incorporating BLACK PHOENIX

THIRD WORLD PERSPECTIVES ON CONTEMPORARY ART & CULTURE

SPRING 1989

Editor: Rasheed AraeenAssociate Editor: Jean FisherPromotion: Nikos PapastergiadisAdministrator: Tony Fisher

Advisory Committee: David A Bailey, Guy Brett, Mona Hatoum,Mahmood Jamal, Gavin Jantjes, Sarat Maharaj, Partha Mitter, Pratibha Parmar.

Rasheed Araeen

Yves Michaud

Benjamin Buchloh& Jean-Hubert Martin

Fumio Nanjo

John Mundine

Jyotindra Jain

Louis Perrois

Carlo Severi

Sally Price

James Clifford

Jean Fisher

Yves Michaud

Guy Brett

Our Bauhaus Others' Mudhouse

Les Cahiers/Editorial

Interview

Situation in Japan

Aboriginal Art in Australia Today

Ganea Devi: Tradition

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43& Expression in Madhubani Painting

Through the Eyes of the White ManFrom 'Negro Art' to African Arts

Primitivism withoutAppropriation: Boas, Newman,and the Anthropology of Art

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Our Art — Their Art

The Others: Beyond the'Salvage' Paradigm

Other Cartographies

Doctor Explorer Chief Curator

Earth & Museum: Local or Global?

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Editorial/SubscriptionThird Text303 Finchley RoadLondon NW3 6DT

SubscriptionsRates for four issues

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Cheques are payable toKala Press

Third Text is published byKala Press, part of theorganisation Black Umbrella(Project MRB)

Black Umbrella (Project MRB)is financially assisted byGreater London Arts.

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© 1989 Third Text.No article may be reproducedwithout the writtenpermission of the Editor.

The views expressed by thecontributors are notnecessarily those of theeditors.

ISSN 0952-8822

We are grateful to Yves Michaud, the editor of Les Cahiers,for his permission to publish in English the articles in thisspecial issue of Third Text. These articles were originallypublished in Les Cahiers du Musee d'Art Modeme, No 28, atthe occasion of the exhibition Magiciens de la terre, Paris. Thecopyright of these articles are with Editions du CentrePompidou, Paris.

JUAN FRANCISCO ELSO PADILLA

We regret to announce the death, in November 1988, of theCuban artist Elso Padilla, at the age of 32. Jimmie Durham'sdiscussion with Padilla, published in the last issue of ThirdText, serves as a brief introduction to the artist's work andideas at a time when the work of young Cuban artists is onlynow becoming available to European audiences. We extendour sympathy to his relatives and friends.

We acknowledge the financial assistance ofthe Arts Council of Great Britain

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Our BauhausOthers' Mudhouse

Rasheed Araeen

1. Lucy Lippard's text fromLes Cahiers is notincluded due to aprevious commitmentof the English version.

This issue of Third Text comprises all but one1 of the articles from thespecial issue of Les Cahiers du Musee National d'Art Modeme, Paris, whichhas been published to coincide with the exhibition Magiciens de la terre.Our own objective in publishing these texts in English is to inform ourreaders about this material, and we are doing this without necessarilyagreeing with the position of Les Cahiers or with the views of all thecontributors. What interests us primarily is the debate around thisexhibition; and in view of the stated aims of the exhibition, to whichmost of the articles are in sympathy, we feel that it is necessary thatthese aims are examined.

Going through the texts I have become aware of the ignoranceconcerning the actual state of affairs vis-a-vis other cultures (save thearticles by Brett and Fisher), let alone their modern achievements. Thecentral concern remains the same old-fashioned debate about therelationship between modernism and the traditions of others. It is notperhaps generally known that the 'other' has already entered into thecitadel of modernism and has challenged it on its own ground.

The question is no longer only what the 'other' is but also how the'other' has subverted the very assumptions on which 'otherness' isconstructed by dominant culture. The lack of knowledge of, or areluctance to recognise, what has actually occurred, historically andepistemologically, has led to the perpetuation of the very sameassumptions which the exhibition claims to question. Some of theseassumptions, which form the basis of modern art history, have beenquestioned by Benjamin Buchloh in his interview with Jean-HubertMartin, but the discussion remains entrenched in the liberal/humanistframework.

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It seems that anthropology has also played an important role in theconcept of Magitiens de la terre. The main preoccupation of anthropologycontinues to remain with the 'primitive', with what Buchloh calls 'theoriginal "Other" '; and although recent work in anthropology hasattempted to correct some of the earlier assumptions — particularlythe notion that so-called primitive societies are static, and their artistsanonymous, this correction is somehow misplaced. Moreover, theforegrounding of anthropological discourse in the context of theexhibition has somewhat distracted our attention from the fundamentalissue of the relationship between the globally dominant Western cultureand other cultures. If the relationship between the 'centre' and the'periphery' is of inequality, is it possible for an equal exchange to takeplace within a framework which does not challenge this relationship?

Why is there such an obsession with so-called primitive societies?Where are these societies? Are not most Third World societies todaypart of a global system, with a common mode of production andsimilarly developing social structures? Although countries like Indiaand Brazil may not be as industrialised as those of the West, themainstream of artistic production there has for some time been partof what Jean Fisher calls 'the paradigm of modernism'. It is true thatthere are cultures which somehow still operate outside the limits ofWestern culture, but can we say that they are not affected by moderndevelopments? Their marginality has little to do with the nature of theircultures but with the extremity of their exploitation and deprivationresulting from Western imperialism. The main struggle of many ofthese cultures is for the recovery of their land, as pointed out by bothJean Fisher and Guy Brett, and their entry into the modern world isvery much part of their struggle for self-determination.

The attempts of radical anthropology to question some of the oldassumptions are not of much use when they relate them only to so-called primitive societies of the past and do not take into account thepriority of present-day struggles and their challenge to the hegemonyof Western culture. The thrust of its main argument is often displacedfrom the centre of struggle (modernism/modern art) to the'predicament' of other cultures.

It is perhaps the recent shift towards the right in the art world, causedby the collusion of conservative, liberal and humanist forces, whichhas displaced the issue of power and status from the ideologicalstruggle to cultural eclecticism. The idea of 'anything goes' islegitimised by the benevolence of dominant culture, creating a spacein which the 'other' is accommodated in a spectacle that produces anillusion of equality.

Magidens de la terre is indeed a grand spectacle with a lot of fascinationfor the exotic. There is nothing wrong with a grand spectacle, but ifit ignores or undermines issues of a historical and epistemologicalnature then we must not be bogged down by the excitement andfascination it has produced. However, exoticism is not necessarilyinherent in the works themselves. It is in their decontextualisation, not

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only in the shift from one culture to another (which is inevitable), butmore importantly, in the displacement from one paradigm to another;this has emptied them of their meanings, leaving only what FredricJameson calls a 'play of surfaces' to dazzle the (dominant) eye.

The issues here are too complex to be confined to the mere domainsof ethnology and sociology. Art history may be a limited context inwhich to deal with cultural issues, particularly when it remains firmlyentrenched in its eurocentricity, but ethnology and sociology canconfuse basic issues concerning the function and status of art inadvanced capitalist society. This confusion can lead us to believe thathuman creativity, aesthetics and art are the same things, legitimisingself-expression where it is not transformed into a discourse related tothe historical dynamics of its time, and where there is little recognitionof the constraints and limitations of art as a professional practice. Thismakes it necessary to ask whether the status of art, its meanings andsignificances, are fixed within particular cultural or historical formationsor whether they can be defined universally?

CYPRIEN TOKOUDAGBA (Benin) Installation 1989

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The term quality has been eliminated from my vocabulary, since there is noconvincing system to establish relative and binding criteria of quality ...

1 will... go by visual criteria alone, my vision and that of my colleagues...

Jean-Hubert Martin

Is the EYE enough to recognise what we appreciate to be art? If themere creation of visual images (whatever the reasons for making them)and their attractiveness to the EYE are enough to recognise what isart, and that their significance is available to individual sensibilities,why do we need other discourses (art history, theory and criticism,among others) in order to legitimate them as Art?

In order to understand the function of art, and the privileges of itsproducers (artists), in our modern culture, we need to confront thefact that the production of the commodity is fundamental (bothmaterially and ideologically) to the very historical formation of thisculture. Therefore, is it not necessary that we address ourselves to thevalue of the commodity and to the role it plays in global domination,instead of becoming enchanted by humanist proclamations against itsf etishization? Is not the constant attempt of the bourgeoisie to humaniseits dehumanised body, a condition which constantly requiresstimulation for its survival, creating a beautiful Mirage of manycolours? It will not be realistic to deny the magical effects of suchspectacle, but we should also know that there is nothing magical aboutit.

The concern for mass participation in our contemporary culture isunderstandable and is laudable, but mass participation in capitalistsociety is an illusion which can mask its fundamental contradictions.In the carnival everybody is equal! But what happens when the carnivalis over?

In the beginning it was Modernism, modernism for everybody all overthe world irrespective of different cultures. When the others began todemand their share of the modern pie, modernism becamepostmodernism: now there is 'Western' culture and 'other' cultures,located within the same 'contemporary' space. The continuingmonopolisation of modernism by Western culture (particularly in thevisual arts) is to deny the global influences of modernism, and to maskits function as a dominant force of history to which peoples all overthe world are increasingly subjected. If other peoples are now, in turn,aspiring to its material achievements and want to claim their own share,why are they constantly reminded of its harmful effects on their owntraditional cultures? If the aspiration to modernity and modernism isdetrimental to the creativity of other cultures, why is this concernconfined only to the production of art? Can we separate the questionof contemporary production "of art from the dominant economic systemand its global effects? The trap here is too attractive: the concept of

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'others' as mere victims of dominant culture will be to deny othercultures their ability to question their domination and to liberatethemselves from it. Why is the aspiration of other cultures forsecularism and materialism seen as antithetical to their own traditions?

The shift from modernism to postmodernism does not absolve usfrom our responsibility to look into the history of modernism and totry and understand the implications of what it includes and excludes.What it excludes from its recognition is not only what Buchloh calls'the plurality of cultures', or the continuation of past traditions, butalso 'the objects of high culture' produced by the 'other'. The elitismof modern art is clear to all of us, and this is not the place to arguefor radical alternatives. However, any challenge to modernism, as faras Third World is concerned, must come from a premise whichrecognises its postcolonial aspirations for modernity. Of course, theconjuncture of postcolonial aspirations in the Third World countriesand the neocolonial ambitions of advanced capitalism has producednew conflicts and contradictions, which in turn have necessitated theemergence of a critical discourse that rightly interrogates modernism'sutopian/broken promises. Modernism for the 'other' remains a basicissue.

Magicieiis de la terre has brought to the surface, perhaps unwittingly,some of the questions which are fundamental to the understandingof this exhibition. It would be extremely difficult to discuss all thequestions in detail in the space of a single article, let alone find someanswers. But I feel compelled to deal with these questions after havingseen the exhibition and felt terribly disappointed by the wholeenterprise. One would normally feel obliged to be grateful when oneis actually a participant in such an international exhibition , but it isalso essential that the paternalism of power must constantly bequestioned if we are not to be imprisoned by its benevolence.

My disappointment with the exhibition is not due to the quality ofthe work, or the display. In fact the exhibition looks very attractive;almost all the works are given equal space and are arranged in sucha way that in some cases it is difficult to distinguish visually betweenthe 'modern' and the 'traditional'. Having said all this I must alsoexpress my appreciation of some very beautiful works, particularlythose of the Chinese, Chilean and Brazilian artists. My main criticismconcerns the lack of any radical theoretical or conceptual frameworkthat can justify the togetherness of works which represent differenthistorical formations.

It is claimed that all the works, irrespective of their cultural origin,are presented 'on equal terms'. But is this 'equality' not an illusion?How is this 'equality' achieved, if not by ignoring the differences ofdifferent works? Of course, the differences have been allowed to enterinto a common space. But what is the significance of this entry? Is itpossible for 'difference' to function critically in a curatorial space wherethe criticality of 'difference' is in fact negated by the illusion of visual

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similarities and sensibilities of works produced under different systems,displacing the question of the unequal power of different works fromthe domain of ideology to cultural aesthetics. No wonder the commondenominator here is a presumed 'magic' of all works which transcendssocioeconomic determinants. If Western artists sell their work for largesums of money, this is not due to an imperative of power whichlegitimates their work as precious commodities but the presumed magicof their work! Why does this magic not work in the case of non-European artists?

However, Magiciens de la terre is an extremely important exhibition.Not only for its physical scale — one hundred 'artists' from all overthe world in an exhibition occupying both the top floor of the GeorgesPompidou Centre and the Grand Hall of La Villette — but also for itsglobal ambition; not only for its claim to represent many differentcultures but also for its presumed intention to question those culturaldistinctions which have divided the world. These claims take on aparticular significance when viewed in the context of the bicentennialcelebration of the French Revolution with its famous proclamation ofLIBERTY, EQUALITY AND FRATERNITY. We know what hashappened in the whole world since then. If the French Revolutioninspired the peoples of the world to seek freedom and equality, it isalso now a reminder of the constant failure of its aims. But it seemsthat the Emperor does not want to be reminded of his nakedness, notwhen he is actually wearing so many colourful clothes imported fromall over the world. Shouldn't we in fact be grateful for an imperialbenevolence (the project has cost 3 million pounds) that has enabledmagicians from all over the world to participate in and celebratesomething whose spirit relates to all peoples? Shouldn't we just dowhat is expected of us: entertain and not ask silly questions on suchan auspicious occasion?

Are we being dogmatic or cynical in our attitude ? Let us look at theexhibition again, to see what it comprises and what it claims to achieve,historically and epistemologically, before we pass judgement on it.

Jean-Hubert Martin, the Director of the Georges Pompidou Centre andthe Commissioner of the exhibition, in his statement of 1986 describesthe exhibition as comprising the following sections:

1. Artists from the artistic centres: A representative selection of arttoday, showing the mature artists of the last twenty years mostcommitted to the avant-garde; artists with links to non-Europeancultures.

— African and Asian artists living in the West whose work revealselements of their own cultural roots. Western artists whose work showsa concern for cultures other than their own.

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2. Artists who do not belong to these centres but to the 'peripheries'.

— Works of an archaic nature intended for ceremonies and rituals,linked to transcendental religious experience or magic...— Traditional works showing an assimilation of external influences(e.g. aeroplanes or motor-bikes found on Nigerian Gelede masks).— Works from the artists' imagination, sometimes marginal, re-inventing or re-discovering a cosmogony or interpretation of the world.— Works of artists who have been trained in Western or Westernisedart schools.

The claims (paraphrased) are as followings:

— Magiciens de la terre is the first world-wide exhibition of contemporaryart.— It questions the false distinction between Western cultures and othercultures.— And its main objective is therefore to create a dialogue betweenWestern cultures and other cultures.

It is the 'super-empiricism' (as Yves Michaud, the editor of Les Cahiers,has phrased it) of Jean-Hubert Martin which has formulated theframework of the exhibition and one shouldn't object to it. Allexhibitions, national or international, work around predeterminedframeworks, which are often thematic or historical, and the limitationof the aims can be justified by the specificity of frameworks. But whatis special about this exhibition is its extreme ambiguity, masked by thegoodwill and dedication of its organisers. And yet it can be locatedwithin what is often described as colonial discourse.2

Of course, Magiciens de la terre is a departure from the famousexhibition, 'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art (MOMA, New York, 1984)since Magiciens... does not deal only with objects from other culturesbut includes living artists from these cultures on a basis which appearsto be one of equality: the world is equally divided between Westernand non-Western artists with equal participation. But what is thesignificance of this departure? Does the mere inclusion of non-Westernartists in this exhibition question the basic assumptions on which pastsimilar exhibitions were based? Are these not the same assumptionsthat privilege the Western artist (modem, white and male) and excludethe non-Western artist (the 'other') from the domain of modern art?This question can be dismissed on the basis that the exhibition'sobjectives are different, and it does not deal with the question ofmodernism or the history of modern art. But is this dismissal not basedon the assumption that other cultures have not yet responded creativelyto modernism and have only become victims of what Jean-HubertMartin calls 'Western contamination'? The very use of the word'contamination' echoes the essentialism of 19th century racial culturaltheories, according to which cultures belonging to different races mustremain pure for their survival.

2. For further readingsee my article 'Fromprimitivism to EthnicArts', Third Tact No. 1,Autumn 1987.

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On the state of art outside the Western world, Jean-Hubert Martincontemplates: 'the imposition of Western codes of behaviour upon theThird World has destroyed or at least contaminated everything; andin our eagerness to chastise ourselves we failed to go and see whatwas really happening'. I will not disagree with the question ofimposition, but what are the results of this imposition? Its victims areeverywhere, except for those who managed to keep themselves insidetheir own traditions? So Martin sends his men to Indian villages insearch of 'what was really happening', by bypassing all that whichhad anything to do with modern developments:

I want to show individual artists, not movements or schools, and in thatsense I'm trying to do exactly the opposite of what the Biennale de Parishas traditionally exhibited when it relied for its selection on theinformation provided by the cultural functionaries of the individualcountries who are all more or less imitating mainstream culture of theWestern world, the Ecole de Paris or New York painting.

Was the Director of Folk Art in Delhi not approached for his contactsand advice? Why was the 'functionary' of the Folk Art Museum moreauthentic than a 'functionary' of the Museum of Modern Art? By

BOWA DEVI (India) Installation 1989

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bypassing the institutions of modern art in India are we not deliberatelyignoring its recent history? And in recognising only traditions, is onenot reminded of the same old colonial game of promoting tribal/traditional structures in the perpetuation of imperial power?

Metaphors are important in the understanding of a complex reality.And here is one: Bowa Devi, one of the Magiciens (sic), a folk painterfrom Bihar, India, stands in front of her wall painting during theopening of the exhibition, accompanied by a man (perhaps herhusband) and a boy (perhaps her son). Every time someone approachesand addresses them (they are unable to communicate verbally becauseof the language problem, but this is beside the point), they raise theirhands together in the air and do namaste (the Indian way of greeting),in the manner of an Air India hostess. This is constantly repeatedduring the whole occasion. What better way than this to communicate!

Perhaps Bowa Devi's response was not in itself a gesture ofsubmission. It depressed me because it reminded me an Indianstereotype: meek and humble, ready to salute as soon as the masteris in sight. Moreover, the entire exhibition was conceived and arrangedin such a way that it would minimise all differences and conflicts. Infact, the process of homogenisation worked so well in some cases thateven extreme differences appear to be eliminated. Entering the GrandHall of La Villette and looking towards the end wall, one immediatelynoticed a large work by Richard Long which covered the whole walland overshadowed everything else . However, on approaching it, onethen saw traditional works by Esther Mahlangu (South Africa) and bythe Yuendumu Aboriginal community (Australia). All these works wereplaced in such a way that their 'similarities' eradicated their differences.It was revealing the way the question of the difference of status of theartists in the exhibition was discussed in the Colloquium a few weekslater. It was argued by an official that there was in fact no differencebecause it was not evident in the exhibition.

If all the things are equal and same, why was nobody sent to the villagesof Europe? Is there no folk or traditional art in Europe? If the purposeof the exhibition was to question distinctions between modern worksof art and folk or traditional art, why was this not done also withinor in relation to Western culture? It appears that the assumption is thatWestern culture alone has passed from one historical period to anotherand its contemporary creativity is represented only by modern art. Canone avoid an implication here that other cultures, in spite of theircontacts with the West, do not yet have a modern consciousness? Orif they do, it is not important to their creativity?

Are we really breaking the distinctions or reinforcing the very sameassumptions which divide the world into the West (modern/dynamic)and the 'Other' (traditional/static)? There is no point in repeating herethat traditions do not necessarily represent static societies. Theimportant point is that other cultures have already aspired tomodernity, and as a result have produced modern works of art. Manyof the artists from Africa, Asia and Latin America are now to be found

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RICHARD LONG (UK) Mud Circle (on the wall) 1989YUENDUMU ABORIGINAL COMMUNITY (Central Australia)Ceremonial Ground Painting, Installation 1989

living in the Western metropolis where they have been in the forefrontof modern movements. Their work has very little to do with whatMartin calls 'their own cultural roots'. Of course, their relationship withthe Western society they live in is problematic, as much as theirrelationship with modernism, and in many cases this problematic hasentered into their work. Is it not the actual presence of the 'other' inthe Western society which has exposed many of its contradictions? Whyare we so afraid to recognise these contradictions?

If, as pointed out by Martin, 'cultural functionaries' of Third Worldcountries have failed to expose the best of their contemporary work,how do we explain the total ignorance about the achievement of non-

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European artists in the West? Why are they invisible? Look at any majorgallery, museum or art journal, in the West and you would know whatI mean. In spite of the claim to represent the world, it is the white artistwho is everywhere.

How can we judge those works of art which have not been allowedto enter the international art market, and which do not have theprivileged position of their Western contemporaries? Is it notparadoxical that Martin should speak from the very position whichrefuses to recognise the necessity of non-European artists entering theparadigm of modernism to question those distinctions he himself wantsto destroy?

It is significant the way a distinction between Western artists andother artists living in what Martin calls 'artistic centres' has been made.Whilst African and Asian artists are identified by 'their own culturalroots', Western artists are recognised by 'their concern for culturesother than their own'. In other words, the relationship of African andAsian artists to their cultures is presumed to be 'natural', but it is notclear what connects Western artists to other cultures. Of coures, weall know that the Western artist occupies historical space (read Hegel),and it is his historical mission to be 'concerned' with other cultures.

The difference between 'their own' and 'other than their own' isfundamental to the distinction between AfroAsian artists and Westernartists, and I would go further and say that it's this presumed differencewhich has prevented the recognition of modernity in the work ofAfroAsian artists whether they live in the West or in their countriesof origin.

It would be a useless exercise here to cite the actual achievementsof AfroAsian artists vis-a-vis modernism, not only because prevailingignorance will turn every argument into 'the victim syndrome' but inthe face of prevailing attitudes and assumptions in the West it wouldface an intellectual blockage which would be difficult to break through.

Instead of recognising the problematic position of other cultures inrelation to modernism, with all its conflicts and contradictions, Martinonly sees pastiches and imitations of Western culture everywhere. Andthen he perhaps concludes that modernism is no good for othercultures. They better keep out of it (postmodern prescriptions?), bysticking to their own traditions. Martin's sincerity and good intentionsare not in question here. He seems to be a very good chap and isgenuinely concerned about the divisions which exist between differentcultures and the resulting lack of dialogue. During our privateconversation, he explained his position to me:

I do not make distinctions between objects in the museum of ethnologyand the museum of modern art. They are all art, and I want to breakthose distinctions which keep them apart. All art objects, if they arebeautiful and represent creativity, give pleasure; and this is my aim forthe exhibition. I want people to look at these objects and enjoy them.I don't care whether they have any value or status.

Nobody would disagree with his concern about the 'distinctions', butit does not seem to deal with or question those structures which

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underpin these distinctions. There is no harm in one's idiosyncraticunderstanding of things, but if it is not located, both theoretically andhistorically, within the specificity of the discourse called art, then oneis not really serious about one's intentions.

The distinction between the modern and the traditional is not reallyfalse, because it is the result of a historical force which is dominanttoday. If we wish to challenge this distinction then it will have be donewithin a context which challenges the dominance of Western culture.Magiciens de la terre has very cleverly confused this question byassuming that other cultures are facing some kind spiritual crisisresulting from 'Western contamination'.

The crisis is in fact of Western humanism; its failure to come to termswith the modern aspiration of the 'other'. What happened in Iran, forexample, is not the result of what Jean-Hubert Martin calls a 'searchfor spirituality', but a direct result of Western imperialism whichfrustrated the aspirations and struggles of Iranian people to achievea modern, secular and democratic society in the postwar period. TheShah of Iran^as not an Oriental despot but an imperial puppet forwhom modernism meant imitating everything Western or American.When, in 1972, a museum of modern art was built in Tehran, withAmerican design and technicians, its administration was handed overto an American team; which, of course, spent millions of pounds (Iran'smoney) buying American works. As for Iranian artists, they wereperhaps living in exile in London, Paris or New York and ignored onthe basis that they were producing 'imitations' of Western art.

It is easier to be cynical and dismissive about modernism in ThirdWorld countries than to recognise not only those structures which areresponsible for what is actually happening in other cultures, but alsothose assumptions which continually reinforce the marginalisation ofthe Third World.

The example of Iran is an extreme case, but it is meant to be ametaphor. The struggle in Third World countries is not for 'spirituality'but for independent societies, which are democratic, modern andsecular, and contemporary art produced in these countries is part ofthis struggle. The question of socialism is extremely important for usbut it does not supercede the present stage of anti-imperialist struggleto claim our independent place in the modern world.

The failure of Magiciens de la terre to take into consideration the presenthistorical and material conditions of other cultures, their aspirationsand struggles to enter into the modern world with all its conflicts andcontradictions, and what they have actually achieved within theselimitations, is to mystify the production of art and to remove it fromthe question of power and privileges. By this failure it has defeatedits own stated objective to provide a viable framework which wouldbreak the distinctions and allow a dialogue among the diversity ofcontemporary art from all over the world.

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EDITORIAL

This summer issue of Cahiers du Musee nationald'art moderne has been published to coincidewith the exhibition Magiciens de la terre as a firstcritical reflection on that project.

When one takes into account the originalityof this exhibition, which is the first truly inter-national exhibition of contemporary art, andwhen one takes into account that what it reallyis (what it will show and how it will show it)will produce the kind of effects and provokethe kind of reflections which could scarcely beenvisaged when the project was conceived, itwould have made little sense to bring togethera set of theoretical texts whose whole thrustwould have been in some sense predeter-mined. It would, moreover, have beendishonest to contemplate having texts takingsides with or against an exhibition whichnobody had seen and which it would almostcertainly be difficult to have a clear idea aboutin advance.

We therefore decided to ask for contributionsfrom people who, in one way or another, areengaged in similar or related enterprises, fromspecialists who have long taken an interest inthis opening up of art to what has, for a longtime, been seen as its peripheries. Thus we con-tacted ethnologists and anthropologists, art-critics and fieldworkers.

The contributions then fell into fairly naturalcategories. After a general overview of the maincontours of this project, we present moredetailed surveys of particular fields. We can-not claim to cover the whole world; these'dispatches' from the field (from Japan,Australia and India) are valuable as sounding

boards for ideas, and, I might add, because oftheir tone and rhythm, which speak forthemselves.

We then hand over to the anthropoligists andethnologists. They write of that foreign way oflooking which is applied to so-called primitivearts, and of the efforts which we must maketo modify our approach, of the methods weshould follow and the revisions that this entails,as well as of the advances that have alreadybeen made.

The last, and longest, group of articles reflectson what is at stake in Magiciens de la terre andon the conditions and perspectives of such aproject. These articles speak of a watershed inour conception of art.

We are aware, in this edition, that thethoughts presented are in the process of beingworked out, that the documentation is beingconstantly refined and reformulated, that thewhole represents the practical application of away of thinking. That indeed was our aim:neither to praise the project nor to criticize it,but to take it seriously and attempt to gaugeits strengths.

In doing so, we feel we are being faithful tothe spirit of Cahiers du Musie national d'artmoderne, which is both to study and re-evaluatethe recent past and to engage in the mostadvanced research and explore the newestperspectives with the conviction that new ideascan be born of this combination of two criticalthrusts.

Yves Michaud

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ESTHER MAHLANGU Mural Painting (Mabhokho, Kwandebele) 1987(Photo. A. Magnin)

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INTERVIEWBENJAMIN H.D. BUCHLOH - JEAN-HUBERT MARTIN

Benjamin Buchloh: In the discussions of the lastfew years, the question of culturaldecentralization has emerged as increasinglyimportant: from the decentering of traditionalconceptions of the author/subject constructionto the challenge of the centrality of the oeuvreand the concept of the work of art as a unifiedsubstantial object. But it ranges further, fromthe critique of the hegemony of the class cultureof bourgeois Modernism to the challenge of thedominance of the cultural production of theWestern Capitalist world and its market overthe cultural practices in the social and geo-political 'margins'. Cultural decentralizationaims at a gradual recognition of the cultures ofdifferent social and ethnic groups within thesocieties of the so-called First World as muchas at the recognition of the specificity of culturalpractices within countries of the so-calledSecond and Third World. Does the projectMagiciens de la Terre originate in these criticaldiscussions or is it just another exercise instimulating an exhausted artworld by exhibitingthe same contemporary products in a differenttopical exhibition framework?

Jean-Hubert Martin: Obviously the problem ofcentre and periphery has been reflected inEuropean-American avantgarde culture inrecent years, but our exhibition projectMagiciens de la Terre is a departure from that.First of all, already on the geographical levelwe want to reflect on contemporary artproduction on a global, worldwide scale. But

the questions of centre and periphery have alsobeen asked with regard to authorship andoeuvre, especially since, in a number of thecontexts with which we will be dealing, theartist's role and the object's functions aredefined in a manner entirely different from ourEuropean way of thinking. As for the problemof marginality, it is difficult and delicate toinclude artists from different geo-politicalcontexts in an exhibition of Western (Euro-American) contemporary art, the dominant artof the centres. But we come to recognize thatinorder to have a centre you need margins andthe inverse is true as well. Therefore Magiciensde la Terre will invite half of its approximatelyone hundred artists from marginal contexts,artists practically non-existent in the awarenessof the contemporary art world.

