Hal Foster, "The 'Primitive' Unconscious of Modern Art," p. 206: Historically, the primitive is articulated by the West in deprivative or supplemental terms: a spectacle of savagery or as a state of grace, as a socius without writing or the Word, without history or cultural complexity; or as a site of originary unity, symbolic plenitude, natural vitality. There is nothing odd about this Eurocentric construction: the primitive has served as a coded other at least since the Enlightenment, usually as a subordinate term in its imaginary set of oppositions (light/dark, rational/irrational, civilized/savage). This domesticate primitive is thus constructive, not disruptive, of the binary ratio of the West; fixed as a structural opposite or a dialectical other to be incorporated, it assists in the establishment of a Western identity, centre, norm, and name. In its modernist version the primitive may appear transgressive, it is true, but it still serves as a limit: projected within and without, the primitive becomes a figure of our unconscious and outside (a figure constructed in modern art as well as in psychoanalysis and anthropology in the privileged triad of the primitive, the child, and the insane).

Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places, p. 5: In part, this book is about the plight of objects from around the world that --in some ways like the Africans who were captured and transported to unknown lands during the slave trade-- have been discovered, seized, commoditized, stripped of their social ties, redefined in new settings, and reconceptualized to fit into the economic, cultural, political, and ideological needs of people from distant societies. Although the devastation wrought by this twentieth-century brand of cultural imperialism is of an entirely different order from that of its slave trade precedent, it, too, diminishes the communities that are its suppliers. To understand this phenomenon, we must begin by focusing our attention, not on the art objects themselves, nor on the people who made them, but rather on those who have defined, developed, and defended, and defended the internationalization of Primitive Art, and other racial, cultural, political, and economic visions.

pp. 23- : From a Western point of view, this planetwide closeness is permeated with the flavor of Unity, Equality, and Brotherly Love. One of its most /p.24 successful depictions has been engineered in television commercials for Coca-Cola (a many-shaded sea of faces, all smiling, and united by their human warmth and shared appreciation of the good things in life, including Coke). The musical prize might well be awarded to the 1985 hit "We are the World," in which the singers' brotherly smiles, phenotypic diversity, and altruistic record contracts were never allowed to stray very far from the minds of those who were humming along with the melody; indeed, this song of triumph over famine (or at least determined optimism toward this goal) captures much of the essence of the Family of Man ideology, whose Brotherhood represents an idyllic regression to childhood ("we are the world; we are the children...")....

p. 32: The proposition that art is a "universal language" expressing the common joys and concerns of all humanity is based firmly on the notion that artistic creativity originates deep within the psyche of the artist. Response to works of art then becomes a matter of viewers tapping into the psychological realities that they, as fellow human beings, share with the artist....
A widely accepted belief within this general scheme is that, more than any art from the world's Great Civilizations (whether Western or Oriental), Primitive Art emerges directly and spontaneously from psychological drives. Just as children cry when they are hungry and coo when they are content. Primitive artists are imagined to express their feelings free from the intrusive overlay of learned behavior and conscious constraints that mold the work of the Civilized artist....
Western enthusiasts of Primitive Art have always argued that its authors are in particularly close touch with the 'fundamental, basic, and essential drives' --drives that Civilized Man shares but 'buries' under a layer of learned behavior.

p. 34: One rarely mentioned feature of this point of view is its one-directionality. We partake of an identification with African art; this allows our self-recognition and personal rediscovery and permits a renewed contact with our deeper instincts; the result is that we increase our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to art. Admittedly, the authors of such statements are writing for Western audience, not African artists. But there is an implicit asymmetry which goes deeper than considerations of readership. Because of the assignment of conscious aesthetic understanding to Western minds, and unconscious primal drives to Primitive artists, commentators eliminate the need to consider the potential reaction of the latter to works of art from outside their own cultural universe. Western Man, who is in full possession of conscious, analytical thought processes, can view the creative output of His less civilized brothers and gain understanding. But it is not generally thought that the complementary process would yield worthwhile insights.

