For Durkheim by Edward A. Tiryakian

Author:Edward A. Tiryakian [Tiryakian, Edward A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9781351936224
Google: a7yoDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-05T03:24:37+00:00

The Primitive in Representational Avant-Garde Art

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque are the key figures in introducing radical innovations in the pictorial representation of reality, with Picasso’s 1907 landmark in modernism that is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Elderfield 1994). It marked the debut of analytical Cubism, presenting an entirely new perspective on objects from that which had prevailed since the Renaissance. The “primitive” was a critical lever that Picasso applied, but although highly innovative, Picasso did not use his artistic imagination to put in place primitiveness ab novo on the art scene. It had already been gathering momentum.

“Primitivism”, to tack on an ideological note, might well be considered in early twentieth century Europe a broad counter-culture to the dominant orientations and institutions of modernity, rather like the counter-culture of the 1960s. Although elusive and amorphous, the covert ideology sought to bring down the bourgeois social order resting on rationalization, materialism, economic individualism and the market place in which it flourished. And like its later twentieth century off-shoot, the counter-culture of primitivism attacked the established norms of tradition, sought to remake communal ties, found appeal in anarchistic currents and an Archimedean lever in archaic and exotic. The “primitive” served as both a perspective of the pre-modern past and as a resource for the remaking of the future, a lever, in the expression of the avant-garde poet Apollinaire, for “re-ordering the universe,” (Leighten 1989: 113). In the pictorial arts, “primitivism” had several components which need brief mention.

In an earlier essay immediately preceding the present one, “The Quest for the Bygone Society, Emergent Sociology and its Cultural Setting” (supra, pp. XXX), I invoked the symbolic movement in the cultural scene of the arts and literature (Redon, Gauguin, Verlaine, Mallarmé, among many others) and suggested that the emphasis on symbols and rituals of the Durkheimians partook of this ethos.

This has led the noted historian of religion, Ivan Strenski, to think that I was proposing Durkheim and his associates, who wrote monographs on symbolic structures of society, were in accord with their contemporaries who extolled the exotic, the esoteric, the irrational (Strenski 2006: 160). That was not my intention, but the fact remains that the Durkheimians, many the product of the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure and other jewels of French secular higher education, did give a prominent place to expressive symbols. The construction and reconstruction of republican France, as I interpret the motivation of Durkheim and his close associates like Mauss, Fauconnet, Hertz, and Hubert, was to understand the scaffold of society, one resting on morality, the sacred and its symbolism. To understand present-day modern France and its institutions, there was not only need to examine scientifically contemporary social organization (as Durkheim, Halbwachs, and Simiand showed the way in various monographs), but also to return to much earlier bases and to alternative, earlier and more fundamental structures or “elementary forms”. Their explorations of the symbolic realm and the avant-garde artists at the turn of the century who made extensive use of symbols were part of a general

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