B.B.: How will you go about this projectwithout falling precisely in the worst of alltraps, seemingly inevitable: to deploy onceagain ethnocentric and hegemonic criteria inthe selection of the participants and their worksfor the exhibition?

].-H.M.: I agree, this is in fact the first trap onethinks of but I would immediately argue thatit is actually an inevitable trap. It would beworse to pretend that one could organize suchan exhibition from an 'objective, un-acculturated' perspective, a 'decentered' pointof view precisely. How could one find a'correct' perspective? By including artists on a

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proportional scale, or by having the selectionsmade by cultural functionaries in each country,whose principles are infinitely less elaboratethen ours? Or by political commissaries fromthe UNESCO, according to the size of thepopulation of each country? I do not believethat this is possible. It would throw us back intothe worst mistakes from the beginning of theParis Biennale when the artists were selectedby national commissaries who only chose whatthey considered to deserve the official stampof cultural and political authority. It was boundto become a disaster of officious and officialculture. Therefore, I have argued for the exactopposite: since we are dealing with objects ofvisual and sensual experience, let us really lookat them from the perspective of our culture. Iwant to play the role of somebody who selectsthese objects from totally different cultures byartistic intuition alone. My approach — in a way— will therefore be the opposite of what yousuggest: I will select these objects from thevarious cultures according to my own historyand my own sensibility. But obviously I alsowant to incorporate the critical reflections onthe problem of ethnocentrism, the relativity ofculture, and intercultural relations whichcontemporary anthropology provides.

B.B.: Which are the self-critical and correctiveelements in your method and procedure? Areyou actually working with anthropologists andethnographers on this project, and withspecialists from within the cultures that youapproach from the outside?

J.-H.M.: Yes, I have collaborated withnumerous anthropologist and ethnographersin the preparation of this project. Thiscollaboration has proven to be very fertile sinceit has helped to assess the role of the individualartist in the various societies, their specializedactivities and the functions of their formal andvisual languages. By the way, our exhibitionproject emerges at a moment when manyanthropologists have started to ask themselveswhy they have privileged myth and languagetraditionally over the sign of visual objects. Thecorrective critical reflections I am primarilythinking of are ethnographic theories ofethnocentrism as they have been developedover the last twenty or more years. I have also

benefitted from the advice of ethnographersand specialists of local and regional cultureswhen it came to obtaining precise informationin order to prepare research and travels. Insome cases we have conducted theseexploratory travels in the company ofethnographers. We went for example to PapuaNew Guinea in the company of Francois Lupu.

But let us not forget, after all, I have to thinkof this project as an 'exhibition.' That is, if anethnographer suggests a particular example ofa cult, let us say in a society of the Pacific, butthe objects of this culture would notcommunicate sufficiently with a Westernspectator in a visual-sensuous manner, I wouldrefrain from exhibiting them. Certain cultobjects may have an enormous spiritual power,but when transplanted from their context intoan art exhibition they lose their qualities andat best generate misunderstandings, even if oneattaches long didactic explanatory labels tothem. In the same manner I had to exclude anumber of artisanal objects, since many of thesocieties we are looking at actually do notdifferentiate between artist and artisan.

B.B.: Another crucial problem of your projectas I see it is that, on the one hand, you do notwant to construct a colonialist exhibition, likethe one in Paris in 1931, where the objects ofreligious and magical practices were extractedfrom their functions and contexts as so manyobjects displayed for the hegemonic eye ofcontrol, Imperialist domination andexploitation. On the other hand, you neitherwant to simply aestheticize these heteronomiccultural objects once again by subjecting themto the Western Modernist concept of'Primitivism'.

J.-H.M.: Our exhibition has nothing to do withthat of 1931 which clearly originated from theperspective of economic and politicalcolonialism. The exhibition of 1931 has,however, inevitably served as a negativereference point for the authors of the catalogueand will be critically discussed. Concerning theproblem of the cultural object and its contextI would like to make two arguments. First ofall, when it comes to foreign literature, musicand theatre, nobody ever asks this question,and we accept translation — which we know

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to be most often a falsification — as a form ofmediation. Now you might argue that these aretemporal and aural forms of artistic experience,different from the spatial and visual objects we •are dealing with. Here different modes ofreception clearly apply and a Western viewersees in a manner altogether different from anAsian viewer, even though the moment ofretinal experience is actually identical. But,nevertheless, to argue therefore that it isimpossible to present visual — spatial objectsoutside of their cultural context seemsabsolutely horrible to me when, in fact, sincecenturies this type of communication hasoccurred within the fields of literature ioiexample. That is my first argument...

B.B.: If I may interrupt here, it seems evidentthat your problem is that of Modernist arthistory which has traditionally onlycontemplated the objects of high culture, eventhough Modernist avantgarde art is constitutedin the dialectic relationship with mass culturefrom its very beginnings. The objects and theusers of mass culture — if considered at all —were at best compartmentalized into a differentdiscipline (sociology, or more recently that ofmass cultural studies). In the same manner thattraditional art history has always excluded theplurality of cultures within bourgeois culture,your attempt to select only the 'highest artisticquality' from the cultural practices of 'theOthers' runs the risk of subjecting them to asimilar process of selection and hierarchization.

].-H.M.: This is another point to which I willreturn. But let me first make my secondargument. A criticism instantly voiced withregard to this project is the supposed problemof decontextualization and the betrayal of theother cultures. Yes, the objects will be displacedfrom their functional context and they will beshown in a museum and an exhibitioninstitution in Paris. But we will display themin a manner that has never before beenemployed with regard to objects from the ThirdWorld. That is, the makers of the objects willbe present for the most part, and I will avoidfinished moveable objects as much as possible.I will favour actual 'installations' (as we say inour jargon) made by the artists specifically forthis particular occasion. Works of art are always

the result of a ritual or a ceremony, and thatis just as true for a famous painter of the 19thcentury where — in a manner of speaking —we are looking at a 'mere residue' as well. Onealways speaks of the problem of 'context' whenit come to other cultures, as though the sameproblem would not emerge for us in theconfrontation with a Medieval miniature oreven a Rembrandt painting when we visit themuseum. Only a few specialists really knowanything at all about the context of theseobjects, even though we would claim that theseobjects constitute our cultural tradition. I knowthat it is dangerous to extricate cultural objectsfrom other civilizations, but we can also learnfrom these civilizations which, just like ours,are engaged in a search for spirituality.

B.B.: This concept of an abstract transhistoricalexperience of 'spirituality' seems to be at thecore of your project. In that respct it remindsme of the exhibition 'Primitivism' and TwentiethCentury Art which took place at the Museumof Modern Art in 1984. There a presumedspirituality was equally placed at the centre ofthe exhibition, operating regardless of socialand political context, regardless of technologicaldevelopment of the particular social formations.Don't you think that the search for the (re-)discovery of spirituality originates in thedisavowal of the politics of everyday life?

].-H.M.: Not at all. As you will recall, the maincriticism levelled at this exhibition at the timewas that it was a formalist project. To me itseems important to emphasize the functionalrather than the formal aspects of thatspirituality (after all, magic practices arefunctional practices). Those objects which actin their spiritual function, on the human mind,objects which exist in all societies, are the onesof interest for our exhibition. After all, theworks of art cannot simply be reduced to aretinal experience alone. It possesses an aurawhich initiates these mental experiences. Iwould go even further and argue that preciselythose artistic objects which were created twentyyears ago by artists with the explicit desire toreduce the auratic nature of the work of art byemphasizing its material objectness, appearnow as the most spiritual ones. In fact, if youtalk to the artists of that generation you will

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often encounter their own involvement withthe concept of the 'magic' in work of art. Wehave to admit that there is a sphere of socialexperience which has taken over the space ofreligion, and while it does not fulfill religion'scommunal functions it involves large segmentsof our society.

B.B.: It sounds as though you are arguing thatthe failure of artistic practices of the Sixties toemancipate art from ritual (what WalterBenjamin called its parasitical dependence),could now be compensated best by ritualizingthese practices themselves. To mention anexample: when Lothar Baumgarten set out inthe late 1970's to visit tribal societies of theAmazon, which are now threatened withdestruction, he operated in the manner of anamateur ethnographer. But he also operatedfrom within a Modernist artistic tradition: tosearch and discover the values of exotic culturesin order to reconstitute the cult value of thework of art, its share in the ritualisticexperience. Paradoxically, in doing so, artistsof that tradition in Modernism have contributedto the conception of a highly problematic visionof the 'Other' in terms of 'primitivism'. Iwonder whether this is not the model uponwhich your exhibition is based as well. Is thatthe reason why, in the course of thepreparation of his contribution for yourexhibition, you sent Lawrence Weiner to PapuaNew Guinea?

J.-H.M.: There are enormous prejudices inwhat you just said concerning our exhibitionproject. The basic idea during the elaborationof our exhibition was to question therelationship of our culture to other cultures ofthe world. Culture here is not an abstractgenerality but describes a set of relations thatindividuals have among each other and withwhich we interact. I wondered whether itwould be possible to accelerate theserelationships and the dialogue ensuing fromthem. That is the reason why I suggested thatLawrence Weiner should go to Papua NewGuinea. Let me emphasize that first of all thisexhibition wants to initiate dialogues. I opposethis idea that one can only look at anotherculture in order to exploit it. It is first of all amatter of exhange and dialogue, to understand

the others in order to understand what we doourselves.

B.B.: Inevitably your project operates like anarchaeology of the 'Other' and its authenticity.You are engaged in a quest for the originalcultural practices (magic and the ritual), whenin fact what you would find most often, Ipresume, are extremely hybridized culturalpractices in their various stages of gradual orrapid disintegration and extinction as a resultof their confrontation with Western industrialmedia and consumer culture. Are you going to'distill' the original objects for the sake of anartificial purity, or are you going to exhibit theactual degree of contamination and decaywithin which these forms of cultural productionactually exist?

].-H.M.: On the contrary. I have never stoppedsaying that there is an original purity to bediscovered elsewhere. The fact that earlier artswere 'without history', has produced too manymyths. All the work shown will be the fruit ofexchange influences and of changes derivedfrom our civilisation or from others.

I think there is a real misunderstanding aboutmy way of looking at these phenomena. I amin fact very interested in archaic practices (Iwould like to avoid the problematic term of the'primitive'). I am really against the assumption(underlying in a way also Rubin's exhibition)that we have in fact destroyed all other cultureswith Western technology. A text written by theAboriginal artists of Australia participating inthis exhibition has clarified this for me. Theyexplain the problem of decontextualizationperfectly well, only to continue by arguing thatthey commit their 'treason' for a particularpurpose: to prove to the white world that theirsociety is still alive and functioning. Exhibitingtheir cultural practices to the West is what theybelieve to be the best way to protect theirtraditions and their culture at this point in time.

B.B.: It sounds as though you are engaged insome kind of a reformist project, in search ofresidual magic cultures in the societies alien toours, and in pursuit of revitalizing the magicpotential of our own.

J.-H.M.: Obviously we live in a society where

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we always speak from our position about theothers and we judge their position from ours,and it is 'us' who think 'them' as still beinginvolved in magic. It is an a priori upon whichwe naively rely, when it is actually infinitelymore complicated than that and we have noidea how it really functions. In the samemanner that we do not know how magicthought functions in our society, andobviously, there is a lot of it.

B.B.: Is your exhibition going to address themagic rituals of our society as well? You seemto be looking for an irrational power that drivesartistic production in tribal societies, and youseem to argue that there is a need for oursociety to rediscover this power. By contrast,the actual mechanisms in which magic ritualsare practiced in our society, in the fetishizationof the sign, in spectacle culture and incommodity fetishism, do not seem to be ofinterest to you.

J.-H.M.: But I am also not in search of anoriginal purity, even though there are cultureswhich still have had very little exposure toWestern civilization and whose modes ofthinking are utterly different from ours. Itastonishes me more and more, the longer Ihave been working on this project, that evenin serious studies the ideal of an archaic andauthentic production is upheld, possibly eventhat of a collective production, when in fact thenumber of objects which would truly qualifyfor this category is rather small. We know thatfor the most part these practices have beencompromised or destroyed altogether...But inthe large cities of Asia and Africa, where theshocks resulting from the encounter betweenthe local cultures and the Western industrialcultures still reverberate, one finds numerousmanifestations that we would, once again, haveto identify as works of art. And one findsexamples from both spheres, objects of atraditional local high culture as much as objectsof popular culture.

B.B.: Don't you think we have to differentiatebetween the residual forms of high culture andlocal popular culture on the one hand and theemerging forms of mass cultural consumptionon the other?

J.-H.M.: No, I do not exclude the objects ofmass culture, but I am really interested infinding the individual artist or artists that onecan name and situate and that have actuallyproduced objects. I refuse to show objectswhich claim to be the anonymous result of acultural community. That to me seems preciselya typically perverted Western/European ideathat I want to avoid at all cost. If fiftycraftspeople produce more or less the sametype of cult object, that does not interest me.I am looking for the one that is superior to allthe others, more individual than the rest.

B.B.: You don't seem to mind that thisapproach re-introduces the most traditionalconception of the privileged subject and theoriginal object into a cultural context that mightnot even know these Western concepts,excluding from the beginning notions such asanonymous production or collective creation?

J.-H.M.: No, I will not exclude objects ofcollective production, in fact there are quite afew already included in the exhibition. But I dolike the joke which argues that the only reasonwhy we imagine Black African masks to beanonymous is because when they were firstfound in the various tribal communities thepeople who took them or collected them didnot care to take down the names of theirauthors. It is a typical Western projection tofantasize that these communities live in a stateof original collective bliss, therefore one doesnot want to credit them with having individualauthors. Let me give you an example: themasks which are identified as Geledes are onlyworn once a year for a particular ritual. A recentstudy shows that the makers of these masks arespecialists who make them for the variousvillages and communities who use them. Notonly are they specialists of this type of masksand identify their works with their signatureson the inside, but they also originate fromdynasties of mask-makers, and often theseobjects can be traced through two or moregenerations. Furthermore, what is peculiarabout these Geledes masks is that they actuallychange over time — as opposed to our Westernconcept of a fixed and stable type — and overthe last few decades they have incorporatedmore and more elements from industrial

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culture. This proves to me the vivacity of thatculture and its flexibility in responding to thecontact with Western civilization. Certainethnographers are distressed by this becausethey perceive these tribal communities ashaving lost their original purity. But I don'tthink that any society ever had this purity sincethey are all in constant flux and exchange withother societies. Admittedly, the Western worldis, of course, a particularly powerful influencein these contacts.

B.B.: Let us discuss a concrete example. Howdid you approach the Algerian Republic, aSocialist state which was once a French colony?I am sure there are rather active Beaux Artsschools in Algiers and other cities, and Iimagine, if you travel through the remotevillages, you would probably find residualforms of artisanal popular culture and possiblyeven religious practices. At the same time Iwould imagine that there are emerging formsof a new Socialist culture. Which of the threedomains is of primary interest to yourexhibition project?

J.-H.M.: I would like to address the method ofour work first of all. The particular needs of thisexhibition require that a constant exchangetakes place between theory and practice, andthat both will constantly correct each other inthe course of the preparation of this exhibition.It is not that discourse on interculturalrelationships has been absent from Frenchthought; what is missing are the pragmaticforms of putting this discourse into practice.That is what I am trying to develop. To answeryour question, 'which of the three formationsare of interest to us;' well, I want to show asmuch as possible, as many divergentphenomena as possible, even if that mightmake the exhibition heterogeneous at times.

B.B.: To invert my question: will yourexhibition also present information on so<alledminority cultures living inside the hegemonicWestern societies? Will you show, for example,the particular forms of Black Modernism as itemerged in the United States since the turn ofthe century, or the cultural practices of Africanand Arabic minorities living in France at thispoint?

J.-H.M.: Obviously I have thought about thisand often one is obliged to start from there. Ihave for example encountered a painter fromthe People's Republic of China who came toFrance about four years ago and who now livesin Paris. He is now part of a Chinese artisticcommunity in France and he has given me anumber of leads how to approach thisphenomenon of Chinese emigrant artists asmuch as the art of his country. As far as yourexamples of Algeria or Morocco are concerned,I will approach these in a pragmatic manner,not a theoretical way. In these countries youwill find a widespread tendency to harmonizetraditional calligraphy with ficole de Parispainting. This transposition of calligraphy intoa Western easel painting technique leaves metotally cold. I prefer to show a real calligrapherlike the Iraqi Youssuf Thannoon.

I will first of all go by visual criteria alone,my vision and that of my colleagues withwhom I prepare and discuss this project. If weencounter visually astonishing material we willgo further and visit the artists and find outmore about the history and the context of thework. I want to show individual artists, notmovements or schools. In that sense I am tryingto do exactly the opposite of what the Biennalede Paris has traditionally exhibited when itrelied for its selections on the informationprovided by the cultural functionaries of theindividual countries who were all more or lessimitating mainstream culture of the Westernworld, the Ecole de Paris or New York Schoolpainting.

B.B.: The central tool by which bourgeoishegemonic culture (white, male and Western)has traditionally excluded or marginalized allother cultural practices is the abstract conceptof 'quality.' How will you avoid this mostintricate of all problems in your selection criteriaif you operate by 'visual' terms alone?

J.-H.M: The term 'quality' has been eliminatedfrom my vocabulary, since there is simply noconvincing system to establish relative andbinding criteria of quality when it comes to sucha project. We know very well that even thedirectors of the great Western museums do nothave any reliable criteria to establish aconsensus on this question. But of course one

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has to develop criteria; some are more tangibleand rigorous than others. There are criteria tobe derived from the physicality of the work,from the relationship between the maker of theobject and the community which relates to thatobject, the socio-political and cultural contextof that object.

B.B.: When exhibitions are organized in theUnited States from a critical perspectivechallenging mainstream hegemonic culture, thestandard prejudicial response one always hearsis: that is very interesting work indeed, but itlacks 'quality.'

J.-H.M.: Indeed that happens when one groupsartists together by country or geo-politicalcontext. But that is not my approach: we selectindividual artists from a wide variety ofcontexts, and it is the individuality of theseartists which guarantees the level of ourexhibition. That brings us back to the criteriaof 'quality'...

B.B.: But certain works (for example feministartists) distinguish themselves by preciselychallenging and criticizing that very notion ofabstract quality, because the term itself is ofcourse already invested with interest, privilege,control and exclusion.

J.H.M.: Certainly. We are going through aphase where all these concepts are transformedand re-evaluated and we are gradually movingon to different concepts. While this happens,first of all on the level of theory, we do not yethave any reliable means or any solid bases toarticulate these changes on the level ofexhibition practice. But that should not deterus from trying to develop them...

B.B.: In the course of the last ten years or soWestern Modernism as a hegemonic culturehas been criticized from the perspectives ofother cultural practices as much as from theinside. It seemed generally no longer acceptableto treat Modernism as a universal internationallanguage and style, governing all countries ofadvanced industrial culture as much as thecountries of the so-called Second and Third

World. This became particularly obvious in theincreasing attacks on International Style inarchitecture and the recognition that it wasnecessary to take national and regionalspecificities and traditions much more intoconsideration than hegemonic Modernism hadallowed. Does the project of your exhibitiondepart from similar critical perspectives?

J.-H.M.: Absolutely. That is precisely thereason why we want to build a trulyinternational exhibition that transcends thetraditional framework of contemporary Euro-American culture. Rather than showing thatabstraction is a universal language, or that thereturn to figuration is now happeningeverywhere in the world, I want to show thereal difference and the specificity of thedifferent cultures.

B.B.: But what are the real differences betweenthe different cultures- at this point? Westernhegemonic centres use Third World countriesas providers of cheap labour (the hiddenproletariats of the so-called post-industrialistsocieties), devastate their ecological resourcesand infrastructure, and use them as dumpinggrounds for their industrial waste. Don't youthink that by excluding these political andeconomical aspects and by focussingexclusively on the cultural relationshipsbetween Western centres and developingnations, you will inevitably generate a neo-colonialist reading?

J.-H.M.: That implies that the visitors of theexhibition would be unable to recognize therelationships between the centres and the ThirdWorld. Our generation — and we were not thefirst — has denounced these phenomena, andthings have after all developed at least a littlebit. One cannot say that we live in a neo-colonialist period. Obviously the WesternWorld maintains relationships of domination,but that should not prohibit us fromcommunicating with the people of thesenations by looking at their cultural practices.

B.B.: But isn't this precisely once again theworst ethnocentric fallacy: it communicates forus, therefore it is relevant for the exhibition.Worse yet: it smacks once again of cultural (and

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political) imperialism to request that thesecultures deliver their cultural products for ourinspection and our consumption, instead of usmaking an attempt to dismantle the falsecentrality of this approach and to developcriteria from within the needs and conventionsof these cultures.

J.-H.M.: I understand very well what you aretrying to say, but how would you actually goabout developing these immanent criteria? Ihave determined a number of them and appliedthem for the definition of the participants of theexhibition, but inevitably these criteria will bedifferent in each case and eventually maygenerate considerable contradictions. I do notsee how one can really avoid ethnocentricvision altogether. I have to accept it to someextent in spite of all the self-reflexive correctionswhich we tried to incorporate into ourmethods. What is important to recognize is thatthis will be the first truely internationalexhibition of worldwide contemporary art, butI do not pretend in any way that this is acomplete survey of the planet, but rather it isa sampling that I have chosen according tomore or less accurate and yet somewhatrandom criteria. I cannot select objects in themanner of ethnographers who chose theobjects according to their importance andfunction inside the culture that they study,even if these objects 'mean' or 'communicate'very little or nothing to us. Inevitably there isan aesthetic judgement at work in the selectionof my exhibition with all the inevitablearbitrariness that aesthetic selection entails.

B.B.: The other side of the ethnocentric fallacyis a cult of a presumed authenticity whichwould like to force other cultural practices toremain within the domain of what we considerthe 'primitive' and the original 'Other.' In factartists in these cultures very often claim, andrightfully so, to have developed their ownforms of high culture corresponding to that ofthe Western world and its institutional valuesand linguistic conventions, and insist thereforeto be looked at in terms of their own highcultural achievements, not in terms of ourprojection of authentic Otherness.

J.-H.M.: That is the reason why we have

conceived of the exhibition as a situation ofdialogic relationships between the artists fromthe Western centres and those from the so-called geo-political margins. But the exhibitionwill also establish other types of cross-culturalrelationships. For example, the manner inwhich the repetition of identical modelsfunctions in Tibetan Tonka painting and in thework of certain Western painters whoconsistently repeat the model which theyestablished for themselves. After all, Tonkapainting is still a living artistic practice, eventhough we only know it from ethnographicmuseums. To disturb this kind of absurdity isonce again one of the goals of our exhibition.Let us not forget that many of the societies thatwe are looking at do not know or agree withWestern divisions of culture between high andlow, ancient and recent. The AustralianAboriginal culture does not separate highculture from popular culture at all. There issimply one traditional culture which they nowdeploy to defend their identity against theincreasing onslaught of Western industrialculture. Even if they are called Bushmen, theyobviously drive cars and have guns, but theyteach their children how to use bow and arrowand how to pursue their cultural traditions asa form of political resistance against theviolation by Western industrial culture. That isalso the reason why they were eager to acceptmy invitation to show their work, outside ofits original functional context so to speak, butnevertheless in its function to defend theiraboriginal identity.

B.B.: That raises another problem. How willyou avoid the total aestheticization of this, andall other exhibited forms of culturalmanifestations emerging from non-westerncontexts, once they enter your museum orexhibition? How can you supply your visitorswith sufficient visual and textual informationto avoid this problem without strangling theactual experience of these objects?

J.-H.M.: Obviously I do not want to constructa didactic exhibition with an overwhelmingamount of text panels. It is self-evident that allof the artists will receive the same treatment inboth exhibition and catalogue. And thecatalogue will, of course, provide the crucial

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information as well as the didactic assistanceneeded for such an exhibition.

B.B.: Your restriction to 'aesthetic' criteriatherefore depends also on merely pragmaticfunctions, to enable you to construct anexhibition from this heterogeneous mass ofobjects.

J.-H.M.: Obviously, I will work with anarchitect, and we already have numerous ideasabout various forms of installation whichconvey to the viewers the complexity of thesituation; that they are not looking at thetraditional museum objects, but that they areconfronted with objects from totally differentcontexts. But we have to keep in mind that thisis an exhibition, not a discourse. I know thatexhibitions cannot claim innocence from thediscourse, and our exhibition will be critical andvisual at the same time. What interests me inparticular are the visual shocks that thisexhibition can possibly produce and thereflections which it could provoke. But most ofall I would like to see this exhibition operateas a catalyst for future projects andinvestigations.

B.B.: I could imagine that your project wouldprovoke a lot of scepticism if not anger amongthose authorities in the art world whose roleit is precisely to defend the rigorous divisionsand criteria of hegemonic culture at all cost?

J.-H.M.: In the art world, yes, but not amongartists, who have generally responded withgreat enthusiasm and interest.

B.B.: Even if this project threatens to displacethem a little bit from their centrality in thereception of contemporary art?

J.-H.M.: I don't think they are worried aboutthis, and they don't have to worry about itanyway. I believe that every creative individualis deeply interested in the activities of othersin the world. After all, an element of curiosityand surprise is part of artistic experience ingeneral, even though over the last few years,when it came to the big international groupshows, you didn't even have to see the list of

participating artists in advance, you couldpretty much tell beforehand who was going tobe in these exhibitions. With our project, thisis quite different. There will be many surprisesand the artworld will not always like it, but theywill certainly see things that they have neverseen before. I am aiming at a much largerpublic. In fact I have already noticed whendiscussing the project with people from outsideour little museum and gallery world, that thisexhibition really has something to offer whichgoes way beyond the traditional boundaries ofour usual conception of contemporary culture.

B.B.: Could one say that you also aim todecentre the social parameters traditional to theart public?

J.-H.M.: Absolutely. I want to show artists fromthe whole world, and to leave the ghetto ofcontemporary Western art where we have beenshut up over these last decades. A larger publicwill certainly understand that, for once, thisevent will be much more accessible to it, andthat it comes to an exhibition founded on totallydifferent principles. If we do not try to makethe effort at least to engage in this evolution,we risk serious blockages.

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SITUATION IN JAPANFUMIO NANJO

There are many differences between theJapanese art world and that of Westerncountries. Identifying these points oi differencemay prove to be revealing, not only in termsof trying to understand contemporary Japaneseculture, but also the cultures of other non-European countries.

Taking an overview of the Japanese artworld, three fairly distinct categories can beenumerated: Nihon-ga, painting on paper or silkusing traditional water-soluble mineralpigments; Yo-ga, oil painting of European styleintroduced at the end of the 19th century, atthe time of Japan's opening to the rest of theworld; and thirdly, contemporary art, practicedby artists attempting to adopt the avant-gardeattitudes of movements such as Dada andL'Informal. In terms of their position andawareness, these latter artists should be seenin the same artistic context as their counterpartsin the West. Of the first two categories, Nihon-ga can be seen to establish a characteristicOriental painting style, and is derived fromSuiboku-ga (painting in Chinese ink) and Yamato-e (classical style of Japanese painting). Thesecond, Yo-ga, often utilises a style reminiscentof Impressionism of Ecole de Paris. However,it is sometimes impossible to distinguish thesetwo categories merely according to their styles,as the criteria for distinction are based only ona difference in materials.

Despite this, there is seldom any interchangebetween these disparate fields; artists from eachgroup move in different circles and do not

communicate with one another, remainingignorant of the activities of each other. Toclarify the situation, it can be said that, insteadof interaction between them, the differentschools have their own hierarchical structures:like a pyramid , each school of Nihon-ga andYo-ga is crowned by one or more masters similarto the lemotoseido (masters of a particular artisticschool or style) found in the traditionalJapanese arts. Each of these schools buildsstrong relationships between its members and,in the same way as a political organisation, hasa strong influence on the art world. Comparedwith these schools, artists involved incontemporary art are aware of the contextwhich is more individualistic and international.

The structure of the gallery world, whichsupports such a situation, is very different fromthat of Western countries. It is said that thereare around 500 galleries in Tokyo; more thanhalf of these being rental galleries, where, forabout £1,000 to £1,500 a week rent plus otherexpenses, an artist can exhibit his or her work.This system, peculiar to Japan, arises fromcircumstances such that, despite the lack of adomestic market for contemporary art, thereare significant numbers of artists with strongambitions. It is both a capitalistic anddemocratic system at the same time: artists withsufficient finances have the opportunity andspace to exhibit their work.

However, one of the drawbacks of thissystem is that a large number of exhibitionsflood the art world without any screening or

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sifting of the artists. In fact, those who areinvolved in contemporary art find it difficult,when they visit Japan, to understand theposition of each artist in relation to the wholesituation; because both a Sunday painter andan avant-garde artist can rent the same galleryand exhibit their work in the same way.

There are probably less than one hundred artdealers who patronise particular artists andattempt to support and promote their work.Out of these galleries in Tokyo, only about tenare concerned solely with contemporary art.However, such a special interest has recentlybeen developing among the rental galleries aswell, and there are now 50 or so places whichfocus exclusively on contemporary art.

