of the restless vitality of rafia, the hierarchy of permanencewill continue because it is overdetermined.Soft materials deteriorate,requiringspecial care (the few masks with leafy bases shown in the Rockefeller Wing are grouped together in temperature-controlledcases); they may look messy on a coffee table; their commodity value, as well as their display value, is lessened if they deteriorate. Perhaps most deeply, there is an unstated and largely unconscious link in the West between the permanentand the civilized, the durable and "high"civilization and arts, made explicit, handily enough, by Sir Kenneth Clark in Civilisation (1970). He regards the urge toward permanence and the (alleged) correlative urge towardmaking objects of permanentmaterials to be a hallmarkof the civilized. According to Clark,civilized societies show themselves to be such by locating themselves within history, partly by making objects that endure: meanssomethingmorethanenergyandwill andcreativepower.... Civilization The How can I define it? Well, very shortly,a sense of permanence. wanderers
and invaders were in a continual state of flux. ... And for that reason it didn't

occurto themto buildstonehouses,or to writebooks.... Almostthe only stone afterthe Mausoleum Theodoric of buildingthathas survivedfromthe centuries is the Baptistryat Poitiers.It is pitifullycrude.... But at least this miserable is construction meantto last. It isn'tjust a wigwam.Civilizedman,or so it seems to me, mustfeel thathe belongssomewhere spaceandtime;thathe consciously in looks forward looks back. [Clark1970:16-17] and In a few sentences he equates civilization, sedentary existence (read: agriculture rather than hunting, gathering, or nomadic pastoralism), permanent structures (and by extrapolation other objects that are made to last-not wigwams!), and a sense of history, of locating oneself in time. Although the objects in the Rockefeller Wing would probablybe dismissed out of hand by Clark and by most art historical students under the sway of the Italian renaissance-indeed, that was partof the problem the Rockefellers had in getting Primitive Art into the Met in the first place-it is no accident that the ones chosen here are among the most enduring.They are at least on the road to permanence, which is more thancan be said about a piece of music or a sand-painting,or even a basket or an intricately woven leaf and flower offering. The importanceof portability and durabilityas criteria of art is confirmed if we look at the practices that have produced"modern"forms of non-Western arts derived from prior, evanescent art-forms. One example is that of Navajo sand-paintings.Navajos made intricatedesigns in the sand, which, in the course of the curing ceremony, were sat upon and stepped on, hence erased. In the course of this century, various people had the idea of preserving the designs, first by painting them, and eventually by applying sand to a board with a thin coating of glue. At thatpoint the designs became both durableand portable,able to be moved to new locations (collected and sold) and hung on walls as "art"

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(Parezo 1983). Something analogous happened among the AustralianAborigines, who draw ancestraldesigns in the sand, paint them on bodies, and paint and incise them on bark,rocks, and a few other materials. Only those on permanent materials(rocks and bark)arekept between ceremonies, often hidden from view in caves and other secret stashing-places. For a number of decades bark paintings stood as "Aboriginalart"and were sold as such in shops in Sydney and Canberra. But Aboriginal art really gained a market and a place in the world art scene when Aborigines began painting ancestral designs in acrylic on canvas. (See Williams 1976, Sutton 1988, and Morphy 1991.) Art by intention-those objects, paradigmatically framed paintings, that were created in order to be sold, collected, and hung on silent walls-is also portableby intent. Its portabilitygreatly facilitates its collectability and its ability to be commodified. Durability also makes its collection, display, and commodification more convenient than would otherwise be the case. (One need not ask which came first, art's durability or its commodifiability, to acknowledge the convenient correlation.) Primitive Art, then, is usually the size and durabilitythat money can transport, dealers can store, and collectors can conveniently display. Thus a hierarchy of Primitive Art substances emerges, in which Benin bronzes, ivory masks, and hardwood sculpturalforms predominateover ritual figures made of leaves, disintegrating fabric, deteriorating tapa cloth, fraying baskets, breakablepottery. Framing "Art" Art by intention is framed, literally or figuratively. We owe the literal frame, which is derived from the wooden triptych,to the Renaissance invention of portable, salable canvases thatneeded protection. The literal frame increases the portability, durability, hence commodifiability, of the object.2 The 18th century took the idea of framing furtherthan the literal frame by distinguishing "art"from "craft"and separatingthe "fine arts"into five types: painting, sculpture,architecture,music, and dance.3M.H. Abrams traces the social practices in the 18th centurythatseparated"art"from life, ending in Kant's articulationof the theory of the purely aesthetic object with no useful function but to be contemplated (1985). By the end of that century, then, all five "fine arts"became useless, contemplatableobjects and requiredthe frame-whether a picture frame, a pedestal, or a stage-to function as a boundarybetween the piece of "art"and the world, setting off artfrom everyday life, from social context, and from mundaneutility. The framepronounces what it encloses to be not "real"life but something different from it, a representation of reality. Thus, at the end of the 18th and first partof the 19th century,music and dance, which are activities, were turnedinto "aesthetic"objects by framing them (by the stage or platform) and separatingthem from the audience, who then contemplatedthem as distant spectacles, as the art connoisseur contemplated the painting on the wall. The audience does not participatein the performancebut only views it.

WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 207

Art by appropriation, contrast, is not born in a frame, so to speak. It beby comes "art"by being framed, by being removed from a context of use and performance. Here it is worthremarkingthat, although not all humansocieties have produced what I would call art (at least when being meticulous, I would prefer to confine the wordto objects conforming to the clusterof associations andpractices articulatedat the end of the 18th century in Europe), all human cultures have what Cassirercalled "symbolic form":artifacts,activities, or even aspects of the landscape that humans view as densely meaningful (1955). Further,human beings have several sensory capacities: we see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and have "haptic"or "kinesthetic" empathetic capacities. Very few symbolic forms are cast in a single sensory medium: an audience hears drumbeatswhile looking at maskeddancersand perceiving their movements with kinesthetic empathy; people doze and smoke clove cigarettes and munch on snacks while sitting in front of shadow puppets and hearing gamelan music. Only mechanical reproductionallows us to separateour sensory modalities and utilize a single capacity to listen to a symphony while we wash dishes. But some of the multiple media in which non-mechanically-replicated symbolic forms are cast are temporally evanescent; sounds, smells, tastes, muscular exertion, and kinesthetic empathy do not last. Masks and all the rest of these objects slough off their evanescent performancecontexts on the way to New York, retainingonly the durable partthatcan be set aside in a frame or on a pedestal. By the time they become Primitive Art, then, the mask and the ancestorfigure look a lot more like "sculpture"than like something that needs a performanceto activate its meanings. Sculptural Qualities Even now, painting and sculpture stand as the epitome of "fine arts" for both museumcuratorsand museum-goers-in spite of the eclectic and universal natureof artin the late 20th century. Certainlyat the time thatPrimitive Art was being discovered or invented at the turn of the 20th century, prior to Duchamp, Cristo, and suchlike, the two forms were paradigmatic.Painters and sculptors were the ones who discovered Primitive Art and used it for inspiration. Regardedas a deep schema, paradigm, or patternratherthan as an already obvious object, a "painting"is a portable, flat, four-corneredthing with some iconic content. Such objects are relatively rare in the history of the world. Persian miniatures and Japanese and Chinese brush-paintingsand screens are the closest candidates to approximate this schema outside the Western tradition, and it cannotbe an accident thatthose items have long entereddealershipcircles as "high"forms of non-Europeanart. The peoples of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas-the regions that produced what became Primitive Art-created very few objects correspondingto that schema. They did produce, however, three-dimensionalobjects in durable materials that can be grafted fairly easily onto the schema of sculpture, the second paradigmaticform of fine art. It can be no accident that the vast majority of objects exhibited in the Rockefeller Wing and other fine artsmuseums can pass for (and "pass as") "sculpture."

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Iconicity A feature of both painting and sculpture in the Renaissance canon was a special form of iconic signification. The Italian renaissance reinvented and rationalized a certain type of iconic signification, perspectival illusionistic realism, what Summers calls "opticalnaturalism"(1987), or the geometrical representation of virtual space. Consideredin the context of the history of the world, optical naturalismis a peculiar type of iconicity: it attempts to depict precisely the way something looks.4Between the 15th and 18th centuries, optical naturalism emerged and crystallized as part of the definition of "art"in Europe. In the 19th century, objects that had a recognizable iconic content but yet fell short of the optical naturalismachieved in academicpainting were called "primitive"including everything from the Italian "primitives"(primitive because prior to the full rationalizationof perspectivaltechniques), to the Douanier Henri Rousseau (primitive because not academicallytrained), to Japaneseprints (primitive because not sufficiently optically, perspectivally realistic). What eventually became Primitive Art in the 20th century was simply grotesque in the 19th. The niche of the primitive in art was occupied by others. That space began to be occupied by l'art negre (African art) at the turnof the 20th century, when the Renaissance canon appearedto collapse completely, admitting as art the "distortions"to optical naturalismrepresented by cubism and African masks. Curiously enough, it did not collapse entirely. A vitiated or updatedversion of optical naturalismremaineda partof the criterion of what is allowed to count as art:that is iconicity, pure and simple. Objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas that resemble something recognizable-most notably, a person, a person's face, or an animal-are more likely to become Primieven beautifully, but have little or tive Art than are objects that are "decorated," no iconic content.5 The criterion of iconicity intrudedlegally in the 1930s, concerning more thanjust Primitive Art, accordingto an anecdote that appearsin Russell Lynes's Gold Old Modern (1973). It seems that the Museum of Modern Art was trying to import abstractEuropean sculpture for a show on modern art. But as Lynes explains, according to Paragraph1807 of the Tariff Act and a definition made in ratherthanas eitherraw materialor utili1930, sculptureto be importedas "art," tarianobjects (on which there was a 40 percent duty), had to be "imitations of naturalobjects, chiefly of the humanform... in their trueproportionof length, breadthand thickness"(Lynes 1973:138). Apparentlysculpturesby Giacometti, Arp, Miro, and other modernist artists at the time did not qualify. The previous year the museum had had a similar problem with Primitive Art, but in that case it was compoundedby the fact that several of the items were declared utilitarian or worse.6 Iconicity remains an unstatedand even repressed criterion for the identification of what counts as art. This is still the case today, even after the advent of objets trouves, abstract expressionism, and so forth. The catalogue Masterpieces of Primitive Art, published when the Museum of Primitive Art collection moved into the Met, for instance, is organized by dividing the objects into faces,

WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 209

figures, animals, and abstractions (Newton 1978). This organization asks the viewer to see these objects as representations,as though these objects' meanings lay primarily in their iconic content-revealed especially in the residual cateOr gory, "abstractions." note the two-page spreadin the New YorkTimesMagaof September20, 1987, advertisingan exhibit at the Centerfor African Art, zine New York, by its sponsor Philip Morris.It asks, "Whatare you looking at?"and features five pieces of Primitive Art selected from one hundredin the show; all five are clearly recognizable as sculpturalanthropomorphicfigures. Iconicity is the hidden specter thatcontinues to hauntPrimitive Art: it is not absolute, but it lurks at the edges of collecting and categorization. Much commentary on non-Western arts, for instance, calls them "stylized" or "abstract," termsthat make sense only if one imagines thatthe naturalor obvious way to depict the world is in a style of optical naturalism.This observation is as trueof anthropologists as it is of art historians and museum curators,with very few (but enlightening) exceptions. I offer two illustrations. Bill Holm, retiredcuratorof the BurkeMuseum in Seattle, for instance, has written a useful book on how designs are made and applied by stencil to items like blankets, totem poles, hats, bracelets, and so forth, in Northwest Coast American arts. In a section called "Degree of Realism," he divides designs into three types, depending on whetherthe animal partsremain of a piece, very little distortedor separated("configurative"),or are distortedand split somewhat, but still recognizable ("expansive"),or finally are "so distorted it that it is difficult or impossible to identify the abstractedanimal or the exact symbolism of the parts" ("distributive") (Holm 1965:13). Holm's categories may be useful for some purposes, but even to raise "degrees of realism" as an issue suggests that readers share an implicit notion that art is primarilymimetic. His categories, in turn, are loosely based on Boas's classification in Primitive Art (1955[1927]), which divided Northwest Coast art into "symbolic" (because it stood for or referred to something outside itself) and "decorative"(which he characterizedas "meaningless,"because it did not apparentlyrefer to something outside itself). Here is a second example. In the 1984 exhibition "Primitivism" in 20th CenturyArt at the Museum of Modern Art (hereafter, MoMA) in New York, Giacometti's Tall Figure (1949) was juxtaposed with an elongated figure from Nyamwezi, the label claiming that both of them "rejected realism." The label makes no sense as a historical statement:how could one of the pairreject realism when its makers never tried to achieve realism in the first place? The only way that sense can be made of it is if we recognize the implicit assumption, a very deep one in Western art-thought, that art seeks to make optically naturalistic copies of "reality."If some African artifactis really art, it also, ipso facto, seeks to imitate reality. If it does not, it must be because the artistrejected his self-evident mission "rejectingrealism." In short, the naturalisticprejudice-the idea that art (whether flat or in the round) is made meaningful by resembling something in the world and that it strives to do so in a way as optically realistic as possible, even if it does not always achieve it-is very deep. In the 19th century, at least a degree of optical

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naturalism formed the explicit or implicit criterion by which a non-European image or artifact was judged to be art at all and, if it was, its quality or type. In the 20th, anthropomorphic recognizable objects are chosen as artover those and that are not: a mask, with eyes and mouth, is more paradigmantically"primitive art"than is a slit gong or a kava bowl, however ritually meaningful they might have been and however smooth, elegant, and therefore "modem" their lines. I think it possible that the domination of the mimetic theory of meaning within the discipline of art history-that something means by representing something outside itself and that its mode of reference is iconic, which in turn constitutes the object as a mere representationor model of the world ratherthan as partof the world-is due to the dominanceof Renaissance studies within the Anglophone world, especially as formulatedby Panofsky (1955). Meaning, he wrote in his well-known article on the subject, can be preiconic, iconographic, and iconologic. Paintings' iconic contents, in turn, are illustrations of prior texts. And yet, if an object's meaning is signified otherwise than through the iconic function, the whole method of interpretation, taught to generations of art Thus one might explain the difficulty of convenhistory students, collapses. tional arthistory as a discipline in dealing with 20th-centuryWestern arts, preRenaissance arts, and non-Western arts generally, all of which may have iconic content but very few of which imagine themselves to be primarilyabout mimesis. In any case, the mad search for iconic meaning in Primitive Art was broughthome to me in December 1984 when I took the docent tourof the Rockefeller Wing and the docent and I came upon a horizontally long object with a beakof sorts.7 This, the docent said, was a "butterflymask."Their artis very sophisticated, she said, but it is entrenched in traditionalwisdom. This butterfly mask is well carved and painted, and we thinkit was used in initiationrites in the spring.Why, she asked rhetorically,is it in the shape of a butterfly?She said that we do not know, but thinks that it might have been to welcome spring. I objected that it has a beak; how do we know it is a butterfly? That is not all there is to it, she continued: its intention was not to make something look like a butterfly:their artis conceptual, it is about invisible concepts. For instance, she said, moving to a case with a carvedmale andfemale figure from Dogon, this is a primordialcouple (.. . and note the long, cylindrical slender shapes characteristicof the style of the western Sudan). The man carries a quiver, and the woman has a baby on her back. That shows that he is the progenitor, she the nurturer.Moreover, his hand is holding his penis and his other armis aroundher. They had no writing, but by means of such statues they were able to express invisible concepts like the cooperation between the sexes. I wondered what spring was like in the Sudan,8and what sorts of concepts were not invisible, but even that was way aheadof me. That first object did not look like a butterflyto me; in fact, I was not sure it was a mask. It remindedme of the old joke, "if I had some ham, I could have some ham and eggs, if I had some eggs": if it is a butterfly, it is a splendid example of a butterfly mask, if it is a mask. But then again, perhaps it is a bat, and then what would one make of

