Post #502718 by bigbrotiki on Wed, Jan 6, 2010 9:59 PM

On 2010-01-06 20:35, JOHN-O wrote:
BigBro,

Is "Pop Primitivism" a term that you coined like "Tiki-style" and "Polynesian Pop"?

I did a search on "Pop Primitivism" and "Mayan Revival" to see what other interesting web sites I could find. The closest match brought me back to Tiki Central. :)

I think so. It seems like a good opposite to modernism, with which it forms a symbiotic relationship. The term "primitivism" alone has been applied for many varied subjects already, in art, literature, philosophy, but nobody has dealt with its POPULAR, less intellectual perception and application in everyday items so far.

The most influential book in terms of HIGH art for me was William Rubin's "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art", published in conjunction with the exhibition he curated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984:

http://www.amazon.com/Primitivism-20th-Century-Art-Affinity/dp/0870705180/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262842289&sr=8-1

This was the first major book on the subject since Robert Goldwater's groundbreaking work "Primitivism in Modern Art " in 1966. The important difference was (for me, and others) that the Rubin book was all visuals, making the simple visual primitive/modern comparisons I am so fond of. Of course, like any influential idea, it received a lot of flack from culture critics:

Article: Primitivism Revisited: After the End of an Idea

In 1984 William Rubin, art historian, curator, and director of the Museum of Modern Art's department of painting and sculpture, organized "Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern" in New York. The exhibition traced the formal relationships between Western art and African, Pre-Columbian, Native American, and Oceanic art. The show was highly controversial and received solid criticism from the art community, in particular African art historians, for applying a notion of "primitivism" to non-Western art--evident in ...>The prevailing viewpoint is made all too clear in one of the "affinities" featured on the catalogue covers, a juxtaposition of Picasso's Girl before a Mirror ... with a Kwakiutl half-mask, a type quite rare among Northwest coast creations. Its task here is simply to produce an effect of resemblance (an effect actually created by the camera angle). In this exhibition a universal message, "Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern," is produced by careful selection and maintenance of a specific angle of vision. (1)

A 100-year-old legacy of curatorial colonialism has produced profound disorganizations of unique knowledge systems...