As for the state of museums in Japan, morethan two hundred have been established in thelast fifteen years, of which about fifty arepublic, founded by local self-governing bodies;the rest are private or small scale museumswhich display antiques, Nihon-ga, folk art orcrafts. In the case of public museums, it isnecessary for the directors to be in accord withpublic opinion and with the museum'sgoverning body. Thus the public collectionsoften come to include little contemporary artbut many works by Nihon-ga and Yo-ga masters,as well as works by the major figures of late19th and early 20th century European painting.The exhibitions held in public museums aresimilarly inclined towards those artists who arecomprehensible to the general public. Curatorshave to collect and exhibit works from all thecategories mentioned above, and it is thereforedifficult for them to develop a particular artisticcharacter for their museums. In the case ofprovincial museums, preference must be givento the local artists, and consequently there isan increasingly limited opportunity for thecontemporary artist to exhibit in thesemuseums. As can be seen, the situation ofcontemporary art in Japan is such that it isdifficult for both artists and galleries to becometruly professional.

There is a further important point whichmakes the situation in Japan different fromWestern countries: an important role is playedby newspaper companies in organising artexhibitions in Japan. Newspaper companieshad been occasionally sponsoring exhibitionsin the department stores, but after the War this

led to a competition between four or five majornewspapers to hold such exhibitions; as a resulttheir number dramatically increased. Thenewspaper companies thus played animportant role as sponsors of public artexhibitions. Until the '60s, when there wereonly a handful of museums, many exhibitionswere sponsored and organised in departmentstores as promotional events by thenewspapers. Such exhibition spaces — called'museums' — still exist in some stores.

The following reasons provide an explanationfor this situation: 1) newspaper companies areregarded as public organisations, or bodies,representing the interest of the public; 2) theyhave an affective power of (self)-publiritythrough the means of their own newspapers;3) they use the exhibitions for their ownpromotional purposes, by the distribution offree tickets to readers prominent in culturalfields. They thus enlarge their share of themarket and improve the newspaper's image.

These companies maintain a strong culturalleadership even today; and many publicmuseums rely on their research andorganisational skills, as well as finances, whenorganising the exhibitions. At first, this systemappears to have a certain merit in that it freescultural activities from the financial support ofthe government. But, at the same time, it is notwithout problems: when one of the newspapercompanies organises an exhibition, the othernewspapers do not cover or comment upon thisexhibition, it is thus ignored due to the lack ofdebate or discussion about the work; 2) despitebeing specialists in their fields, the curators ofpublic museums cannot always reflect theirown positions and opinions in such exhibitions.With the rush to build new museums the resulthas over-reached itself: there are in fact notenough curators of ability and experience.Consequently, only a restricted number ofmuseums are able to hold large-scale artexhibitions without the support of newspapercompanies.

At this point, the background to artists'customary use of rental galleries should beclarified. In Japan there is a long tradition ofGei-goto, or artistic hobbies. From the MiddleAges, Ikebana (Flower Arrangement), Sado (TeaCeremony), traditional music and thecomposition of Haiku poetry were popular

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hobbies, and it was usual to learn them froma master, to whom a monthly fee was paid.Those who were less adept learned from a moreskillful teacher; and the teachers themselveslearned from one of higher rank and greaterability. Thus a hierarchical pyramid-likestructure was formed, at the top of which theMaster dominated as the leader of a particularstyle or school. Within such a structure,professionalism gradually declines from thesummit downwards; with the lower levelsreduced to amateurism. This is what is knownas the lemotoseido, or master system. Thisstructure can be found in any of the traditionalJapanese arts, and no dear distinction betweenprofessionalism and amateurism is made. Thecategories of Nihon-ga and Yo-ga, as referred toearlier, share this same structure and hierarchy.As a result of such a cultural situation it canbe assumed that even experienced professionalartists — accustomed to paying their superiors— have no qualms about renting the space fortheir exhibitions.

This peculiar system seems now to begradually changing for the following reasons:1) the contemporary art market is graduallyincreasing; 2) young gallery owners withinternational aspirations are beginning to opengalleries dealing mainly in contemporary art;3) young curators in museums are becomingmore competent; 4) a critical response to artexhibitions held in department stores is nowdeveloping; 5) there is an increasing awarenessabout the negative aspects of exhibitions beingsponsored by a single newspaper company; 6)the exchange of information and personalrelations between Japan and other countrieshave developed to such an extent that Japancan no longer remain outside the internationalart scene; 7) artists are taking up a greater socialrole through cultural/commercial events andactivities, which has increased their awarenessfor professionalism.

However, the public comprehension ofcontemporary art is not easy to develop. InWestern countries contemporary art may alsobe the least popular form of art, but in Japanthis problem is more serious. This is partly dueto the historical differences between Japan andthe West, particularly in the definition of art.Originally there, was no concept of the fine artsin Japan, and when the foreign word 'art' was

introduced a little over 100 years ago, there wasno term to correspond to it in the Japaneselanguage: the word Geijutsu was thus coinedas an equivalent.

Instinctively, Japanese people in general donot demarcate between art and craft, and haveno clear awareness of the contemporarydistinction. Western Modernism, however, hasnow established the following criteria in the

' definition of artistic value: 1) the subject of artis not technique, but the artist's ownconception; 2) historical evolution of art isaffected by artists of the avant-garde; 3) andtherefore the avant-garde always contains newconcepts; 4) the idea of a new concept is relatedto the artist's own individual identity. Thesecriteria are not always clearly recognised by thegeneral public in Japan, and sometimes noteven by the specialists in art history.

In contrast to the Western view embodied inModernism, it was fundamentally assumed inOriental countries such as China, Japan and -Korea, that the disciples of a master willpreserve his style in a fixed form over thecenturies; of course, if the style was consideredto be worth preserving. Consequently, theimitation of styles and ideas oi the precedingmasters had been very important. If an artistwere to create a unique style of his own , andthus deviated from a formal tradition, therewould be an enormous resistance to it, bothfrom the hierarchy of the art world as well asfrom the artist's own consciousness. Such asituation might have also existed in the practiceof artisanship in Europe, but it is certainly notapplicable to art today.

The artist's role in Japan has been different.He or she is still generally regarded as a personwho, with the skill of an artisan, makespaintings or sculptures which are pleasing tothe eye. The concept of the artist as a propheticfigure with the capacity to see truth and divinethe future, is quite alien to the Japanesetradition. From the point of view of the artistas an individual creator, the difficulty of thesituation in Japan is very clear. The problem isone of positioning: how and where is theJapanese artist placed today in relation to thecomplex issues of tradition, localism,internationalism, and Modernism? When aJapanese artist intends to create an originalwork of art, he or she is frequently in danger

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of falling into the trap of an exotic Japonisme,for which Ukiyo-e were once praised in Europe.On the other hand, if the works produced weresimilar to Western contemporary art, theywould run the risk of being regarded asimitations of Western artists. It seems difficultfor Japanese artists to avoid such pitfalls andbe accepted universally on the basis of theuniqueness of their work. This difficulty is infact common to artists from all non-Westerncountries. The question however remains: howcan artists from these countries produce worksof art which are of an international anduniversal nature, without also losing theircultural and national identities?

Admittedly, I have adopted a Westernmanner to describe the situation, In Japanimitation is not a problem. Throughout itshistory, Japanese culture has alwayssuccessfully absorbed elements from Chineseand Korean cultures, and it was thus notunusual that American culture should have hadan overwhelming influence after the SecondWorld War. The origin of this tendency is infact discernable in the ancient history of Japan.

It may well be said that the notion of culturalidentity itself has never existed in Japan. It maybe asked whether one of the reasons for thisis that, until the American occupation of Japanin 1945, Japan had been separated from othercultures by sea and had never been invadedfrom the outside. Consequently, Japan neverexperienced the critical moment of losing itsnative culture. These reasons aside, Japan hasalways imported elements of foreign cultureswithout any discrimination, selecting andadopting them only for practical purposes.

Thus Japanese culture, which is the result ofan eclectic attitude, has a certain resemblance

to the phenomenon known today as Post-modernism: something which involves ajuxtaposition or co-existence of thingsbelonging to different styles and contexts, usingquotations excessively or imitating other forms.However, Japanese culture does not have thesort of logic of its own which would sum upthe whole, and hence there have been thingsor styles which were rejected because theywent against its basic grain. Ultimately, it couldbe said that Japan did not experienceModernism; instead it moved directly from thepremodern to the postmodern.

The question of how to produce a uniquework of art, grounded in Japanese culture andhistory, remains a problem for the Japaneseartist. It may be possible to offer acontemporary viewpoint, artistic . orphilosophical, through a method whichexplores its traditional roots. Or, to developentirely new forms or styles which are rootedin the awareness of today's advance technologyand information explosion. Its chaotic energy— especially in Tokyo — its pluralism, and itsfondness for novelty, which have shaped thecharacter of contemporary Japanese life, mayoffer a new potential for Japanese art today.Many foreigners involved in cultural activitiesare already aware of this, and they thinksomething new is going to appear soon. Ientertain similar expectations, but I'm alsoaware that there is no assurance that thepresent factors of Japanese culture will open atruly new and profound horizon ontocontemporary culture. If this can happen, thenit will be the outstanding achievement of a fewgeniuses, accomplished by artists, thinkers andintellectuals, not only Japanese, but alsoforeigners involved with Japanese culture.

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ABORIGINAL ARTIN AUSTRALIA TODAY

JOHN MUNDINE

Aboriginal art in northern Australia exists inmany ways between two extremes: artproduced to serve the Aboriginal communitesand art produced for external sale. There aretoday some twenty to thirty Aboriginalcommunities in what is called 'the top end'which produce art for commerical sale. Mostcommunities in fact produce art for sale outsidetheir own community. Despite this, their artoriginates in the context of ceremonies, whichinvolve singing, dancing, construction ofsculptural material, narratives, performance,mime, painting and so on. Sometimesceremonial life is manifested in simple, localforms; sometimes in grand, complex socialoccasions. When cermonies are organised intheir most intense forms, they may involvethousands of people, drawn from overthousands of square miles, and may take placeover a period of some years before they are fullyconcluded.

These ceremonies, the most important formsof art in the region, are rarely seen by outsidepeople and are conducted for the immediatebenefit of the communities concerned. Most ofthis art is very personal, event-oriented andtemporary. It is art for a particular place andtime, for a particular people and for particularreligious and social purposes.

However, derived from this primarilyreligious art, is a more secular art that isdeveloping new forms as it is produced foroutside consumption. In some of the portable,static forms of art that are projected beyond the

communities through commercial sale, theimagery produced functions rather like 'staticpolaroids', as abbreviated records of the morecomplex ceremonies. Elements of the religiousstories that are embodied in the communalceremonies may be referred to in the secular,static works, but they are — and must be —summarised and transformed, in order toaccommodate the important differencesbetween religious and secular life that are vitalto traditional Aboriginal culture.

Any material that belongs to the dimensionof 'secret-sacred' culture involves the strictestsanctions and cannot, by Aboriginal law, becommunicated to non-initiated people,whether from within the community orbeyond. To break such sanctions involves thegravest censure, even punishment. Howeverthe senior people of Aboriginal communitieshave come in recent years to see a value incommunicating secularised forms of theirculture to people beyond their communities,and especially to the wider world of humanculture generally.

All of the static art produced for outsidepurposes is therefore intended for commercialsale, and this involves a change in status.However, its intended sale does notautomatically mean that it is unimportant ormaterialistically motivated alone; for it is alsoseen as a medium of exchange, as aneducational tool for white people and as a proofto the outside world of Aboriginal people'sseriousness about their culture.

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The financial exchange involved in the saleof Aboriginal art may be seen in a number ofways. First, there is the simple level ofeconomic transaction: the production of cashthat can be used to purchase useful things. Yetalthough people may exchange certain culturalgoods for cash, the transaction may be regardedin a larger context of value that stretchesbeyond the most immediate circumstances; inthis second, more continuing context, themoney gained is not seen as a conclusivepurchase, but more like the rental on a part ofthe producing culture — as a service to whitepeople as much as an income source for theAboriginal communities concerned. Regardedin this dimension, the economic exchangeserves a larger purpose. It is as thoughAboriginal people are saying, "We will showyou something of our culture and you mustmake a small copyright payment in return forour showing you this culture."

At 'the top end' of Australia, the 20 or 30Aboriginal communities in remote areas,generally off major highways, are still carryingon what has been designated a traditional life-style (hunting and gathering). This life-styleenables them to continue their traditionalreligious practices, to observe their obligationsto the land and to maintain their social customs.However, most of these communities alsomake use of white technology. For instance,they may use motor vehicles to travel toceremonies, or even buses or trucks. They mayeven use planes to travel to ceremonies, whichis something I have seen just recently — peoplearrived at a very secret-sacred ceremony somemonths ago in the north by small airplane.People may also introduce new materials intotheir art forms. They may use glue as a fixativein their paint or employ nylon to make stringinstead of traditional bark fibres. In whateverforms, the new technology may provide newtools and means, but still be employed tosustain traditional objectives, withoutnecessarily dominating or subvertingcustomary practices. The artists of the remotecommunites may live in small settlementsscattered across a broad area, on traditionalestates located in relation to individual artists'customary responsibilities for particular tractsof land. These settlements are referred to as'outstations', many of them newly established

in recent years as people have moved awayfrom the concentrated settlements createdartificially by white administration. The'outstation movement' as it has come to beregarded, represents an important aspect ofincreasing self-determination by Aboriginalpeople in the remoter areas of Australia. It hasinvolved people moving back into proximity totheir own traditional lands, where they pursuea more distinctive life with their own family andcustomary relatives. Against the backdrop ofthis broad movement, the role of artists and artworks has been vitally interconnected withcultural regeneration.

Apart from early examples of collectingAboriginal artifacts as anthropologicalcuriosities, most of the traditional communitiessurviving today have only begun to produce'art' in a white sense — for the outside world— in the last 50 years. During the first trade inartifacts, what might be termed art pieces fromthe very northern regions were noted in the1930s, when people at Yirrakala made piecesof art for the mission superintendent, orChristian minister, who then marketed themfurther afield: to museums or collectors ofcurios in the south, and to others in the widerworld outside Australia. Such beginnings ofartifact collecting were quite modest, and it wasnot until much more recently — the late 1950s— that the market for artifacts really began tooperate, creating for the first time somethingmore like mass-production of certain types ofwork for sale, in comparison with the verymodest output of earlier times.

There was nothing wrong with theproduction of works for marketing in anyfundamental sense, as long as people were stilltelling their traditional stories, still caring abouttraditional religious beliefs and practices, andwere trying to encapsulate aspects of this in artfor the outside world.

A traditional religious ceremonial piece orperformance art work is of course nottransportable beyond its originating communityand occasion. Moreover I would estimate thatabout half the works produced originally in thenorth were in materials that were verytemporary, which disintegrated or degradedafter creation. Some people have more recentlyadopted various devices to overcome thelimitations of a particular medium or of the

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original forms of production.The Western Desert peoples, for instance,

were not traditionally producers of 'paintings'for the outside world at all. Their art formsinvolved designs carried out on weapons,utensils and sacred objects, and on the ground(on a very large scale) in sand, ochre andspinifex grass, without any binders or fixativesto preserve the imagery. The large grounddrawings, especially, were totallyuntransportable to the outside world, and quiteoutside any form of marketing or economicexchange.

What happened in the early 1970s totransform this situation in Central Australia isnow widely known under the name of the'Papunya movement': responding to theinterest of a particular art teacher posted at thePapunya school (Geoffrey Bardon), varioustraditional Aboriginal men were stimulated totransfer some of their customary designs intomural decorations for parts of the school.Geoffrey Bardon was trying to bridge the gapbetween the European culture of the white artcurriculum and the traditional culture of thelocal Aboriginal clan groups. What he touchedupon in the process was that a lot of the peoplewho were ceremonial leaders in the Aboriginalcommunity had been reduced to a very menialstatus at the fringes of the white-organisedschool system. Men who were the guardiansof some of the most important knowledge ofAboriginal traditions and training, were nomore than the gardeners, cleaners and so onat the local school. One of the reasons for thisdramatic inversion was that, in a white sense,they were unable to communicate anything oftheir important knowledge and social positionto the outside world. However, it was,precisely, many of the elders of the Aboriginalcommunity who became the key 'artists' of thenew 'painting movement' that seemed toemerge astonishingly quickly from Papunya.Many men began to paint their customarydesigns, using acrylic paints, on a variety ofboards and scrap or improvised materials, andeventually (after the Papunya Tula co-operativewas formed to market their work) onto canvas.

At first, this was treated by the formal artworld as some sort of inauthentic, transitionalart — essentially hybrid, adapted and 'impure'.It was not regarded seriously as an expression

of Aboriginal culture, and for a while wasignored or even shunned by white artmuseums because it appeared to adopt whatwas regarded as an exclusively 'white medium'(acrylic painting on canvas). A kind of racisthistorical interpretation prevailed, whereby itwas acceptable for white Australian artists toborrow from Aboriginal designs and nourishartistic tradition in the process, whereasAboriginal borrowings of white means wereautomatically denigrated as a 'dilution'. In factthe Aboriginal adoption of acrylics and canvasinvolved a revitalization of traditional culturalawareness more than a cultural decentering,and the force of cultural assertion involved inthe Western Desert paintings in a very fewyears had gained them an acceptance in thewider Australian art world, including theserious attention of art museums.

This efflorescence has been such that peopleare now conscious of a new 'wealth' ofAboriginal art and cultural capacity. Thispotential went unrecognised until it was'discovered' by the outside world through anincrease in visible activities in recent years. Inreality, Aboriginal art of the present is strongnot because it has gained some attention fromwhite audiences in recent years, but becauseit arises from strong cultural traditions thathave evolved over 40,000 years, and are stillpursued today.

The continuous activity of reworking ancienttraditions dispersed throughout Australiabrings us directly to the vexed question ofAboriginal art's contemporary dimension. In thepast, Aboriginal art's adherence to traditioncaused it to be seen as a static, 'frozen' culture,and it was therefore not incorporated in anyexhibition of contemporary art in general. Thissituation has changed only recently, but it haschanged quite dramatically.

There are acute problems as to how to fit sucha culture into western historical readings thathave no place for it — as is the case for the vastamount of the third world cultures. The wholeof the European-derived educational systemprecludes any recognition of these cultures,except as something totally alien or outsideEuropean descriptions.

At the Art Gallery of New South Wales thereis a substantial collection of Aboriginal art thatoriginates from a collection of bark paintings

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which was commissioned in the late 1950s andearly 1960s, for an exhibition that was beingcompiled for touring at that time. It showedconsiderable foresight — in comparison withgeneral art museum attitudes of the time — tocreate such a collection throughcommissioning. Indeed most collections ofAboriginal art in Australia have originatedthrough the collecting of bark paintings, whichfor a long time were popularly thought of assynonymous with 'Aboriginal art' itself — incomparison with the great range of forms,artifacts and expressions that more trulyconstituted 'Aboriginal culture' (unseen by theoutside world).

However, since the beginnings of Aboriginal'art' collections in art museums in Australia,dating from the 1950s, there have been majorchanges occuring in response to wideninghorizons on Aboriginal art within theAustralian community at large, as well as thechanges that have occurred within Aboriginalcommunities' production of culture for theexternal world — mentioned already inconnection with the dramatic case of thepainting 'movement' emanating fromPapunya. Here, a 'pointillist' mode of painting,now celebrated as the 'dot-and-circle' style ofAboriginal art from the Western Desert, hadsome ready affinities with a Western stylealready well assimilated in modern art's historyand aesthetics. Papunya painting's rapid riseand penetration into wider acceptance, inAustralia and now much further afield, is inpart a result of the ground being prepared interms of aesthetic compatibility with Westernart history. Nevertheless it has been part of aperiod that has witnessed a great opening upin aesthetics concerning Aboriginal art.

One major result of this change in aestheticattitudes, is that some of the old stereotypedapproaches to Aboriginal culture throughcertain artifacts and utensils — such as theboomerang and didjeridu, for instance — oreven the profiling of Aboriginal art throughconcepts such as the 'X-ray style' in rockengravings and bark paintings from certainareas, have at last had to give way to a morecomplex analysis. There is consequently a greatnumber of changes in the ways in whichcollections may be put together, and thesechanges are coming as a result of changed

consciousness imposed by Aboriginal peoplethemselves, as they gain more influence andcontrol over the interpretation of their cultureby the outside world.

As Aboriginal people are forcibly bringingabout changes in the consciousness of theirculture, and about their culture, this may alsobe seen as part of a larger process of theopening up and change in the ways thatAustralians think about themselves, about theiridentity, history and future place in the world.Aboriginal people believe that they have asignificant — and necessary — role to play inthis process. It is of benefit not only tothemselves directly, but can contributeimportant new awareness to the widercommunity as it discovers something aboutAboriginal culture's aspirations and valuesthrough some acquaintance with Aboriginalart. What were previously regarded as utterly'remote' places to Australia's white populationof the southern capitals may now be selectivelyvisited, and their history and geographicalcharacter be better understood and valued.Places like Broome, for instance, on the farnorth-west coast of Western Australia, maynow be experienced for their unique characterand cultural history, whereas previously manyof the more inaccessible settlements of northernAustralia were visited only by anthropologists,minerologists, miners and adventurers — allwith selective interests in such areas.

This is a quite critical period of developmentin Australia's cultural history, whereconservative forces may promote continueddivisions within Australian society in order tocontinue to profit from development ofAboriginal resource areas and labour, withoutsufficient regard to long-term issues. Feelingunder threat, conservative economic forces maycontinue to present a negative view ofAboriginal aspirations. There are criticalpolitical and social questions that directlyinterlock with the meanings of Aboriginal art,and they cannot be separated one fromanother.

It is not possible here to deal with the wholerange of legal and political issues affectingAboriginal people, but it is at least importantto focus on organisations that directly affect artsproduction, development and promotion.

The Aboriginal Arts Board was one of the seven

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TURKEY TOLSON TJUPURRULA (Pinrubi Tribe) Broom Venomous Serpent© Papunya Tula Artists PTY Ltd and Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd.

boards created by the Whitlam LabourGovernment, under the umbrella of theAustralian Council for the Arts (now theAustralia Council), after it won power in thefederal election of 1972. The broad spread ofvisual arts in Australia was placed under theresponsibility of a separate Visual Arts Boardwithin the Australia Council, alongside aLiterature Board, Music Board, Performing ArtsBoard, and so on.

The separation of Aboriginal Arts from thewhole spectrum of national arts activity, whileit has in some ways continued the idea ofAboriginal cultural activity as distinctly separatefrom the rest of contemporary Australianculture, was at least a far-sighted step to havetaken in the early 1970s. In contrast to previousgovernments' attitudes to Aboriginal culturaldevelopment, it represented a radical change.For the first time, Aboriginal cultural

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CLIFFORD POSSUM TJAPALTJARRI Dreaming (Luritja Tribe, Central Australia)(Central Mount Wedge,Australia). © Papunya Tula Artists PTY Ltd and Aboriginal ArtistsAgency Ltd.

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YUENDUMU CEREMONIAL (Central Australia), Preparation for EarthPainting, 1988. (Photo: Peter McKenzie)

development was distinguished as importantin its own right and was given its own separatebudget. An all-Aboriginal Board was set up toconsider and make judgments about fundingof Aboriginal arts projects and the promotionof Aboriginal culture to the world. This did notproduce change immediately, and the longstruggle to put Aboriginal people more andmore in control of all aspects of Aboriginalcultural organisation still goes on. However,the Aboriginal Arts Board's creation paved the

way for Aboriginal self-determination in artsaffairs.

One of the critical initiatives taken by theAboriginal Arts Board in the 1970s was to set upa series of positions for Art and Crafts Advisers,to locate people within the more traditionalAboriginal communities in the far north andcentre of Australia. Their role was to fosterAboriginal art and guide it to the outside world— to the market place — and to make sure thatpeople were not simply being 'ripped off by

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external interests as they had been in the past.They were to ensure that Aboriginal artistswere not just selling works for a carton of beeror a busted-up truck and so on.

The Art and Craft Advisers have thereforebeen crucially involved in this important periodof change over a decade or more: changes inthe wider community's aesthetic approach toAboriginal art, and changes in people'sattitudes to Aboriginal people themselves inmany ways. I consider that the Advisersprovide a very important linking role, betweenthe outside world and traditional communities,and in the chain of contacts that influence howand where Aboriginal art is dispersed.

With the spread of advisers, and the growthof consciousness in urban Aboriginal art therehas been a critical struggle going on in the lastfew years about the organisation of Aboriginalart's circulation. The Art and Crafts Adviserswere under threat by the federal government,which had become interested in capitalising onAboriginal art's increasing popularity, anddecided to try to federalise and centralise itsdistribution and marketing through the capitalcities directly. This new policy initiativethreatened to circumvent the role of theAdvisers working directly within and for theAboriginal communities themselves, and tobring art's marketing under agencies controlleddirectly by government. Strong reactions wereexpressed in many places, particularly aboutthe dangers of taking a short-term view andbecoming dependent on a distant governmentagency. Policies under governments can easilychange, leaving distant communities strandedwhen forms of economic support are suddenlycut. Moreover federal departments cannotreadily deal with the diversity and reality ofgrass-roots Aboriginal opinion and wishes. Asa result the Art and Crafts Advisers in the bulkof the Aboriginal communities banded togetherlast last year and formed a joint body, calledthe Association of Northern and Central AustralianAboriginal Artists. The aims of the looseassociation are to make sure that the wishes ofAboriginal artists are a first priority, and toensure that any statements made aboutAboriginal art truly reflect their aspirationsrather than those of government agencies.

In a similar manner to the formation of this 'association by artists in the north, a more recent

body has been formed in Sydney in 1988, callthe Boomali Artists Residents Ko-operative. Thishas arisen through a group of artists fromseveral states with a more urban background,who share similar feelings about controllingtheir work, the marketing and reading of it bythe rest of the community. Quite recently theyhad a joint exhibition with the Association ofNorthern and Central Australian Aboriginal Artists,which was shown at the Boomali art space inSydney.

In the Bicentennial year of 1988, however,many Aboriginal artists and many Aboriginalpeople in general ignored or protested theoccasion, as the commemoration of 200 yearsof white occupation only dramatised the stateof dispossession of the country's originalowners. The federal enquiry into theextraordinary number of black deaths incustody was one of a number of far moreburning issues for Aboriginal people in 1988,along with the infantile death rate, health careand land rights — all issues of black grievanceas the Bicentenary proceeded throughout theyear, causing a general boycott of any formalceremonies of celebration.

Meanwhile the bicentennial occasion was thesubject of some alternative constructions byAboriginal people: the massive and effectiveprotest march by representatives fromcommunities right across Australia thatrepresented the greatest and most diversegathering of Aboriginal people since theEuropean invasion, and the major Aboriginalgroup work that was made especially for the1988 [Australian] Biennale of Sydney. TheBiennale work of 200 memorial poles (afunerary pole for each year of settlement overtwo centuries) was created in the far north. Itwas drawn from the artists of Ramingining andseveral other Aboriginal communities inArnhem Land and the Northern Territory: fromManingrida, Milingimbi, Galiwinku, Barunga,Beswick and Bulman. The idea of taking partin this particular Biennale, with its emphasison an Australian view-point ('A View from theSouthern Cross', as it was sub-titled) was tocreate a representation that would be anauthentic Aboriginal statement for 1988 — notjoining any rhetoric of celebration, butpresenting a collective Aboriginal work, inAboriginal cultural forms, in the context of a

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CLIFFORD POSSUM TJAPALTJARRI Lightning Dreaming 1987Auckland City Art Gallery. (Photo: Yves Michaud)

survey of world contemporary art. If peopletruly accepted Aboriginal art, this was meantto say, they would also accept the largerstatement of cultural integrity and rights thatwas being made through this work. Theywould receive the work in the variety of itsdimensions and reflect upon its meanings.

What the artists had done was to create aforest of 200 burial poles, which was installedfinally in sand at the large wharf site of theBiennale, one of the two Biennale sites inSydney. The form of these poles has a specificmeaning and functional context: they arehollow-log, bone coffins, ritually used in post-death ceremonies in Arnhem Land, and stillmade today as a part of communal cultural life.The particular log coffins for the Biennale,

however, while completely traditional in formand decoration, did not contain the bones ofany actual deceased persons, nor had they beenused in ceremonies. Their function in Sydneywas intended to be entirely symbolic. Theywere to assist in the transformation of whatwould normally represent a disparate series ofprivate graves into a collective public memorialand mourning for all the Aborigines who haddied defending their own country as a resultof the white invasion since 1788.

Though stated by many to be the mostpowerful piece of art in the Sydney Biennalefor 1988, and judged by others to be one of themost important pieces of art ever created inAustralia (for instance, by the Director of theAustralian National Gallery in Canberra, whose

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museum acquired the poles for its permanentcollection, to be housed in a permanent display)the work is still seemingly a rather cumbersomeor difficult piece for the public, and even mostart writers, to come to grips with.

