Arts

Shiner makes a convincing case that the arts are a modern invention, "not an essence or a fate but something we have made … [an] invention barely two hundred years old" (p. 3). One of the first to convincingly argue the point was Paul Oskar Kristeller in his 1950 essay "The Modern System of the Arts," but Shiner's argument is distinguished by its awareness that the category of the "arts" is a markedly European construct, one that in recent years has come under increasing scrutiny as the (Western) art world has "opened" itself to works made in other cultures. In the process, the very idea of the "arts" has begun to change once again.

One of the key moments in this process happened in the summer of 1989, with the opening of an exhibition in Paris that announced itself as "the first world-wide exhibition of contemporary art." Called Magiciens de la terre, or Magicians of the Earth, the show consisted of works by one hundred artists, fifty from the traditional "centers" of Western culture (Europe and America) and fifty from the so-called Third World, from Asia, South America, Australia, Africa, and, incidentally, Native American art from North America. The show's curator, Jean-Hubert Martin, conceived of the exhibition as a way to show the real differences between and specificity of different cultures. But the exhibition raised many questions of the kind articulated by Eleanor Heartney in her extended review of the show in Art in America:

Can there really, one wonders, be any continuum between a Kiefer painting and a Benin ceremonial mask? How does one make judgments of "quality" about objects completely foreign to our culture and experience? Is there any "politically correct" way to present artifacts from another culture, or does the museological enterprise inevitably smack of cultural exploitation? Wary of the tendency to romanticize the lost purity of vanished worlds, the organizers have emphasized societies in transition, in many cases choosing Western and non-Western artists who represent an exchange of influences between their respective cultures. Still, one wonders if Kwakiutl mask from British Columbia, Canada, 1887. Painted wood. The Kwakiutls, a native American tribe found along the northwest coast of Canada, utilized masks for virtually every occasion in their culture. William Rubin, director emeritus of New York's Museum of Modern Art, attempted to compare Kwakiutl art to that of Picasso to prove that abstraction is a universal concept. © BILDARCHIV PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ / ART RESOURCE, NY such exchanges are really equivalent. Is the same thing going on when an artisan from Madagascar incorporates airplanes and buses within the traditional tomb decorations of Madagascar and Mario Merz appropriates the igloo or hut form into his sculptures? (pp. 91–92)

In order to treat all the show's exhibitors on equal terms, the curators included only the names of each work's creator and its geographical origin in identifying the pieces. As a result, the average Western viewer was encouraged, as Heartley says, "to apply preexisting Western esthetic standards to objects where such standards are irrelevant" (p. 92).

Nevertheless, in its recognition of the growing impact of Western culture and modern technology on "evolving" cultures, and its refusal to romanticize the originary purity of the artifacts on display, the show marked a distinct advance over the Museum of Modern Art's 1984 exhibition 'Primitivism' in 20th-century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern. Curator William S. Rubin tried to show that abstraction was a universal language by comparing, for instance, Pablo Picasso's Girl before a Mirror to a Kwakiutl mask from British Columbia the likes of which Picasso had almost certainly never seen and arguing that what "led artists to be receptive to tribal art" in the twentieth century had "to do with a fundamental shift in the nature of most vanguard art from styles rooted in visual perception to others based on conception"—that is, abstraction (p. 11). The reaction to Rubin's show was dramatic—and negative. Many critics believed that Rubin unwittingly outlined the terms by which so-called tribal cultures had traditionally been appropriated—that is, colonized and consumed—by Western culture. Others pointed out that Rubin's so-called tribal art was not, to the cultures that produced it, art at all. In a particularly severe review in Artforum, Thomas McEvilley took Rubin to task for insisting that the specific function and significance of each of the objects in the show was irrelevant. "But it is also true," McEvilley points out, "that he attributes a general function to all the objects together, namely, the esthetic function, the function of giving esthetic satisfaction. In other words, the function of Modernist works is tacitly but constantly attributed to the primitive works.… Religious objects … are misleadingly presented as art objects" (pp. 58–59).

In other words, most of the works in this exhibition were produced before their particular cultures had entered the "era of art," and Rubin proceeded as if Western historiography determines global historiography. There was long-standing precedent for Rubin's position, one of the most notable of which was Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro's ground-breaking Primitive Negro Sculpture, first published in 1926 but still current enough in 1968 to be reprinted by Hacker Art Books. As Christa Clarke has summarized the book's ground-breaking principles: "Primitive Negro Sculpture … differs from earlier publications in providing clearly developed aesthetic criteria for an evaluation of African sculpture. The text not only makes distinctions between 'art' and 'artifact,' but also specifies ideal formal properties and delineates cultural 'style regions' based on shared stylistic characteristics" (p. 41). All the illustrations in the book were from the collection of the Barnes Foundation, collected by Albert C. Barnes in order to demonstrate his own aesthetic theory, which was founded on the belief in ideal form. In Clark's summary:

Great art does not imitate nature but interprets the experience of seeing nature through "plastic means"—that is, through color, line, light, and space. This exclusive focus on "plastic form" provided a critical framework that encompassed all visual material, regardless of cultural origin or subject matter. Barnes's aesthetic studies led him to consider African sculpture as the purest expression of three-dimensional form. (pp. 42–43)

Thus Guillaume and Munro, working at Barnes's behest, not only differentiate African "art"—sculptures and masks (i.e., religious objects and fetishes)—from African "artifacts"—cups, utensils, musical instruments—but they emphasize the formal qualities of the "art" in particular:

To the eye, to the hand, to both together moving over the surface, the statue is like music in its succession of repeated and contrasting sensuous forms, its continuities and subtle alterations of a theme. Or rather it is the material for music that one may compose at will, Quetzal feather headdress of Aztec emperor Montezuma II, c. 1520. Fashioned from beads, shells, and over four hundred iridescent quetzal feathers, this elaborate headdress was presented to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V by Cortés. Quetzals were considered sacred by the Aztecs, who believed the birds represented wisdom and peace. © ERICH LESSING / ART RESOURCE, NY proceeding always in a new order from line to line and mass to mass, singling out and reorganizing the elements, perceiving always some new relationship that had never presented itself before. (p. 33)

Guillaume and Munro may as well be writing about the art of Picasso or Henri Matisse (1869–1954), both of whose work, of course, Barnes admired and collected.

In fact, one of the most notable aspects of modern art historiography in the West is its refusal to see the artifacts of other cultures in terms other than the formalist aesthetic of modernism. McEvilley underscores the fact with a telling example:

In New Guinea in the '30s, Western food containers were highly prized as clothing ornaments—a Kellogg's cereal box became a hat, a tin can ornamented a belt, and so on. Passed down to us in photographs, the practice looks not only absurd but pathetic. We know that the tribal people have done something so inappropriate as to be absurd, and without even beginning to realize it. Our sense of the smallness and quirkiness of their world view encourages our sense of the larger scope and greater clarity of ours. Yet the way Westerners have related to the primitive objects that have floated through their consciousness would look to the tribal peoples much the way their use of our food containers looks to us: they would perceive at once that we had done something childishly inappropriate and ignorant, and without even realizing it. Many primitive groups, when they have used an object ritually (sometimes only once) desacralize it and discard it as garbage. We then show it in our museums. In other words: our garbage is their art, their garbage is our art. (p. 59)

In sum, the category "art" is by no means universal.

In The Invention of Art, Larry Shiner points out that "the Japanese language had no collective noun for 'art' in our sense until the nineteenth century" nor before the nineteenth century had anyone in China "grouped painting, sculpture, ceramics, and calligraphy together as objects" sharing any qualities in common (p. 15). Indeed, there is, among non-Western peoples and those cultures that exist on Western culture's margins, a growing antipathy to the appropriation of their "crafts" into the art context. Shiner cites a statement by Michael Lacapa, an "artisan" of mixed Apache, Hopi, and Tewa heritage, that he encountered at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe in 1997:

What do we call a piece of work created by the hands of my family? In my home we call it pottery painted with designs to tell us a story. In my mother's house, we call it a wedding basket to hold blue corn meal for the groom's family. In my grandma's place we call it a Kachina doll, a carved image of a life force that holds the Hopi world in place. We make pieces of life to see, touch, and feel. Shall we call it "Art?" I hope not. It may lose its soul. Its life. Its people. (p. 273)

Quite clearly, the process that would transform Lacapa's pottery, basket, or Kachina doll is not so much their appearance in the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (where they apparently fall on the "culture" side of things), but the fact that they were to be purchased, collected, and commodified by agencies outside the culture and "life" in which they were produced.

Homi Bhaba, one of the great students of contemporary "global" culture, has reminded us of the "artifactual" consequences of Western colonization. "The great remains of the Inca or Aztec world are the debris," he writes, "of the Culture of Discovery. Their presence in the museum should reflect the devastation that has turned them from being signs in a powerful cultural system to becoming the symbols of a destroyed culture"(p. 321). The headdress of Montezuma II (in Nahuatl, Motecuhzoma; r. 1502–1520), presented to the Habsburg emperor Charles V (r. 1519–1556) by Hernán Cortés and now in the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna, is a case in point. Consisting of 450 green tail feathers of the quetzal bird, blue feathers from the cotinga bird, beads, and gold, it is a treasure of extraordinary beauty. But the historical moment is being approached, if not already here, when such objects will be allowed to give up their status as "art," except insofar, perhaps, the recognition that the "arts" are a historically constructed phenomenon that conveniently serves to mask social history. "It seems appropriate," Homi Bhaba says, "[to make] present in the display of art what is so often rendered unrepresentable or left unrepresented—violence, trauma, dispossession" (p. 321). It seems likewise appropriate to let the arts, which in the early twenty-first century have neither pleasure nor the revelation of genius as their principal aims, represent these things.