23/06/08
"Art is the imitation of nature in her manner of operation" – St Thomas Aquinas
Introduction
Since resources to record and store audio were available for the first time within the last century, music has expanded in many ways, partly close to visual media. Meanwhile, in modern painting, renowned artists such as Gauguin, Brancusi, Picasso and Moore, were borrowing from the primitive. This points out to a certain extent that some cultural tribal materials were long omitted from euro-centric histories of art written by scholars on the dubious grounds that it was non-historical.
Primitivism, a general concept used by the movement of the same name within art history, concretises the search for a 'primitive' style or intention - that is, something that belongs to a rudimentary state and close to its origins. Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, is often considered primitive music. However, this influence can also be found in many other sound works where the experimental is explored, which will be analysed further within this text.
In the process of bringing a primitive influence to contemporary art, there was even some suspicion of elitism, almost suggesting that westernized cultures were 'more civilized' and therefore, 'better'. Some sort of 'cultural colonialism' was present - regardless if the artistic influence was Asian, African of Native American – and this can possibly suggest that, if is not originally from Western influence, can be referred to as primitive. Due to gender patterns, women also rejected primitivism at first – possibly to avoid more stereotyping – as, in many cases, would reinforce their low status and recall their traditional link to nature rather than culture.
In Western art, early examples of experimental sound include Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori or noise machines, and subsequent works by Dadaists, Surrealists, the Situationist International and Fluxus happenings. Through the abstract rhythm of sound and image, we can also say that Arnold Schoenberg and Wassily Kandisky had similarities – so does the structural cubism of Picasso also related to the rhythmic and clear-cut thinking of Stravinsky. Because of the diversity of sound art, there is often debate about whether it falls inside or outside both the visual art and experimental music categories. Like many genres in contemporary art, sound art is interdisciplinary, engaging in acoustics and psychoacoustics, electronics, audio technologies (both analogue and digital), found or environmental sound, exploration of the human body, sculpture, video, and an ever-expanding set of issues that are part of the discourse in contemporary art. Other artistic lineages from which sound art emerges are conceptual art, minimalism, site-specific art, sound poetry, spoken word, avant-garde poetry, and experimental theatre. Early practitioners include Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Hugo Ball and Henri-Martin Barzun.
Since the 1980s until today, there has been much 'abstract' or 'art' music that is difficult to categorize, and it ends up being called simply 'experimental'. Carl Orff is also associated with primitivism, as Carmina Burana has strong references of paganism. Orff was influenced by Stravinsky, who also collaborated with Pablo Picasso in the Pulcinella ballet piece from 1920. The texts and literary sources for his work began with a period of interest in Russian folklore. Although folklore can be connected to primitivism, it remains to be seen whether its patriotic and social values really reflect what primitivism can be.
If we compare primitive expression to what is happening today artistically, we have to consider that we live in a highly developed technological era for such aspects to fit. To contextualize the process of art, as primitive or contemporary, the tools used has to be taken into account - since they are also products of the civilization, mind and object in question. There will always be some developed contemporary thought connected to it, so we can only count with an influence of the primitive mind in some part of the creative process. Philosophically speaking, the rationalizing on the act of choosing this path of re-taking primitivism, as a rational choice, has the risk on not being primitive anymore.
I. How they can relate
In many cases, the word 'primitive' can refer to someone or something simpler, regressive or less complex, than the person or thing to which it is being compared. It is conventionally often defined in negative terms, as lacking in elements such as organization, refinement and technological accomplishment. Primitive can also refer to anarcho-primitivism, a critique of the origins and progress of civilization; primitive culture, one that lacks major signs of economic development or modernity; the noble savage, uncorrupted by the influences of civilization; primitive communism, according to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; primitive Baptist, have an historical connection to an early 19th century controversy; and primitive as a biological term, characteristic of an early stage of development or evolution; in naïve art, found on works created by untrained artists; and neo-primitivism or simply primitivism, where they look to early human history, folk art and non-Western or children's art for inspiration.
Searching the primordial made the interest in the character of the primitive creative impulse to increase as an important aspect in the development of Primitivism in modern art during the first half of the twentieth century. Social-Darwinist thought, popularized mainly through magazines and colonial exhibitions, placed primitive peoples as a symbol for the origins of humanity. This represents an attempt on the part of the Western artists to retreat from 'reason' and thereby gain access (and maybe more artistic liberty) to the very sources of creativity itself, which they believed was exemplified in its most authentic and liberated form in the minds of children, tribal peoples and the insane.