The 200 memorial poles, however, a workthat I co-ordinated through my position as Artand Crafts Adviser at Ramingining in centralArnhem Land, is to me a statement thattouches the crux of the question of black/whiterelations in Australia. Its acceptance or non-acceptance touches directly on the question ofthe readiness of white Australians to come toterms with a horrific past that needs to beaddressed, reflected upon and remedied.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The variety of requests of the Arts and CraftsAdvisers located within Aboriginal communities andprimarily dedicated to their servicing is growingmonth by month. It is therefore sometimes difficultto accommodate formal requests from the outsideworld to provide essays and written information ofa more broad-ranging kind, at the same time as thereare often pressing issues to attend to that concern theongoing cultural life of the communities themselves.I therefore was grateful for the back-up and practicalassistance of the Museum of Contemporary Art,Sydney (formerly Power Gallery of ContemporaryArt), when I needed to generate this text during abusy visit to Sydney on other matters. My thanksmust go to Jennifer Storey for transcribing my originalaudio-taped version into a typescript for me to lookover; and to Curator, Bernice Murphy, for givingeditorial time to the technical matters of convertingan audio-recording of my narrative into a suitablefinal version for printing in another language onanother continent. Their efforts in assisting me duringa very busy time are much appreciated.

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GANGA DEVITRADITION AND EXPRESSION

IN MADHUBANI PAINTINGJYOTINDRA JAIN

As in the case of most Kayastha women paintersof Mithila of her generation, Ganga Devi's earlyartistic expressions confined to painting thewalls of Kohbar ghar or the bride's weddingchamber, aripan or ritual floor paintings and thefive sheets of paper for wrapping sindur,vermillion, sent to the bride by the bridegroom.The entire tradition of Madhubani painting, ofwhich the finest and the most elaborate part isthe Kayastha tradition, is basically rooted inthese ritual paintings done on the walls, floorsand wrappers. The whole outburst of'Madhubani Painting' on paper is a laterdevelopment. With the introduction of paperthe artists of Madhubani, on the one handcontinued to derive the very essence of theirpictorial expression from the age-old culturaltraditions, and, on the other, recognised anunprecedented freedom from the confines ofpre-determined religious iconography andhighly formalised geometric symbolism of theirritual wall and floor paintings. From this greatupheaval, several individual painters emergedwhose work showed signs of "a radicaldeparture within the context of their owntradition". Ganga Devi is one these artists.

Ganga Devi's capability to transformexperience into pictorial images — ritualistic,symbolic, iconographic or narrative — made hera painter who, so to say, appears 'traditional'in her 'modern' work and 'modern' in her'traditional' work. In other words her painterlyqualities are such that irrespective of the subjectmatter — traditional Kohbar of Madhubani or

her recent impressions of America — the levelof image formation and pictorial transformationremains steady. Her concern is characterisedby an effort to create a series of refined andconceptualised images, all filtered through hercreative vision and sensibility. Her paintingspossess a stylistic certitude which is undeterredby the varied nature of themes she chooses topaint. As we shall see, this purity of perception,conceptualisation and depiction makes her agreat individual artist stemming from thecollective tradition of Madhubani painting.

Ganga Devi's evolution as an artist is deeplyconnected with the socio-cultural norms of theKayastha caste to which she belongs, but moreimportant determinants of her artistic careerwere a series of agonising events in herpersonal life which led her to find solace inartistic expression. Like her personal life, herpainting was shaped partly by the collectivesocial norms of her caste, partly by herindividual response to the latter and partly byher inherent character comprising of herresponse to inner beliefs and interests.

A few years after her marriage, and in theface of poverty and childlessness, her husbandmarried another woman and virtually threwher out on the street. In order to earn herlivelihood and to divert her attention from thepainful event, she began to paint, only to beexploited by a fellow painter and childhoodfriend who marketed her paintings under herown name, and paid Ganga Devi nearlynothing for the large profit she herself earned

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from them. By the strength of sheer quality ofher work, she carved a niche for herself rightat the top of the art world of India. In the courseof time she earned much fame and somemoney, but before she could relish any of theseshe became a victim of cancer and is virtuallycounting her last days.

Each one of these very peculiar situationssharpened Ganga Devi's perception, andprovided her with a profound understandingof the human world and its manifestations; and

above all, taught her to retreat, from time totime, to the world of her pictorial imaginationconcretised by her well-controlled line and afine sense of spatial organisation. Her chaoticlife and the neat and clean world of her paintingare intrinsically related. In her personal lifethere was an all-round invasion andencroachment; but, as if to ward this off, in herpainting each( character, each image, isprovided with'its own breathing space. Herinner turmoil led her to create, at least one

Ramayana 1974 (detail)

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canvas, a world full of peace and order.Ganga Devi was born around 1928 in Chatra

village of Madhubani district in the state ofBihar. Her father was a well-to-do pettylandlord. Her mother was a deeply religiouswoman endowed with great talent for painting.

Gange Devi's life centred around panchanga,the traditional lunar calendar of Mithila,comprising 12 months each of 30 days. Themonth, divided into two halves of 15 days, eachbeginning with the full moon and the new

moon respectively, was the basic unit of theannual ritual cycle. Two months formed aseason. The year had six seasons. The ritualsignificance of each day, on account of theposition of the moon, the movement of the sunand the planets, the cycle of seasons and thereligious festivals, was described in minutestdetails in the panchanga calendar.

Among the Kayasthas it was customary forwomen to learn reading and writing fromchildhood. Ganga Devi learnt the alphabet so

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The Cycle of Life 1983-84 (detail)

as to be able to read the panchanga calendar: "sothat I could lead my life, by correct achara andvichara or purity of action and thought."

The women of Mithila kept vratas or vowsand observed fasts on some of these rituallyimportant days. Every month had at least onesacred day on which aripana, womens' ritualfloor paintings, were done by using rice pastefor pigment and a twig for brush. Specific floorpaintings were also done on the occasion ofimportant events of human life such aspuberty, conception, birth, sixth day rites afterbirth, tonsure ceremony, initiation intolearning, betrothal, marriage, etc., and to markimportant days of the annual calendar.

The beginnings of Ganga Devi's paintings arerooted in these floor paintings. Her concern forritual purity in everyday life was responsiblefor the iconographic perfection of her earlierwork, and the symbolic overtones of her

imagery highly characteristic of her laterpaintings.

The word aripana stems from the Sanskritword alepana which derives from the root lip,meaning to smear, and therefore basically refersto ritual smearing of the ground with cowdungand clay as is prescribed in most of the ancientritual handbooks, and is practised by a largenumber of village and tribal communities ofIndia even today.

Another important mode of pictorialexpression that occupied Ganga Devi in herformative years was that of painting thecowdung plastered walls of the kohbarghar, thebride's wedding chamber, where marriage issolemnised under the auspicious influence ofthe painted symbols of plenty and fertility.From her explanation of each motif and symbolof the collective kohbar painting, it becomesclear that she understands kohbar not as mere

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'festive decoration', but as pictorialreconstruction and synthesisation of themagico-religious world comprising paintedimages of deities, sacred trees, primordialcreatures, ritual accessories, heavenly bodies,the male and the female, etc. with formsranging from representational-narrative topurely abstract-symbolic to geometric-diagrammatic. The entire kohbar painting isunderstood by her as a magical edifice in whicheach image, each symbol is to be conceptualisedwith utmost purity of essence and form. As sheonce said "impure expression is tantamount toself-destruction." By "self-destruction" shemeans destruction due to magical ill-effect asmuch as the violation of her artistic self. In thiscontext the 'magical' content cannot beseparated from the 'artistic'.

These perceptions, which crystallised in theearly stage of her career and in the context ofritual wall and floor paintings, continued topervade through her later works even in thecontext of purely secular themes, as in her'American series'. The concern for magicalpurity eventually got transformed into thepurity of expression — the former not separablefrom the latter.

The second important phase of Ganga Devi'spainting began when, discarded by herhusband on the eve of his second marriage,painting appeared to be the only means ofearning a livelihood. Around this time therewas a drought in Bihar and the Governmenthad been tackling the problem of providingoccupation to the drought-stricken people ofMithila by encouraging them to paint on papersupplied to them for the purpose. The personalneed for survival and the change of mediumfrom wall to paper offered her a greatchallenge. Being a fine artist, she immediatelyrealised the advantage of the smoother surfaceof paper over the rough plaster of the wall, forit allowed her to discover the potentiality of fineline especially for rendering narrative themesfrom the sacred legends of Rama and Krishna,the epic heroes.

The introduction of paper brought her atwofold liberation. She was no longer confinedto painting kohbar and aripan with their limitedvocabulary of symbols & images, and she couldnow investigate the unlimited possibility ofdrawing in fine line. One outcome of the

innovation was the series of paintings based onmythological subjects so far unconventional inher work.

As a devotee, she had known the story ofRama, and as a woman banished by herhusband for no fault of her own, she hadexperienced the agony of Sita. But for the firsttime in her life, she attempted pictorialconceptualisation of the story of Rama and Sita.

In this new situation, which marks thesecond phase of her painting career, GangaDevi was faced with handling the problems ofperspective or depicting the three-dimensionalworld on a two-dimensional surface,converting the temporal sequence of thenarrative into a spatial situation and translatingthe mythical images into pictorial ones.

She solved the problems of perspective byeliminating the depth-dimension totally.Realising the true nature of painting to be two-dimensional she did not attempt to fake thethird dimension by means of shading, or byoverlapping images to indicate depth; eachcharacter, each object, each leaf, flower or bladeof grass, was provided with its own free space.These aperspectival pictorial depictions makeher work appear 'unfamiliar' and therefore herown. The vertical and horizontal sprawling ofimages in fathomless white spaces adds a senseof drama and surprise to her painting.

The problem of converting the temporalsequence of the legend into the spatial one, hasbeen tackled by her in a rather simplisticmanner, she divided the space into varioussquare or rectangular compartments by meansof cross-bands, in the manner of a comic strip,in which each compartment contained acomplete painting reflecting tremendouspictorial narrative qualities. Spaces between thecharacters were filled up with flowers, branchesand creepers, growing from nowhere. GangaDevi eliminates all indication of sky or earth,time and space, instantaneously imparting amythological quality to the painting. Eachpicture with its ornate frame, the charactersfocussed in action and dialogue, minimalindication of mountains, rivers or forests,looked more like a scene from Ramleela, thetraditional folk theatre of Northern India whichhappened to be the main source of pictorialinspiration behind these paintings. Flimsylooking crowns, halos, bows and arrows, and

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'cardboard' chariots with lotus-shaped wheels,further testify that this phase of her workderived much from the Ramleela theatre.

Ganga Devi's third significant phase ofpainting began in 1982 with her epic workentitled The Cycle of Life. With this painting shetruely crossed the threshold of convention toexcavate fresh grounds hitherto untouched byany painter from Madhubani tradition or byherself. The theme she chose to paint, The Cycleof Life, comprised a series of Samskams or ritualevents of initiation as practised in Madhubani.For the first time she painted a theme relatedto everyday life and the immediate humansurrounding. This offered a departure and achallenge. This being unprecedented both inher work and in Madhubani tradition, she hadto dive deep into the ocean of her imaginationto find a new pictorial vocabulary. The results

were startlingly fresh and original.Her images in Kohbar and aripan floor

paintings were constructed within theprescribed iconography of these magicalpaintings. Her Ramayana series derived itsimagery heavily from scenes of the theatricalperformances of Ramleela as well as from thepopular local version of Ramchartimanas ofTulsidasa.

But in the case of The Cycle of Life she wasfaced with the problem of depicting the entirestory of human life as a continuous narrativein which each image, each scene and eachsequence, was conceived afresh without anyreference to a pre-existing model in her owntradition. The painting was conceived on anepic scale, replete with rich cultural detailpertaining to social manners and customs, andreligious beliefs and practices peculiar to epic

American Folk Festival, American Series, 1986

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U^J*JU>^^

Ride on a Roller Coaster, American Series, 1986

style. Here she eliminated thecompartmentalisation of scenes as in her earlierRamayana series. The resultant effect was thatof a universe teeming with millions of people,trees, birds, animals — all a part of a greatcelebration of life — from one birth to the next.

The entire cycle of life has been rendered by24 scenes, each marking a significant event inthe process of being born and growing up inMithila. The single most striking feature of thispainting is the highly individualisticconceptualisation of images and strictadherence to the ritual-symbolic conventionsof the collective culture of Madhubani. Theseimages owe very little to 'other pictures', butstem from a mind searching for a newvocabulary of self-expression to suit thechallenging new subject matter. The human

images here are much more real andspontaneous than in her earlier mythologicalpaintings of the Ramayana, reflecting on theirfaces and their postures earthy sentiments. Thetemporal dimension of The Cycle of life unscrollshorizontally to encompass a multitude ofimages in a double interaction of time andspace.

Ganga Devi's poetic imagery blendsbeautifully with a plethora of symbolic, magicaland natural detail rendered in the intersticesbetween the figures and scenes. A youngwoman, with flaming hairlocks and an ocean-like aura of fine streams of water, stands on apainted magical diagram representing thefemale organ smeared with menstrual blood,and being given a ritual bath on attainment ofpuberty; a pregnant mother lies on the ground

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holding a bunch of mangoes to safeguard herfertility and the child inside her womb anxiousto be born, and prays with folded hands: "OGod, release me from this hell"; two womenhelp to deliver and cut the umbilical cord, whilethe newly-born child lies on freshly-harvestedpaddy stocks and a pair of parrots make lovein the air, indicating genesis. These areimmortal images that could have stemmed onlyfrom Ganga Devi's great individual perceptionsof her collective cultural tradition and herpersonal artistic capability, unique in the entireMadhubani tradition.

In 1985 Ganga Devi visited the United Statesof America to participate in an exhibition ofIndian folk art and culture' in Washington. Shedid not remain aloof to this doosara hi duniya(completely different world) but confronted itwith a series of paintings based on herAmerican experience which I shall call, her'American Series'. She did these in the twoyears after her return from the USA. Sherecalled images from her memory of the visualexperience of America. The images here werenot as exhuberant as those of The Cycle of Life,but were more in the nature of minimal graphicsymbols. In her Washington Monument, for thefirst time using a narrative situation, sheapproached the canvas as a free pictorial spacenot dividing it up into linear compartments orrows in which sequences are chronologicallyorganised. In the centre of the painting is theWashington Monument surrounded byAmerican flags. The tower and the crosswaysleading to it automatically divide the paintinginto four rectangles. The scenes depicted arederived from her memory of the 'Festival ofAmerican Folk Life' celebrated annually at theMall around the fourth of July. The imagerycomprising multi-storeyed motor cars withlotus wheels (the latter resembling the wheelsof chariots in her Ramayana series); a handcoming out of a window handing over a ticketto climb up the Monument; pedestrianscarrying flowers and prominent shopping-bags; people wearing half-American, half-Indian costumes — all rendered in Madhubanistyle — gives the painting a surrealistic quality,as if an American dream painted on a celluloid .sheet had been super-imposed upon a distant

Madhubani landscape.Another painting of this series is based on her

recollection of a ride in a roller-coaster inAmerica. The gravity railroad, having a trainwith open cars that moves along a high, sharplywinding trestle built with steep inclinesproducing sudden speedy plunges for thrill,must have been a unique experience to resultinto such a graphic pictorial expression. Theneat drawing of the trestle, the way the headsof passengers rise above the open cars, the waytwo passengers try to balance while getting onto the train and the eyes of all the passengersin the train standing below and the contrast tothe passengers in the train speedily climbinga steep slope above results from her greatfaculty of observation of detail and itspictorialization to minimum graphic images.

Ganga Devi had learnt to eliminate formalcontext in her mythological paintings based onRamayana. She achieved this by avoiding anydefinite pictorial reference to wordly settingsor a known landscape. Paintings of this serieswere twice removed from reality (suitable formythological themes) — the first time becauseof her own interpretation and conceptualisationof the themes and images, and the second timedue to inspiration from the visual aspects of thetraditional theatrical performances of Ramleelawhich by themselves were visualconceptualisations of the narrative.

Thus, in the Ramayana painting, in a way,she 'mythologised' the mythology. But in her'American Series' what she did was somethingeven more brilliant — She mythologised the'reality'. She attempted to transform the day-to-day images of motor cars, flags, ticket-booths, roller-coasters, people carryingshopping bags, into completely imaginary and'fantastic' objects. She removed them againfrom any recognisable formal context andstripped them of all their 'familiarity' ascommon objects of everyday life.

What better course can the work of an Indianpainter of Ganga Devi's calibre, truely rootedin the rich tradition of magic, ritual andmythology, take after a sudden exposure to a'completely new world' if not come a full circleat another plane of artistic awareness!

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THROUGH THE EYESOF THE WHITE MAN

FROM 'NEGRO ART' TO AFRICAN ARTSCLASSIFICATIONS AND METHODS

LOUIS PERROIS

It may seem strange that after several decadesof survey and study of African plastic arts,controversies, indeed a whole polemic, are stilldeveloping as to the most 'legitimate' andappropriate manner in which to approach thesearts which even now are too often describedas 'primitive'. Instead of being concerned bythis, should we not rather see it as the healthysymptom of a renewed interest in little knownart and artists whose importance in theensemble of cultures we instinctively feel makeup today's world? There are, broadly speaking,two schools of thought in this field: those whoprivilege a universalist contemplation of aprimarily aesthetic kind, with the intent ofelevating African plastic arts, through thisfreeing of the eye and the mind, to the levelof the major 'arts' of the West, andconsequently dismissing as irrelevant or evenas obstructive any contextual informationrelative to the objects of those arts; and thosewho consider that theenvironmental/anthropological approachfurnishes an 'aesthetic' perception which, onthe basis of the mutual respect of cultures,necessarily corresponds to a particular logic andperception which are the proper aims of thisstudy in its fullest possible articulation.

Amongst all the most passionateconnoisseurs one can note that there are veryfew Africans, indeed far too few; the very peoplewho could, through a participatory approachand with an appropriate degree of sensitivity,strengthen the legitimacy accorded to African

arts. Must the White Man's way of seeingremain the point of reference for ever more, orwill other ways of seeing be allowed?

With the impact of the Third World, thenumber of pure 'aestheticians', of exalters of'Negro art' and of 'primitivism', is in decline,since the volume of information on the onehand, and the increasingly substantial presencein France of African cultures on the other(particularly in music), lead us to understandthe objects as partaking of a whole humancontext, the real interest of which we are onlybeginning to see.

Nowadays these two schools of thought canbe distinguished more by their methods ofanalysis and the way they deal with the peopleand 'field' of their enquiry than by positionsof principle.

Personally speaking, as a trained professionalethnologist with long experience of Africancultures in Africa itself, I cannot but alignmyself with the second group, not in order todeny or minimize the great 'aesthetic' value ofthe objects I study (some are quite clearlyamong the great masterpieces of world art), norto reduce the activity which dreamt them upand gave them form to a sort of 'functional'craft, but out of a scrupulous concern for agenuine reciprocity of cultures.

These works of art are, for me, objects andsigns; they first appeared in towns, villages,amongst families and secret societies, made upof living women and men who have a historyand a corpus of experience, which, in the event,

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seems unthinkable and totally unjust to neglectfor the sake of economy. I therefore claim thata better cultural balance is necessary in orderto understand the reality of these creations, tounderstand what they really are in theircomplexity and not merely what we want themto be, a result of having passed through thealmost imperceptible filters of our taste and ourmodes of thought. We should not so readilyforget past inequalities and the time when wespoke of 'Negro art' and the 'Art of theSavages'. We should, likewise, guard againsta new and very contemporary manifestation ofethnocentrism.

With regard to these artists, what seemssimply 'right' is to rehabilitate the legitimacyof these different cultures using their ownvalue-systems, even if these are difficult for usto understand.

If one considers that, as research has shown,the plastic arts are, in fact, languages whosefunctions are to be used and to be understood,one can see that, beyond the mere vocabulariesof form, motif and colour, there might besyntaxes, styles, and even a 'poetry' of form.This point of view is only radical in appearance,and because it is about objects with which theWestern world, or at least a certainintelligentsia, has become infatuated.

Ethnology, the study of social structures, ritesand, why not, arts, amongst other subjects,leads us not only to allow 'otherness', the rightto be different, but, moreover, inevitablyimplies the attempt to put oneself 'inside theskin' of those others whom one wishes to getto know, while avoiding all preconceptions,however broad. Ethnocentrism is a trap whichwe easily fall into, especially when it comes to'traditional' art.

How then, in dealing with African arts, canwe resolve this difficulty which consists in thefact that the notion of 'art' (our concept of 'art')cannot be perceived in the same isolatedmanner, but only as closely bound up withother elements of a spiritual and sometimesfunctional nature? Furthermore, how can wetake in the great variety of works, themultiplicity of variations of styles, the apparentcontradictions, in short the whole profusion ofcreativity in the African plastic arts? And lastly,how can we link these objects, which are poorlyidentified and often difficult if not impossible

to date, to a little-known social structure, to anindistinct historical framework and to anesoteric mode of thought?

Borrowing Michel Leiris' statement in theforeword to Afrique Noire, la creation plastiquethat it would be better to conceive of the overallapproach to African arts less as primarily 'ahistory of arts and styles' and more as thesearch for, and the according of spatio-temporalform to 'the visible products of a certainsociety's history', I have, since 1964,undertaken a whole series of research projectsin this field, first in connection with West CoastEquatorial Africa and later in connection withthe Grassland of the Cameroons, and finallyleaving the area to deal with objects incollections. This long immersion in coherentAfrican contexts (on a regional scale veryrestricted in relation to the whole of BlackAfrica), whilst allowing me to build up a largebody of information (and of impressions), has,over the years, made me increasingly modestand cautious in relation to the subject.

Let us start with the significance of those setsof objects considered, whether they be inmuseums or in private collections.

At the start of any research into African art,there are the objects. These constitute both thebasis and the end of research, the principalcentre of interest which potentially contains allthat one might be looking for, but always in aveiled, indeed esoteric, manner. If everythingis there, contained within the object, thennothing is either apparent or directlycomprehensible to the layman. The objectsseem beautiful, ugly, strange, extraordinary oruninteresting. This is, however, the only basicfact that we can obtain, an essential piece ofinformation because of its fixity, a fixedexpression, at a precise moment in time, of theinspiration and the creative capacity of a manwho is both long gone and often forgotten. Allthe rest, the sense and quality of this mouldedmessage has to be found in the more or lessrelevant archives, in often misleadingmuseographical research, in a limitedbibliography and in field-work that is alwaysdifficult at the heart of cultural and ethnicgroups who are undergoing a constant change(the pace of which has increased since theirindependence) and who are often uninterestedin their traditional arts.

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FANG NGUMBA (South Cameroon) An Ancestral StatueMuseum Fur Volkerkunde, Berlin

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A 'collection' is merely a set of objects, madeup haphazardly of pieces which were availableat a given moment in the field or on the market(galleries, other collections at auctions) andwhich are accorded with the tastes, and suitedto the pocket of the collector. In museums thismake-up will depend on the competence andthe inclinations of the curatorial staff, on theirtaste and their financial constraints (or on theirmission to collect, as was the case up until the1960s and 70s). One must always rememberthat any known object, has, de facto, beenthrough several selection processes.

If we consider the actual conditions of this'collecting' in the field, we must remain veryopen to the possibility of progressivelyenriching the corpus. Most of the well-known'Negro' art objects, the masterpieces whichadorn our museums, were obtained on the spotby more or less violent methods (for example,the destruction of the capital of the Oba of Beninand the confiscation of the bronze plaques fromthe royal palace in 1897) or by more or lessdirect pressure from colonial administrations orthe Church. No collecting has ever been carriedout outside an unequal power relation, evenwhen it is emphasized that villagers willingly(?) gave essential objects away to their visitors!

African objects have all therefore beenremoved from their environment. For the scientificresearcher who wishes to carry out a study inthe most objective manner possible, thisconstitutes a handicap that he should neverignore. Indeed, one may thus end up with anincomplete or even distorted image of an art.Amongst the Fang of Equatorial Africa forexample, we are most familiar with the statuesof ancestors and with two types of mask (thevery long ngil and a white 'moon' mask); theFang, made up of ten or so different groupings,have other artistic products: masks (the masksof the Ngil secret society in fibre and feathers;Ngeul polychrome wooden masks; Ngontanghelmet-masks with three, four, or five faces;Bikereu or Ekekek demon-masks); giganticpainted earthen sculptures containing variousobjects which perform certain roles (bones,plants, shells etc); sculpted architecturalfeatures (temple posts); decorated personalobjects (implement-handles, weapons, stools,culinary utensils etc.); highly fashionedheadwear (embellished with pearls, cowries,

brass tacks etc.); musical instruments withsculpted features (harps, drums etc.); variouskinds of personal adornment (bracelets,necklaces, face-painting, etc).

All these objects clearly present us with agreat number of variants which until recentlynobody was either bothered or been able torelate together. This entails an enormous amountof work for each region of Africa, and it is clearthat, despite various moves in the rightdirection, the task is far from being completed,especially as regards published work.Monographs, like 'catalogues raisonnes' do notmake much money, because the buying public,and hence publishers, still prefer comfortablegeneralizations. Yet without these monographsand these systematic studies there is no wayforward.

A METHOD1 ADAPTED TO A PARTICULARCASE:AN ETHNOMORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSISOF THE SCULPTURE OF THE FANG OFEQUATORIAL AFRICA.

An objective scientific understanding of atraditional work of art demands a complexapproach which starts with simple contemplationand finishes with the analysis of the totalenvironment in which the work originated. It isthe dialectical collation of objective anddeterminate data and the intrinsically humanknowledge of a society that enables us to graspthe particular originality of African tribal art.2

The method of analysis of Fang statuarywhich will once again be used here draws itsinspiration directly from the nature of the objectto be analysed: the Byeri as well a sculptedobject (an ancestor-statue) as a belief, a work ofart and a mystical link with the world ofancestors. The work of art is a mediation betweenthe living and the dead, the communication beingmade by means of the sculptural messageexpressed in the statue. Therefore we shouldconsider Fang statues as objects, as works of art,as objects used in ritual, and lastly as an institutionor, to be more exact, as the privileged mode ofexpression of an institution.

The aim of this method, the study of thecorrelation between the concrete (the sculptedforms) and the abstract (the imagination thatgave them form), is to define the constantcharacteristics of 'styles', to help place them

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FANG BETSI (Gabon) An Ancestral StatueMuseum Fur Volkskunde, Basle

historically and geographically and thereby togain true access, albeit in a limited way, to thecomplex worlds of African thought, wheresocial, religious, scientific and aestheticelements combine as one. In this particular casethe method was very carefully adapted to fitthe specific problems posed by Fang statuary,which is thematically and morphologicallyhomogeneous. Nevertheless, the fundamentalprinciple of comparing the results of aestheticanalysis (museum-work) with the real-lifeenvironment in which the particular styleflourished (field- work) is applicable to anyother traditional style.

The object, taken on its own, removed orsnatched from its proper context, and isolatedin an artificial environment, will not reveal itssecret straight away, whatever method isapplied to it. The computer will help us to theextent that we shall, with its aid, be able tocollect all the variables relevant to the object,whether they be morphological data or dataconcerning signification.

We can thus give an outline of the method:1) a morphological analysis leading to thedelineation of 'theoretical' styles;2) a stylistic investigation carried out in theoriginal context of the tradition in order to testand validate the theoretical styles (which willenable one to determine the relative relevanceof each of the classifications obtained), toidentify their place of origin and to study thereciprocal stylistic influences within a historicalperspective.

Morphological analysis

Morphological analysis is the identification,classification and comparison of forms, thevolumes and rhythms of statues, independentof all other considerations, particularlyhistorical or ethnographic. This approach isbased on the principle that all forms, in theirinternal organization of elements, aresignificant in themselves; the work of art, quacomplex of forms or morphological elements,is never fortuitous. Therefore there is always anorder to be found amongst the morphologicalelements, and this order reflects the concept ofstyle as I defined it above. Morphologicalanalysis provides us with these styles which are'theoretical' because they are defined according

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to the sole logical criteria of our system ofknowledge and without reference either to theirprecise provenance or to the opinions of theinterested parties (artists or native users). Theclassification into logical series requires nofurther criteria than those given by thedistinguishing features of the work, but onlythe data obtained in the field can go on to givethat classification real significance.

Whilst being theoretically applicable to thetotality of traditional plastic arts, this methodis, in practice, only manageable at a regionalor epochal level. Documentary evidencetherefore has to be pre-selected. One must firstselect a region or a coherent set of ethnic groupswhere one might hope to find stylistic affinities.(Which might consist in either a single stylewith significant variation or several relatedstyles.)

We are straight away confronted with theproblem of identifying the various pieces.3

This is made harder by the intermixing ofpopulations, migration and frequent exchanges(field-work comes up against this problem).The whole ensemble of African arts musttherefore be studied, region by region, in amonographical form similar to that used ingeneral ethnology.

When the region has been selected, we maystart on the museographical investigation (theestablishment of the collection to be referredto) and on the bibliographical research. The aimis to have a representative collection. We sawabove the particular difficulties that oneencounters in this respect. The minimum sizewould seem to be about 300 or 400 items fora fairly homogeneous style such as those of the

-Fang, Dogon, Bambara, Senufo, etc. When itcomes to masks, that number must be at leastdoubled because of the very large number ofvariations. The number of items studied isimportant for the research because it serves asa statistical validation of the conclusions. A largenumber of pieces of the same sub-style willdemonstrate the continuity, the consistencyand the duration of the complex therebydefined. 'Atypical' sub-styles represented byonly a few pieces may signify abandonedinnovations or a fashion that petered out before •developing into a true style.4

We can thereby create a museographicalindex card identifying the morphology of each

object which will serve to describe each piecein a detailed and standardized way.

