The Death of Authentic Primitive Art & Other Tales of Progress (Paper)

1. Auflage 1998
ISBN: 978-0-520-21211-4
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 335 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 544 g

In this lucid, witty, and forceful book, Shelly Errington argues that Primitive Art was invented as a new type of art object at the beginning of the twentieth century but that now, at the century's end, it has died a double but contradictory death. Authenticity and primitivism, both attacked by cultural critics, have died as concepts. At the same time, the penetration of nation-states, the tourist industry, and transnational corporations into regions that formerly produced these artifacts has severely reduced supplies of "primitive art," bringing about a second "death."

Errington argues that the construction of the primitive in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and the kinds of objects chosen to exemplify it) must be understood as a product of discourses of progress—from the nineteenth-century European narrative of technological progress, to the twentieth-century narrative of modernism, to the late- twentieth-century narrative of the triumph of the free market. In Part One she charts a provocative argument ranging through the worlds of museums, art theorists, mail-order catalogs, boutiques, tourism, and world events, tracing a loosely historical account of the transformations of meanings of primitive art in this century. In Part Two she explores an eclectic collection of public sites in Mexico and Indonesia—a national museum of anthropology, a cultural theme park, an airport, and a ninth-century Buddhist monument (newly refurbished)—to show how the idea of the primitive can be used in the interests of promoting nationalism and economic development.

Errington's dissection of discourses about progress and primitivism in the contemporary world is both a lively introduction to anthropological studies of art institutions and a dramatic new contribution to the growing field of cultural studies.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Errington, Shelly

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophische Anthropologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 20./21. Jahrhundert

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Preface
A Note on Punctuation and the Primitive

INTRODUCTION
TWO CENTURIES OF PROGRESS

PART ONE
THE DEATH OF AUTHENTIC PRIMITIVE ART
1. Three Ways to Tell the History of (Primitive) Art
2. What Became Authentic Primitive Art?
3· The Universality of Art as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
4· The Death of Authentic Primitive Art
5· Authenticity, Primitivism, and Art Revisited

PART TWO
AND OTHER TALES OF PROGRESS:

NATIONALISM, MODERNIZATION, DEVELOPMENT
6. Nationalizing the Pre-Columbian Past
in Mexico and the United States
7· The Cosmic Theme Park of the Javanese
8. Making Progress on Borobudur

Afterword
Notes
References
Index
Illustration Credits

Über Autor(innen)

Shelly Errington is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm (1989), and coeditor of Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia (1990).