Postmodernist thinkers have had different views on the question too. Anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruhl insisted in the early part of the last century that the 'primitive' mind could not be directly judged according to our standards, since it was operating in very different principles. Postmodernist thinker Claude Levi-Strauss accepted this part of his argument, adding that the difference between the two mentalities lies, not at the level of individual logical operations, but rather in their grand strategy for approaching experience. Both are perfectly logical, but they employ their logic on different levels of experience.
Some contemporary artists who brought the primitive through ritual and performance were Joseph Beuys, on ritualistic works influenced by books by Rudolf Steiner and Carl Gustav Jung, had the 'primitive' intention of connecting with the matter and the anima of the artwork, and the artist as a shaman, who transcends through creation. Anna Mendieta, a female artist, invoked in many of her works, not only the ancient and forgotten power of the primitive, but of the feminine, connecting with the earth as uterus, visceral force, that is, a shaman that is a witch and a healer, and capable of visions. Land art, or "Earth art", was another way of re-connecting with the primitive – through a fusion of the human with nature, and the primitive could also be assessed, which also brought an environmentalist message.
The intention of Nicolas Roerich's collaboration with Stravinsky seemed to have been nothing less than to create an entirely primitive, 'pre-artistic' music. The common ground was Roerich's belief in "the refined primitivism of our ancestors, for whom rhythm, the sacred symbol, and subtlety of movement were great and sacred concepts". The Rite of Spring is a fantasy-primitivism, a brutal image thrown into the face of civilization, frightening it, declaring that civilization is a myth and that the only reality is mysticism and violence. Because of its primitive nature, the dance is commonly associated with Dances of the Young Girls, also by Stravinsky.
Primitivism would bring to the public the desire for escaping, an attraction to the exotic, and the longing for the natural. Traditional or formalist art historians have tended to see the primitive as a crucial and direct source of stylistic inspiration for modernist abstraction. The affinity that the European avant-gardes felt for primitive art, which liberated them from the constraints of history, civilized society and external nature – ceased time to be a historical dimension; and as it became an internal psychological moment, the whole mess of material ties, an instinctive, and elemental art above time. Circuses and zoos frequently featured exotic tribal acts and displays for their entertainment value. Exotic themes had not only saturated urban entertainment by the turn of the century, but had also spilled over into the world of fashion and commerce as well. When Stravinsky's primitivism ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps, was first performed in Paris in 1913, for example, it enjoyed a success de scandal so immediate that primitivism art became the instant rage of fashionable society. Afterwards, as exhibitions of primitivism paintings were held in Munich, London, and New York, the outrage of public opinion was becoming so general and violent that an interest in the new art was immediately assured.
In the 1930's Heitor Villa-Lobos in Brazil and Carlos Chavez in Mexico found inspiration in primitivism, a movement that had swept European art decades before. The Mexican "Aztec Renaissance" of the 1930s had no obvious parallel in the United States, but musical primitivism as unleashed by Stravinsky and others in Diaghilev's artistic circle found abstract echoes later in America, although not with Indian subjects. The U.S. would slowly explore indigenous values in its own art and music, not only to enrich the content but also as a way of identifying origins and a sense of belonging, and an attempt to avoid the influence of a traditional western academy would also be another way of reaching that.
Several primitivist musicians would work with percussion instruments, as water drums, various barrels and tin pans. Although rhythm is the base for most music that is known today, to work on simple and repetitive beats has always been a form of connecting with the primitive ideal, thus percussion music was widely explored. Downtown music, a genre that would come out through Fluxus art production in 1960's New York independent scene, was represented by artists such as John Cage, who coined the term experimental music for the first time 1950; La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich and Yoko Ono between others. On an experimental approach, musicians would explore, in between many other values, the primitive. Many works were consisted or based by 'sound recordings' or simply environmental recording, which we can relate to land or earth art.
Minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass had their influences in repeating a sound that might take to a trance or shamanic state, where music can creatively be more abstract. Indian and African music was also especially influential on La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Glass and Reich. Both genres were considered a primitive adoption and adaptation of African with American popular music. Energy-based and trance sounds, like mantras, can also be considered another reference from 'exotic' cultures. Some primitivism works that has been expressed through experimental music reminds us of the communion with the spirit, with a higher force in charge of the art and the creative process itself. Hegel's concept of a 'spirit' of art can possibly illustrate part of this idea. These primitive conceptions can be contingent or necessary, to show a sense of own cultural identity. Adding the concept of 'text-sound art' which has roots in the various arts it encompasses, it extends back to primitive chanting which, one suspects - was probably developed for worship ceremonies. One extension of this tradition is non-melodic religious declamation in which the same words are repeated over and over again, such as Hebrew prayers which are spoken so rapidly that an observer hears not distinct words, but repeated sounds.
