response to Errington

Shelly Errington's "What Became Authentic Primitive Art?" discusses the growing popularity of what is considered 'primitive art' in history, as well as what, for better or worse, is to be considered 'authentic.' Due to the fact that people in the West are fascinated with this so-called 'primitivism,' the trend and importance of gathering and collecting primitive forms of art grew significantly. With this trend came the controversy over what makes the art authentic or not. In relation to the film we watched in class, "In and Out of Africa" (Barbash and Taylor, 1993), the people who sold these works of art to the West realized the importance of the market and began to create a sort of 'new/old' art form, selling it as 'authentic,' and old. They even went as far as to weather down the primitive sculptures that they had just created from wood using mud, and root to give it an aged appearance, and making multiple copies of these art forms as a means of mass consumption for the white Westerners who then sold them in high-end galleries. It's interesting to me that the same African masks which Picasso painted, as seen in his painting, "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon," which was highly controversial, became an increasingly popular form of art, through what was considered to be cultural objects that had a certain significant purpose or use through the specific culture.


Errington discusses the two categories "art by appropriation...and art by intention." (203) The way in which people decided which objects belonged in a museum, and the idea that any form of primitive object could be displayed in a museum, and therefore, is authentic, primitive art, is very interesting. The idea of art by appropriation basically means that any work of art that is framed and hung in a gallery "becomes "art" by being framed." (207) As I mentioned before, as the Africans created the weathered appearance of new wooden sculptures to sell to the Westerners, is similar to the way in which, in the 1920s, art dealers practiced a similar approach of altering objects to create a specific authentic appearance, as they used to "strip African artifacts of their soft and fibrous parts, rendering them starkly "modern" looking and preserving or creating a particular aesthetic." (204) African objects, which at one point, had a purpose or significance in the given culture and environment, once exhibited in a museum becomes meaningless and merely decorative. The objects which were favored to be exhibited were mainly described as "ceremonial" (212), which downplays as well as completely ignores the true significance of the objects, which are misunderstood and underrated by the Westerners. People in the West were mystified by the objects of primitivism, therefore concluded and assumed that all of the art displayed carried some sort of spiritual or magical power, as well as superstitions. To me, Errington's article discusses how the West took African and Oceania objects, put them on display, categorized them and placed them in specific genres of "ethnic" art, and continued to fascinate and mystify people on a culture they knew nothing of, other than what they were being told to think was "primitive art," otherwise known as Non-Western artifacts labeled and misconstrued by the White, eager to collect and create new meanings for a new kind of art.