p. 37: The Family of Man encompasses not only brotherhood but also sibling rivalry, and the recognition of shared concerns or pleasures coexists and competes with an insistence on those essential features that separate the Civilized and Primitive branches of the genealogy. The Noble Savage and the Pagan Cannibal are in effect a single figure, described by a distant Westerner in two different frames of mind; portrayals of Primitive Man can be titled either way in their recognition that he is at once a 'brother' and an 'other.'

p. 38: The tradition of envisioning the life of Primitives in terms of diabolical rites and superstitions did not die with Voltaire or the early missionaries, nor has it been significantly eroded, at the level of 'received wisdom,' by the ethnographic record that has been amassed over the intervening centuries. On the contrary, one finds its legacy, alive and well, permeating every corner of our late twentieth-century common sense, and promoting images of fear and darkness, often with side journeys into unharnassed eroticism and cannibalistic feasts. The contrasts it proposes --sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly-- are between darkness and enlightenment, depths and heights, fear (superstition) and tranquility (knowledge), and primal urges and civilized behavior (especially in the realm of sexuality). As a link between cultures (Ours and Theirs), art may be viewed as the reassuring unifier, the 'mingling of souls in common enjoyment,' but in its own setting it becomes the dark expression of irrational terrors.

p. 56: Like music, literature, and drama, the story of the visual arts is presented as a mosaic of contributions by creative individuals whose names are remembered, whose works are distinguished, and whose personal lives and relation to a particular historical period merit our attention. The prominence of a historical dimension in the study of visual art is equally striking; most university catalogs that list departments of Comparative Literature or Music introduce the word 'history' for the equivalent entry on painting, sculpture, and architecture. Our very conceptualization of art is inseparable from its historical chronology; with few exceptions, scholarship glossed under the rubric of 'Fine Arts' is situated in the temporal sequence of successive schools, designated in terms of centuries and an orderly progression of styles and aesthetic concerns.
One exception is made, however, to this general focus on individual creativity and historical chronology. In the Western understanding of things, a work originating outside of the Great Traditions must have been produced by an unnamed figure who represents his community and whose craftsmanship respects the dictates of its age-old tradition.

Hal Foster, "The 'Primitive' Unconscious of Modern Art," p. 206: Historically, the primitive is articulated by the West in deprivative or supplemental terms: a spectacle of savagery or as a state of grace, as a socius without writing or the Word, without history or cultural complexity; or as a site of originary unity, symbolic plenitude, natural vitality. There is nothing odd about this Eurocentric construction: the primitive has served as a coded other at least since the Enlightenment, usually as a subordinate term in its imaginary set of oppositions (light/dark, rational/irrational, civilized/savage). This domesticate primitive is thus constructive, not disruptive, of the binary ratio of the West; fixed as a structural opposite or a dialectical other to be incorporated, it assists in the establishment of a Western identity, centre, norm, and name. In its modernist version the primitive may appear transgressive, it is true, but it still serves as a limit: projected within and without, the primitive becomes a figure of our unconscious and outside (a figure constructed in modern art as well as in psychoanalysis and anthropology in the privileged triad of the primitive, the child, and the insane).

p. 20: A sensitive exhibition defines a certain moment, embodying attitudes and, often, changes of attitude that reveal, if only by the anxieties they create, the direction in which culture is moving. The distance from "Primitivism" to "Magiciens" suggests how much things have changed in the five years between them. Western culture as it enters the 1990s is somewhat inchoately seeking a new definition of history that will not involve ideas of hierarchy, or of mainstream and periphery, and a new global sense of civilization to replace the linear Eurocentric model that lay at the heart of Modernism. These issues rose into the foreground in the art world with the "Primitivism" show, which was widely perceived --here, in Europe, and indeed around the world-- as an amazingly unconsidered display of neocolonialist mentality. It seemed to want to turn back the clock of history, anachronistically reaffirming the ideology of classical Modernism.