In the first works of Ono, the concept of consciousness was often explored through music and sound. 'The natural state of life and mind is complexity. At this point, what art can offer (if it can at all – to me it seems) is an absence of complexity, a vacuum through which you are led to a state of complete relaxation of mind', she says.
John Cage and Lou Harrison had a penchant for fashioning percussion from found objects, such as tin cans and automobile brake drums. Cage, in his desire to hear sounds for their own sake, was led by his percussion and prepared-piano music to indeterminate composition, in which he employed chance operations to create scores independent of his own memory and tastes. He was an apprentice of Schoenberg for two years, who said "none of his American pupils were interesting, except Cage: "Of course he's not a composer, but he's an inventor—of genius." He was influenced by anything or shall we say - the most unexpected influences would appear in his work. Much of his composing life existed within institutions and music schools; therefore although he was avant-garde and the father of experimental music, he was very much imbued in the academic and westernized thought himself.
The chance art developed by Cage would echo endlessly through many experimental tracks from all sort of contemporary musicians dealing with complex futuristic music (where they leave the machine to abstract, prolong and mix the sound/music on its own and by chance) or primitive sound works - where the 'trance' state of the musician is a tool to bring the unexpected into noise form. Primitivism can be more accessible to experimental music on the likes of Cage's chance term. The sound has its own intelligence, where - not only the academy, but also the westernized mind is banned - but a purer, 'unworldly' sound or arrangement is composed and manifested. Thus, it is easier to conceal Cage's experimental music with primitivism via the creative process where the intellectual or trained mind is not that much in charge of the results.
Some artists would turn to "the primitive" not only to escape from Europe (as had Picasso) but to discover and create, through a similar appropriation - the formal means for a truly American art. Thus Cage's barbaric piano was inspired by an African American's dance, and thus Jackson Pollock's paintings and others sought to escape the rational and civilized through some shamanistic, ritualized, bodily engaged art. The festival 'Bang on a Can', where you have musicians working on a mixture of modern primitivists, minimalists and experimental music, has a name that already conjures up something on the edge of primitivism: aggressive percussive noises, and assaults with sonic weapons. With its Minimalist repetitions, Eastern melodies and sudden contrasts, Lerchenmusik by Henryk Gorecki is alternately fascinating and provocative, and creates a sense of devotional primitivism.
In Brian Eno's progressive rock (note that he, in common with many of the primitivists' choice, never had musical academic training) there is certainly the level of harmonic primitivism, though not quite the "three-chord primitivism" of which Rockwell wrote in connection with the rock and roll of the 1950s. Also verbal irony and word play, musical nostalgia, contemporaneity, and futurism, experimentation in different kinds of compositional processes would also be found in his work, as varied inclinations to several genres such as assaultive, pop, strange, and hymn-like - where none of them were used quite conventionally, thus taken together adding up to a rich variety of expression.
Primitivism walks hand in hand with futurism, as a temporal condition of artistic expression. It reflects the necessity to identify the human mind with a period of time, the utopia of the future, or the noble savage of the past. An example for this could be the German band Einsturzende Neubauten, where their songs bring futurism, primitivism and experimental music altogether, showing that they can have similar manifestations and targets. Adopting an ancient Toltec image as the band logo, their name means "collapsing new buildings", and is an expression highly influenced with the fast re-building of Berlin after the Second World War. This represents a clash between futurism and primitivism, bringing a whole new creature from this fusion, between industrial, experimental, chance, punk, and other influences. The destruction, deconstruction and apocalyptical representation illustrated in many of their works, can almost suggest a futurist primitivism that is also anti-futurism; the machinery sounds are recorded, in many times, whilst operated in an almost trance-state and irrational form. This band was the main voice for German experimental music, bridging the gap between 1970s progressive rock, industrial music, punk rock and something (very atonal, very chaotic, very non-musical, both austere and subversive) that had no name yet. They created a living theatre of self-destruction, where their live shows were pagan rituals that sacrificed instruments and people to their totemic angst. The claustrophobic atmosphere relied on a sinister assortment of harsh sounds but it nonetheless achieved lyrical pathos, and their masterpiece was an expressionist collage set in a spiritual wasteland. The cacophonous horror was sincere and internal, and that was a point of no return. It was made of silence as much as of sound, and made of 'gestures' as much as of 'harmony'. As their technique became 'manner', the ensemble relied on a combination of highly emotional elements to disorient, and sometimes, to shock the audience. Incorporated electric drills, bed springs and every conceivable appliance to build up an armoury of percussion were included, joining Butoh performers and jackhammers hitting concrete at the same time.
