Making Primitive Art High Art

Abstract

Literary critics engaged in the interdisciplinary study of art and literature have cause to feel considerable pride and satisfaction at the distance we have come since an earlier special issue on the interart comparison, in 1972, in New Literary History. Then the interdisciplinary study of art and literature had to justify itself, explain itself, theorize itself. It still staggered under the burden of zeitgeist and the damage done to interart study by the vagueness of work guided by such dubious notions. We needed to prove we were not dilettantes, and that literary critics had important things to say about art history. We needed to get beyond narrow fact-finding, or hunting for artistfigures in literature, or other methods that had made our interests seem esoteric or self-contained. The position of interart study is now very different. The flowering of literary theory and the variety of dynamic new approaches within literary studies have made it clear that literary critics and theorists can This essay was written for Poetics Today in the fall of 1986. The long delay in publication makes some of its statements about William Rubin and aspects of its tone out of date. In 1988, Rubin was made director emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and his position as director was filled by Kirk Varnedoe. Varnedoe worked with Rubin on the 'Primitivism' show discussed below but is associated with postmodern art rather than with earlier modernist traditions, and he is expected to move MOMA more firmly out of modernist values than Rubin was willing to do. Were I writing this essay today, I would problematize the term primitive art more fully. I would also distinguish more clearly between the terms primitive and third world, which are not synonymous.