ART? 211 PRIMITIVE WHATBECAMEAUTHENTIC

it? And why, I wonder, does it have a beak? Unless the beak really represents a penis, in which case it is well on its way to being a visual representationof the invisible concept of "the cooperation between the sexes." This mask (if it is a mask) is a particularlybeautiful and well-executed carving of a butterfly with a beak; conversely and alternatively, it is a singularly poor rendition of a bat. Higher Realities In a witty passage that addresses the question of what becomes Primitive Art, ArthurDanto explicitly rejects the idea that formal qualities alone make an object into art.To make this point he imagines two tribes, the Pot People and the Basket People, who make identical pots and baskets. But Pot People invest pots with a great deal of meaning, which Danto writes about with ingenious and amusing detail. "Lying at the cross point of art, philosophy, and religion," he concludes the passage, "the pots of the Pot People belong to Absolute Spirit. Their baskets, tightly woven to insure sustained utility, are drabcomponents in the Prose of the World"(Danto 1988:24). The opposite is trueof the Basket People, of course. In sum, "artifacts" consist of "objects whose meaning is exhausted in their utility.... They are what they are used for, but artworkshave some higher role, putting us in touch with higher realities; they are defined through their possession of meaning" (Danto 1988:31). Happily for Danto's point, a very large proportion of the objects in the Rockefeller Wing have "ceremonial"uses in their original contexts, such as ancestor poles from the Pacific, totem poles from the northwest coast of America, and masks and reliquaryfigures from Africa. Objects such as these have "uses" and "functions"in their own societies, but those functions are outside our experience of usefulness and can therefore be grafted onto the sacred-useless category of art with more ease than can objects like cooking pots or grain grinders. Everyday functional items are for the most part left out. (Of course there is an occasional exquisite ladle, reminiscent of a Brancusi in its radical simplicity.) Here is a selection of labels from artifacts in the Rockefeller Wing: The Asmatcelebrated deathwith feasts and ritualsthatboth commemorated the deadandincitedthe living to avengethem.
Dogon figures with raised arms "allude to the communion between heaven and earth. The sculptures sometimes wear pendants, representing covenant stones that identify priests of totemic ancestorcults. Large containers often with a horse's head and tail are used to hold sacrificial meat duringannualceremonies commemorating the Dogon myth of creation." Nowhere is the complexity and variety of Kuba design more apparentthan in the plush textiles that men and women of high rank wear as wrapped skirts on ceremonial occasions. Fijian clubs, "favored weapons in the 19th century," were "intendedto shatter the skulls thus not only causing death but insulting the sacred part of the body."

212 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

From the Solomon islands, "the finest examples of shell-work are certain ceremonial shields, a small number of which were made in a brief period in the 19th century."

The terms"ceremony,""ritual," "rite,""initiation,""sacred,""sacrificial," "ancestor,"and "totemic"occur again and again in Rockefeller Wing labels; the objects chosen for display are overwhelmingly "ceremonial"objects. If something apparentlyutilitarianis displayed, such as a bowl, it is almost inevitably a "ceremonialbowl," as likely as not used by high-statuspeople. I was interested to note that the museum labels and the catalogue of MoMA's 1984 "Primitivism" in 20th CenturyArt" show even used the completely discreditedterm"fetish." (Curiouslyenough, a very similar figure to the one in the Primitivismshow labeled a "fetish"appearedin the show going on concurrentlyat the Centerfor African Art;but there it was called an "oath-takingfigure.") Nowadays, I would have thought,the termis confined to departmentstores, such as a display I came upon in Gump's in San Francisco selling "Zuni Fetishes-In The Traditional Fetish Style." Ritual objects, high status, and rarity all tend to imply each other in the labels of High Primitive Art. There is no reason to suppose that these labels are incorrector even really misleading-although these days anthropologistsseldom use termslike totemic ancestor cults, as though what totemic means and what ancestor cult means which they are not. My point, rather,is that these objects are were transparent, drawn overwhelmingly from the realm of the "sacred" as contrasted to the "secular,"a Durkheimiandichotomy that, once more, has little currencyin modern anthropology.Then, too, the lack of culturalspecificity of the labels, the use only of English-languageterms(ritual,ceremony, initiation, etc.) andthe failure to explicate the purposes and sociology of these "ceremonies" (initiation into what? by whom and for whom? ritualin orderto do what?) leave the casual visitor with the distinct impression that "PrimitiveMan" is obsessed with ritualor, at least, that Primitive Art expresses higher realities. Part of the reasoning that underlies the selection of ritual objects as art ratherthan more mundaneitems, it seems probable, is the 18th-centurydistinction between mere craft and high art. Applied to the selection of non-Western objects, the distinction between high art and utilitariancraft tends to mean that obviously functional items (especially if they are undecorated)do not qualify as art. It was gratifying to see the distinction between art and non-art spelled out explicitly at the Field Museum in Chicago. An exhibit case near the entranceto the ethnographic rooms I saw in 1986 (since removed) was divided into three sections: "Art,"featuringa decoratedritual object; "Decorative Art,"featuring a decoratedbowl; and (miserable thing) "Non-Art,"featuring a ratherstraightforward-lookingundecoratedstone ax. "Art"was described like this:
Art objects differ from society to society, but they tend to be concerned with making visible the supernaturaland the intangible. In so doing, art may render more manageable some of the terrors and uncertainties of life.

WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 213

The selection of ritual objects over utilitarianones as Primitive Art is undoubtedly multiply determined.For one thing, ritual use links an object to the transcendent,a way that art in general (not just Primitive Art) is validated rhetorically. For another,art and craft were separatedfrom each other at the end of the 18th century, and anything with an immediately obvious utilitarianuse runs the risk of being categorized as mere "craft,"whereas objects used for ceremonial purposes from other traditions,by contrast, appearnonutilitarianto us and are more likely to be regardedas transcendent,therefore making them into the category "art."And finally, the talk about "higherrealities" shades off into the talk that has been characterizedas "primitivism." One of the most common ways we talk about Primitive Art is by talking about the primitive, a word and concept that has different valences in different
eras. In her book Primitive Art in Civilized Places (1989), Sally Price asks,

