Abstract
By inquiring into the mythopoetic roots of creativity in Modernism, this chapter aims further to search for answers regarding human creativity in one of its most enduring expressions and manifestations, detrimentally called Primitivism. Following Pellizzi’s invitation to see “Primitivism as an essential rather than episodic constituent of our art historical consciousness” (Pellizzi 2005, 9), and with the help of other anthropologists (Lévi-Strauss) and theorists of the image (Belting), I hope to understand why the “archaic” never dies in ourselves. The focus of this chapter will be on the artistic expressions of Brancusi’s work and some of his Avant-garde contemporaries, trying to define the mechanism of the creative process as a mythopoetic activity, a mode of “communication” between the model, the materials, and the user, a collective or authorless event and, indeed, as a revelation: a play of unpredictable operations.
“Ce n’est pas l’oiseau que je veux exprimer,
mais le don, l’envol, l’êlan.”
(Brancusi)
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Notes
- 1.
The exhibition was curated by William Rubin, Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, in collaboration with Kirk Varnedoe of the Institute of Fine Arts, and was considered as “the first exhibition to juxtapose tribal and modern objects in the light of informed art history.”
- 2.
“We owe to the voyagers, colonials, and ethnologists the arrival of these objects in the West. But we owe primarily to the convictions of the pioneer modern artists their promotion from the rank of curiosities and artifacts to that of major art, indeed to the status of art at all” (Rubin 1984, 7).
- 3.
Pertaining to human creativity that uses in the process of creation a similar mode of understanding as in the making of a myth, from Greek mytho- and poiein “to make, create.”
- 4.
Especially the contemporary artist’s interest in anthropological matters, and his encounter with cult object from tribal cultures. (Foster 1996, 171–204).
- 5.
A trilogy of plays about Prometheus written by Aeschylus, and a festival to honour him for his acts for the benefit of humanity. He was credited with the creation of humans and bringing them civilization through the theft of fire from Olympus.
- 6.
The study of human origins; the creation of man.
- 7.
In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger translates deinón as violence, the awesome or the terrible, and the unheimlich. In Sophocles’ ode, human being is poetized as tò deinótaton, which is rendered by Hölderlin’s translation das Unheimlichste, the most uncanny. Heidegger makes some clarifying remarks concerning the word ‘tò deinón’ in his reading of Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ (Stiegler 1998, 192).
- 8.
Greek technè is ‘art, skill, regular method of making a thing’ (H.G. Liddell & R. Scott. (1968). A Greek–English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press).
- 9.
Concrescence regards the continuous process of life of forms, rather than punctual events.
- 10.
Lévi-Strauss’s “mythologicals,” as Derrida has shown, is a critical search for a new status of the discourse in which is abandoned all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arché. Here the ethnographic bricolage deliberately assumes its mythopoetic function.
- 11.
Marcel Duchamp’s paper entitled “The Creative Act,” addressed in 1 April 1957 at the Convention of the American Federation of Arts in Houston, Texas. The full transcript of the paper is found in Lebel R. (1959). Marcel Duchamp. New York: Grove Press, 77–78.
- 12.
Modular is a term used particularly in relation to minimalism, referring to a work of art with constituent parts that can be moved, separated and recombined (cf. Tate Glossary definition for “modular”).
- 13.
Oscular is pertaining to the mouth or kissing, used here as a word play with modular.
- 14.
In Christian theology, kenosis (Greek: kénōsis, lit. emptiness) relates to the “self-emptying” and humbling of Christ in the gesture of taking the flesh of a human being. Here the word is used metaphorically to emphasize Brancusi’s radical vision upon sculpture by attributing a great importance to the plinth—a marginal aspect in sculpture before him.
- 15.
The quality of the object of being two, in itself, and as a reflection or a shadow.
- 16.
In his book Difference and Repetition, the French philosoper Gilles Deleuze puts forth the view of the world as chaosmos (a term borrowed from Joyce), the endless flow of difference prior to any systematic organization (cosmos) in which we leave. Ontology is the dice throw, the chaosmos from which the cosmos emerges.
- 17.
According to Plato’s Timaeus, chôra is the third kind of form (along with being and becoming) in the process of creation of the universe (Plato Timaeus, 1929, 52b). She is the space for all things that are generated (genesis). Yet chôra is not operative as an image of something, she is the paradigmatic espacement (space-in-between) for the operation of the fleeting, visible images. She grants an abode for an experience of difference in the imagination.
- 18.
This is discussed by Jacques Derrida in his Dissemination, whereas “the dissemination of the whites produces a tropological structure that circulates infinitely around itself through the incessant supplement of an extra turn: there is more metaphor, more metonymy” (Derrida 1982, 258).
- 19.
The word Geschick used by Heidegger means “fate, destiny” as well as “skill” in German. Heidegger derives the term from Heraclitus’ account of the aion (time) as a child at play, and assimilates it to the “Geschick of being”: “The Geschick of being, a child that plays, shifting the pawns: the royalty of a child—that means, the arkhé, that which governs by instituting grounds, the being of beings. The Geschick of being: a child that plays.” This echoes Heraclitus’s Fragment 52: “Time (Aion) is a child playing draughts, the kingly power is a child’s.”
- 20.
The word for a die—a cube, like the gaming piece—comes from the proto-Indo-European zero-grade root do, through the Latin datum, “that which is given.” datum is the Latin verb dare means both “to give” and “to play.” The English language received the word “die” in this sense through the Old French dé, “a playing piece.” Marcel Duchamp’s posthumous work (a twenty-year secret) Etant donnés from Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose direct antecedent is to be found in Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés is a readymade, a playing piece: a curious puzzle, a perplexing intellectual and aesthetic enigma, an involvement with chance and fun.
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Isar, N. (2016). Tropes and Tools of Creativity: The Ontology of Image and Its Unpredictable Operations. In: Glăveanu, V. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46344-9_34
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