Authentic primitive art and Indigenous global desires between reality and hyperreality

Abstract

Some twenty years ago, Shelly Errington discussed the “double death of authentic primitive art” in her influential work The Death of Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress.1 Emerging in the first half of the twentieth century in the West, the category of authentic primitive art has comprised all those “exotic” objects with “authentic” ritual or practical functions in their source communities. After a golden epoch, which, to Errington, and other authors,2 spanned from the 1957 opening of the New York’s Museum of Primitive Art to MoMA’s 1984 exhibit “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art,” authentic primitive art began to die out. As Errington argues, this was mainly caused by the antievolutionary and ethical turn of disciplines such as history and anthropology, along with the “vanishing” of non-literate societies and their “authentic” material cultures (which provoked its “double” death). More recently, Errington has observed that artefacts made by Thirdand Fourth-World art makers have continued to be seen as bearing attributes of authentic primitivism, even though they are chiefly targeted at the global (art) market and hence are “inauthentic.” 3 Moreover, a further point she raises is that the concept of art has become loose. Thus, differences between low and high art, but also authentic and inauthentic or primitive and non-primitive (if it can be put so) are more and more blurred. That being so, Errington eventually contends that the terms “authentic” and “primitive” have “lost credibility, at least when linked to the term ‘Art’.”4