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In the first part of this essay we inscribed the notion of primitivism into postcolonial discourse. There, we examined a traditional approach to primitivism in which the West, or the colonizer, used the rhetoric of primitivism in order to support a discriminatory ideology against the non-western – be it African, American, Asian or Austral-Asian. However, at the end of this section, it was demonstrated that postcolonial discourse enables alternative readings and appropriations of the concept of the primitive in order to develop strategies of resistance that destabilize the western colonial ideology. In the second section, we looked at a wide range of examples in which the notion of the primitive, and the primitive itself, has been appropriated in literature, painting, music and other arts as a means to resist and/or challenge prevailing values and cultural narra-tives. Two different attitudes were explored: on the one hand, modernist metro-politan uses of primitivism in order to disrupt codes of representation (as in Picasso’s cubist paintings), revealing a crisis in the belief of the efficacy and ethics of empire. On the other hand, postcolonial re-appropriations of the primi-tive by non-western subjects in order to re-imagine their own past, as well as insert alternative experiences and knowledges into the western European

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canon. In this section, we will elaborate further on the latter strategy by focusing on the impact that primitivism had on twentieth-century architecture in Latin America. Particular attention will be paid to the first fifty years of the century when primitive motifs were appropriated by various architects in order to construct a sense of identity in relation to their pre-colonial past – from which, according to the architects themselves, they had been severed as a result of many years of colonial domination.

The first half of the twentieth century was a time when, on the one hand, the governments of Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil, as well as most Latin American nations, began to advocate national modernization which, to some extent, implied the deletion of an indigenous historical past and the adoption of Euro-American social, cultural and political models. On the other hand, there were nationalist movements opposing the governments’ ‘developmentalist’

agendas and calling for the recuperation of the same (lost) indigenous past that the former group wanted to erase. In spite of the fact that both movements sought to erase a shameful colonial past, their means and aspirations were opposed. The search for a national identity, therefore, developed between these two extremes, a situation that could not but engender tensions and conflicts. In many cases, antagonism led to popular revolts and violent incidents.²⁸One such violent incident was the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910.

Mexican revolutionary artists were among the first to appropriate primitive motifs, not only as an aesthetic but as the centre of their political agenda. They declared that art belonged to the people in the same way that Mexico belonged to the Indian people. This group of revolutionaries included Gerardo Murillo, an artist of Spanish origin who joined the revolution and adopted the name of Dr Atl (Water), David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and the architect and painter Juan O’Gorman. These artists took it as their task to reveal a counter-history based on the return to a mythical past, an original pre-colonial moment that would provide the foundations for the development of a post-colonial²⁹– and, in the case of Mexico, post-revolu-tionary – culture. For them, primitivism was the means to reach for the lost past they wanted to recuperate, oppose the government’s modernizing aspirations and dismantle colonial hierarchies whose effects were still felt throughout Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

The architect Juan O’Gorman was an active militant of primitivism.

However, like most architects of his generation, at the beginning of his career O’Gorman was a fervent follower of Le Corbusier and an advocate of function-alism. He designed a series of twelve ‘functionalist’ houses, and various schools, in and around Mexico City. Most notable among his early work is the joint house and studio for Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera with whom O’Gorman carried out various projects and had a long-lasting friendship. This well-known

Post-colonizing the primitive

project consists of two regular rectilinear volumes organized around a courtyard whose shape is reminiscent of Ozenfant’s studio in Paris designed by Le Corbusier in 1922. Much has been said about O’Gorman’s ‘Mexicanist’ impetus in this project – that the line of cacti and the outside wall, for example, are essentially Mexican – however, such affirmations are difficult to sustain given the evident formal, functional and, even, structural connection with modernist European buildings. During the mid-1930s O’Gorman became disillusioned with the principles of modern architecture as well as with professional practice.

He thus retired from practice and devoted his time to easel- and mural-painting.

For nearly fifteen years, O’Gorman produced work closer to that of other revolu-tionary artists, particularly that of his friend Diego Rivera, whose favourite subject was the indigenous worker and his/her direct relation to Aztec ances-tors. This is why, when O’Gorman returned to architectural practice in the 1950s to collaborate in the design of the Ciudad Universitaria (university campus) in Mexico City between 1950 and 1952, his work showed a dramatic transformation. He was no longer interested in the purity and abstraction promoted by modernist architects – and found in his early projects – but in the inclusion of powerful allusions to a pre-colonial past. This is clear, for example, in the design for the central library at the university in which he collaborated with Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martinez de Velasco. Their original scheme was for a pyramid, which, occupying a central location on the campus, would make a direct connection – visually and symbolically – with Aztec architecture.