First the object is measured (height, width,depth, axes, etc), then it is taken apart oranalysed, feature by feature. In this respect theoverall pattern of component elements in theobject is subjected to scrutiny, for example, inthe case of a statue: the balance and rhythmof the sculpted blocks, its proportions, how itfits its space, the dialectic of empty and fullspace, the relation between the different planesetc; the supplementary details of itsmorphology (its eyes, mouth, ears, etc); itsdecoration.

It should be noted that drawings permit a farbetter visual and manual understanding ofsculptures than do photographs which one canonly contemplate passively. Drawings enableone to understand the technical procedureemployed by the artist. Moreover we shouldnot forget that certain objects, especially masks,are made to be seen in a particular way.

Starting from the basic documentation weisolate each relevant morphological feature ofthe object and compare it to the homologousfeature in every other piece in the collection;this splitting up into basic elements enables usto classify it in a particular typical category.

Let us look at, for example, the morphologicalfeatures used in the study of Fang statuary.

I first tried to see if the size of different partsof the body (head, trunk, legs) had a particularsignificance. It was later found that, in Fangstyles, the differences in these sizes weresignificant at the level of tribal differentiation.Nonetheless in the case of size one cannot makeimmediate generalizations, even when oneapplies it to the other styles of Gabon.5 I nextlooked at the following: the height of the trunkin relation to the total height of the body (interms of the total height); the relative heightof the head and the legs (and in relation to thetotal height of the body): thus one might have,for example, as the typical associated featuresof the style 'very small head/very long legs' or'very fat head/medium-sized legs', etc; the sizeof the neck (in relation to the total height of thebody); the concavity of the face; the shapes ofthe head, face and profile; the hairstyle or thehead-dress; the arms. In this case one muststudy how the sculptor was able to treat them(attached to the body in low or high relief, or

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detached from the body; breasts and genitalia;the position of the legs (e.g. half-kneeling,sitting etc.); the mouth, the nose, the ears, theeyes, the navel, etc.

The detailed examination of this splitting upinto distinct morphological features togetherwith the specific characterization of each aimsat an exhaustive survey of all the forms usedfor each sculptural detail in every statue in thecollection in question.

For each of the features a set of mutuallyexclusive categories can be defined. Forexample, the 'eye' in Fang statues can bedivided into seven different types: 1) mirrorstuck on with resin; 2) 'coffee-bean'; 3) copperplaque fixed with a screw, nail or glue; 4)incision; 5) raised disc; 6) no eyes; 7) raised,rectangular.

As regards the 'eyes', each statue falls intoone of these categories, and so on for each ofthe other features studied. We can thus codeall the morphological variables and characterizeeach object by a formula (for example, a seriesof figures) which will summarize thedescription of its form in a standardizedmanner.

The establishment of 'theoretical styles'

Once each work has been studied separatelyin the most objective manner possible (albeitobviously in relation to our 'geometrical'Western vision), we must proceed tomultivariable systematic comparison. This canbe done either, as I did in 1970, by manualcollation of all the figures pertaining tomorphological identification (the descriptiveformulae), or, as is possible nowadays, bycomputer-aided data analysis. This process, inboth cases, boils down to deriving a number ofsets from works which have consistent andhence significant resemblances.

In Fang statuary it can be seen that, despitean overall homogeneity, the statues are of verydifferent sizes. Some are very long, thin andslender, others are squat and solid. It becameapparent to me during the course of mymuseographical research and my field-workthat, within the vast Fang complex, these sizesare related to a certain ethnic differentiation:taking into account the geographical spread ofgroups at the end of the nineteenth century,

long-form styles are generally from the northand short-form styles from the south of theregion.

Nevertheless the distinguishing feature orfeatures can be differentiated: according to J.Laude what distinguished Dogori statuary wasthe organization of volume in space and thetechnical freedom in relation to the materials;according to P. Vandenhoute for Dan/Gueremasks the distinguishing features were relatedto the represented reality, a combination ofidealized realism and primitive expressionism.A. Leroi-Gourhan thought that, for primitiveart in general, the notion of distance wasimportant, particularly the distance betweenthe vital elements of the statue (eyes, mouth,navel, genitals, etc), and that defining thesedistances contributed to a geometricalunderstanding of 'sculptural rhythm'.

The results of the multivariable analysis allowus to determine the minimum measurablecharacteristic for each set, the latter having beenidentified and distinguished from one anotherby means of a statistical method.

Can we say that, now that these theoretical'styles' have been established by means of ourpreliminary analysis, we have in fact completedour research and discovered the actual styles?We cannot do so, of course, but what we dohave here is an outline containing all theelements which will enable us to carry out theanthropo-stylistic research proper, which alonewill enable us to see a reflection of that realitywhich is both a product of history and the livedexperience of actual people. We must givedepth to that rough canvas made up of linesand measurements by painting into it the depthof the real world, the fertility of imagination,and the individual inspiration of the artistswhich are the fruit of a continuous flourishingprocess of borrowing and exchanging styles.

The anthropo-stylistic research

The first and most important point is to beaware of the absolute necessity of a thoroughacquaintance with the social context in whichone is working. Since traditional art is one ofthe privileged forms of expression of a society,it would seem impossible to picture it, to studyit, to classify it, or to understand it whilstdeliberately ignoring the civilization which gave

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rise to it and used it, at least as long as onewishes to avoid the dangers of ethnocentrism.

P. Frascatel, J. Maquet and J. Laude havealready outlined the various problems involvedin discovering the relation between the workand the society, and in evaluating the role ofthe sculptor in his social group (his freedom ofexpression, his social and religious roles),which are all problems that can only by solvedthrough field-work. This direct acquaintancewill, at a regional level, also enable us todetermine more precise locations for the styles,to validate the theoretical classifications, tostudy influences, to determine a historical orderof development — in short, to study in situ thedynamism of the plastic arts.

The modes of research in the field

The field-work has two main aims: to delimitthe spheres of influence of different sub-stylesand to situate the centres of particular styles; andto become aware of the importance of theobjects in ritual (their use) and the technical,artistic, and spiritual conditions of their creation.

The questions I asked about the statues of theFang, by way of example, dealt with theproblem of sculpture and with the generalinformation on Fang customs which had beenobtained from elsewhere (from books or fromother visits to the region, for example). I triedto find sculptors and initiates, indeed anyonewho was able to answer my questions, themajority of young people under thirty beingunable to do so.

The subjects dealt with were as follows:famous sculptors; techniques involved in themaking of these objects (the frequency andcircumstances of their being made, the woodsused, their selection, the way the trees werefelled, the way the wood was treated, the wayit was sculpted, the decoration); the meaningof the statues (representations of females andmales, of animals, of mother and child, busts,heads), the meaning of the posture of thesculpted figures and of their size; theidentification and sense of the head-dresses,tattoos, beards, jewels, etc; the relationbetween masks and statues, the definition ofthe Byeri (Fang ancestor-cult): their vocabulary,terminology, their re-modelled or paintedskulls, the consultations given by the Byeri,

their sacrifices, their priests, their interdicts, theprocess of initiation and the role of relics andstatues; the definition of the Melan (an initiatorysociety linked to the Byeri); the links betweenthe Byeri and the Melan, rituals, frequency ofrites, the nature of ceremonies, the role oftwins; the gradual disappearance of the Byeriand the Melan: the reasons for thedisappearance of rituals and statues and thereasons for the survival of certain masks.

After the questions, I carried out a test, basedon a number of photographs, which consistedin identifying the nature and origin of objects

-characteristic of the theoretical sub-styles. In aset of eighteen photographs, I introducedreliquary figures foreign to the Fang (belongingto the kota-mahongwe, the kota-obamba and thesango), in order to determine to what extentsculptors could recognize works which werestylistically related to their own.

Field-work will always complicate the initialtheoretical classification and demonstrate thathuman behaviour does not easily fit into strictcategories and that reality is awkward. It is onlywith experience that one realize that directcontact with the area studied is absolutelynecessary if one is to begin to get close toobjective reality, even in the domain of theplastic arts. This contact may still be valid fora number of years for the study of ancient art,even though most of the sculptors havedisappeared leaving no artistic heritage. Field-work will complete a deficient documentationand will provide it with the elements necessaryfor a genuine understanding of the question.

The analysis of the answers given to thequestions and the results of the photo-testcreated new sub-divisions amongst the broadersets already defined. It was thereby possible todetermine several typical sub-styles in theshort-form set (with their significant details)which became apparent in the course of thefield-work — for example, the three-shelledhead-dress of the Mvai.

The history of peoples and their migrationexplain certain influences and the present formof the sub-styles. It was realised that there weretransitional forms (medium-form) that could betaken apart and analysed.

The results of the two methods of enquiry canbe collated as follows:

One can see that it is impossible to say, for

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example, that all Ntumu statues are very long,or that all long-form statues are Ntumu. Thereare a considerable number of variations. Sub-styles are defined by a majority of objects (ageneral tendency towards a certain form) yetinclude various exceptions, which are however,recognizable through other details of sufficient

Analyse theorique

Enquete de terrain

Hyperlongiforme Longiforme Equiforme BreViforme

NGUMBAMABEA

NTUMUBETSI-NZAMAN

MVAIOKAK

STYLE DUNORD STYLE DU SUD

significance. It is only the extreme categorieswhich do not overlap: Ngumba — very longioimlMvai — short form. On the other hand,the intermediate medium-form category splitsinto two sub-categories, either Ntumu orNzaman/Mvai/Betsi. Hence, we can discern inthe homogeneous Fang ensemble two quitedistinct centres of production, the existence ofwhich can be explained by the study ofmigration, which had two main waves: first,the Betsi, the conquerors, and second theNtumu, who were able to exploit the land.

Also, through the study of all the patterns ofartistic exchange in the area bounded by theSanaga in the Cameroons and the Ogooue inGabon, we end up with a dynamism of styles.

What is controversial about this method is tohave dared, along with several others, tomeasure African art, to have observed it,scrutinized it, analysed it and codified amoment of its history. Despite all theprecautions taken, this approach still has theability to shock. How could we 'geometrize' theinspiration and the drives of pure creation?

Whilst being aware of the limits of amorphological approach, even one which is LONCIFORME BREVIFORME

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carefully adapted and counterbalanced bycorrective anthropological and historical co-efficients, I believe that the creations of theplastic arts of Africa form a complex 'ensemble'of specific orders whose distinct and identifiable'styles' are its formal indices. Africa, too, hasa right to a logic of imagination. Its arts areconceived and constructed, and are nevereither instinctive or determined by externalconditions.

These logical features lie behind the feelingof visual delight and the flights of imaginationthat the works spark off, that we should beuncovering and analysing, so that we maycontribute to a greater cultural balance, theneed for which we all feel, between Black Africaand the West.

NOTES

1. This method is derived from a whole number ofdifferent works, particularly those of F. Olbrechts,P. Vandenhoute, and A. Leroi-Gourhan (see L.Perrois, 'Statuaire fang, Gabon', ORSTOM, Paris,1972, et 'Problemes d'analyses de la sculpturetradtionnelle du Gabon', ORSTOM, Paris, 1977.2. The very notion of 'tribality' (in the sense givenby W. Fagg) should be used with caution to the extentthat ethnic or 'tribal' space is very open to the outsideworld. In real life the ethnic group does not,therefore, have clearly defined and convenientboundaries.3. Genuine articles, as far as it is possible to judge:in other words conceived and made by Africans forAfricans.4. Nevertheless an 'atypical' set can in due coursebe identified, (for example, the sub-style of the Mabeaof the Cameroons).5. J. Laude based his classification of Dogon workson the complexity of the sculpture in relation to thelog from which it was carved.

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PRIMITIVISMWITHOUT APPROPRIATION

BOAS, NEWMANAND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ART

CARLOS SEVERI

In September 1946, in a piece introducing anexhibition of North-West Coast Indian painting,Barnett Newman wrote:

It is becoming more and more apparent that tounderstand modern art, one must have anappreciation of the primitive arts, for just as modernart stands as an island of revolt in the stream ofWestern European aesthetics, the primitive arttraditions stand apart as authentic aestheticaccomplishments that flourished without the benefitof European history.1

Whilst postulating a very close link between hispainting and primitive art, Newman hereproposes an aesthetics whose primitivistreference is not restricted to directappropriation of forms.

The great New York painter invokes the ideaof a ritualistic will2 to create, which heattributes to Amerindian artists (The first manwas an artist is the title of a piece he wrote atthat time), and at the same time engages informal artistic research free of all imitation. Hehas no desire to borrow visual themes fromprimitive art but refers to it as if it were aparallel field of research. This attitude was notunique in 1940's New York. Newman sharedit with other artists including Gottlieb, Still,Rothko and Kline.3 This approach, animatedby a strong feeling of affinity with primitiveartists ("to be an artist is to make, is to be justthat", Newman seems to be saying in hispresentation of Kwakiutl painting), is that ofone of the great currents in twentieth centuryprimitivism, one" which Rubin and his fellow

researchers least explored.4 It is perhaps alsothe approach which is still alive today in thework of painters and sculptors like Beuys andTwombly. This feeling of solidarity, almost ofbrotherhood, that Newman has towardsAmerindian artists challenges anotherdistinction: that between the work ofcontemporary artists and anthropologicalresearch into the art of so-called primitivesocieties.

Elsewhere I have attempted to give adefinition of the field of study of theanthropology of art, which whilst allowing usto understand the history of Westerninterpretation of primitive art, can be appliedto all works of art.5 In this essay I should liketo show how, from the same angle, one mightformulate that link which exists betweensupposedly primitive art and certaincontemporary research.

The Latin word 'ars' has had for centuriestwo distinct senses, which nowadays seemquite remote from one another. On the onehand — writes Panofsky (1987, first published1943) — 'ars' designates the conscious andintentional capacity of man "to produce objectsin the same manner as nature producesphenomena." In this sense "the activities ofan'architect, a painter or a sculptor could, evenat the height of the Renaissance, be describedas 'ars' in the same way as those of a weaver.or a bee-keeper". On the other hand, the term'ars' also designated — in a use of the wordwhich has almost disappeared nowadays — aset of rules, or of techniques, that thought must

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use in order to represent the real. Thus not onlywere the rules of logical argument an 'ars' forsophists and stoics, but also what we now callastronomy could, for centuries, describe itselfas the "art des e'toile".

Taking as a starting point the double meaningof this concept, which has almost disappearedfrom our own tradition, we can say that thestudy of the link that each culture establishes betweenthese two aspects of the notion of art — betweencertain forms of knowledge and certain techniquesof conception and production of images — constitutesthe object of anthropology of art. The task of theanthropologist is, then to compare, in each andany work of art, the functions of technique andthought.

In actual fact, in this meeting of Newman'sartistic research and the work of Kwakiutlartists — an attitude of revolt against Westerntradition facing the art-products of societieswhich have always been foreign to our own —the problematic notion is precisely that oftechnique.

According to Boas' earliest research — whichis part of a tradition going back to Reigl6 andSemper 7 — the pioducts of the plastic arts ofprimitive societies acquired the status of worksof art precisely because of a reflection ontechnique:

"The intuitive feeling for form must bepresent," writes Boas. "So far as ourknowledge of the works of art of primitivepeople extends the feeling for form isinextricably bound up with technicalexperience."8

The criterion which guides him in hisanalyses of the art of the North-West coast isclear: art exists where the absolute mastery ofa technique culminates in a perfect form. Thisform can then transcend the simple functionof the utilitarian object and become the modelfor a style. This depends as much on theparticular organization of a culture as on theconstraints inherent' in all representation ofspace. According to Boas, there are only twoways of representing space: one refers directlyto vision and, imitating the eye, representsobjects in a unifocal perspective. The otherrepresents objects not as they presentthemselves to vision, but rather as they arerepresented by the mind. Hence a North-Westcoast sculptor can multiply perspectives and

represent an animal from several points of viewsimultaneously, or even combine the disjectamembra of a male dolphin and a female seal toshow us the monstrous fruit of theirmetamorphosis.

Primitive art is then neither naive norrudimentary: in fact in choosing a specificvariation of mental organization of space, itconstructs a complexity where our eyes areused to simplifying. When we look at a picturedrawn in an illusionist perspective we expecta simplified representation of the object in orderto imagine the complex totality of features whichconstitute it. Primitive art moves in the oppositedirection: the tendency is towards a complexrepresentation of the features of an object sothat we can mentally construct its real presence:so that we can imagine it more completely thancan the mere eye. This type of representation— when it reaches that state of perfection thatBoas describes — generates such a tensionbetween verisimilitude and the invisible that itproduces the illusion of an unreal space: thecoordinates that determine this space are notthose of vision.

We have seen that the discovery of thisconcept of space in Kwakiutl art was for Boasthe result of a reflection on technicalexperience. If we turn our attention to the textswritten by the artists of the New York School,this notion seems to have disappeared from thevery definition of art: "Art is defined not byits technique of production, manual or other,but by the inner shape of the society in whichit appears," wrote Harold Rosenberg in a 1971piece devoted to the work of MarcelDuchamp.9 Here as elsewhere in Rosenberg'swriting, the attempt to understand the artist'sthought comes up against a reflection on thepublic (indeed political) nature of art. "Today,art itself is the critic", he wrote in a more recentpiece: to conceive and interpret forms is toquestion the place of art (and, through art,invention) in society.

It is of course not by chance that thesethoughts spring from a reflection on Duchamp.Amongst the great discoverers of the century,Duchamp has, perhaps, most clearly shownthat before even being a form for the eye tobehold, the work of art is an act, and that noform can be understood without analysing thesequence of acts through which the artist

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JOSEPH BEUYS Tram Stop 1, 1976© BEUYS VG-BILDKUNST, 1987

, - - ? ' - • •

realises mental space, amongst which the workof art is merely the end product or a fragment;Rosenberg points this out in connection withMondrian in Art on the Edge (1983).

The ordering of this sequence should in noway be confused with technical procedure. Thisword, Rosenberg seems to think, is too full oftraps. It should be carefully redefined whenapplied to modern art:

In the changed relation between art and history, theautomations involved in the application of craft skillshave been replaced by acts of the mind occurring atthe very beginning of the making of a work.. .Their effectis to remove art from the realm of habit, manualdexterity, and traditional taste into that ofphilosophy.10

This view, which is perhaps excessivelyintellectualist, of the abstract painter's workshould not make us forget that this preliminarysequence of acts by the artist "which occurs atthe very beginning of the making of a work"and which defines the work's style andthought, is directed above all at the definitionof a space. The work of a painter free from anyprimitivist tendency like the early De Chiricoclearly illustrates this point. In his firstpaintings — which, after surrealism and viaDuchamp, had a profound influence on theNew York School — the intensity of the imagesnever results from the objects that appear in thepaintings nor, as has too often been claimedfrom their incongruous placement. The powerof some of the Places d'ltalie and some of theAutoportraits comes from the fact that the co-ordinates of the painted space are sounbearable to the eye that they end up showingus a physically impossible space: a space thatthe eye can never entirely grasp.

What is abolished in these scenes is thehorizon against which the objects — and thebeholder — are inscribed. If we look at variousjrban landscapes from the Ferrarese period, we:an see that no town, no landscape, can havesuch a close horizon. The painter's dizzyingforeshortening shows a point in space that:annot exist. Yet the space is there, silent. Atrain passes by behind the arcades, the shadowof a girl is glimpsed. She has a toy in her hand.The imagery seems oneiric, because the spacein which it appears cannot exist in the worldwe know. This unreal cutting up of space is

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aimed, as De Chirico later wrote, at reflectingthe very mechanism of thinking. n .

Before the avant-gardists the technical taskof a painter (his craft skills, as Rosenberg putit) had as its initial goal the reproduction of aunique and verisimilar spatial model. Fortwentieth century painting, or at least for thosepainters who, like Mondrian, considered that"the surface of natural things is beautiful, butits imitation is dead matter",12 theconstruction of a physically impossible space isthe first act of the technical procedure. In thisact of defining space, which precedes anyoccurrence of image, the contemporary artistidentifies the ars of thought with the ars oftechnique. Opting for radical abstraction thuscoincides with an imaginary exploration of theorigins of pictorial representation. What theKwakiutl artist demonstrates to Newman is thepossibility of conceiving a space where therealm of thought can be made in age ("the I,terrible and constant, is in my eyes the subjectof painting" he declared in 1985); a place wherethe abstract forms of geometry can definitelydisengage themselves from all reference to theeveryday experience of vision in order tobecome "a language of passion".13 From thatpoint on, technical innovation becomes evermore closely identified with development ofthought.

Today, through the work of other artists, thedefinition of space remains very close to thisvision of primitive art. Let us look at a lastsample: Tram Stop, which Beuys first showedin the 1976 Venice Biennale. In this sculpture,all the elements of the image (the tumulus ofrubble, the four rounds of wood around theimage of a man, the tram cable and the lengthof piping which sketch a perspective in a placewhich cannot but suggest the apse of a smallchapel) aim at defining the space of an altar.The traditional coordinates of the place of ritualare, however, completely absent. Instead of anicon surrounded by offerings in the half-lightof a chapel, we see the apparently randomlyscattered traces of a private cult whose beliefswe shall never know. In this case, as inAmerican Indian art, the work becomes theplace where a tension between the realistic andthe invisible is generated. For Newman as forBeuys, primitive art does not constitute arepertory of terms to imitate; Through the

aesthetic ideal in their work, the identificationof the ars of technique and the ars of thought,primitive art at one and the same time offersthem the model of a non-illusionist space anda series of techniques of mental representation.It is in the space defined by these techniques— techniques which no longer follow the eye,but the mind — that each form will henceforthseek its perfect state.

NOTES

1. H. Rosenberg, Barnett Newman, New York,Abrams, 1978, p.241.2. Ibid.3. Rosenberg explains Newman's attitude towardsEuropean painting of that time as follows: "Newmanput forward the concept of an ideal art without visualreferences as a development for which Americanartists were particularly fit. Even in its most abstractmodes, Newman contended, European art remainedwedded to its 'sensual nature'; the geometrical formsof 'purists', such as Kandinsky and Mondrian, wereactually equivalents of trees and horizons. Againstthe naturalism inherent in the European sensibility,a new group of American painters, Newmanasserted, were creating a 'truly abstract world'. Forthose artists (Gottlieb, Rothko, Still and himself), heclaimed an art entirely liberated from residues ofthings seen, a virtually dean state of the imagination.The American abstractionists were 'at home in theworld of the pure idea', as the Europeans were athome among the objective correlatives of sensations."(op.cit.,p.37-38)4. See Varnedoe's study 'Abstract Expressionism' inW. Rubin (ed), Primitivism in XXth Century Art,exhibition catalogue. Museum Of Modern Art, NewYork, 1986.5. C. Severi, 'Anthropologie de L'Art', to bepublished in Dictionnaire de L'Ethnologie et deL'Antrhopologie, Paris PUF.6. A. Riegl, Stilfragen, Berlin, 1923 (2 ed.).7. G. Semper, 'London Lecture: November 11, 1853',in Res-Anthropology and Aesthetics, 6, 1983, and(London Lecture: December 1853), in Res-Anthropology and Aesthetics, 9, 1985.8. Should read p.11.9. H. Rosenberg, Art on the Edge, Chicago, ChicagoUniversity Press, 1983, p.4.10. Ibid., p.136.11. On De Chirico's thought, see P. Fossati, La PitturaMetafisica, Turin, Einaudi, 1988, and G. De Chirico,Il Meccanismo del Pensiero, Turin, Einaudi, 1987.12. "For the surface of things is beautiful, but itsimitation is dead matter. Things give us everything,but their representation no longer gives us anything."(Mondrian, Diaries 1914, cit. in M. Seuphor, PietMondrian, Paris, Flammarion, 1956, p.116).13. H. Rosenburg, Bamett Newman, op. cit., p.37.

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OTHERS ART - OUR ARTSALLY PRICE

In a few years' time the Western world will becelebrating the discovery of America without,however, noticing that what it is celebrating isnot the discovery, but its discovery of thatcontinent. Obviously, for those who werealready living there, the 'New World' was notso new as it was for the Europeans of that time.

An identical distinction should be madeabout the discovery of 'primitive art' duringthis century.1 In the following pages I shall beexamining the proprietal roles that Westernershave bestowed upon themselves when it comesto others' art. As a starting-point I shall takePierre Bourdieu's observation that "the gamesthat artists and aesthetes play and their battlesfor the monopoly of artistic legitimacy are lessinnocent than they appear".2 For, if thisremark can be applied to the heart of a singlesociety, then it takes on a far greatersignificance when applied to a dominantsociety which both judges and controls theartistic output of others.

I shall first make some basic points about thetraditional study of fine art. It is not difficultto see that art-historians take, as their mainsubject of enquiry, the life and works of certainindividuals and the historical unfolding ofdistinct artistic movements. As with the historyof music, of literature or of theatre, the historyof art is seen as a mosaic of contributions madeby individuals whose names we know, whoseworks can be distinguished, and whose

personal lives and the way they related to theirage are worthy of our attention. There is,however, one single exception to this definitionof the study of art which is centred onindividual creativity and historical chronology.In this predominant Western conception, awork of art originating outside the 'worldtraditions' is considered to be the product ofa nameless person who is representative of hiswhole community and who unreflectivelyobeys the precepts of a time-honouredtradition.

Before examining this composite person moreclosely, it will be useful to take a brief look backover the places accorded to individual creativityand to authority in the tradition of ethnologicalliterature.

On the one hand, a great number ofdescriptions of 'primitive' societies are writtenin the timeless tense described as the'ethnographic present' — a mode of expressionwhich has the effect of removing culturalexpression from its historical dimension andhence of amalgamating individuals and evenwhole generations in order to create a singlefigure who is representative of his society's pastand present. Malinowski's Trobriand Islandnative' and Evan-Pritchard's 'Nuer priest' wereconstructed with the aim of showing us thecultural norms and general customs of theirsocieties rather than to explore the differentcharacters of the individuals or to enable us to

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understand chronological developments moreclearly.3 This kind of approach survives to thisday, virtually untouched by the current debateabout the role of history in the lives of peopleswho have no writing.

On the other hand, there have always beenenthnologists who advocate paying greaterattention to the role of creativity, of innovationand of historical change, in other societies.Franz Boas, for example, whilst affirming theconservatism of 'primitive art' and the powerfulinfluence of the traditions that form the basisof that art, radically altered the study of 'other'art when he replaced the work of art by theartist himself as the main object of his enquiry.He emphasized the importance of researchwhich penetrated the vision of people in aparticular society and of a kind of study thatis attentive to the role of virtuosity, to theartistic process, and to what he called the"game of the imagination" in the creation ofartistic form.4 His students, who came torepresent a whole generation of Americananthropology, went on to develop this view intheir own fieldwork by defining the relationbetween tradition and creativity (and hencetheir relative weight) as a question to becarefully explored in each society rather thanas a generalizable feature common to all the'primitive' world. Their observations began toshow to what extent non-Western artists madechoices in their work (albeit within theframework of a specific formative tradition) —choices which showed an awareness of theaesthetic options open to them and whichsometimes represented important innovations.Consequently, the readers of a study of Pueblopottery by Ruth Bunzel became acquainted, notonly with the characteristics of Zuni, Acoma,Hopi and San Ildefonso pottery, but also withthe more specific attributes of the work ofcertain potters such as Maria Martinez andNampeyo.5

At the same time, in Britain, Raymond Firth— the aim of whose work was a betterunderstanding of how an individual's freedomis manifested within the framework of hissociety's prescriptive norms — was focusing on"the position of the creative faculty in theindigenous artist in relation to his conformityto local style".6 Referring in his work tospecific individuals whose lives had contributed

to his knowledge of a society, Firth cleared theway for the use of proper names in ethnologicaldescriptions.

If we now turn our attention away fromethnology to history of art, we can see that'primitive art' has often been used to bolsterthe notion of Western art as champion of theartist's individuality. Seen in the light of thiscomparison, the indigenous artists of Africa,Oceania and America were often merely giventhe role of passive servants of a tradition,faithfully following the rules inherited fromtheir ancestors. Yet amongst today's arthistorians, as amongst contemporaryethnologists, a general reassessment of theseideas has already started; there is at present anincreasing number of researchers (albeit still aminority) who apply their training in historyof art to the serious study of 'primitive art'(especially in Africa), paying particularattention to individual artists' biographicaldetails, chronicling changes over the years, andrefining stylistic categories which enable us toidentify the source and date of their works ofart. In the United States, Roy Sieber and RobertFarris Thompson were among the first to laystress on the dynamism of African art, toemphasize the creative faculty of African artistsand to demand that we judge them in the sameway as we judge Western artists.7 The resultsof this research are beginning to manifestthemselves in major changes of emphasis in theWestern image of 'primitive art', even amongthe most conservative art historians. WilliamRubin is not the only historian of modern artto admit (even whilst claiming that "tribal artexpresses a collective rather than individualfeeling") that "the sculptors enjoy a greaterfreedom than many commentators imagine".8

Amongst art historians, then, as well asamongst ethnologists, there is a new andincreasing awareness of the roles performed bythe individuality and the creativity of artistsworking outside Western society.

