neoprimitivism
In the brutal and lucid attack that Hal Foster launched on MoMA in his 1985 article, The "Primitive" Unconscious of Modern Art, he described the museum as the ultimate guardian of modernism and, consequently, the ultimate avatar of colonialism and imperialism. Foster denounces the narrative of the exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of The Tribal and the Modern, as an “abstractive operation.” And, according to MoMA itself, “modernist primitivism depends on the autonomous force of objects,” and everything can be reduced to the formal coincidences between tribal objects and the primitivist creations of the avant-garde. According to Foster, the MoMA exhibition was essentially dedicated to juxtaposing objects to extract their visual similarities. This simplification is already evident on the cover of the exhibition catalog, which juxtaposes a Tusyan mask from Burkina Faso with Max Ernst's 1934 work, Tête d'oiseau.
Foster describes primitivism as a fetishistic discourse that delegitimizes tribal difference, arguing that it functions because the West, along with its patriarchal subjectivity, is permanently threatened by loss, lack, and, above all, by the Other.By emptying the tribal object (the mask) of its original content, subjugation and extraction are perpetuated. In this sense, MoMA stands as the ultimate guardian of Western modernism, emerging as the perfect legitimizer of the subjugation of the other and, consequently, reinforcing the colonialist paradigm and its hegemonic, self-perpetuating center of power.
In NeoPrimitivism I use that same systemic “abstractive operation” of the West toward primitivist art to construct a mirror of my own conduct as a white man. I can only speak for myself: myself as the ultimate sign and symbol of the West. I examine behaviours from the past through the articulation and composition of signs and their indexical aberrations, more or less explicit. This time, the work tends toward a cultural dissonance rather than an indexical one. The mask is used in symbolic and semiotic terms, as the ultimate emblem of the primitivist phenomenon.
In this sense, the object does not aim for verisimilitude or ethnographic precision, but rather to have a symbolic and representational value of the oppressed. My reflection is on the colonizer, insofar as my heritage anchors me to it. I cannot claim to give voice to others, but I can use my own to speak of myself. The only time I allow myself to intervine is when I blur the images of masks exhibited in museums. I seek to eliminate the objectification that the Western museum institution has imposed on the tribal object—exactly what MoMA did with the "Primitivism" exhibition. By blurring it, I reject it, I erase it. Blurring is a tradition that, since the postwar period, many have used to show the unshowable. It is a political use of blurring that I employ semiotically, thus establishing a factual annulment and redirecting the gaze toward the eternally pending restitutions.