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Romanian folk art and African art were the two main sources of influence on Brancusi's primitivism. Brancusi identified himself with the Romanian peasantry and its folk culture. Romanian folk culture embraces woodcarving and folk literary fables--both of which Brancusi incorporated in his sculptures. In my opinion, Brancusi's wood pedestals, such as the Endless Column, are based on wood funerary, decorative, and architectural motifs from Romanian villages.
Brancusi was exposed to African art through his relationship with the New York avant-garde. The art dealers Alfred Stieglitz, Marius de Zayas, and Joseph Brummer exhibited Brancusi's sculptures in their galleries, in addition to exhibiting African art. Meanwhile, Brancusi's main patron John Quinn also collected African art. His interaction with the New York avant-garde led him to incorporate formal features of African sculpture, such as the oval forms of African masks, into his abstract sculptures. Brancusi also used African art to expose the racial prejudice of his time. African art, along with Romanian folk art, informed Brancusi's primitivism consistently throughout his long career as a modern sculptor.
To read Neshat’s photography, it is crucial to register her use of Persian language and historical poetry. Although the reading and understanding of the Persian texts Neshat inscribes on her photographs plays a fundamental role in the interpretation of her work, Neshat’s artworks are not entirely conceptual. The lack of translation of these included texts in Neshat’s exhibitions indicates a decorative use of Persian calligraphy. The Western eye can aesthetically explore this exotic Eastern decorative calligraphy. The formal qualities of Neshat’s photographs remain, even if the viewer is unable to read or understand the Persian texts.
This paper traces the shift into performative interactions by European scholars and artists as they sought or feigned interaction with the spirits and objects of Native American culture. I discuss the postwar artworks of Max Ernst, Joseph Beuys, and Steven Yazzie. I argue that each of these artists’ use of Native American objects goes beyond earlier surrealist appropriative and mimetic strategies. From a postcolonial position, these artworks address personal trauma as well as the collective trauma of colonialism. Aby Warburg’s late nineteenth-century travel to the American Southwest, and his resulting notion of an aesthetics of empathy, or of “mimesis through communion with/entering into the object,” becomes very relevant for Beuys’ work in particular. Furthermore these postwar artworks by Ernst, Beuys and Yazzie contain a comic element that invites laughter, a critical/therapeutic element that Pierre Clastres describes as a distinctly political act.