This design was modified into a large cubic tower standing on a lower plinth.

However, both tower and plinth were covered with colorful images of mestizo workers and soldiers, Aztec imagery and traditional pagan motifs. According to O’Gorman himself, the mural was conceived in order to enlighten the masses about the greatness of their pre-colonial past and the blessings of the revolu-tion. As Edward Burian enthusiastically and optimistically puts it, ‘O’Gorman’s mural represented a shift to a didactic, symbolic, allegorical architecture as well as mythological imagery and occasionally compositional devices from pre-Columbian culture’.³⁰

O’Gorman’s own house, designed between 1949 and 1953, the same time he was working on the murals for the university library, also illustrates his adherence to the nationalist ideology. Like the central library at the university, his house shows an amazing combination of materials, forms, imagery and symbolism. The house is almost completely covered in brightly coloured mosaics and contains a rich variety of sculptural elements such as Aztec gods and warriors as well as snakes, jaguars, monkeys and other animalistic imagery made of local stone. The main entrance to the house is guarded by giant figures on either side of the door.³¹Paradoxically, O’Gorman’s house shows, nonetheless, a rationalist arrangement of spaces and a subtle separation of the areas dedicated

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to different social classes: servants and elites. He also uses mass-produced metal-frame windows, which are also found in his earlier functionalist buildings.

The central library at the university also contains these kinds of contradictions.

Behind the colourful walls there is a functionalist building, which, unavoidably, uses cement (a material symbolically linked with progress, modernization and globalization³²) and numerous mass-produced elements, such as prefabricated concrete panels and blocks.

Far from negative, the contradictions found in the work of O’Gorman are evidence of the antagonistic attitudes towards national identity, culture and architecture during the mid-twentieth century in Mexico. Such contradictions bring to the fore the enormous and unbridgeable differences that coexist in the various nations of Latin America. It is precisely here that we see the effects of the post-colonial appropriation of primitivism as a mode of resistance. While it is impossible to assert that O’Gorman successfully establishes a connection with an imagined pre-colonial past, his work does clearly unsettle the univocality of Euro-American architectural discourse. Given the fact that O’Gorman appropri-ates from a variety of cultural sources – he uses Mexican Aztec and Mayan motifs and also elements from classical antiquity and modernist architecture – his work, as well as that of many other architects and artists of his generation,

‘posits itself as the returning gaze of the colonized, a reappropriation of identity that lays claim to the rhizomorphous continuity of multiple cultural origins’.³³In other words, the same primitivism that was at the centre of the West’s colonial discriminatory strategy is transformed into ‘a form of cultural affirmation and a reformulation of identity starting from non-Western autochthony’.³⁴It is impor-tant to underline that O’Gorman’s use of the primitive is not an essentialist move that ignores the violence of colonization and the multiplicity of cultures and social groups that coexist in the space of Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

In not returning to an idealized, homogeneous pre-colonial past he avoids essentializing identity.

As we have noted throughout this paper, one must, however, proceed with caution when discussing the degree to which (non-western) post-colonial subjects can transform western dominant narratives. It is also important to be careful about the recuperation of an imagined pre-colonial past.

This can be seen in the work of Edward Burian, for example, whose un-problematic acceptance of O’Gorman’s success is alarming precisely because it is based on his implicit assumption that the past is transparent. When referring to O’Gorman’s university library, Burian affirms that ‘in one of the landmark symbols of modern Mexican architecture, O’Gorman, architect and painter, was able to reconnect to a mythical past for political and racial purposes’ (our emphasis).³⁵Such a facile celebration of the appropriation of primitivist motifs in the construction of national identities and nationalist agendas poses numerous

Post-colonizing the primitive

political questions. Most importantly, it draws our attention to the way in which critics, artists, architects and writers have naively assumed that the concept of the primitive can be disassociated from its colonial usages. The politics of using the primitive as a site of resistance presents problems because, to a large extent, it is an attempt to ‘recover forms already established or at least influ-enced or infiltrated by the culture of empire’.³⁶It is for this reason that the primi-tive, as we stated at the opening of our essay, cannot be understood without its colonial context.

