Primitivism/Orientalism Lecture Flashcards

Lamassu, winged bulls with human heads

• Thought to ward off evil

• Shown: East side of the Gate of All Nations (Gate of Xerxes) in Persepolis, Iran

Sphinxes from Karnak (Luxor, New Kingdom Egypt)

• Enormous temple, added on to by subsequent generations of pharaohs

• Sphinxes are really easy to steal, turn up in Western museums over and over again

Nepal, Guardian Lions of Singha at the Kumari Ghar

• Dedicated to the goddess Siddhi Lakshmi, worshipped from like 9 years old in this temple, lined with finery and presented on a balcony

• Stairway is lined with five pairs of guardian statues: Two wrestlers, elephants, lions, griffins, tantric goddesses, each pair being successively more powerful

• Kathman du (?), temples over and over have these statues that have a deep meaning inside of the community

King Yaksha Malla (1428-1482 CE)

• builder of a Duttatreya temple (fusion of Shiva, Krishna and Brahma), opened to the public in 1486 CE

• Comparison: de Medicis, guarded by statues of Rao Jaimal of Rathor, ruler of Badnor, and Patta of Kelwa, hindu princes resisting against the Mughals

• When you begin to do the difficult research work of researching a temple guardian, there’s this richness at the end of the tunnel

17th century emperor Aurangzeb’s grave is India’s flashpoint

• The tomb of a 17th century emperor is still causing violence up to this day

• The choices you draw from will be looked at by cultural patrons!

• Conflict in Nepal surrounds if his tomb can be demolished or not, and there’s religious conflict surrounding it

  • Even though there’s conflict surrounding it, it’s protected by historical protections

• Comparison: Borgund Stave Church, 1200, in Laerdal

• Associated with Vikings, Russia, Norway, etc, made of timber

  • One of norway’s most beloved monuments

  • Genshin draws from these complicated pasts to influence an orientalist mish mash of a game

Comparison: Egyptian influence, Genshin temples compared to the Fifth element

• Compared to: Hegra Archaeological Site, Qa-r-al, Farid, “The Lonely Castle”

  • Largest of the 1st century Nabataean tombs

  • Petra, archaeological site in a lot of contemporary media

Henri Rousseau, 1844-1910, dans son atelier de rue Perrel devant le tableau

• Outside of the government stranglehold on history painting, there’s been a shift towards Orientalist ‘return to primitivism’ racist subjects

• Rousseau, In a Tropical Forest, Combat of a Tiger and a Buffalo, 1908-09

  • Radically different from Gerome and the talent shown in the Salon, this is a style that looks deliberately amateur, without formal training

    • Orientalism->Primitivism is a direct line

  • Shows a space brutally under colonial rule, all under colonialist notions of the ‘mysterious’ exotic other

  • he viewed these exotic plants as if he was entering a dream

• The Dream, Rousseau’s last completed work, 1910

• A lot of his work has this dreamlike imagery, and at that time there was a Freudian interest in psychological study in dreams

• You can’t photograph your dream yet, photography still has a place

• First exhibited not at the Louvre, but in his own independent exhibition

• Yadwigha (his Polish ex-girlfriend) falling asleep to a reed instrument, falling asleep to a black lady snake charmer 

  • Movement towards abstraction

• Comparison: Venus of Urbino (Titian) and Olympia (Manet)

• Even though the artist probably didn’t intend to be racist, his paintings really were

The Snake Charmer (d’Orsay) commissioned by Berthe, Comtesse de Delaunay, mother of artist Robert Delaunay, Rousseau’s first large commission

• Naked woman with a tree, references the bible (garden of eden)

• Black woman being naked also references back to primitivism (and orientalism)

  • A reminder of how the male gaze continues to cycle through the paintings

  • Rousseau remarked to Picasso: Basically, you do in an Egyptian style what I do in the modern style.

• Comparison: 1884, No Jury, No Reward, group of independent artists in the Salon des Independants

Fang mask used for the ngil ceremony, used as inspiration for Demoiselles d’Avignon

• To protect yourself during these ritual dance ceremonies, this mask would have been carved

• All of this significance is carved away from it when it’s dropped on the head of a sex worker

  • Just like Genshin Impact!!!

Reliquary guardian head, Fang peoples, Gabon. Late 19th-20th century

• The remains of the dead can be placed in these figures, which was misunderstood as cannibalism by western missionaries and merchants

Ngil mask from Gabon or Cameroon, Fang people, in a museum in Berlin, Germany

• Even today there’s this recontextualizing and returning of indigenous artworks, such as certain sections in the Smithsonian museum today being closed because there’s things there that are not supposed to be seen by the public

• Solomon-Godeau, Abigail “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of the Primitivist Modernism”

  • Explores the notion of primitivism as the notion of desirability and distance

  • Kind of goes in line with the interest of anime, how we embrace this thing that’s kind of other

Cote d’lvoire or Libera, Dan artist, Tankagle (mask), U of Iowa museum of art

• It’s been hypothesized that the Dan mask Matisse showed Picasso was a piece purchased from Emile Heymenn’s shop of non-Western artifacts in Paris

  • Like if you put a tutu up on a wall without knowing about ballet, it’s a dance costume!