"How do we talk about primitive art?"and, in a chapter she calls "The Night Side of Man," states thatthe notion that "PrimitiveMan"fears the elements and terrifying spirits is very deep in arttalk aboutPrimitive Art. I do not doubt it-in fact, evidence to that effect crops up everywhere-but it is also worth noting that art talk about "the primitive"is not monolithic. Many of the quotations in Price's book are drawnfrom the writings of people whose sensibilities concerning "the primitive"were formed between the two world wars, when most of Africa and Oceania was still colonized and when the notion of Primitive Art was still being formed and institutionalized in museum shows. This view of Primitives-that they fear the unknown, and throughtheir art they both express their superstitions and exorcise their demons-has its origins, I believe, in 19th-century horror at the grotesque pagan rituals that were observed among the colonized. It is probably very basic to the invention of the non-Western artifact as art; it was there at its inception, when Pablo Picasso was inspired not-he insisted (at least in this quote)-by these objects' formal characteristics but by their magical power. He says: They were againsteverything-againstunknown threatening spirits.... I, too, I amagainsteverything. too, believethateverything unknown, everything is that I, people avoid comingunderthe influenceof spiritsagain, to help thembecome ... independent. Spirits,theunconscious theyareall the samething.I understood All with the masks... thedusty why I was a painter. alonein thatawfulmuseum Les musthavebeenbornthatday,butnotat mannequins. Demoisellesd'Avignon all becauseof the forms;becauseit was my first exorcismpainting-yes abso1976:5] lutely! [Malraux The view that Primitive Man is obsessed with fear and irrationalsuperstition and that their arts express it is reflected in the following passages by Kenneth Clarkand by Thomas McEvilley, which Price quotes. Juxtaposingpictures of the head of the Apollo Belvedere and something labeled merely "African mask," Clark makes this comment in his book Civilisation:
is an enemy! ... women, children . .. the whole of it! I understood what the Negroes used their sculptures for. ... All fetishes . . . were weapons. To help

214 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

An even more extreme example comes to mind, of an African mask that belonged to Roger Fry. I remember when he bought it and hung it up, and we agreed that it had all the qualities of a great work of art. I fancy that most people, nowadays, would find it more moving than the head of the Apollo of the Belvedere. Yet for four hundredyears after it was discovered, the Apollo was the most admiredpiece of scupture in the world.... Whatever its merits as a work of art, I don't think there's any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilization than the mask. They both represent spirits, messengers from another world-that is to say, from a world of our imagining. To the Negro imagination it is a world of fear and darkness, ready to inflict horrible punishment for the smallest infringement of a taboo. To the Hellenistic imagination, it is a world of light and confidence, in which the gods are like ourselves, only more beautiful, and descend to earthin order to teach men reason and the laws of harmony. [Clark 1979:2, quoted in Price 1989] Lest one imagine that this view of Primitive Art, and with it Primitive Man, is completely outdated, it is worth reading McEvilley's 1984 critical review of the 1984 MoMA exhibit "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art. In it McEvilley castigates Rubin and Varnadoe, the curators responsible for the show, for appropriating these artifacts as art rather than what they "really" are, religious artifacts; he suggests that they should have been provided with ethnographic context that reveals them as such. He tells us what he thinks Primitive Man's religion is in this remarkable passage: In their native contexts these objects were invested with feelings of awe and dread, not of aesthetic ennoblement. They were seen usually in motion, at night, in closed dark spaces, by flickering torchlight. Their viewers were under the influence of ritual, communal identification feelings, and often alcohol or drugs; above all, they were activated by the presence within or among the objects themselves of the shaman, acting out of the usually terrifying power representedby the mask or icon. What was at stake for the viewer was not aesthetic appreciation but loss of self in identification with and support of the shamanic performance. [McEvilley 1984:59, quoted in Price 1989] Nonetheless, it is my impression that this strand of primitivism is not the most prevalent one in the United States in the 1990s, in which the voices promoting Primitive Art (and of course its descendants, ethnic arts and tribal arts of various sorts) sound increasingly New Age. The more dominant primitivism in popular culture in the late 20th century, it seems to me, is a much softer primitivism. Rather than imagining drug-besotted natives dancing around flickering fires and terrified of the spirits, it imagines an ecologically conscious people living in harmony with nature and, sometimes, worshiping their version of the goddess. I call this version New Age primitivism. It is practiced by people who visit Egyptian and Mesoamerican pyramids and Stonehenge in order to collect the cosmic rays that gather there, and by those who conduct rituals in the kivas of Pueblo Indians in the Southwest (much to the latter's annoyance), and so forth. And, of course, many people who in other aspects of their lives are not particularly New Age are also deeply interested in the "primitive" and the "authentic" and are interested in buying and collecting its tokens.

WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 215

It seems to me thatthese attitudes-the one thatviews PrimitiveMan as obsessed with ritual and terrified of spirits, and the one that views Primitive Man as living harmoniously with nature and as in touch with higher realities-are each other's flip sides. Both should be called primitivismbecause both make the same moves thatEdward Said implied were characteristicof "orientalism":the moves of dichotomizing, otherizing, and essentializing (1979). It is their imagined or presumed link with the "higher"realites (Absolute Spirit, or Cosmic Energy, or Gaia, or The Goddess) that allows some objects, even from places far from the Renaissance in space and time, to be claimed as art. Formal Qualities, or Does It Look Modern? A great many objects and sorts of objects have been displayed, collected, sold, and valued by individuals as Primitive Art. Historically (between the two world wars and in the 1950s) and in art-historicaland art-museumcircles, one of the most importantways of talking about, hence selecting, certain kinds of objects over others to become Authentic Primitive Art was their "formalqualities." In practice this could not help but mean, more or less (but usually more), how closely they approximatedthe formal qualities, the "look,"of high modernist art. The discourse of formal qualities claims these objects as valuable "aesthetically,"divorced from any of their uses or meanings in the societies thatproduced them. This point of view is well known and is insistently articulated in pre-World War II MoMA exhibits of non-Western artifacts. The catalogue of MoMA's 1935 exhibit African Negro Art was a paean of praise to the formal plastic qualities of African (read: modern) art. In his concluding paragraphto this catalogue, James Johnson Sweeney asserts that, taking into account anything at all about the history, cultures, or contexts that produced African art is positively dangerous-a more clear and present danger to us, since we know more than Picasso did about African cultures: In the end, it is not the tribalcharacteristics Negroartnorits strangeness of that It areinteresting. is its plasticqualities.Picturesque exotic featuresas well as or and historical ethnographic considerations have a tendencyto blindus to its true worth. Thiswas realizedatonce by its earliestamateurs. Todaywiththeadvances we have made duringthe last thirtyyears in our knowledgeof Africa, it has becomean even graverdanger.Our approach must be held conscientiouslyin It another direction. is the vitalityof the formsof Negroartthatshouldspeakto withoutimpoverishment, unnerving the us, the simplification emphasison the of essential,the consistent,three-dimensional organization structural planes in architectomic truth witha seemingly sequences,the uncompromising to material intuitiveadaptation it, and the tensionachievedbetweenthe idea or emotion of to be expressedthrough and of representation the abstract principles scupture. The artof NegroAfricais a sculptor'sart.As a sculptural in tradition the last it we it. ] century hasno rival.It is as sculpture shouldapproach [Sweeney1935:11 A few years later, different authors emphasize the same theme. From the catalogue for the exhibit Indian Art of the United States, MoMA, 1941:

216 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

In theory,it shouldbe possibleto arriveat a satisfactory aestheticevaluationof the artof any groupwithoutbeingmuchconcerned with its culturalbackground. A satisfactory of organization lines, spaces,forms, shadesand colors shouldbe self-evidentwhereverwe find it. [DouglasandD'Harnoncourt 1941:11] (They go on to explain that in practice, however, we are saved from many errors by knowing something about the culture that produced the object. For a more complete account of this exhibit, see Rushing 1992.) An object's formal qualities (how closely it approaches a modernist aesthetic) persist as criteria that filter High Primitive Art from crafts, however "authentic" the latter may be. Take, for instance, the two pieces of jewelry shown in Figure 2-both of them chest ornaments,both made of gold, both from Sumba, Indonesia. One is much more memorable as art than the other, which looks simply like a gold chest ornament.See also the postcards in Figure 3 announcing exhibitions in one of San Francisco's "best"galleries of "artof Africa, Oceania & the Americas." One of them construes the shield as a "canvas,"the other concerns "the vertical" in "tribalcomposition." A decoratedritual object that has become High Primitive Art has two relevant qualities: its participation in the sacred and its formal plastic qualities (to use art-talk). And indeed non-Western objects entered the realm of Primitive Art by two roads: by their formal aesthetic qualities, or by their expressiveness of shamanistic exorcistic power. In practice, these two are often merged in the same objects: it is no accident that the mask, reliquaryfigure, or totemic ancestor figure stand as paradigmaticexamples of the highest, most Authentic Primitive Art.

'Figure 2

Figure2 Two chest ornamentsfrom Sumba,Indonesia.Reprintedby permissionof Musei

Barbier-Mueller, Geneva, Switzerland. Photograph by P. A. Ferrazzini.

TO

IN

WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 217

GALLERYDEROCHE
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in A case study in High Primitive Art and the notions of "authenticity" the "primitive"that surroundedit occurredin the most interesting andcontroversial show of Primitive Art in the last several decades. It was the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "Primitivism"in 20th CenturyArt, which took place in 1984, organized by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe. It merged these two readings, formalist and mystical, depending on whether one read the show backwardsor forwards. (That was not, of course, its stated intent.) It was laid out in three areas, which the visitor passed through sequentially. The first area showed what

218 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

I have called High Primitive Art-the pieces, or ones like them, that influenced the cubists and surrealists.The second areawas a large room called "Affinities," where examples of Primitive Art were juxtaposed with examples of modem art; the primitive andthe modem of each pairrevealed a presumablyremarkableand strangeaffinity with its opposite. The last room was called "ModemPrimitives" and consisted of the work of contemporaryWestern artists who are influenced by the Primitive. The exhibit's statedintent was to reveal the connections between Primitive Art and the modernists,most especially Picasso. Enteringthe exhibit, the visitor could read a plaque with a ratherdefensive message from William Rubin insisting thatthe exhibit was not, afterall, aboutPrimitive Artin its ethnographiccontext but about its importanceto modern art and modern artists.Rubin's qualification is, in my view, entirely legitimate, for there is no reason whatsoever to insist that these objects must be understood within their culturalcontext if one is interested in their meanings to cubists and surrealists. A social history of primitivism in 20th-centuryart would have been fascinating. But that was not, in fact, what the exhibit was about. The first partof the show was about how the formal qualities of African artifacts made them appealing to cubists, while Oceanic artifactsappealed to surrealists. The voice-over of museum labels was insistently formalist: a Melanesian object explored "negative space" with great sophistication; another piece revealed "frontalsymmetry." The exhibit's middle section, "Affinities," paired various non-Westernartifacts with European20th-centuryobjects reminiscent of them in formal terms. Depleted of historicity, anything that is similar visually to anything else is indeed visually similarto anythingelse. To thatthere can be no objection. The museum's voice-over never explained what, other than the context of their display (a possibility never admitted by the labels or catalogue), could have brought such similarities into being. The thirdandfinal section of the show contained the workof contemporary Western artists who are "primitivists."The room's introductoryplaque stated that primitivism these days is less inspired by the formal qualities of actual objects, the way they look, as it is by Primitive Man's myth, ritual, and religionhence the absence of actual Primitive objects in this room. It featured contemporarysculpturesby Euro-Americanartists with bits of feathers and other items that signify the Primitive. The visitor could infer that the Primitive now is a spirit or attituderatherthan the formal qualities of certain objects. Reading chronologically and historically, a visitor strolling through 20th CenturyPrimitivism moved forward in time, from past to present, beginning with Picasso and friends early in the 20th century, passing through a lesson in purely formal relations in the "Affinities" room, and ending with contemporary primitivist artistsin 1984. But the same stroll was also a journey throughmythical space, one that takes us backwards through time to our origins. It moved from a specific point in historical time, the early 20th century(the exhibit's first part), into the realm of pure form and spirit (the "Affinities" room), and finally

WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 219

to the mythical realm of the purely authentic(the last room), where the spirit of the Primitive, rather than simply material objects, informs the creation of art. Read as myth ratherthan history, the sequence narratedthe story of the search for modern art's origins, taking us away from mere form and deeper into spirit. If the spirit of classical Greece was the worthy ancestor of Art with a capital A in the Renaissance, the spirit of Primitive Man, this exhibit in effect said, was the worthy ancestor of modern art in the early 20th century. Defining Authentic Primitive Art High Primitive Art is not a set of specific objects but a prototype that defines the term Primitive Art. Just as some linguists claim that, when we say the word bird, we have in mind a prototype of a bird (it resembles a robin), in the same way, I believe, when we say Primitive Art our basic prototype is High Primitive Art. Other objects sold or exhibited as Primitive Art gain their legitimacy or fail in it by their closeness or deviation from High Primitive Art. If the category-prototype"bird"looks more or less like a robin, what does the category-prototype"High Primitive Art"look like? The startingpoint from which to understandthe prototype is the fact thatobjects of a certain sort gained legitimacy as art as partof high modernism;they migrated into the category art due to their place in the narrativeof art history. The highest of High Primitive Art, then, the first-tier or basic core of objects that define the prototype, consists of objects that actually did influence, or look as if they could have influenced, the likes of Picasso and Maurice de Vlaminck: they are African; they were "collected" by the turn of this century; they are in the shape of a mask or the ancestralfigure, to wit, an anthropomorphic form in a certain range of size; they are made of wood; they are ritual objects ratherthan utilitarian ones (the mask, not the grain-grinder;the ancestral figure, not the basket). Just as the prototype bird may look a lot like a robin but is not actually any particular collection of individual robins, the prototype High Primitive Art looks like the kind of thing that could have influenced Picasso and Vlaminck, but need not actually have done so; it ought to have been collected by the turn of the century, but it may not have been. In other words, the prototype is defined by an idea and a "look"ratherthan by any particularmaterialexemplars that fit it. The slippage is necessary and inevitable. For one thing, the pieces that actually influenced Picasso or hung in his living room are valuable to collectors because of their provenance, but they may not have been the "finest" examples of their kind; Picasso is reputed to have said, "You don't need a masterpiece to get the idea." Nonetheless, "fine, old" pieces that also look like the things Picasso might have been influenced by, but are "better"than the things he looked at or owned, are fully prototypical. Second, whereasmany exemplarsof the prototypemay have been collected afterthe turnof the century, it is difficult to documentthese matters,and one can be sure that plenty of objects that have been displayed in the most prestigious

220 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

museums were made later. Fortunately,the analyst seeking to define whatHigh Primitive Art prototypeslook like could simply look into the "Affinities"room in the 1984 MoMA show. It contained examples of pieces of PrimitiveArt bearing a supposedly uncannyresemblanceto moder art. (Since they were selected because they bore an uncannyresemblance to modern art,the juxtapositionwas more canny than not.) The "Affinities" room in effect showed museumgoers how High Primitive Art ought to look. If the prototypeof a bird looks like a robin but is not actually a robin, some exemplars of birds that do not deviate greatly from it consist of bluejays and swallows; they are immediately recognizable as birds by people who know the prototype. Second-tier High Primitive Art, the bluejays and swallows of Primitive Art, is a deviation from the prototype immediately recognizable even by conservative collectors and curatorsas exemplars of it. The Rockefeller Wing, in my view, displays this second-tier High Primitive Art. Geographically, the definition has expanded to New Guinea (Asmat, Sepik) and to Mesoamerica (pre-Columbian);the expansion in materialsis to pottery and gold in the case of Mesoamerica, and to figures adornedwith feathers and raffia in the case of New Guinea and the rest of the Pacific. Another kind of object is now coming onto the market, largely since the 1970s, which is often sold as "authenticethnic art."I am thinking of the large numbers of beautiful, finely crafted objects and textiles that have been made available to the market in the last couple of decades due to changes in "third world" nation-state policy towardforeign investments and internalminorities, and due to revolutions and the displaced peoples and objects that, in desperation, they sell. These sorts of events liberate objects from the contexts that produced them. At galleries and boutiques and from private dealers, one can now see old silks and purses and caps and elaborately worked boxes from parts of China, where individualEuro-Americanentrepreneur-sellerscan now go; ayurvedic medicine apparatusesand chests from Sri Lanka;textiles, temple decorations, and ancestralfigures in abundancefrom Indonesia; or huge quantitiesof old silver jewelry from Morocco, Ethiopia, and other northerlyareas of Africa. Often these objects are not labeled as primitive-it is out of fashion to say the wordprimitive in any context, and besides, these objects are often from "high," literate, hierarchical societies. The word ethnic, rather, signifies that they are non-Western.And these objects often are not promoted as art-some are utilitarian,some consist of jewelry, and some are so far from the aesthetics of modernism that they are hardly assimilable as Art with a capital A. Objects of this sort are sometimes labeled crafts, sometimes collectibles, but very often they are called arts, which seems to have a different signification from the singular word art. (The semiotic burdenborne by Primitive Art and "ethnic arts"is very different.) Sometimes the signifying feature is that they were "handmade," But "used,"and "traditional." they are sold as "authentic,"a termthatis used by one large emporium of "tribal, ethnic, and folk arts" to mean that they were made and used "pre-1940s." One does not know, of course, when they were made or used, but they may have come onto the marketfairly recently. I consider

WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 221

these sorts of "authenticethnic arts"to be a kind of third-tier"AuthenticPrimitive Art," perhaps the ducks and chickens-this analogy is getting a little stretched-to the prototype. The kinds of objects that are made for the market by ethnic minorities within NorthAmerica, or by fourth-worldpeoples within third-worldcountries, many of which became independentat midcentury,are currentlysold as as contemporaryethnic arts, authenticIndianjewelry, genuine Mayan folk art, and so forth. They stand to the prototype Authentic Primitive Art perhaps as emus and cassowaries do to the prototype bird. Objects of this sort used to be denigrated as degenerate"touristart"but now are taking their place as legitimate forms of arts, crafts, and decorations, and are moving into the category of contemporary art, with named artists. (See Figure 4.) It is worth mentioning, finally and briefly, the vast marketin kitsch, reproductions, and spinoffs of Authentic Primitive Art, although I have run out of birds with which to compare them. These, too, could no doubt be hierarchized;

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Figure 4 "Beautiful Investments" advertisement for the Gallery of Eskimo Art, Santa Monica, California.

