Saturday, September 3, 2011
"Primitive" Art
When studying the practice of art classification, it could be more useful to approach the issue of "primitive art" by trying to identify what DISqualifies art as "primitive," and even more, how anything qualifies as art to begin with - an approach that led me to realize that art is not a need; it may often, if not always, be an insatiable substance-producing desire, curiosity or craft, but the difference is, it is not an idea or practice necessary to survival. As Layton explains in the first chapter of The Anthropology of Art, much of the world's oldest art went a significant deal beyond the needs of the people in its making. Objects that we tend to classify as works of art through our modern outlook include symbolic imagery sometimes placed on utilitarian objects, such as patterns frequently representative of societal distinctions such as gender, social class, cultural cliches and other implicative "art" that is designed with more care, skill and quality than what would be basically required to designate a role for the object.
Dissanayake (What Is Art For?) suggests the same idea in her assertion that art is unnecessary, and further forges a wall that binds "fine" art within it and all other art around it. Fine art is easier to categorize because of the standards that we have been trained to regard art with, but these complicate our ability to understand art of a different time, place and relationship to the development of humanity as a species, which causes people, even experts, to misunderstand the essence of such art and often grow assumptive when assigning meaning to it.
“Primitive” art implies that the art is not advanced enough to be grouped in with art as the world has come to know it – expressive, flawless, and complex – whereas the context of such art in a period of obvious development for such societies from primitive states greatly takes away from the justice of the concept of “primitive art.” In such circumstances, those who study art would do best to reserve such judgment in respect to our lack of ability to establish entirely accurate assertions about art of this variety.
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Your idea to change the viewpoint on how to classify primitive art by looking at the what classifies art as western society knows it was very clever. The only thing I would change is in your last paragraph you say art as we know it is expressive. I would argue that primitive art is also very expressive of the culture and people that create it. Aboriginal Australian art, cave paintings, and fertility sculptures are all some examples that come to mind. Although I would definitely say that western art would claim to be expressing content of much greater meaning and significance. Your thoughts about art not being a necessity to survival were very interesting and overall I thought your post was great.
ReplyDeleteApproaching a definition by crossing out the extremes seems incredibly useful in defining art. =) It is easy to say what is not, and once we get those out the patterns are easier to see, Hopefully. Definitely an approach I will try during our next conceptual debate in class!
ReplyDeletewe take "fine arts" for granted and rarely question why they are. Fine arts would just be the most clearly defined arts in terms of that culture? Fine arts aren't even the oldest arts are they? do you know what the oldest would be? carving perhaps?