Having noted this awareness, we can nowfocus on views of those students and collectorsof 'primitive art' who still form a majority andwho still have a less refined picture of theinfluence of tradition and the role of collectivewill among the 'Primitives'. Take, for example,the views of Herschel B. Chipp, a distinguishedspecialist in modern art who has also written

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on what he calls "the artistic styles of primitivecultures". Amongst the Maoris Chippdescribes

a radical narrowing of the field to which the personalinventiveness of the artist is restricted. Thecommitting of an error of a technical nature — a faultcommitted by a sculptor in the exercise of traditionalwork-methods — would jeopardize or even destroythe customary channels of communication with thespirit world, and could only be expiated by severepenalties, including death.

The denial of individual creativity issometimes expressed in somewhat boldgeneralizations. Henri Kamer, for example,declares that in Africa

there are no individual creative artists.. .(The Africanartist) produces masks and fetishes according to theneeds of the moment, always by order of tribal eldersand never on impulse as would any conventionalartist.10

From this perspective any given artist'sidentity loses its value, because his relation tothe production of art is the same as theworker's relation to the assembly-line. Aconceptual leap is made from his lack ofindividual creativity to his lack of creativity fullstop. The artist becomes 'anonymous'.

A large number of 'primitive art' lovers seemsto have taken on board this idea of anonymity.One occasionally comes across a culturalexplanation of the phenomenon:

The identity of the individual African sculptor hastended to become obscured, because he ismanipulating forces which exist outside himself, sothat once he has caused those forces to enter into thesculpture, he sinks into anonymity.11

This use of the singular in referring to'primitive' artists is a common conventionwhose effect is to suggest their undifferentiatednature — that is, their anonymity — not onlywithin their own societies, but also in thebroader context of the activity of their fellowsall over the world. It is partly through thisgrammatical convention that it has beenpossible to make global generalizations aboutthe work (and even the character) of artistsfrom all over the world — like, for example, thestatement made by Douglas Newton that "theprimitive artist can move unself-consciouslyfrom naturalism to abstraction".12

It is interesting to ask for whom these artistsare anonymous, since sometimes one is led tobelieve that anonymity is an inherent trait of'primitive art' and not a construction imposedfrom outside. Take, for example, a newspaperreview of the Center for African Art in New York,which says, "In our name-oriented Westernculture, it boggles the mind that such works asthese are anonymous."13

Should it really boggle our minds, foreign tothe artist's society as we are, not to have learnthis name? No, for what such a statementimplies is that the suppression of each artist'sidentity takes place in his own society, and thatwe, despite our preoccupation with names, arethe innocent inheritors of this 'primitive''insouciance'. The idea that we shall neverknow the artists' names makes it easier touphold the notion of the communal characterof 'primitive art'. One commentator hassuggested, rather nonchalantly: "Since weknow very few African artists' names, a workis generally considered as being the product ofa culture".14

Even those who are completely aware of therole of the individual artist express themselvesin a manner which gently invites the reader tosee anonymity as an inherent characteristic ofprimitive societies: Paul Wingert, for example,writes that "the anonymity of the artist" is oneof "the features common to the arts of allprimitive areas", without ever suggesting thathe is in fact speaking about a phenomenonoutside those 'primitive areas'.15 Furthermore,George Rodrigues' declaration that African artis "with very few exceptions, anonymous", inthe same way fails to point out the Westernorigin of this anonymity.16

Whatever its origins, anonymity plays animportant role in the Western image of'primitive art'. A Parisian art dealer with whomI have discussed this phenomenon summed itup neatly: "If the artist isn't anonymous, thenthe art isn't primitive."

This image of 'primitive' artists as a mixtureof people lacking both identity and artisticindividuality, as passive servants of their time-honoured traditions, is derived from the useof 'primitive' societies for legitimizing Westernsociety. To characterize this use as 'racist' or'patronizing' is probably an over-simplification,but we can quite categorically state that

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anonymity, (and its corollary, the absence ofhistorical development) attributed to 'primitiveart' owes much to the desire on the part of thecommentators to believe that their society isclearly superior to others, that their societyrepresents a higher level in the unilinearevolution of civilization. An article by JacquesDarriulat in Realties shows what some of theresults of such an attitude might be. Derriulatsuggests that the suppression of individualityfor the benefit of a homogeneous communalideology is common to all African and Oceanicsocieties, and that this feature of these societiesis expressed by means of artistic traditionswhere personal identity is not preserved:

The art of Africa is anonymous... The reason for thislies in the nature of the civilizations that created them(its products). They reflect communal societies, wherethe individual exists only as part of a group. In Africaand Oceania, art is public, it has to offer thecommunity mirror images in which it can recognizeitself. . . .art is the cement that holds the communitytogether; but for it the tribe would die.17

In another article in the same edition ofRealties, Rene" Huyghe takes up this theme,explaining the absence of individuality bymeans of an evolutionist schema the racistimplications of which are hardly disguised byhis statement that "African and Oceanic art isin no way inferior to Western art".18 Huyghedeclares that in these societies "little value isset on individuality, which in more developedsocieties plays an increasingly important role",and that this phenomenon can only beunderstood by distinguishing the language ofwords ("connected to thought-processes whichtake place in the upper brain") from thelanguage of images (which originate in thoseareas of the brain where the drives, instinctsand emotions are based"). Linking this latterkind of language to what he terms "lessdeveloped peoples... where words are lessclearly bound to the intellectual process thanto the imagination", Huyghe lends hisauthority as a member of the AcademieFrancaise to the idea that "in these societies artis a complete communal language". Hecontinues:

There is no room for individual expression in art ofthis kind. Forms can be reduced to their primarygeometric state, because they are governed by a

psychological law, which is itself the reflection of theuniversal biological principle of the conservation ofenergy. Straight lines involve the least expenditureof energy, and the easiest way to remember any givenfeature of the real world is to reduce it to geometricShapes, which are basic and universal. African andOceanic art is geometric because its creators areinstinctively imitating the ways of nature. It is notin any way the result of sophisticated and concertedresearch, as modern Western art is, but of an innateway of looking at the world.19

For those who, like Huyghe, think that Africanand Oceanic art is created by anonymous artistswho are expressing communal thoughts bymeans of instinctive processes that take placein the lower part of the brain, it only requires onefurther step to arrive at the belief that this arthas no history. The homogenization of peopleand generations is made more complete; as onecommentator puts it: "These anonymousartists feel they are a link in an unending chainof generations."20

Even those who try to respect the history of'primitive art' have a certain difficulty in gettingrid of the notion of its absence. Claude Roy,for example, opens his book Arts Sauvages withthe observation that there do exist, contrary topopular opinion, "primitive societies thatpossess both writing and a history", butstraight away undermines the effect of thatstatement by saying: "These are not peopleswith a memory, but simply peoples with a poormemory."21

A sequence of events that took place inAustralia serves to illustrate the consequencesof this tendency to homogenize 'primitive'artists and to exclude them from the passageof time.22 It started in 1963 when a Hungariancollector bought a bark painting by an ArnhemLand artist called Malangi in order to donateit to the Museum of African and Oceanic Artsis Paris; in the course of the same year photosof several paintings by the same artist were sentto the director of the committee in charge ofAustralian currency decimalization, who, inturn, sent them on to designers working on thenew bank-notes. In this indirect way, one ofMalangi's paintings ended up on everyAustralian dollar bill, but, in the confusion, theidentity of the artist was forgotten. Thanks tothe efforts of a journalist and a school teacherwho recognized Malangi's hand and discreetlymentioned the possibility of legal proceedings,

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the government admitted its error andproposed not only financial compensation, butalso giving him an engraved medal inrecognition of his artistic contribution. Whenasked about the reason for its initial negligence,the governor of the Bank of Australia replied— and this is the revealing point for our presentdiscussion — that all those who had seen thepainting had automatically and unreflectivelyassumed that it was the work of "sometraditional Aboriginal artist, long since dead."The way we distance ourselves from 'primitiveart', placing it in a remote and anonymous past— can be of tangible importance in the lives ofthose who produce such art; Malangi's storyis not unique.

What are the alternatives to this view of theartist who cannot be differentiated from hisfellow artists past and present? Here and therecurrent research is beginning to suggest some.Bill Holm's research, for example, combats thenotion of anonymity in the artists of theCanadian North-West coast, particularly withreference to the Kwakiutl artist Willie Seaweed.Holm makes the following remarks:

The indigenous artists of the North-West coast have,like the 'primitive artists' of other cultures, beenrendered anonymous in our time. Moreover, whenmodern man (the product of a society which attachesgreat importance to names, to fame and to individualactions) sees a collection of masks or other works ofart from an exotic culture, he does not tend to thinkof an individualized human creator behind eachobject. Only infrequently do the labels he reads helphim to give personal characteristics to the facelessartists. Sometimes an object is identified as comingfrom 'the North-West coast' or from 'Alaska' or from'British Columbia'. At best a tribal identification issuggested (although the likelihood of error is quiteconsiderable.) The idea that each object representsthe creative activity of a specific human being, wholived and worked at a given place and time, whoseartistic career had a beginning, a middle and an end,and whose work influenced and was influenced bythe work of other artists, does not readily spring tomind.23

Other researchers also started to penetratethe mists that envelop the artists of the North-West coast. Robin K. Wright gives us thehistories of individual works by Haida artistslike Charles Edenshaw, John Robson, JohnCross, Tom Price, Gwaitehl and others.24 Inthe case of objects made in the early or midnineteenth century he shows how stylistic

analysis can help distinguish the work of agiven artist. Similar progress is being made inother parts of the world. In a study of the artsof the Igbo in Nigeria, for example, Herbert M.Cole and Chike C. Aniakor state:

Individual hands are recognisable in Igbo sculpture,as in African art in general, and the artists have been,and continue to be, well-known in the areas in whichthey live.25

Given the fact that when an examaple of'primitive art' appears on the scene in theWestern world, it is more often through theintermediary of a dealer or a collector than ofan ethnologist or an art historian, it is essentialto examine those people's commonly-heldbeliefs, attitudes and experiences if we are tounderstand the clash that this appearancegenerates. These few pages will not be able tothrow light on all those aspects. Let us, then,just take the question of 'anonymity' tohighlight how Western personal and culturalinterests determine our view of 'primitiveartists', and reflect upon the role that an artwithout signatures might have within thecontext of the Western art market.

When taken away from the society in whichit was produced, the 'primitive' art object loses,in most cases, its identity. When placed in oursit gains a new one. This replacement of aforeign passport by. a domestic identify-cardserves to facilitate the introduction of the objectinto a system which centres around Westernaesthetics and large sums of money. When weerase the object's 'signature' so that it mighthave Western 'pedigree', we transfer theresponsibility of artistic paternity.26

It is not uncommon to hear collectors ofAfrican and Oceanic art saying that the artist's'anonymity' adds greatly to their enthusiasm.One of these collectors, with whom I talked oneafternoon in Paris, became very excited whenspeaking of this aspect of his passion. "Itthoroughly enchants me", he said. "It givesme great pleasure not to know the artist'sname. Once you have found out the artist'sname, the object ceases to be primitive art."The actor Vincent Price (who is also an avidcollector) expressed the same feeling:

The anonymity of the creator actually increases thevalue of the work of art. ... it is our lack of knowledge

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about these men that provides part of the mysteryof their creation.'27

Over several years I have brought up thisalleged question of anonymity with numerous'primitive art' lovers. Their opinions can bedivided into two groups. One group claims thatonly a gifted and qualified connoisseur (bydefinition, a member of Western society) canrecognize the aesthetic excellence of amasterpiece. One collector went to greatlengths to tell me of the keenness of theconnoisseur's eye, describing in detail thenature of the aesthetic considerations he makes,the role of subjectivity, etc.. When he hadfinished talking, I asked him whether, in hisopinion, the creator of a 'primitive' work of artmight, on occasions, be aware of the things hehad just pointed out. His response wasimmediate and categorical: "Certainly not!""The creator of this sort of object", he said,"will only be interested in the way it is craftedand in its conformity to communal standards;he will not be able to appreciate its artisticmerit, the discovery of which depends on itsbeing seen by a Western connoisseur." Or, inthe words of Henri Kamer, "the object made inAfrica... only becomes an object of art on itsarrival in Europe."28 When the matter is seenfrom this perspective, there is no point inseeking to establish the identity of the personwho made a 'primitive' object (called artist, butit would make more sense to call him artisan",according to Kamer) because he was neitheraware of, nor responsible for, its aestheticqualities. According to the people that take thisview, the Western connoisseur does for Africanmasks (to take but one example) what MarcelDuchamp did for urinals.

The second group of opinions mentionsneither the artist's intentions nor his aestheticawareness, but claims that all clues to hisidentity are, sadly, lost for ever. According tothis point of view, the custom of putting thename of the collector, but not that of the artist,on an exhibition case (or, as in a case likeMalangi's, of paying the Western collector andnot the Aboriginal artist..., or even to giveAfrican and other indigenous sculptures thenames of distinguished collectors, so that wecan speak, for example, of the 'BrummerHead') simply comes from the impossibility of

tracing the object's movements before its arrivalin Western society — this impossibility beingbound up in the communal nature of its origins,of the absence of the written word in the'primitive' world and in the carelessness ofthose explorers of another era who obtainedthem in the first place.

We must recognize, of course, that a largeproportion of Western art objects carry'signatures' of the kind that arelacking in mostobjects of 'primitive art'. That said, the slightestreflection is enough to abolish the illusion thata signature can easily and incontestablyestablish the artistic paternity of an object.Indeed there have been a large number ofwhich have served as a basis for complexdiscussions and wide-ranging debates betweenexperts — not only about great masterpieces,but also about all that belongs to the artisticheritage of Western civilization. Let us take asingle example: the 'forgery' called 'the Cellinicup', which provoked a perfectly eruditediscussion over one hundred pages of theMetropolitan Museum ]oumal, which in turninspired a second, equally erudite, discussionby Joseph Alsop, a distinguished authority onthe history of Western art.29 Research into theidentity of this object extended over threedecades, occupying all the researcher'sworking-hours, not to mention (as did one ofthe participants in this debate30) all thesleepless nights it induced.

Partly because of the traditional segregationof the disciplines of ethnology and history ofart, we find it difficult to imagine that acomparable amount of energy as that spent on,for example, the Cellini cup, could producesignificant results outside the domain ofWestern art. Yet this idea, which is beginningto take root in the minds of some contemporaryresearchers, could help to uproot the culturalethnocenrrism which has been so firmlyembedded in the Western study of art. Like theexhibition Magiciens de la terre, this idea remindsus that the distinction between 'centre' and'periphery' is a structure determined by theobserver and that it often works as animpediment to human understanding. Infinally giving up the view of the study of artas a private reserve, this exhibition clears theway for an appreciation of 'other' art which isas deep as that of our own.

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NOTES

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1. For a critical discussion of the notion of 'primitiveart', see S. Price, 'Primitive Art: Civilised Views,Gradhiva, VOL IV, 1988, p 18-27, and Primitive Artin Civilised Places, University of Chicago Press,Chicago, 1989.2. P. Bourdieu, La Distinction, editions de Minuit,

Paris, 1979, p 60.3. 'First of all, it has to be established that we have

to study here stereotyped manner of thinking andfeeling. As sociologists, we are not interested in whatA or B may feel qua individuals, in the accidentalcourse of their own personal experiences — we areinterested only in what they feel and think quamembers of a given community.' B. Malinowski,Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922, p 23.4. F. Boas, Race, Language and Culture, The Free

Press, New York, 1940, p 589.5. R. Brunzel, The Pueblo Potter: a Study of Creative

Imagination in Primitive Art, Dover, New York, 1972(original edition 1929).6. R. Firth, Art and Life in New Guinea, AMS Press,

New York, 1979 (original edition 1936).7. In order to appreciate this new attention to

history in the study of 'primitive art', we must startby giving up certain prejudices which are all too easilyattached to societies which do not possess the writtenword. The fact that the history of art in such a societydisplays an interested and selective memory (stronglyinfluenced by a cultural ideology that deals withpolitics, kinship, the roles of men and women, therelationship between gods and mortals, etc.) shouldonly underline its resemblance to history of art in theWestern world; see S. Price, 'Sexism and theConstruction of Reality', American Ethnologist, Vol 10,1982, p 460-476, and 'L'esthetique et la temps',Ethnologic Vol LXXXII, 1986, p 215-225.8. W. Rubin (ed.), 'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art:

Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, The Museum ofModern Art, New York, 1984.9. H.B. Chipp, 'Formal and Symbolic Factors in the

Art Styles of Primitive Cultures', in Art and Aestheticsin Primitive Societies: an Anthology (C.F. Jopling, ed.),E.P. Dutton, New York, 1971, p 168.10. H. Kamer, 'The Authenticity of AfricanSculptures', Arts d'Afrique Noir, Vol XII, 1974, p 168.11. D. Duerden, African Art, Feltham/Middlesex,Paul Hamlyn, 1968, p. 16.12. D. Newton, The Art of Africa, the Pacific Island, andthe Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NewYork, 1981, p 16.13. G. Glueck, 'Show from France opens new Centrefor African Art', New York Times, 21 September 1984,p Cl, C28.14. L. Sigel, 'A Private Collection at the Art Instituteof Chicago', African Arts, Vol 5, 1971, p 50-53.15. P. Wingert, Primitive Art: its Traditions and Styles,Oxford University Press, New York, 1962, p 377.16. G. Rodrigues, 'Evolution et psychologie descollectionneurs d'art africain', Antologia di Bella Arte,Vol XVII/XVIII, 1981, p.23.

17. J. Darriulat, 'African Art and its Impact on theWestern World', RMitts (English edition). No 273,p 42, 45.18. R. Huyghe, 'African and Oceanic Art: how itlooks from the West', Rialith (English edition), No273, 1973, p 67.19. Ibid., p 67.20. O. Bihalji-Merin, 'Art as a UniversalPhenomenon', in World Cultures and Modern Art(Siegfried Wichmann, ed.), Bruckmann Publishers,Munich, 1972, p 7.21. C. Roy, Arts Sauvages, Delpire, Paris, 1957, p 7.22. D.H. Bennett, 'Malangi: the man who wasforgotten before he was remembered', AboriginalHistory, Vol IV, No 1, 1980, p 42-47.23. B. Holm, "The Art of Willie Seaweed: a Kwakiutlmaster', in The Human Mirror (Miles Richardson, ed.),Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1974,p60.24. R.K. Wright, 'Anonymous Attributions', in TheBox of Daylight (B Holm, ed.), Seattle Art Museumand University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1983,p 139-142.25. H.M. Cole and C.C. Aniakor, Igbo Arts:community and cosmos, Museum of Cultural History,Los Angeles, 1984, p 24.26. As a Parisian art dealer said to me: 'Pedigree isworth a signature'.27. "The Vincent Price Collection', African Arts, VolV, No 2, 1972, p 22-23.28. H. Kamer, op cit., p 33.29. J. Aslop, "The Faker's Art', New York Review, 23October 1986, p 25-26, 28-31.30. S.E. Lee, 'Reply to Alsop 1986', New York Review,18 December 1986, p 76.

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> * > » . . '

The Tomb of Mahafel & Alouals (South-East Madagascar)(Photo: A. Magnin)

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73

THE OTHERSBEYOND THE 'SALVAGE' PARADIGM

JAMES CLIFFORD

The subtitle of this essay, Beyond the 'Salvage'Paradigm, may seem cryptic. To some of youit will recall early twentieth centuryanthropology, the 'salvage ethnography' ofFranz Boas' generation; A.L. Kroeber and hisBerkeley colleagues recording the languagesand lore of 'disappearing' California Indians,or Bronislaw Malinowski suggesting thatauthentic Trobriand Island culture (saved in histexts) was not long for this earth.

In academic anthropology 'the salvageparadigm' has an old-fashioned ring about it.Still, many ethnographies and travel accountscontinue to be written in the style of apris moile deluge, with the exotic culture in questioninevitably undergoing 'fatal' changes. We stillregularly encounter 'the last traditional Indianbeadworker', or the last 'stone age people'. Thesalvage paradigm, reflecting a desire to rescuesomething 'authentic' out of destructivehistorical changes, is alive and well. It is foundin ethnographic writing, in the connoisseurshipand collections of the art world, in a range offamiliar nostalgias.

My essay's subtitle names a geo-political,historical paradigm that has organized Westernpractices I'd like to call 'art — and culture —collecting'. Seen in this light, it denotes apervasive ideological complex. I'll sketch someof the paradigm's underlying conceptions ofhistory and authenticity, conceptions that needto be cleared away if we are to account for themultiple histories and inventions at work in thelate twentieth-century. What's at issue is a

particular global arrangement of time andspace.

TIME/space. The dominant temporal sense ishistorical, assumed to be linear and non-repeatable. There is no going back, no return,at least in the realm of the real. Endlessimaginary redemptions — religious, pastoral,retro/nostalgic — are produced; archives,museums and collections preserve (construct)an authentic past; a selective domain of valueis maintained in a present relentlessly careeringforward.

SPACE/time. A dominant 'theatre of memory'organizing the world's diversities and destinieshas been described in Johannes Fabian's Timeand the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object,1984. Speaking very schematically, in the globalvision of nineteenth-century evolutionism theworld's societies were ordered in linearsequence (the standard progression fromsavage to barbarian to civilized, with various,now arcane, complications). In the twentiethcentury, relativist anthropology — our current'common sense' — emerged. Humandifferences would be redistributed as separate,functioning 'cultures'. The most 'primitive' or'tribal' groups (the bottom rungs of theevolutionary ladder) could now be given aspecial, ambiguous, temporal status: call it the'ethnographic present'.

In Western taxonomy and memory thevarious non-Western 'ethnographic presents'are actually pasts. They represent culturallydistinct times ('tradition') always about to

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undergo the impact of disruptive changesassociated with the influence of trade, media,missionaries, commodities, ethnographers,tourists, the exotic art market, the 'worldsystem', etc. A relatively recent period ofauthenticity is repeatedly followed by a delugeof corruption, transformation, modernization.

This historical scenario, replayed with localvariations, generally falls within the 'pastoral'structure anatomized by Raymond Williams inThe Country and the City. A 'good country' isperpetually ruined and lamented by eachsuccessive period, producing an unbrokenchain of losses leading ultimately to...Eden.

In a salvage/pastoral set-up, most non-Western peoples are marginal to the advancingworld-system. Authenticity in culture or artexists just prior to the present (but not sodistant or eroded as to make collection orsalvage impossible). Marginal, non-Westerngroups constantly, as the saying goes, 'enterthe modern world'. And whether this entry iscelebrated or lamented, the price is always thatlocal, distinctive paths through modernityvanish. These historicities are swept up in adestiny dominated by the capitalist West andby various technologically-advanced socialisms.What's different about peoples seen to bemoving out of 'tradition'" into 'the modernworld' remains tied to inherited structures thateither resist or yield to the new but cannotproduce it.

In American anthropology a growing bodyof recent work has begun to unravel theassumptions about tradition, history, andauthenticity that underlie 'the salvageparadigm'. The result has been to displaceglobal dichotomies long 'orienting' geo-political visions in the Occident. One of thesedichotomies sorts the world's societies intopeople with or without history. The inheritorsof Thucydides, Gibbon, Marx, Darwin, etc.,are endowed with 'historical consciousness',others have 'mythic consciousness'.This dichotomy is reinforced by otheroppositions: literate/non-literate; developed/underdeveloped; hot/cold. The last pair, coinedby Levi-Strauss, assumed that, for good or ill,Western societies are dynamic and orientedtoward change, whereas non-Western societiesseek equilibrium and the1 reproduction ofinherited forms. Whatever truth this sort of

general contrast may contain, it becomes rigidand oppressive when ranges of difference —both within and between societies — becomefrozen as essential oppositions. The history ofanthropology is littered with such oppositions:'we' have history, 'they' have myth, etc..

Anthropologists now challenge theassumption that non-Western (even small-scale'tribal') peoples are without historicalconsciousness, that their cultures have scantresources for processing and innovatinghistorical change. I'll quickly list a fewimportant recent works. In llongot Headhunting,1883-1974, Renato Rosaldo, 1980, discovers adistinctive historical idiom among nonliteratePhilippine highlanders, a concrete way ofnarrating real past events and of using thelandscape as a kind of archive. Richard Price'sFirst Time: the Historical Vision of an Afro-American People, 1983, probes an elaborate localhistorical memory and discourse among thedescendents of escaped slaves in Surinam. Astrong historical sense is crucial to the group'sidentity and its continuing resistance to outsidepowers. In Islands of History, 1985, MarshallSahlins argues that 18th century Hawaiianmythic and ritual structures, far from beingtimeless and unchanging, were concrete formsthrough which forces of historical change (likethe arrival of Captain Cook) could be locallyprocessed. Work by sociologists like AnthonyGiddens and Pierre Bourdieu has introducedan increased awareness of process andinventive agency into formerly synchronic andholistic theories of culture. A seminal work ofmid-1970s by Roy Wagner, a work deeplyinfluenced by Melanesian processual styles,

• gives its title to a whole new perspective: TheInvention of Culture.

Of course, I'm painting with a broom here,glossing over a number of important debates.Suffice it to say that, for me, the importanceof the new anthropological attention tohistorical process has been to reconceive'cultures' as arenas not merely of structuralorder and symbolic pattern but also of conflict,disorder and emergence. Several of theessentializing, global dichotomies I'vementioned are complicated. For example,Sahlins has spoken of 'hot' and 'cold' sectorswithin specific societies: people may, in fact,be willing rapidly to discard or change whole

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areas of traditional life, while guarding andreproducing others.

Another dichotomy is displced by Trinh T.Minh-ha in the special issue of the reviewDiscourse she has'edited (No. 8, Fall-Winter1987: She, the Inappropriate/'d Other). She writesin her Introduction: "There is a Third Worldin every First World, and vice versa." (A walkin many neighbourhoods of Greater New Yorkeasily confirms the first part of her statement!)Old geo-political oppositions are transformedinto sectors within Western and non-Westernsocieties. Hot/cold, historical/mythic,modern/traditional, literate/oral, country/city,centre/periphery, first/third,...are subject tolocal mix and match, contextual/tacticalshifting, syncretic recombination, import-export. Culture is migration as well as rooting— within and between groups, within andbetween individual persons.

A significant provocation for these changesof orientation has clearly been the emergenceof non-Western and feminist subjects whoseworks and discourses are different, strong, andcomplex, but clearly not 'authentic' inconventional ways. These emergent subjectscan no longer be marginalized. They speak notonly for endangered 'traditions', but also forcrucial human futures. New definitions ofauthenticity (cultural, personal, artistic) aremaking themselves felt, definitions no longercentred on a salvaged past. Rather, authenticityis reconceived as hybrid, creative activity in alocal present-becoming-future. Non-Westerncultural and artistic works are implicated by aninterconnected world cultural system withoutnecessarily being swamped by it. Localstructures produce histories rather than simplyyielding to History.

What kinds of cultural and artistic historiesare being produced? I'll end with a fewexamples drawn from the ongoing inventionof Native American culture and art.

Anne Vitart-Fardoulis, a curator at the Muse"ede l'Homme, recently published a sensitiveaccount of the aesthetic, historical, and culturaldiscourses routinely used to explicateindividual museum objects. (See the newjournal Gradhiva, No. 1,1986, published by theArchives Division of the Musie de l'Homme.)Vitart-Fardoulis discusses a famous, intricatelypainted animal skin (its present name: M.H.

34.33.5), probably originating among the FoxIndians of North America. The skin turned upin Western collecting systems some time agoin a Cabinet of Curiosities; it was used toeducate aristocratic children and was muchadmired for its aesthetic qualities. Vitart-Fardoulis tells us that now the skin can bedecoded ethnographically in terms of itscombined 'masculine' and 'feminine' graphicstyles and understood in the context of aprobable role in specific ceremonies. But themeaningful contexts are not exhausted. Thestory takes a new turn:

The grandson of one of the Indians who came to Pariswith Buffalo Bill was searching for the [painted skin]tunic his Grandfather had been forced to sell to payhis way back to the United States when the circuscollapsed. I showed him all the tunics in ourcollection, and he paused before one of them.Controlling his emotion he spoke. He told themeaning of this lock of hair, of that design, why thiscolor had been used, the meaning of thatfeather...And this garment, formerly beautiful andinteresting but passive and indifferent, little by littlebecame meaningful, active testimony to a livingmoment through the mediation of someone who didnot observe and analyze but who lived the object andfor whom the object lived. It scarcely matters whetherthe tunic is really his grandfather's.

I don't know what's going on in this encounter.But I'm pretty sure two things are nothappening: 1) The grandson is not replacingthe object in its original or 'authentic' culturalcontext. That is long past. His encounter withthe painted skin is part of a modern re-collection. 2) The painted tunic is not beingappreciated as art, an aesthetic object. Theencounter is too specific, too enmeshed infamily history and ethnic memory. Someaspects of 'cultural' and 'aesthetic'appropriation are certainly at work. But theyoccur within a current tribal history, a differenttemporality (and authencity) from thatgoverned by 'the salvage paradigm'. The oldpainted tunic becomes newly, traditionally,meaningful in the context of a present-becoming-future .

This currency of 'tribal' artifacts is becomingincreasingly visible to non-Indians. Many newtribal recognition claims are pending at theBureau of the Interior. And whether or not theyare formally successful matters less than whatthey make manifest: the historical and political

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reality of Indian survival and resurgence, aforce that impinges on Western art-and-culturecollections. The 'proper' place of many objectsin museums is now subject to contest. The Zuniwho prevented the loan of a War God fromBerlin to the Museum of Modern Art in 1984were challenging the dominant art-culturesystem. For in traditional Zuni belief, War Godfigures are sacred and dangerous. They are notethnographic artifacts, and they are certainlynot 'art'. Zuni claims on these objectsspecifically reject their 'promotion' (in all sensesof the term) to the status of aesthetic orscientific treasures.

I'm not arguing that the only true home forthe objects in question is in 'the tribe' — alocation that, in many cases, is far fromobvious. My point is only that the dominant,interlocking contexts of art and anthropologyare no longer self-evident and uricontested.There are other contexts, histories, and futuresin which non-Western objects and culturalrecords may 'belong'. The rare Maori artifactsthat recently toured museums in the UnitedStates normally reside in New ZealandMuseums. But they are controlled by thetraditional Maori authorities whose permissionwas required for them to leave the country.Here and elsewhere the circulation of museumcollections is significantly influenced byresurgent indigenous communities.

This current disturbance of Westerncollecting systems is reflected in a new book byRalph Coe, Lost and Found Traditions, NativeAmerican Art: 1965-1985,1986. It is a coffee-tablebook: we have not transcended collecting orappropriation. And once again, a Whiteauthority 'discovers' true tribal art — but thistime with significant differences. The hundredsof photographs in Coe's collection documentrecent works, some made for local use, somefor sale to Indians or White outsiders. Beautifulobjects — many formerly classified as 'curios','folk art' or 'tourist art' — are located inongoing, inventive traditions. Coe effectivelyquestions the widespread assumption that finetribal work is disappearing. And he throwsdoubt on common criteria for judging purityand authenticity. In his collection, amongrecognizably traditional katchinas, totem poles,blankets, and plaited baskets we find skillfullybeaded tennis shoes and baseball caps, articles

developed for the curio trade, quilts, anddecorated leather cases (peyote kits modeledon old-fashioned toolboxes).

Since the Native American Church, in whoseceremonies the peyote kits are used, did notexist in the nineteenth-century, their claim totraditional status cannot be based on age. Astronger historical claim can, in fact, be madefor many productions of the 'curio trade', forthe beaded 'fancys' (hanging birds, mirrorframes) made by Matilda Hill, a Tuscarora whosells at Niagara Falls:

"Just try telling Matilda Hill that her 'fancies' aretourist curios," said Mohawk Rick Hill, author of anunpublished paper on the subject. "The Tuscarorahave been able to trade pieces like that bird or beadedframe at Niagara since the end of the war of 1812,when they were granted exclusive rights, and shewouldn't take kindly to anyone slighting herculture!"

"Surely," Coe adds, "a trade privilegeestablished at Niagara Falls in 1816 should beacceptable as tradition by now."

Coe does not hesitate to commission new'traditional' works. And he spendsconsiderable time eliciting the specific meaningof objects, as individual possessions and astribal art. We see and hear particular artists; thecoexistence of spiritual, aesthetic, andcommercial forces is always visible. Overall,Coe's collecting project represents andadvocates ongoing art forms that are bothrelated to and separate from dominant systemsof aesthetic-ethnographic value. In Lost andFound Traditions authenticity is somethingproduced not salvaged. Coe's collection, for allits love of the past, gathers future.

A long chapter on 'tradition' resistssummary. For the diverse statements quotedfrom practicing Native American artists, oldand young, do not reproduce prevailingWestern definitions. Let me end with a fewquotations. They suggest to me a concrete,nonlinear sense of history — forms of memoryand invention, re-collection and emergence,that offer a different temporality for art — andcultural collecting.

Whites think of our experience as the past. We knowit is right here with us.

We always begin our summer dances with a song that

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repeats only four words, over and over. They don'tmean much of anything in English, "young chiefsstand up." To us those words demonstrate our pridein our lineage and our happiness in alwaysremembering it. It is a happy song. Tradition is notsomething you gab about...It's in the doing...

Your tradition is 'there' always. You're flexibleenough to make of it what you want. It's always withyou. I pray to the old pots at the ruins and dreamabout making pottery. I tell them I want to learn it.We live for today, but never forget the past...

Our job as artists is to go beyond, which implies alove of change, [always accomplished with] traditionsin mind, by talking to the elders of the tribe and bybeing with your grandparents. The stories they tellare just amazing. When you become exposed tothem, everything becomes a reflection of thoseevents. There's a great deal of satisfaction being anartist of traditions.

We've always had charms; everything that's new isold with us.

A slightly longer version of this article was published in English in Discussions in ContemporaryCulture, No. 1, Ed. Hal Foster, Dia Art Foundation, Bay Press, New York & Seattle, 1987.

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OTHER CARTOGRAPHIESJEAN FISHER

He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, heends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he hasseen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheardof and unnameable things.1

Arthur Rimbaud

Are we capable now of leaping through"unheard of and unnameable things", ofresponding to the demands of the other whois the other side of consciousness, the Outsidethat is always interior to our thoughts? Wemight hope that this is what is augured byMagiciens de la Terre; but why do we hesitate,throw doubt upon the authenticity of thisproject? The recent interest shown by ourcultural institutions in creative work outside theparadigms of modernism raises the suspicionthat, as so often in the past, the West is turningto other worlds to revitalize itself in the face ofa spiritual and sociopolitical bankruptcy. Thecrisis of modernity, according to postmoderndebates, involves not only a loss of ethical andhistorical consciousness to the vacuous signsof mass consumerism — a paralysis of the will,but a loss of the world to the voracious geo-political machine of multinational capitalism.In Magiciens de la Terre, the conjunction of multi-ethnicity with an invocation of spirituality doesnot allay fears that another chapter in thenarrative of global annexation is in process. TheWest's traditionally anthropocentric search forlost Utopias has never resulted in an equalexchange with others; and the racial,ideological, historical and physical

cartographies by which Eurocentric societiessecured their economic dominance of the worldremain largely in place. Current liberal or 'NewAge' enthusiasm for what it calls native'spirituality' or 'mysticism' not only obfuscatesthe nature of different belief structures, butworks to conceal a political relation betweenmetropolitan capitalist enclaves and the rest ofthe world. In effect, it perpetuates nativedisempowerment. To recognise the spiritualand ecological failure of the capitalistenterprise, or to acknowledge the validity ofnon-European belief structures, does notreinstate the legitimacy of others stillsubjugated by alien forces. Our languagecontinues to map a landscape of fictiveidentities from the fragments of history andfantasy in the interests of Western powerstructures.

That cultural and academic institutions arecomplicit in these structures, despite theirclaims to neutrality, has been well argued byEdward Said, who maintains that "politicalimperialism governs an entire field of study,imagination, and scholarly institutions — insuch a way as to make its avoidance anintellectual arid historical impossibility."2

Within the field of art, objects have simply beenrelocated from the trading-post to the museum,and remapped according to Western codes ofaesthetic pleasure. This ahistoricalhomogenising process is antagonistic to thehuman rights agendas of indigenouspopulations seeking self-empowerment and

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identity from among the fragments oftraditional values adrift in the murky wake ofcolonialism. The question here is not how dowe make the artefacts of others 'fit' ourinstitutions, what universalizing principles canwe invent to incorporate them into ourexhibitions, but how do we interrogate anddismantle the assumptions upon which ourinstitutions are based.

Foremost on the agendas of indigenouspeoples is the struggle for land rights. Formany, it is the earth that legitimizes culturalidentity; and creative acts are the events whichmap an intimate bonding of bodies — earth,community, self. This hardly constitutes amystical, superstitious or supernatural relationto the world. Rather, it concerns what isintrinsic to nature perceived as a material orconcrete reality. If we have imposed aterminology of fear and superstition on theartefacts and ceremonials of others it is becauseour own language is inadequate to describewhat is outside a narrowly interpreted Judeo-Christian tradition that has lost touch with thereal, with nature as the embodiment of life-force. When, for instance, a Native Americanelder states that he has 'swum with the fishes'he indicates that it is in his relation to thenatural world that he comes to understandhimself and his place within it. Metaphor herefunctions not as a rhetorical trope but as a literaltruth in a conceptualization of the world thatthe West has not only poorly understood buthas too often actively held in contempt. Canwe seriously, and without cynicism, still believe'of the earth' to be a matter of aesthetics or'spirituality' without acknowledging that forothers, suffering the consequences of Westernbarbarism, it is fundamentally a political issue?The legacy of the West's assault on theterritorial bodies of others is a topography ofambivalent and .often paradoxical signs, amutilated body across which a coherentidentity can no longer be mapped. Notsurprisingly, cultural bricolage has become acommon strategy among cultural workerstrying to make sense of the paradoxes of theirown experience; and if there is a role for a'magician' here, it is to 'conjure' a critical spacein which cultural difference may becomprehended and nurtured in all itsheterogeneity and ambiguity.

This is what I feel to be the productiveintention of a short film, Harold of Orange,1984,3 scripted by the Anishinabe writer,Gerald Vizenor. Vizenor is by no meansrepresentative of a Native American point ofview; there is no such homogeneousconstituency outside a shared experience ofcolonialism. Vizenor's perspective is drawnperhaps from the borderlands of a dual culturalexperience, that of urbanised and educatedNative Americans and metis. But while it is aperspective that particularly concerns us here,it must be said that it does not necessarily findapproval from those who strongly believe thatthe only 'authentic' Native American voice cancome from the reservation. This internal debatebetween the pastoral and the metropolitan,with all its complex ramifications, remainslargely unresolvable as a result of the divisivepolicies of government agencies who havecrippled those structures by which indigenouspeople traditionally conducted their debates.But since the repression of the American IndianMovement, and in the absence of an effectivejuridical or political platform, cultural activism(whether it takes the form of a regeneration oftribal ceremonial or an engagement withcontemporary forms of communication) hasacquired a double task: to fight against nationalindifference to the economo-political situationof indigenous Americans; and to mobilise thepeoples themselves to fight against what AsibaTupahache has astutely argued to be a tragicinternalisation of the "victim-perpetrator-facilitator" cycle of abuse against ethnicminorities.4

Harold of Orange is a satirical tale of culturalterrorism which explores the possibility ofremapping native identities in and against a'no-man's land' of untenable cultural signs.The storyteller and major protagonist, HaroldSinseer, presents the Warriors of Orangewhose veiled war of attrition deploys thepsychological strategies of Indian warfare(doubling back, laying false trails, and settingdecoys) to confuse the enemy. The Warriors are"tribal tricksters" who, "word-driven" fromthe land, are now "returning in mythic timeto reclaim their estate from the white man."

The action takes place in and around areservation that might be somewhere inMinnesota. It is assumed that the audience is

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aware that reservations, controlled by theBureau of Indian Affairs, typically have thehighest mortality rate, poverty, unemploymentand alcoholism in the USA. This form of controlis not fortuitous. The reservation was institutedas the site of cultural difference: the non-placeassigned to the Indian body — a body removedfrom its homeland, enclosed, domesticated,observed, robbed of its cultural memory, andreinscribed with non-threatening signs of'Indianness'.

The Warriors' School of Acupuncture isdedicated to tapping into the resources of aliberal American foundation that funds worthyprojects on the reservation, and it has nocompuncture about manipulating white guiltand ignorance, pious charity, or taste for theexotic. Seeking imaginative ways to secure afoundation grant, the Warriors have devised afictitious scheme to grow 'pinch' beans and toinstall coffee houses on the reservation in aparody of white gentility. The winning card intheir game is that coffee will assist in the 'soberrevolution' to eradicate alcoholism. To supporttheir proposal the Warriors invite the grantapproval committee on a tour of 'Indian sites'and 'tribal ceremonials', which include such'traditions' as eating Indian fry-bread in a car-park (it is not uncommon to find such facilitiesbuilt on sacred sites); giving 'Indian' names;visiting an anthropological museum (theinaccessible repository of tribal heritage); andplaying soft-ball where each team wears theother's colours while Harold, as thepolymorphous instigator of this charade, wearsboth.5

The Warriors' scheme almost fails when thecommittee's adviser, Fanny, who has priorexperience of Harold's trickery, .threatens towithdraw her support from the project unlesshe repays a financial debt incurred during theirearlier encounter. After several unsuccessfulattempts, Harold wheedles a cheque from thefoundation director using the same deceptionhe used earlier with Fanny — that he neededmoney to bury his grandmother. This chequeis reluctantly handed over to Fanny.

It is in the implications of this sub-plot thatthe satirical mask shifts beyond the verbal playon Anglo racism to reveal something of the realissues at stake. Vizenor's text describes anumber of exchanges of property — possession

and loss — that circulate around the recurrenceof a debt. There is the smug account by onecommittee member of his family's 'acquisition'of tribal artefacts: as the people were 'word-driven' from the land, so they were cheated outof their past. There is the Warriors' 'giving' of'Indian' names — place names, representing aroguish return of another 'property' belongingto the history of native dispossession. InHarold's previous association with Fanny, weare told, he assisted her research into oralliterature. There is a resonance here of theIndian 'gift', an economy of sharing wealth,wholly incompatible, if not thoroughlyincomprehensible, to individual capitalaccumulation upon which Western economy isbased. Then, finally, there is the passage of thecheque itself — the flow of capital as it mapsthe relations of power.

Emerging from this web of im-properexchanges is the recounting of a debt thatrepeatedly produces the absent figure of theunburied grandmother. What precisely is calledforth here? The colonised body is a vampirisedbody; it arises as a debt — a depletion of blood,of identity — and it cannot be settled or buriedsince it perpetuates an inexhaustible demand.If we consider the symbolic function of thegrandmother in relation to this draining ofcolonised communities, then she appears as thesite of recollection: of the recounting of storiesthat are the bearers of beliefs and values. Sheis the sign of continuity: a genealogy, a lineback to cultural memory. Hence in Harold ofOrange what otherwise refuses to be laid to rest,what constantly appears, is tradition —tradition, not in the sense of nostalgia for whatonce was, but as a production of meaning. Thedebt, the circulating residue in the exchangebetween disparate cultural entities, is theconstant production of otherness.

It is here that the figure of trickster (whomwe will call 'he' but our gender distinctions areprobably inappropriate) takes on a particularresonance. Harold's trickster-warriors mean toreclaim their 'estate' from the white man.Vizenor, whose use of the English language isuncommonly subtle, means, I imagine, morethan a simple reclamation of territory or landedproperty (a white man's concept). In any case,in the present political climate such anaspiration is at best a fantasy, and trickster is

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too canny to dream the present-impossible. No,what trickster means to reclaim as his 'estate'is his right to difference, his right to map hisidentity according to the myriad of traces thathave constituted him as the product of ahistorical process. Bewildered, he has seen hisvisions, and understands well that the more heundermines and disseminates confusion in thelanguage of the Other, the more he producesdifference. And in difference he can dreamother cartographies of the self.

Is trickster a magician? Perhaps. But he ismore certainly 'of the earth'. A pragmatist, acultural terrorist, a dice-thrower andmanipulator of the main chance, not a conjurorof the supernatural. His self-appointed role assauvage savant is a masquerade designed to fulfila more serious purpose. Trickster is not, andnever was, an anthropocentric subjectpossessing mastery of his world; rather, heexists in a dialogical relation with it. In oraltradition he often appears as a transformer,harmonizing (but by no means eradicating) thecontradictions of life. Most importantly, heseems to be a figure who refuses inertia; onewho acts, not always to his own advantage,upon the circumstances in which he findshimself. As such, one might speculate thattrickster's resurrection in contemporaryindigenous American art and literature issymptomatic of the collectivity of selves thatconstitutes 'Indian subjectivity' as an effect ofAnglo-Indian history, and of a reneweddemand for positive action.

Trickster is everywhere in the world,

wherever the West has made reservations ofrepression, although we may not alwaysrecognise him. And his disguises may notalways be benign. But whenever we trembleat the sound of a diabolical and savage laughterwe will know he is close by. He is in theobduracy of Nelson Mandela, the bloodsacrifice of the IRA, the merry laughter ofAfrican women as they invent the 'traditional'stories to accompany their tourist baskets:wherever a piece of life, a handful of earth, athought, is snatched from the all-consumingvampiric machine of capitalism and itssupporting institutions. Trickster does notalways win his game; but then, as the earthfragments before the onslaught of unrestrainedabuses, we also shall lose.

Footnotes

1. Arthur Rimbaud, 'Lettre au Voyant', in CompletedWorks and Selected Letters, ed. W. Fowlie, Universityof Chicago Press, 1966, p.307.2. Edward Said, Orientalism, Routledge & KeganPaul, London and Henley, 1978.3. Harold of Orange, 1984, 16mm colour film, 30min.duration. Directed by Richard Weise, scripted byGerald Vizenor, and starring the Native Americanactor and comedian, Charlie Hill. Distributed by Filmin the Cities, Minneapolis.4. Asiba Tupahache, Taking Another Look, Spirit ofJanuary, Great Neck, NY, 1986.5. The game is played to the strains of the WilliamTell Overture which, as some of us may remember,was adopted as the signature tune of the TV cowboyLone Ranger whose side-kick was the polite andtrusty savage, Tonto.

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DOCTOR EXPLORERCHIEF CURATOR

YVES MICHAUD

We need exhibitions that question the boundaries ofart and of the art world, an influx of truly indigestible'outside' artifacts. The relations of power wherebyone portion of humanity can select, value, and collectthe pure products of others need to be criticized andtransformed. This is no small task. In the mean timeone can at least imagine shows that feature theimpure, 'inauthentic' productions of past and presenttribal life; exhibitions radically heterogeneous in theirglobal mix of styles; exhibitions that locate themselvesin specific multicultural junctures; exhibitions whoseprinciples of incorporation are openly questionable.1

In any case an exhibition such as Magiciens dela terre will have some positive aspects.Whatever reservations one might have had ormight continue to have about its title, about thespirit of the project, about the selection of artistsand goodness knows what else, it will have theone initial healthy effect of underminingvarious received truths about art. The twentiethcentury will be seen as the century thatquestioned aesthetic norms and academiccodes.2 This questioning must be continued.Frenchmen, Frenchwomen, the revolution stillhas some way to go! The next step will be toplace high art and popular art on the samelevel, to challenge the sacrosanct distinctionbetween 'avant-garde' and 'kitsch'. From thispoint of view Magiciens de la terre continues thatprocess of de-defining art and has alreadystarted that next step, because much of whatis exhibited here is both art and kitsch, both fineart and decorative art, both high art and popularart, kitsch and not avant-garde — art and not art.

It is not that it is particularly inherentlyexciting to break rules,3 but, once started, oneshould not stop half way. If anything can beart, a signature, a telegram, a safe, a bit ofochre, a smile or a piece of tent-canvas, if thecentral maxim of aesthetic anarchism is just thesame as that of epistemological anarchism, if'anything goes', if all is difference andfragmented discourse, why should we holdback by granting a certain dignity or giving ourparticular blessing to the great white (andpreferably Anglo-American) magicians whilstignoring the magicians of the periphery?4 Whydo we always have to make fetishes of thoseawards made by white (and preferably Anglo-American) intellectuals which sanctify the verymarket they perpetuate?

In short, we should continue to break downall distinctions — and, to ensure that theydisappear for good, we should exhibit not onlythe work of the sorcerers of the slums and ofthe 'beaux quartiers' side by side, but,alongside them, the work of thosestakhanovites who churn out the paintings inhotel corridors, of retired railway employeesand of producers of Virgin Mary statuettes. Ifall is art, then let's go all the way and letLourdes meet the Aborigines, let everyoneindulge in his or her own dream. If we take onefurther step then perhaps explorers will crossthe bocage of the Vendee on their way to NewGuinea. After all, the place where Levi-Straussfelt most at home as an explorer was New York.This really isn't a joke.

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Centre and periphery. It is also one of thestrong points of the exhibition that it exposesthis false distinction and tackles it head on. Thegeneration that saw the triumph of art as acultural phenomenon has also witnessed firstthe polarization of the two superpowers,followed by the further polarization ofindustrialized countries and Third World. Wefailed to notice what was already right underour noses, the fact that the Third World is alsohere with us, within virtual spitting distance,on the edge of our cities, in our high-rise blocksof flats. Neither did we notice that the ThirdWorld will not always be the Third World, thatit sells us not only the obvious raw materials,tourism and immigrant labour, but also T-shirtsand televisions, gadgets and computers.Surely, the centre will always exist: it will bejust where we are, a simple indicator ofsubjectivitiy. Yet this clearly shows that we cannever really tell where it is amongst themultiplicity of levels of activity, tension andstimulation. There are cross exchanges likemultiple circuits, few of which are regulatedand few of which are organized, and evenfewer that occur in a way that we would chooseif we could control them. This much is, ofcourse, already known. We know aboutborrowing in art; we know that Pergamon'ssculpture borrowed from Hindu sculpture, thatRoman art borrowed from Greek art, we knowabout the recycling of Italian Renaissancearchitecture, neoclassicism, orientalism,japonism, primitivism etc. It is essential torealize, though — and Magiciens de la terre willhelp us in this — that these exchanges are notjust one-way. Culture, to use the title of JamesClifford's book, is a predicament.5 Adaptingthe first line of a William Carlos Williams poem,he says "The pure products of culture havegone crazy." The apparently pure productsprobably never were. In any case nowadaysthere is certainly not on the one hand a lostworld, whether spoiled or authentic, and onthe other a glorious or ruined future. Thenotion of two equally pure identities is just afantasy. Our roots are not pure and they willbe even less so in the future. Everywhere newidentities are under construction. This does nothappen painlessly and, in any case, theseconstructions will be composite. As Cliffordsays, "if authenticity is relational, there can be

no essence except as a political, culturalinvention, a local tactic."6 The exotic is withinstriking distance, not only by a charter-flightto the other side of the world, but right here,in our midst. We are just as exotic to others asthey are to us.

Whether one likes it or not, the merit ofMagiciens de la terre will be to show this cross-fertilization and this generalization and thisgeneral reciprocity. In his excellent article onthe exhibition 'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art:Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (TheMuseum of Modern Art, New York, 1984),Thomas McEvilley expressed this reciprocity of'borrowing' in a memorable phrase: "ourgarbage is their art, their garbage is our art".7

For his part Clifford sees surrealism from thepoint of view of an ethnology of "Culturalimpurity and disruptive syncretisms."8 Hespeaks of a surrealist moment in ethnography,"that moment when the possibility ofcomparison shoots up in an immediate tensionwith the pure and simple incongruity."9

Magiciens de la terre should produce thatsurrealist moment of incongruity found incontemporary art, and in a considerably morestriking manner than do ready-mades artilyarranged amongst paintings; that, after all, isstill our world. Needless to say, in the twoexhibition sites, some compartmentalizationhas taken place; the architects have made theirown arrangements, everything is managed sothat no feelings are hurt, but that will not affectthe "pure and simple incongruity". Those whohave no stomach for the surreal, thepolylogical, the Bakhtinian "carnivalesque"will not like it — starting with those artists whoearnestly trace their own career and artisticroots in a past that they do not authenticallydespise.

Despite the cautious words and intentions ofthe organizers, the exhibition's effects will bebeyond their control. Indeed the actual effectof the exhibition never quite matches theorganizers' aims: many visitors are ignorant orunobservant, display-cases are badly lit, workshave had to be transported from God knowswhere or when in space and time, or themuseum director has just failed to make himselfunderstood.

Yet here the scale of disorientation changes.The organizers of the exhibition present us with

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a collection of objects for which either we haveno criteria for perception, or for which we haveconfused criteria, or for which we have norelevant criteria. Do we actually have anycriteria by which to perceive an AustralianAborigine dreaming? For most of us it is thesame infantile and elementary criteria whichattract us to multicoloured bead necklaces andsmall glass objects.10 By what criteria can wejudge Chen Samba? Might not these be thesame as those by which we perceive Jeff Wallor Cucchi? Conversely, are we so certain aboutwhat there is to be seen when we look at Burenor Polke? Disorientation works in all directions:it is what we feel before an 'exotic' work, alsothe feeling which is produced when we lookat the exotic from much closer to home.

A fascinating feeling of otherness will follow,as long as it is accepted as a disorientating forceand not channelled into a conventional• aesthetic discourse. It is on this point that Ihave, I confess, had reservations about theorganizers' aesthetic discourse.

They claim not to have included in theexhibition those works "which completelyescape all our aesthetic categories and criteria",nor to have included those which depend tooheavily on their context. They also claim tohave privileged the value of intrinsically visualcommunication in objects. I must confess tobeing unable to understand in what the valueof intrinsically visual communication mightconsist, especially if what is meant is somethinganalogous to the 'natural' or immediatemeaning of a gesture, a posture or anappearance. The analyses of philosophers likeWittgenstein or Davidson have more thanamply demonstrated the presence ofconvention in what seems completely naturaland obvious. If a gesture has immediatemeaning, it is because we decide "charitably"— that is to say in virtue of what Davidson callsa "charity principle" — to give it the meaningthat we give it in our tribe. That is the only wayto start a process of interpretation, so that, bydegrees, we can see that we are wrong, or,more bizarrely, that something does not 'fit'without us really knowing why. Withouttouching on philosophical considerations,Badandall's Painting and Experience in FifteenthCentury Italy, shows that there is nothing

transparent in the interpretation of gestures,behaviour or belief, that is to say, in theinterpretation of works of art. We must acceptthat when we perceive aesthetically, we areusing clearly defined criteria.11 For Buren wepossess some of these criteria, derived inparticular from the recent history of this sortof artistic activity, for Jeff Wall a few as well,and as for Che'ri Samba we can at least believewe have them. For the Aboriginal artists wecould always read John Mundine's article inthis edition of Cahiers, and so on. In fact,uncertainty, far from disappearing, snowballs,and in addition to all these heterogenousuncertainties is the effect caused by thismelting-pot of different items, this Tower ofBabel of different places. You'd have to bepretty smart even to begin to imagine you couldmaster all these effects. Magiciens de la terre willmake people think, strike them dumb orbewilder them; the exhibition is in no dangerof giving any clues as to "the generalcontemporary tendencies in world art". As wecould tell, the exhibition will be the ruin ofthose experts currently in fashion.

But for all that, it is not the aesthetes whowill win the day. The exhibition will also be thedownfall of taste, since there will be no normexcept what is socially determined by thepublic. It will trigger off deep-rooted desires,fantasies, whims; those strange motives at theheart of both the desire to collect and thepleasure derived from curiosity. Everyone willbe confronted by himself or herself and eachwork will become part of a personal mythology.The whole thing will be a lovely mess.

That is probably not the way the organizerssee it. They have adopted a universalizingaesthetic — an aesthetic that is articulated in thevery title: Magiciens de la terre. I do not wish togo into detail about what Jean-Hubert Martinsaid in his interview with Benjamin Buchloh,but merely to note the key points of thisaesthetic since it plays a major role in the wholeproject.

It is a matter of the individual creator'sconfidence, the radical energy of his work, hissense of adventure or of danger, of the work'soriginality in its cultural context, itsinventiveness, of the degree of adequationbetween the man and his creation and of thevalue of resistance and opposition to its

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environment. To which we might add thatthese are generally the criteria by which wejudge contemporary art.12

One can make all kinds of criticisms of suchcriteria. I shall set aside the fact that they areovertly ethnocentric, which contrasts both withthe stated desire not to be ethnocentric, andwith the general spirit of the project itself. Iwish rather to concentrate on what I believe tobe an essential flaw: the vague, and indeedfunctionally vague character of all these criteria.

After all, what exactly do we mean when wesay that a work is inventive or original in itscultural context, or that we can see anadequation of man and work? We could meanso many things that a whole range of artistscould be represented in Magiciens de la terre.Personally I am not sure whether artists suchas Buren, Oldenburg, Cucchi, Kirkeby or evenHaacke can really meet these kinds of criteria.

As I write I cannot be sure whether mydoubts apply to the artists of the 'periphery'or not, but whether or not one has used two'aesthetic' yardsticks is not really what matters.What has happened is that either one has usedtwo aesthetic yardsticks, each appropriate to aparticular cultural domain, in doing which onehas, in effect, allowed any number ofyardsticks: judgements will then have beenmade individually and empirically, and, at theend of the day, the result arrived at (which willbe no bad thing) will be that Teshigahara is, asthey say, 'worth exhibiting'. Or what it meansis that one has applied the same criteria andit is just the same kind of art. These criteria are,however, so vague that they can perform anyfunction: their whole point is that they caneither be presented as 'the same criteria' whichcan perform a proper function in every case,or as variable criteria which are adaptable toparticular situations and flexible enough to copewith the whole diversity of specific cases. It ishere that, paradoxically, universalization meetscasuistry.

How can we fail to see that these criteria arenot criteria at all? Since, these days, theadmission of an arbitrary, rhapsodic orsubjective choice is just not the done thing, wefeel obliged to foreground criteria, an aesthetic,which may be no more than a sham, but whichcover anything we want them to. To put itanother way, hyper-empiricism has no need of

any kind of criteria, except when the explorerwishes to give the impression of being learnedand of having a mission, that he is not doingall he does for fun, or because he is uncertain abouthis mm identity.