Notes

1 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 86.

2 Ibid., p. 86.

3 Ibid., p. 111.

4 It is important to note, however, that Bhabha never refers to the notion of primitivism, nor does he use the term itself.

5 Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context, Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1992, pp. 69–70.

6 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travelling Writing and Transculturation, London, New York:

Routledge, 1992, p. 134.

7 Ibid., p.134.

8 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 110–11.

9 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, New York: Dover, 1990, p. 66.

10 Thomas Macaulay, ‘Minute on Education’ (1835), in Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain: A Reader, Antoinette Burton (ed.), New York: Palgrave, 2001, p. 20.

11 See also Pierre Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes Orientales et à la Chine, for a similar attitude: ‘We find among the Indians the vestiges of the most remote antiquity ... We know that all peoples came there to draw the elements of their knowledge ... India, in her splendor, gave religions and laws to all the other peoples; Egypt and Greece owed to her both their fables and their wisdom’ (1996:

18).

12 See Alan Richardson’s edited collection: Three Oriental Tales: History of Nourjahad, Vathek, the Giaour, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

13 Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle (1831), Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1999, p. 49 [elec-tronic resource].

14 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, W. Conyngham Mallory (trans.), New York: Tudor, 1935, bk I.

15 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 35.

16 George Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, London: Chapman & Hall, 1880, p. 125.

17 Ibid.

18 William Rubin, Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, New York:

Museum of Modern Art, 1984, p. 254.

19 Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, New York:

Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 163.

20 Ibid. p. 161.

21 Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books, 1994, p. 216.

Felipe Hernández and Lea Knudsen Allen

22 While we wish to maintain the full range of meanings in the term ‘language’, it is significant that imposing its own literary tradition onto the other is a strategy of domination and cultural imperi-alism practised by the colonizer. In a speech before the Edinburgh Philosophical Society in 1846, Thomas Babington Macaulay offered a toast ‘To the literature of Britain … which has exercised an influence wider than that of our commerce and mightier than that of our arms … before the light of which impious and cruel superstitions are fast taking flight on the Banks of the Ganges!’

23 Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home, New York: L. Furman, 1937, p. 229.

24 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 216.

25 Derek Walcott, ‘Another Life’ in Collected Poems, 1948–1984, London: Faber & Faber, 1986, p.

294.

26 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 212.

27 Ibid. p. 214.

28 Felipe Hernandez, ‘Spaces of Hybridization: The House of the Architect’, in Cruelty and Utopia:

Cities and Landscapes of Latin America, Jean-Francois Lejeune (ed.), New York: Princeton Archi-tectural Press, 2005, p. 111.

29 Please note that our use of the hyphen in ‘post-colonial’ refers to the period after colonialism, while the non-hyphenated ‘postcolonial’ refers to scholarly discourse.

30 Edward Burian, ‘Modernity and Nationalism: Juan O’Gorman and Post-Revolutionary Architecture in Mexico, 1920–1960’, in Cruelty and Utopia, Lejeune (ed.), p. 220.

31 For a more detailed description, and images, of the house, see Keith Eggener, ‘Contrasting Images of Identity in the Post-war Mexican Architecture of Luis Barragán and Juan O’Gorman’, in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 2000, 9(1): 27–45; or Burian, ‘Modernity and Nationalism’ in Cruelty and Utopia, Lejeune (ed.), p. 30.

32 For more information about cement’s symbolic relation with progress, modernization and global-ization, see Adrian Forty’s essay ‘Cement and Multiculturalism’ in Transculturation: Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America, Felipe Hernandez, Mark Millington and Iain Borden (eds), Amsterdam–New York: Rodopi, 2005, pp.144–54.

33 Erik Camayd-Freixas and José Eduardo Gonzaléz, Primitivism and Identity in Latin America:

Essays on Art, Literature and Culture, Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2000, p. x.

34 Ibid, p. xiv.

35 Burian, ‘Modernity and Nationalism’ in Cruelty and Utopia, Lejeune (ed.), p. 220.

36 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 210.

Post-colonizing the primitive

Chapter 8

Notes for an alternative