Futurism was a twentieth century Italian and Russian avant-garde movement in literature and arts. It promoted extreme artistic innovation and experimentation, declaring a radical disassociation from the past and a focus on new art, technology, and politics, commonly manifested through primitivism. The Futurists strongly rejected the self-awareness behind the overextended lyricism of symbolism—the dominant school of the time. In contrast, it showed a preference for the visual arts that discussed conservative social elements and challenged them in order to provoke a violent negative response. We shall not forget that this movement was originated in Italy, a country ruled by extreme Catholicism and until then, with a strong Roman conservative inheritance and Fascist tendencies. Because of this, the academy there was also strong, and maybe one of the most conservative Western cultures. This was an art movement that loudly and boldly proclaimed their discontentment with society. In The Art of Noises, also known as Futurist Manifesto, their focus is to liberate creativity and explore pure abstract and free sound (noise) as an art manifestation. Being apocalyptical (end of the world) was to tune in to a raw source of inspiration similar to the primitive (beginning of the world).
II. How this relation can be questioned
The core of Cage's musical practice and philosophy was concentrated on sounds of the world and the interaction of art and life, such as Orientalism and Silence, Zen Buddhism, and the I Ching. Cage was not interested in self-expression, whether it was in music or in painting; he was also becoming less sure about communication, and his appropriation of other cultures for musical purposes was centred more on the operations of the mind than the body. He was interested in choosing amongst the ideas of the adepts without taking up any body practices, and less interested in getting the ego out of the way to enable the unconscious to come out into the world, than in removing the go so more of the world could get in unobstructed. He wanted to be open to 'divine influences' but not to the extent of fusing them with a world within.
Cage's work was, although based in chance and aleatoric art, extremely calculated, in the sense that he would use of complex technical details and rational thoughts about the final results that would come. Endless theories would be developed in the sense to create something by chance, which is not exactly the primitivism that we know – in this case, there is an idea and intention since the beginning, and is a very different concept from unconscious works. According to him, experimental music was the one in which the outcome could not be foreseen - thus, infiltrating purposelessness into music, indeterminacy; others simply called it aleatory. The innovative component takes priority above the technical craftsmanship.
The primitive mind can be that part that we share with animals, and almost unchanging from one person to another. The primitive mind begins the process finding a pattern and passes the incoming signals to the emotional and cognitive centres of the brain. The emotional centre classifies the input as something to be frightened of, something to eat, something to mate with, etc – and may trigger instinctual behaviour. This is purely reactive, and maybe this complexity compared to man-made machinery could most likely be predicted in the same way if understood in sufficient depth. Learning cannot realistically be expected to change the primitive, visceral mind.
Experimental music – whether employing chance operations in composition or in performance, in many cases, is without tendency or direction. Tones do not imply other tones; they simply exist. Such music seems timeless, not only in the sense that one experiences no awareness of motion through time in hearing it, and in the sense that its temporal order is not fixed but also in the sense that our response to it is probably not affected by the number of times we hear it.
When the 'abstract expressionism ego' appears, it is something that could also be called a primitive influence. Primitivism has often been the avant-garde's first recourse to the problem of cultural tradition, and sometimes, an interpretation into the art of colonized, conquered, or merely other cultures. But unlike the alien exoticism that Europeans sought for their paintings – for example, those African Grebo masks Picasso encountered in the Trocadero Museum and painted 'as a kind of exorcism' into his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Cage and contemporary painters such as Jackson Pollock found "barbarism" in their own country's past. At this point they were not so sensitive to the barbarism of the white invaders (although later Cage would feel this keenly). Their works echoed percussion traditions of earful geometries of Native American art. Particularly in this early part of his career, Cage was clearly aware of the parallels between his chosen revolution in music – self-described as durational rather than harmonic – and the rhythmic basis of jazz. In 1949, he praised the work 'outside school' by Satie and Webern, arguing that their "different and correct structural footnote", he explains, "This [durational basis] never disappeared from jazz and folk-music. On the other hand, it never developed in them, for they are not cultivated species, growing best when left wild". Although Cage rarely appropriated such "wild" sources directly, his very efforts to shift Western music from tonality and functional harmony to an emphasis on indeterminacy and duration suggests a sophisticated recognition of the differences fuelling American vernacular culture and an understanding of the momentum gained from harnessing such differences for 'high' art.
Neither the fluidity nor the expansiveness would last. Jackson Pollock would remain a central figure within the abstract expressionist canon, and John Cage would become the mentor for a younger generation now seen to oppose it. His Performing Improvisation I – Child of Tree in Branches (1975), consisted of playing on cacti and plant materials that had been connected with contact microphones. "My reason for improvising on them", explained Cage, "is because the instruments are as unknown that as you explore, say the spines of a cactus, you're not really dealing with your memory or your taste, you're exploring." Although organic in nature, its primitivism is questionable, as it starts to converge with a different and new purpose.
Experimental music challenges both as form and content by exploring its governing structures such as harmonic relation and instrumentation. It can be placed alongside the general movement of modernism in its argument with representation, for its strategies incorporate an expanded sonic palette. The intensification of a listening experience – in volume, in location, and in procedure, can bring an investigation of alternative methods of writing and composing. The number of experimental creations today is extremely vast; and they all may fit these criteria; however primitive music is only one of the many possibilities of how experimental sound can manifest.
Conclusion
Primitivism is the re-approach of primitive values on our modern and westernized society. With a primitive influence and experimental approach to any sort of technologies and devices, you can relate both of them to futurism, which can be represented by the machine and man becoming one; the thought of the future brought back to our present; a denial of the academy, and where some sort of unknown and primordial intelligence takes charge. For many artists, to reject our present time is needed to automatically reach freedom of artistic expression.
The act of being a primitivist is a never-ending cycle. Past values are always being re-taken and re-thought, and can always find ancestor's influences in contemporary creations. The punk movement, as a sub-culture influencing fashion (like Mohawks, piercings and other tribal inherited attributes), music and sometimes painting (or some political art and DIY attitude) also has its roots and connections which bring the noble savage or the 'utopian brut' back to our society of today. Reclaiming original human's values and questioning what we have built in our society of now, it also, in many occasions, brings the message that says No Future. While punk was solidly centred in the rhythmic and harmonic bases of rock and roll, many 'no wave' bands were characterized by atonality and rhythmic irregularity. This possessed non-idiomatic improvisation, where the weirder was the better.
'Tribal' art has an influence from a 'society' or 'civilization' already, each tribe sharing its own traditions and values. Therefore, from any organized social grouping of humans, there would be such sense present, and might not be primitive or primordial anymore - unless the simple fact that they manifest a different culture than ours makes them primitives. This opens the possibility of labelling cultures such as the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and China as primitives. And this can still be relative; as most of these cultures were quite developed for their time and are older than the European culture as we know, maybe, on another point of view, the Europeans can be the primitives. Perhaps all the 'exotic', and therefore, 'pure', can be considered primitive. The academy, in many cases, has been in search of the perfection, and often reaching unrealistic aesthetic values for that, where complex visual codes where one of the usage purposes was mass manipulation, in favour of the church, the rich class and the government. The search for the ideal soul was there, but possibly on a distorted form.
The 'primitive' utopia, the natural, is the target; it can be reached through the realistic origin and the uncorrupted soul, free from false promises or values. The position or role of the primitive is also relative; a viewer who has no knowledge of art at all can be considered primitive in the sense that his perception will be purer than the one who has knowledge and training in art - and therefore, had his mind 'corrupted'.
As experimental music reaches a more ethereal and subtle sound, that on many occasions, can be executed with the help of technological devices e.g. computers and midi interfaces, could that also be considered primitive in the sense of reaching a more pure and 'virginal' sound, uncorrupted by men? Although is reached through technology, the 'spirit' of the sound would be the one which is from a non-civilized and untrained mind, where the artist is the 'shaman', transmitting these pure sounds to our audience of today. The 'free' and 'unlimited' use of 'natural' sounds and of our environments as they are, also depicts a primitive attempt to bring the 'original human soul' back to our creative music of today.
Possibly most primitive music can be seen as experimental, but not the other way round. Primitivism can flow easily through experimental music, as proved by many artists exploring this possibility; and we can conclude with two possibilities for why this happens. One would be the artist in constant search for more creative freedom and originality; and for this aim (that many other movements share as we mentioned before) the academy or any sort of traditional and institutional training is put aside, for they can blur or stop new and unusual ideas to come. The second reason would be the fact that the attempt to communicate with nature is innate to the human being, as an eternal and atemporal source of self-identification. And perhaps, these two characteristics together, are only found in experimental music that manifests as also primitive.
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http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5656
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