What is this mission?Two ways of describing it can be identified.First of all, it is a humanist mission. When

one reads the different accounts of the Magiciensde la terre project and the emphasis placed onremarkable men, magicians, creators, thosewho endow objects with a spiritual value, onecannot help but hear faint echoes of Malraux'saesthetics in that celebration of the exemplaryindividual, that conception of art as questioningof the world, that affirmation of the permanentvalue of the creative act.13 My remarks are notintended as a criticism for one very simplereason, that it is very difficult, once one hasstarted down the road of general aesthetics, toavoid two kinds of equally seductive andequally illusory discourses, Malraux's brand ofhumanism and Greenberg's brand offormalism, two discourses which are, in spirit,very closely related. In 1984, 'Primitiwsm' in20th Century Art depended on a formalistuniversalism. The very universalism ofMagiciens de la terre almost inevitably, it seemsto me, leads it to adopt the humanist versionof this universalism. This first interpretation iscertainly what comes to mind if one takes theorganizers' stated aesthetic criteria seriously.

A second interpretation, however, bothcomplements and extends the scope of the first.One is led to ask if this opening up of our waysof seeing might not in fact be characteristicallypostmodern. By postmodern I tobviously do notmean the name that might be given to a style— which, except in the domain of banalarchitecture and, moreover, taking into accountthe fact that degeneration of the postmoderninto banality and kitsch is already fairly welladvanced, would be rather difficult to identify— but rather a way of looking, a sort ofapproach, which is fundamentally empiricist,and, as I have already said, hyper-empiricist.

In this respect, one must bear in mind thatpostmodernism has a conceptual history thatlargely overlaps the domain of aesthetics.Feyerabend's first pieces defending anepistemological anarchism and prefiguring themain slogan of Against Method ("Anything

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goes"), were written in 1963. They assertednothing but the right to be "a good empiricist"in the philosophy of science, in other words aradical opening up of our way of looking atscientists' actual procedure and approach.Nothing here was open to criticism, exceptpossibly that a little more reflection onrelativism was needed. I do not believe that,in what followed, the postmodern position hasever wandered far from this constant callinginto question, in the name of hyper-empiricism,of canonical accounts in any field. The troubleis that if one commits oneself to a method thatis anti-authoritarian, anti-obscurantist, anti-monological, anti-nomological, anti-dogmatic,anti-anything, one soon ends up either inundifferentiated darkness, like Hegel's nightwhere all the cows are black, or in what I shallcall 'dogmatic tolerance'. What I mean by thisis that starting from a pluralist, tolerant, open-minded position, which is as yet quite flexibleand unarticulated, one naturally goes on tomake a universalized representation in termsof partial accounts, of differences, of local waysof understanding, to proclaim the reality of aworld where all is possible, where all isinteresting and all has a certain merit, just

• because our criteria make us see the world inthat way. We cannot escape this new trap setby ethnocentrism, this trap set by a mild andcreeping form of ethnocentrism. Tolerance isof course present, because one is so open to somany things, but dogmatism is present too,because it is still in fact our point of view thatlegislates on the world. There is no great crimein this — except perhaps that it might be thecase that things just do not happen like this.

To come to the point, what is that whichcorresponds, in the domain of art, to what Ihave just described? A representation of aworld of art where the artists are, each in hisor her own manner, and in his or her own fieldand genre, interesting, creative, innovative: arepresentation of a world of art where there isa plurality of criteria founded on a bedrock ofaesthetic value. Yet whose words are these?They belong to those who have both found thatworld and chosen that world. In the case ofMagiciens de la terre, since it is hardly a Biennaleand even less of a world fair, the choice ofnational selection committees was challenged(and rightly so) in order to avoid the

phenomenon of official selections and the trapof official art. But what at root does all of thismean? That they wanted to avoid thephenomenon of displays that are only officiallyrepresentative? Isn't that easier said than done?And in any case, who is representing what?

They wanted to avoid the machinery ofmaking official nominations ("You willrepresent us"), and also avoid the effects of anyfixed idea that official committees might havedeveloped about how a country should beproperly represented ("You will berepresentative"). In this last sense, it is clearthat many countries will consider themselvesto be badly represented, or not to berepresented by good artists, these being theofficial artists, and, moreover, the presentableand representative artists — one just cannot getaway from this vocabulary of representation.But just suppose we have already succeededin doing so. Buren and Boltanski do not, in thatcase, represent France at the Magiciens de la terreexhibition any more than the Yuendumucommunity represents Aboriginal Australians.Yet this last sentence straight away betrays itsown obvious impossibility. The Aboriginesremain Australian Aborigines, and Buren andBoltanski become what they are: FrenchAborigines, or European Aborigines, orWestern Aborigines.

Finally, if one asks what the exhibition isrepresentative of, one is forced to admit thatit actually gives a representation of the state ofcreation, in the strong sense of the word, as itis seen by members of commissions and theirassistants who are entrusted with the task ofbureaucratizing the universal. It does notmatter that these bureaucrats will admit thatthey are fallible, that they did not seeeverything, that they were unable to showeverything, that they had to pick and chooseand so forth; it is their very open-mindedness,their empiricist spirit, which represents boththe best and the worst of their enterprise. Theyopen our eyes to the diversity they have found.Thank you. And I mean that most sincerely.The explorer has completed his mission; hecomes to confirm and to strengthen our beliefin the power and diversity of creation: as doctorexplorer chief curator, as the title of my articlesuggests. He is explorer of the world in orderto be curator of our vision of the world, to look

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after it, to strengthen it. But perhaps eventhough this is what interests us, it is not thisthat really matters; perhaps what is of localinterest to people is a different matter, and itwould have been better to side not with a worldwhich came to us because we brought it here(who us?), but with a world where, here andnow, people are deeply engaged in political,social and creative acts which cannot be tornfrom their context and whose aestheticsignificance is not universalizable, with a worldwhich remains immovably there, where itbelongs, even when it is brought here, to us.I do not know how one could show a worldas it is, where it is. Perhaps we should simplyalign ourselves, committedly, with certainforms of expression in just the same way thosewho produce them do.

I do not want to make unfair criticisms of theorganizers, for their exhibition will, in any case,for the reasons I have given, be a success. Isimply wish to ask the question as to whetherartistic — and not aesthetic — values are local orglobal. And to add that, for my part, I amconvinced they are local, that I am convincedthat, to borrow a title of a book by Guy Brett,it is always a matter of seeing "through our owneyes", which is to say, through their own eyes.And to add, moreover, that it makes me sadto believe that there is really no centre exceptthere, where we just provisionally happen tobe, where provisionally they happen to be,every one of them. The world Magicians then runthe danger of being either very, very close tous, or very, very far away.

NOTES

1. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, HarvardUniversity Press, 1988, p.213.2. These codes were never quite so strict. I feel wehave invented a standardized past, a world wherestandards were clear and respected in a similar wayto the way we dream of a supposedly lost world,where values were respected, where things madesense, where things could just be what they were.

This is just one of the artifices of self-definition. Inany case the standards and principles that we bothdream up and call into question, that we probablydream up in order to question, have only served tocover up a considerable diversity of kinds of art: highart, popular art, decorative art, art as fetish, religiousart, secular art.3. Because, in the final analysis, one ends up byseeing nothing: in that night where all the cows areblack... I shall come back to this in the course of thearticle.4. Despite a considerable effort to give them a largerrole than usual, the relatively low number of womenartists is regrettable: there are clearly more magiciansthan magiciennes. Perhaps, though, the feminine of'magician' is 'witch'... .5. James Clifford, op. cit.6. Ibid., p.12.7. Thomas McEvilley 'Doctor Lawyer Indian ChiefArtforum, November 1984, p.59. The title of my articleis obviously inspired by McEvilley's work.8. James Clifford, op. cit., p.131.9. Ibid., p.146.10. Which ironically inverts the situation of thesavage being fascinated by our glass beads.11. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience inFifteenth Century Italy, Oxford, 1972. The whole bookis an exercise in identifying and reconstructing thecriteria in a specific case in order to learn to see whatthe Italians saw, to enter into their vision of the worldand in particular their vision of the artistic world.12. See the exhibition's official press statement, p.6.13. "Though always tied up with history, the creativeact has never changed its nature from the far-off daysof Sumer to those of the School of Paris, but hasvouched throughout the ages for a conquest as oldas man. Though a Byzantine mosaic, a Rubens, awork by Rembrandt and by Ce'zanne display amastery distinct in its kind, each imbued in its ownmanner with that which has been mastered, all unitewith the paintings of the Magdalenian epoch inspeaking the immemorial language of Man theconqueror, though the territory conquered was notthe same. The lesson of the Nara Buddha and of theSivaic Death Dancers is not a lesson of Buddhism orHinduism, and our Museum Without Walls opensup a field of infinite possibilities bequeathed us bythe past, revealing long-forgotten vestiges of thatunflagging creative drive which affirms man'svictorious presence." (A. Malraux, Voices of Silence,trans. S. Gilbert, St. Albans 1974, p.639). Take awaythe proper names and one is left with something verysimilar to the declared aims of the Magiciens de la terreproject.

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EARTH AND MUSEUMLOCAL AND GLOBAL?

GUY BRETT

The title of the proposed Paris exhibition, asone of the few pieces of information availablein advance, inevitably made one ask oneself:who is speaking, and to whom?

Magiciens. To describe any Western artisttoday as a magician (Picasso, say) wouldprobably be found only in advertising copy. Incurrent art discourse it would be consideredtrite, paradoxically a dis-empowering word thatwould weaken the relationship between theaesthetic and social dimensions in an artist'spractice. 'Magician' appears in the title as a wayof cementing links which the exhibitionapparently intends to make betweenmetropolitan artists and those working inreligious contexts in certain African, Asian andLatin American societies. But in doing so theterm rebounds, and inexorably reveals itsnature as a 'primitivist projection'.

De la Terre. In its close association withMagician as a message/massage of evocativewords, the word 'land' {terre) has obviouslybeen used here with a double meaning: terreas the physical substance, signifying theelemental, the basic; and terre as the world, theplanet. But as these two meanings begin todiverge, the one standing for the concrete, theparticular, the local (or in art-language the 'sitespecific'), the other for a general concept oftotality, of overview — a gulf appears betweentwo different kinds of experience. The firstassociates terre with a desperate struggle, a'land-rights' struggle, either to regainappropriated land or simply for a place to live,

a place from which to speak, and the secondis detached: the terre of privilege, of power,which with every passing day seems to becomemore abstract, mobile, and in fact harder to'localise'.

The terms move quickly to a polarizedantithesis. At one end of the scale is theexperience of peoples who traditionally have"a concept of self as an integral part of thesocial body whose history and knowledge areinscribed across a particular body of land", asJean Fisher has described for Native Americans.In this view "territory is a living entity to benurtured and respected as the literal body ofthe self".1 The other end of the scale is at anextreme of technological overdevelopment,revealingly expressed by Jean Baudrillard interms of the pilot's or driver's perception,radically alienated from the earth as also fromthe body.2

These antagonisms, in their extreme form,seem to enter into the very definition of art. Inthe world today indigenous peoples —aboriginal groups in Australia, Maori in NewZealand, Native Americans in North and SouthAmerica — are engaged in a continuous effortto maintain the association of their culturallegacy with their present predicament,especially their struggle for land rights. At thesame time certain institutions — museums andmore recently the giant corporations whichsponsor museum exhibitions — are tryingequally hard to disassociate these two realities.Canada has recently been the scene of some

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clear examples. At the 1986 World Fair, theauthorities decided they could not allow thenative peoples themselves to control a space inthe projected 'Indians of Canada' pavilion

. because they would use it to draw attention totheir present-day struggles, especially landstruggles. And last year, an exhibition ofhistorical Native American artefacts at theGlenbow Museum, Calgary, associated withthe Winter Olympics, was boycotted by theLubicon Cree Indians. Oil companies involvedin sponsoring the show operate in the area ofNorthern Alberta where the Lubicon Cree live,and where they have been fighting a bitter landclaim dispute with the federal and provincialgovernment for 50 years.

The Calgary exhibition's title, The Spirit Sings,contrasted strangely with the words of BernardOmniak, the Lubicon Cree Chief: "What'shappening now is that our people are slowlybeing killed. I think a lot of times our peoplewould be far better off if someone came up tothem and got rid of them instantly. Anythingso we wouldn't be dying a slow death." Andhe himself pointed out the glaringcontradiction: "Our culture is being glorifiedby the same people who are doing the damageto the Native people in our area."3 The oilcompanies are deeply implicated in the local,but their appeal is to the general, universalspace of 'culture' which corresponds to theirown abstract and global power. The NativeAmericans on the other hand have to movefrom the universal to the local: from ourcelebration of their artefacts as masterpieces of'world art' to what is actually happening intheir territory. Naturally the big corporationsshow their 'dependency' — on an artisticvitality and beauty they could not producethemselves and to which their logo is quitesuperfluous and marginal. But they haveclearly realized that they can make use of theway our culture creates an aesthetic centeredon the object and its contemplation, isolatedfrom the rest of reality.4 Their real power liesin the narrow specialization they count on intheir public: our refusal to take responsibilityfor the whole. We begin to read the verbalmessage of the Calgary's exhibition's title, notas uplifting, but as almost sinister: a sign thatwe are being duped.

In this process the colonized group, and the

metropolitan exhibition-goer, are in fact bothbeing duped by the same corporate powerwhich, as it grows, integrates the productionplant, the museum, the state and the media ina single hegemony (the underlying meaning of'corporate sponsorship of the arts'). The threatof this power at a local level, as well as its ever-widening circles, can be vividly felt in anilluminating short book by Eric Michaels aboutthe efforts of an aboriginal group in centralAustralia — the Warlpiri — to set up a local TVstation.5 The Walpiri were implicated not onlyin a power struggle — to transmitautonomously their own programmes in theface of the official national media — but alsoa cultural struggle, to articulate alternative'aboriginalities' to the standardized andethnicised images of themselves issuing fromthe same centralized sources. Michaelsdescribes how, in assisting the Warlpiri video-maker Francis Jupurrurla Kelly to make tapes,he realised that aboriginal history is intimatelyrelated to land and place: "Any story comesfrom a particular place, and travels from thereto here, forging links which define the tracksover which people and ceremonies travel."6

Contradictions immediately arise, and indeedMichaels reports that Francis Jupurrurla Kellyand the Warlpiri themselves see TV as a two-edged sword, both a blessing and a curse. Theywish to "identify their art and describe it to therest of the world", but at the same time to avoidlosing control of it in the process ofreproduction and circulation which videomakes possible. Will it remain a culturalexperience based in material history or beswallowed up

in a particular named future whose characteristics areimplied by that remarkable word 'Lifestyle'? Thisterm now substitutes everywhere for the term cultureto indicate the latter's demise in a period of ultra-merchandise...Lifestyles are...assemblages ofcommodified symbols, operating in concert aspackages which can be bought, sold, traded orlost...Warlpiri people, when projected into thislifestyle future, cease to be Warlpiri: they aresubsumed as 'Aborigines', in an effort to invent themas a sort of special ethnic group able to be insertedinto the fragile fantasies of contemporary Australianmulticulturalism.7

It is not difficult to recognize in this 'lifestylefuture', the same process, mediated perhaps

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by the same transnational corporations, at workin 'our own' culture. For have not thesubversive and emancipatory projects of the20th century avant-garde — from the surrealistsat one pole, with their proposals to 'liberatedesire', to the constructivists at the other, withtheir plans to transform the environment —been reduced, first by the art market and thenby the wider market of lifestyle, to the samebland range of designer-commodities? And hasthis not necessitated new strategies by artistswhich resist, or at least reflect on, exactly thisprocess in order to regain the social value andefficacy of art which the earlier generations hadsearched for? The 'ethnic' package and the'modernist' package are side by side on theshelf.

This fact, I think, has not been lost on anumber of artists of the avant-garde in the last20 years. Their explorations of the "relationshipbetween cultures" (one of the stated themesof the Paris exhibit) has been inseparable froman attack on the inherited bourgeois conceptof art (which is so entwined with the modernforms of colonialism and oppressive power).Whether the Paris exhibit will bring such workto light, or will treat the whole subject as an'instant' phenomenon, remains to be seen. Itis important to grasp the historical moment andsocial context of its first appearance, and theproblematics in which it intervened. Not thatwe are merely talking here about points in adebate, or about single issues. Thecharacteristic of art is to search for complexityand depth of metaphor.

I would like here, in the space available, todraw attention to such complex metaphors inthe work of three artists of different origins,who have viewed the "relationship betweencultures" from different positions: HelioOiticica, a Brazilian who died in 1980 at the ageof 43 and who positioned himself audaciouslybetween the avant-garde, Brazilian popularculture, the realities of 'underdevelopment'and '60s radicalism; the American artist SusanHiller, who was perhaps the first to incorporatean ironical anthropological critique as a visualart practice, in a criss-crossing network ofthemes she is still developing, and the Filipinoartist David Medalla, who over 25 years hascontinually re-inyented the terms of anexperimental dialogue between art and life.

Helio Oiticica's work was in the mid-'60s atthe forefront of modernity. At the Sao PauloBiennale of 1965 he had exhibited somemysteriously beautiful works which were likeno other objects around at that time: glasscontainers, or flasks, filled with red earth or amass of brilliant pigment around a core offlame-like gauze and cloth, Oiticica's generic

HELIO OITICICA Mosquito of Mangueira

wearing Cape 6, 1965

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SUSAN HILLER Fragments (Installation detafl) 1978Courtesy PAT HEARN GALLERY, New York

in Portugese) conceived of the object, not interms of formal relationships, but as an 'energycentre' which draws spectators close ("like afire", as he . once remarked) and invitesmanipulation.

Oiticica had participated in the concrete andneo-concrete movements of the 1950s, whenBrazil had received a first-hand exposure to theinter-war European avant-garde (the work ofMondrian, Klee, the Bauhaus, de Stijl, theDadaists and Futurists was seen in depth at theearly Sao Paulo Biennales). He had begun witha Mondrian-like formal analysis of the pictorialorder: the plane, figure/ground relationships,

the frame. His early experiments were to movefrom that plane to the environmental space,and from a purely optical to a 'bodily' sensationof colour. From then on, his acute analysis ofthe new art movements in Europe and NorthAmerica became closely bound up with his self-exposure to Brazil's popular culture, and to thepowerful contradictions in the social reality ofRio de Janeiro. Crossing class barriers andliving for periods in Manueira (one of Rio'sfavelas, or shanty-towns), becoming acceptedand making friends there (a near-impossibilityin Brazil), joining the Escola de Samba andrising to the level of passista (one of the leadingdancers in the Carnival parade) issued in new

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work concepts. Among these, ParangoU isperhaps the most daring.

Although ParangoU took the physical form of'capes', and sometimes banners and'standards', the word stood for a mode ofcreative-expressive behaviour rather thanobjects as such. The Brazilian critic FredericoMorais called it "a programme, a vision of theworld, an ethic".8 Here, in a hybrid, hebrought together his refined assimilation ofEuropean constructivism, his advanced notionsof spectatpr-participation (that creation is adialogue and the object has no status ousideits 'relational' role), Brazil's popular culture ofthe body, and the exaltations and sufferings ofthe mass of people as he had intuited them.The Capes (incorporating cloth, plastic, earth,words and so on) are internal-external, andindividual-collective, dialogues. Wearing them,running or dancing in them, reveals things tothe wearer, at the same time as it projectsmessages to those around, as a kind of'clothing-utterance'.

I think the implications of Oiticica's work aremany. Here was an advanced avant-garde art,rooted in the culture and reality of Brazil butwhich had thrown off colonial mimicry anddepedence. No doubt there was an element of'romance' in his exaltation of Mangueira andthe marginal, but Oiticica's was no 'aestheticsof poverty*. Mangueira signified revolt againstoppressive authority, and for Oiticica itmirrored his own artistic revolt against thePhilistinism and consumerism of the Brazilianbourgeoisie. Mangueira was also for him asymbol of a communal creativity and festivity.His work, however, is not 'populist'. It alwayskept an abstract, 'model', quality. For him thiswas a necessary defence against the folkloric,the 'tropical', and other packageable images;abstraction signified an "open condition", and"the living potentiality of a culture which isbeing formed".9

My first sight of Susan Hiller's workFragments (in 1978, at the Museum of ModernArt in Oxford) was similarly a revelation,though of a rather different kind. In a startlingmise-en-scene, hundreds of small broken piecesof Native American Pueblo pottery were laidout on low platforms in a large space. Theywere accompanied by painted versions of theindividual pieces, while on the wall were

pinned various charts and documents,including hand-written transcripts of reflectionson their work by Pueblo women potters whichbrought out their imaginative freedoms andrestrictions within their traditions. Spatially,materially, the installation seemed to mock, orto release one from, the imposition of mastered'wholes': either of a sculptural or of anarchaeological/anthropological kind. Thematerial appropriated from another culture wasnot used in order to build up eitherautonomous 'primitive-looking' art objects, orthe 'scientific' displays of ethnographic

. museums. It remained in fragments: a movingassertion of knowledge both as incomplete andas shared.

There was also another level to Fragments,underlined by the inclusion of twophotographs. One taken from an old NationalGeographic Magazine was of a white womanat a camp table, with a caption underneathrunning something like: "Here Mrs....patientlysorts the pieces of pottery of the archaeologicalexpeditions led by her husband." The otherphoto was of Susan Hiller sorting the pieces asan artist. These images linked with thestatements of the potters to establish a struggleby women to be seen as "primary makers ofmeaning".10 In this sense the work was acollaboration. As Caryn Faure-Walker wrote atthe time, the shards "function as analogouscross-references to broader notions of culturein which we ourselves are involved".11 Andindeed the work of Susan Hiller as a wholewould hold up to question the notion of anexhibition dealing with the West's relationshipto other cultures, unless it was dialecticallyrelated to an 'anthropology' of our own society.The view of another culture is taken from insideone's own culture. Both 'at home and abroad',perceptions are concealed and marginalised bythe patriarchal law and official voice.

One of the ways Susan Hiller has examinedthe patriarchal law and official voice 'at home'has been in a subtle questioning of theconventional boundaries between the publicand domestic domains. Her installationMonument, 19 refers to a tradition of public,official culture, though in an unexpected, off-centered way: the photographed inscriptionswhich form its basis — Victorian memorials topeople who died saving or trying to save the

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DAVID MEDALLA in front of Eskimo Carver, Installation at Artistsfor Democracy, 1977

lives of others — tell of unknown lives whichbecame public and heroic in an instant. Hillertries to recover their lost voices and their livesoutside the official discourse of the monumentin her own taped reverie which is part of thework. Her more recent series Home Truthsmoves right into the domestic enclave, to itsskin so to speak, via the appropriation of mass-produced childrens' wallpapers which she usesas a painting ground. Has anyone paid muchattention to these leisure products before?Hiller proffers them as evidence of the growingimportance of the home as the place whereideology is imbibed. She has sorted out a

gender-based indoctrination of values byappeal to ancient themes: language (ABCs),love (Pierrot Lunaires, hearts and cosmeticcolours for girls), and death (guns, robots andwar scenes for boys). Her own superimposedpainting both accentuates and scrambles up themechanical stereotypes. In a subtle artisticstrategy, beauty transfigures a kitschexpression at the same time as it testifies to thesocial power of this kitsch and thus ridiculesa response of mere aesthetic delectation.

David Medalla's Eskimo Carver first appearedin London in 1977, in the immediate context ofArtists for Democracy, which was an artists'

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group and exhibition space active at the timein providing "material and cultural support toliberation struggles throughout the world".Eskimo Carver was an event in three parts; anexhibit of Medalla's drawings andtranscriptions of Eskimo poetry, a performance— "Alaska Pipeline" — based on thesuperpower incursions into the Arctic asmediated by the English 'gutter press', and a'participation-production' piece in whichvisitors were invited to make knives out of apile of waste and refuse collected in theneighbourhood. Each person's 'knife' wastitled and pinned to the wall in a playful parodyof ethnographic museums.

Madalla's kinetic sculptures of the 1960s,using foam, mud, sand and so on, had beenone of the most radical and poetic explorations

of the whole problematic of matter, energy, theephemeral, the random and the relationshipbetween the machine and nature. In the '70she translated his concern with movement andchange from an 'elemental' to a 'social' fieldof metaphor. The mechanical sculpture whichgrew and changed outside the direct control ofthe artist became the participatory propositionwhich, based on the artist's idea, took anunpredictable form from the contributions ofmany people, and thereby threatened to burstthe protocols of the museological concept of art:"I could easily inundate, say, the TateGallery...", as Medalla said of Eskimo Carver,"there is no end to people coming in andmaking knives."12

The invitation to make knives in Eskimo Carverparalleled the Eskimo practice of composing

DAVID MEDALLA Eskimo Carver (detaU) 1977

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poetry, which traditionally is democratic andparticipatory (although it is considered verydifficult to produce a good new song). Thesheer diversity of contributions it produced,ranging from the literal to the fantastic andpoetic was a revelation. In fact the model ofcreativity proposed in this piece wittilychallenged our museum culture in two of itsguises simultaneously; showing up on the onehand the bourgeois notion of the isolatedgenius and the sanctification of art objectsin 'museums of modern art', and on the otherthe 'objective' representation of othercultures made in ethnographic museums! Theintelligence of this dual strategy becomes all themore pertinent when you compare it withother, more one-sided positions; for examplethe later sculpture of a formalist kind madefrom industrial fragments by artists like TonyCragg or Bill Woodrow, or Eduardo Paolozzi's1986 exhibit at the Museum of Mankind inLondon, combining pieces of his own sculpturewith items from the British Museum'sethnographic collections — where he effectively'museumified' even his own work.

The theme of the relationship betweencultures did not disappear from Medalla's workafter Eskimo Carver, but it was posed in a newway. From participatory propositions for'others', he moved towards himself and hisplace in the world. His long series ofperformances and photoworks of the 1980shave been a kind of masquerade using objectsand even the environment itself to make visiblethe "the infinity of traces"13 which constituteidentity. Its witty and incongruous 'conflation'of cultures, and of the exalted and kitsch,seemed designed to rescue a notion of creativityfrom all forms of essentializing, cloning andfinalizing discourse; whether of academic arthistory, of the art market and bureaucracy, ofideas, or of lifestyle.

The Paris exhibition is being organized in themidst of a wave of artistic neo-primitivism; theappropriation of spaces, images, motifs, fromfaraway, which is closely connected withreviving the myth of the artist's unique andsingular identity, and of art's autonomy withinthe social field as a whole. The 'local' in timeand space again becomes the 'global' ofWestern taste. Here we have drawn attention

to work which refuses simple oppositions (we-they, self-other, artist-public) and proposes adynamic complexity for understanding andacting in the world. These differences wouldseem to be the stuff of conflict rather than thedubious unity of Magicians.

NOTES

1. Jean Fisher, Jimmie Durham, 'The ground has beencovered', Artforum, Summer 1988. p.102.2. "...each person sees himself at the controls of ahypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfectand remote sovereignty, at an infinite distance fromhis univese of origin...our body appears simplysuperfluous, basically useless in its extension, in themultiplicity and complexity of its organs, its tissuesand functions, since today everything is concentratedin the brain and in genetic codes, which alone sumup the operational centre of being. The countryside,the immense geographic countryside, seems to be adeserted body whose expanse and dimensionsappear arbitrary (and which is boring to cross evenif one leaves the main highways)...etc, etc. JeanBaudrillard, 'The Ecstasy of Communication' in HalFoster (ed.) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press,1985, p.128, 129.3. Quoted in Last Issue, Alberta, Autumn 1987.4. It is revealing to see that CANAL +, one of thesponsors of Magiciens de la terre, despite the rhetoricof the "abolition of all frontiers", can still, in itspromotion material, remain wedded to a distinctlyWestern bourgeois concept of art: "A tous sesabonne's, CANAL + a choisi de d£dier ce plaisirunique qui s'attache a la possesssion des objets d'artet de leur offrir cette jouissance extreme qui nait deleur contemplation".5. Eric Michaels, For a Cultural Future — FrancisJupurrurla Kelly makes TV at Yuendumu, "Art &Criticism Monograph Series, vol 3. Melbourne:Artspace, 1987.6. Ibid, p.49.7. Ibid, p.71.8. Frederico Morais, Pequeno roteiro cronológico dasinvençóes de Hélio Oiticica. Rio de Janeiro, 1986, p.2.9. Helio Oiticica, 'Crelazer', in Aspiro Ao GrandeLabirinto (selected essays by Oiticica), ed, LucianoFigueiredo, Lygia Pape and Waly Salomao, Rio deJaneiro; Rocco 1986, p.116.10. Susan Hiller, Interview with Paul Buck,Centrefold, (Toronto), November, 1979.11. Caryn Faure-Walker, 'Fragments', in Susan Hiller:Recent Works, exhibition catalogue, Oxford: Museumof Modern Art, 1978, p.25.12. David Medalla, Interview with Steve Thorn, 1977[unpublished].13. The phrase is Antonio Gramsci's, from his PrisonNotebooks.

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