Primitive, Vernacular, Outsider...Oh my!

While Thomas McEvilley's "Doctor Lawyer, Indian Chief" was necessary at the time it was written, McEvilley seemed to make righting the wrong of "primitivism" and slapping down Modernism a personal crusade. In another article "Royal Slumming: Jean-Michel Basquiat Here Below" he claims that Basquiat was trying to emulate “primitivism”: “This black artist was doing exactly what classical-Modernist white artists such as Picasso and Georges Braque had done: deliberately echoing a primitive style…He was behaving like white men who think they are behaving like black men” (95). Thus it would seem that he is just as guilty of the same kind of bias that he accuses William Rubin of committing.

For some reason I thought that McEvilley's "Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief" would also address the use of the words "primitive" and "primitivism" as a construct of white post-colonialism. Clearly "primitive" holds a negative connotation of "lower class" which can be seen resonating from Richard Kalina's article "Gee's Bend Modern" when he states, "While it is possible to understand the Gee's Bend quilts in the context of vernacular art, outsider art or craft, they are more than that (106). He illustrates with one sentence that he believes vernacular art, outsider art and even craft are lower artforms.