  • These characters appear with an orchestra and entertain the audience, kind of like the commedia dell’arte?

  • These images are used to justify colonization, as the ‘saving’ of a culture stuck in the primitive past

Moorish (Term)

• the term Moorish is used as a blending of a bunch of cultures, an Orientalist term

  • Picasso was inspired by viewing an ethnographic museum at the old Palais de Troudaco, a ‘Moorish’ museum

  • He saw in African masks as ‘what humanity is all about,’ a primitive idea

    • Picasso, Three figures under a tree, 1907-08

      • The smell of age and mold almost caused him to leave the Moorish museum, but he was such a brave boy and stayed and explored the museum

Pablo Picasso, 1908, Dryad

• Compared to: William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905), Nymphs and Satyr (1873)

  • Bouguereau was supposed to be the da Vinci of his time, but surprisingly we don’t know him lol

  • Educated, trained, given all this privilege, but is completely ‘outshined’ by his borrowing and stealing of African art to make distinct art

    • Naked girls wearing an African masks

Patapon

• A Japanese game where you go through by drumming, the sound is an integral part of the game

  • This game received a lot of critical attention 10 years ago, lots of tribal designs inside the game

  • Moorish, and tribal designs perhaps from Papua New Guinea

  • ‘Congas and bongos weren’t satisfying enough, so they added more sounds to make it even more ‘interesting’

    • That’s pretty deliberately Orientalist lol

  • They think the game’s style will be for adults with good taste, and draws from these canons of art history

Zeno Clash ACE Team 2009

• How does Picasso’s obsession with African art move forward with stuff like this?

• In this game, you fight fist to fist with the primitivist creatures in the jungle

  • The dialogue is also a ‘jumbled mess,’ perhaps using primitive speak (I eat rock, you go home) and low quality audio, and lack of clear storytelling

From Dust, Ubisoft

• You play a god-like figure guiding people across hazards, as you’re playing you’re a god over folks of color

• Creator Eric Chahi, created Another World and Heart of Darkness

• He went across the world ‘studying volcanoes’ and came back to make these games

  • Deliberately orientalist

• Statues inside the game look like the statues on Easter Island

• Comparison: Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Idol, the Goddess Hina, 1894

  • Gauguin was also a racist dude, did things such as buy a 15 year old girl from her family

• Gauguin, and the Gold of their Bodies, d’Orsay, Paris

Blind Memory of Mauricio Limon de Leon, one of Mexico’s leading contemporary artists

• When you go there, you go to this catholic church and orphanage, kind of an oddity in a ‘modern’ society

• Very clearly a satirical rework of primitivism, laughter defines and separates us from the rest of the species

• The highlight: African masks used as an abstraction of ourselves (white people), Performing White skin

  •  reminds us just how politicized the whole primtivist thing is with the African masks, these are depictions of ‘the viewer’ as the African masks would have depicted of African people from that time

  • He had a video of a performer wearing his take on this primitivst mask

• As we move forward, we have this ‘suitcase’ of memories that we take with us of modern art and primitivist

Auguste Hilarion de Keratry (1769), terracotta bust

• A political caricature, a snapshot into what the politicians of the time looked like

• Usually busts are of Greco-Roman leaders, these are re-imaginings with American politicians

Limon de Leon, made in collaboration with Wixarica artists Josefina Venegas and Ramon Carrillo

• Clothing towards extending their research towards the production of objects with artisanal techniques, Limon de Leon

  • This as a case study for cultural appropriation… a mexican contemporary artist deploying African art as a sense of primtivism

    • Although it might seem like it’s kind of dumbing down the culture, he’s working with indigenous leaders in the community to highlight the extension of their research towards indigenous culture

    • Asking us to look at the intersection between an ancestral object and commercialization/capitalism

      • It’s not to sell a product, it’s to make us question what a product is to begin with

The exhibiton also includes some disconcerting paintings, appropriating from the surrealist painter Yves Laloy

Rousseau, Tiger Hunt, 1895

• One of his direct borrowings from Rudolf Ernst (right), shows the view of an unchanging exotic past, the bodies of color are used as a central tool by white artists to a white audience to perpetuate this vision

  • Also moves forward into Picasso’s work

Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, oil on canvas, MOMA

Prostitutes, influenced by African masks, completely appropriating the masks to be something strange and alien