222 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

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WHAT BECAME AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART? 223

perhaps reproductions put out by museums would rate higher than home decorations that refer only loosely to to a generalized "primitive." Consider the text is a fertility doll from Ghana. Made of bonded in Figure 5a-"Akua'ba to that in Figure 5b: "FERTILITY DOLL In much of the stone."-compared world, a sculpture like this is a traditional wedding gift given to ensure a bountiful future." But it is a close call. All these objects, their markets, their dealers, and their collectors gain legitimacy and comprehensibility by the fact that they are anchored by the prototype Authentic Primitive Art. (As the brochure in Figure 5b puts it, "Primitive art, once fancied only by artists and archaeologists, has recently gained considerable appeal. People are realizing that objects like these can look as sophisticated as ones in sterling silver.") High Primitive Art stands to the rest of the market in primitive art more or less as Renaissance painting stands to the rest of the art market. It invented the category. It defines the genre. It anchors the market. Notes 1. Jacques Maquet makes basically the same distinction and acknowledges the same source, but he calls these categories "artby destination"and "artby metamorphosis" (1979[1971], 1986). I am renamingthe categories out of respect for both Malraux's and Maquet's ideas; the tenor of their writings about "metamorphoses"is entirely different from mine, and it is just as well to keep the terms distinct. 2. The definitive social history of frames has not, to my knowledge, been written, but see Brettell and Starling 1986 for a start.
3. The most useful account of the conceptual reoganization of the arts is probably

still Kristeller's The Modern System of the Arts (1965).

4. The phrase the way something looks means to a rational subject in certain

conditions, as Nelson Goodman points out, not the way it looks to a drunk through a teardrop(1976). 5. It is worth noting, in passing, that iconicity is partly in the eye of the beholder. Many societies have producedobjects that have some iconic content-that is, signs that signify or refer to other things by resembling them, in local sensibilities. The resemblance may be highly conventionalized and schematic, recognizable as "resembling" something else only to people in that culture, or it may be secret knowledge, restricted to the initiated. Conventionalized and schematic though they be, the white spots painted on an AustralianAboriginal woman may be "readable"to her and her clan as signifying dappled light on water; the circles painted on Sepik River men's houses may signify "moons" and "women's bellies." These significations have an iconic content, but it would barely be recognized by those not clued in to the semiotic system. (See Morphy 1991 on the Yolngu of Australia, and Forge 1973 on the Abelam of New Guinea.) The
problematic of iconicity is a deep topic that has had extensive commentary. See Nelson

Goodman 1976.
6. This anecdote is told in Lynes's Good Old Modern. He quotes the Bulletin of

the Museum of ModernArt in April 1936, which explained:

Many objects ... had been refused free entrancebecause it was impossible to prove thatcertain sculptures were not more than second replicas, or because the artist's signature could not be produced,or because no date of manufacturecould be found, or because ancient bells, drums, spoons, necklaces, fans, stools and headrests were considered by the examiners to be objects

ANTHROPOLOGY 224 CULTURAL of utilityandnotworksof art.As a resulttheMuseum forcedto give bond,thepremium was to in on whichamounted $700. [quoted Lynes1973:139] 7. The following conversation was recorded in fieldnotes, December 14, 1984. 8. Incidentally, I took Susan Vogel's recorded tour of the African part of the Rockefeller Wing after finishing the docent tour. It seems that there is a rainy season in western Sudan and that scads of little yellow butterflies appear right before it; as a consequence, according to the tape, butterflies are associated with rain, fertility, and crops. That appears to be the derivation of the docent's suggestion that the "butterfly mask" may be to "welcome spring."

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Lynes, Russell 1973 Good Old Modern:An IntimatePortraitof Museum of ModernArt. New York: Atheneum. Malraux,Andre 1949 Museum without Walls. StuartGilbert, trans.Bollingen Series, 24. New York: Pantheon Books. 1976 Picasso's Mask. June and Jacques Guicharaud, trans. New York: Holt, Rinehartand Winston. Maquet,Jacques 1979[1971] Introduction to Aesthetic Anthropology. 2nd edition. Malibu, CA: Undena Publications. 1986 The Aesthetic Experience: An Anthropologist Looks at the Visual Arts. New Haven: Yale University Press. McEvilley, Thomas 1984 "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: 'Primitivism' in 20th-Century Art" at the Museum of Modern Art. Artforum23(3):55-60. Morphy,Howard 1991 Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Munn,Nancy 1973 Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society. Ithaca:Cornell University Press. Newton, Douglas 1978 Masterpieces of Primitive Art. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Panofsky,Erwin 1955 Iconography and Iconology: An Introductionto the Study of Renaissance Art. In Meaning in the Visual Arts. Pp. 26-54. New York: Doubleday. Parezo,Nancy 1983 Navajo Sandpainting:From Religious Act to Commercial Art. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Price, Sally 1989 Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Rubin,William 1984 Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction. In "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art. Kirk Varedoe and William Rubin, eds. Pp. 1-71. New York: Museum of Moder Art; Boston: Little, Brown, & Co. Rushing,JacksonW. 1992 Marketing the Affinity of the Primitive and the Modern: Ren6 d'Haroncourt and "IndianArt of the United States." In The Early Years of Native American Art History. Janet C. Berlo, ed. Pp. 191-236. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Said, Edward 1979 Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Summers,David 1987 The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sutton,Peter 1988 Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. New York: George Braziller Publishers in association with The Asia Society Galleries.

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