Eccentric Primitivism: The World of Jan “Eskimo” Welzl

Abstract

Eccentric Primitivism: The World of Jan “Eskimo” Welzl Václav Lucien Paris (bio) For almost thirty years, beginning in the early 1980s, the richest vein of scholarship on primitivism was its critique. During this period, numerous studies were published explaining how the primitive is an invented category whose invocation leads, via a kind of “Hegelian determinate negation,” back to the reaffirmation of “our” modernity.1 And primitivist modernism—represented primarily by the 1984 MoMA exhibition, Primitivism in the 20th Century: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern—was exposed as appropriative, abusive, and complicit with colonialism.2 More recently, this mode of engagement has waned. As the critique of primitivism appears to be running out of steam, other kinds of study have become more prominent, tracing primitivism’s strategic and situational uses in particular cases on both sides of the conjectural divide between the West and the Rest.3 There are good reasons to be cautious about this general development. Does a new approach to primitivism not simply cloak old epistemic violence? In his 2006 study, The Neo-Primitivist Turn, Victor Li warned that although we tend no longer to talk about the “primitive” as such, the evolutionary “primitivist logic” exemplified in Edward Burnett Tylor’s 1877 Primitive Cultures continues to inform our thinking about related concepts such as “alterity,” “culture,” and “modernity.” Even when approached as an “incoherent cluster of qualities” (James Clifford) or as a kind of weak theory, primitivism requires an “unending critical vigilance and reflexivity on our part.”4 On the other hand, bracketing our endless suspicion in regard to primitivism, at least temporarily, has certain practical advantages. It allows us to appreciate how contradictory, processual, and variable primitivism was, as well [End Page 241] as the ways in which it developed differently in different places, and how it informed modernism differently at different moments. As Ruth Phillips writes, developing a reading of Susan Stanford Friedman, “[m]ore than any other constitutive component of modernism in the visual arts the modernist appreciation of ‘primitive art’ accounts for its [modernism’s] global adaptability.”5 How can we think about primitivism both in general—as a widescale period-specific collective fantasy—and as a diverse array of potentially contradictory practices that need careful describing and narrating? By way of responding to this problem, this article explores what, drawing on Tirza True Latimer’s Eccentric Modernisms, we might call primitivism’s eccentricity.6 Classically, primitivism is narrated as an épatiste project: upsetting the Western tradition by bringing the outside in. But within the modernist period and especially by the 1930s, primitivist art and literature was not always very shocking, and the “other” was not always outside.7 Rather, primitivism was associated in most cases with milder and queerer affects of curiosity and bemusement: the affects of eccentricity that were often quite compatible with a bourgeois market. Primitivism was also not, until its postwar theorization, a particularly well-defined field. In the writings of Carl Einstein, Georges Bataille, Wyndham Lewis, Hans Prinzhorn, Cesare Lombroso, Adolf Loos, Jean Dubuffet, and Josef Čapek and others, it is presented on a continuum with prehistoric art, various forms of art brut, folk art, and surrealism, as well as the work of the so-called primitifs such as Henri Rousseau. In this regard, primitivism was also an eccentric pose, a way of producing something that was not categorizable in familiar ways. In order to reflect on these connections between eccentricity and primitivism, this article will look at the life of, and work associated with, the so-called Czech Eskimo, Jan Welzl. The story of Welzl, as I hope will become clear over the coming pages, is remarkable and deserves to be better known by scholars of the period. In particular, his semifictional memoir, Třicet let na zlatém severu (Thirty Years in the Golden North), I will argue, can helpfully serve as one—appropriately unlikely—starting point for a thinking anew about primitivism and its global spread in some of its messiness. In part, this reading builds on—and aims to complicate—Ben Etherington’s recent study, Literary Primitivism. Etherington launches his theory of “emphatic primitivism” from a slightly different imaginary cartography to that of...