The ideology involved the Kantian esthetic theory --which made claims for pure form, the absolute value judgment, and the universality of esthetic canons-- with the Hegelian myth of history, which held that history had an inherent goal. These two ideas worked together to justify European colonialist hegemony. The idea that history has a goal makes it plausible to imagine that some cultures may be farther along toward that goal than others. These, of course, would be the colonizing cultures of the West, since this was a Western myth. And if we were closer to the goal, the right to make the supposedly universal value judgment was ours. History, in this view, gave us the right to judge other cultures on our terms (never judging ourselves on theirs). It seemed to follow logically that it was the responsibility of Western civilization to drag the rest of the world, for its own good, into history and toward the goal. Thus the Work (as Hegel called it) of history was the white man's burden, in Rudyard Kipling's phrase. Of course the white man was also burdened with the task of carrying back into Western coffers what an earlier English poet, John Milton, called "barbaric pearl and gold."

Increasingly since the late 60's, this ideology has lost credibility. As post-Modernism (or post-history, meaning the post- Hegelian view of history) dawned it came to seem that in fact history had no inherent goal. It might go wherever circumstances drew it, and circumstances were too manifold, complex, and subtle to be susceptible to extensive control. The distinction we had drawn between nature and culture seemed to be breaking down. That division, when it was first bruited (by the Greek Sophists, from whom Hegel took the idea), was based on the notion that we can't control nature but we can control culture. Nowadays the opposite seems true: it is culture that is out of control, nature all too vulnerable to human direction.

It was at this moment of attitudinal change that the "Primitivism" show appeared, like a holding action for classical Modernism. There was the Kantian doctrine of universal quality again; there was the Hegelian view that history is a story of European leading dark-skinned peoples toward spiritual realization; there was the sense of mainstream and periphery. The fact that so-called primitive art resembled Western advance art seemed to be attributed not to the incontestable fact that Western artists had imitated "primitive" works, but to the idea of an underlying affinity between Western artists and "primitives" that demonstrated the universality of the Modernist canon. The colonized nations were called upon to testify to the superiority of the colonizers....

p. 21: The "Primitivism" show was based on a belief in universally valid quality judgments, particularly those made by the curators. The "Magiciens" show hoped to be able to acknowledge that value judgments are not innate or universal but conditioned by social context, and hence that they only really fit works emerging from the same context. This thought does not mark the end of the idea of quality, only its relativization. When one walked through "Magiciens," instead of automatically thinking, This is good or this is bad, one might be provoked to attend to the limitations of one's ideas of good and bad --to confront the fact that often one was looking at objects for which one had no criteria except some taken from a completely different, and possibly irrelevant, arena.

Norman Bryson, "The Politics of Arbitrariness," in Visual Theory, eds. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, New York, 1991, pp. 99-100: When Varnedoe [the curator of the Primitivism show at MOMA] argues that to modernist artists primitivism represented an extended category of universal mind, the appeal to an unchanging human pyschology uniting Picasso, Gauguin, and the sculptors of Africa and Easter Island...covers over the enormous historical differences between these various groups. And in the context of the Museum of Modern Art, it may be possible so drastically to decontextualize the art of Gauguin, Picasso, Africa, and Easter Island, to eliminate the contexts of these very different kinds of art so completely, that they all come to look the same. One observes here the confluence of several forces, all interested in rednering invisible the facts of historical and cultural difference: a 'universal psychology', which ends up making us all the same; an art historical formalism that eliminates contextual differences of history and culture in order to produce the homogeneity of all art --and the decontextualizing power of the modernist museum.

The elision of cultural differences involved here may project a picture of human sameness that is entirely consoling and pacific; yet it remains so only if we conveniently disrember the brutal era of European colonialism, which is the unspoken historical background to 'primitivism' itself. The modernist project of taking non-European art away from its context and absorbing it into the mainstream of European art assumes, and is part of, the ideology of colonialism, past and present. And if those who benefit from its operations are content to conceal this by projecting a consoling image of human sameness, by homogenizing European and non-European art in the modernist museum, and by employing a language of universal psychology, the need to remind ourselves of the reality of historical and cultural difference becomes morally and politically urgent.

Compare the images of Gauguin of the Southseas to the following ad: