Paper short abstract:

This contribution focuses positions of artists like Gordon Bennett, Jimmy Durham, Georges Adéagbo, Fred Wilson and others. These artists provoke the audience with their works by reflecting ethnographic museums and the obsession of European artists with non-occidental artefacts.

Paper long abstract:

In art history and social anthropology "primitivism" is focussed as colonial product, as ideological practice, as copy or artistic search for elementary power. In this sense artistic experience is interpreted as imitation of the primitive or return to an original status, as creation of a collective myth or even as bringing up a global ethos. Other positions understand primitivism as document of exhaustion of European artistic creativity.

Since a fairly long time art works are shown in blockbuster exhibition (like the Venice Biennal or the Documenta Kassel), which are critical, ironical and humorous comments on European primitivism: they seem like replies of the Other who once was the culture medium of European modernity. These artists, who mostly are wanderers between the worlds, provoke the audience with their works by reflecting ethnographic museums and the obsession of European artists for non-occidental artefacts. In my contribution I would like to cross the field of arts with the tool of the anthropological methodology of "participant observation". By viewing these artworks one can show how the gaze upon the Other becomes an ever more fractured gaze, moving in multivalent directions of feed-back loops between distancing and reflexivity, between local emancipation and the demands of a diversity of globally developing aesthetics.