PRIMITIVE EARTH. FLOATATION AND COLLAPSE

Abstract

Since the end of the 19th century, some painters, such as the French Paul Gauguin or the German Max Pechstein, felt the need to physically move to the places where primitive people lived, attracted by the force of their art. Not content with observing the productions of these so-called “primitive” cultures in ethnographic museums, many artists of the European avant-garde of the 20th century embarked on a direct exploration of them, undertaking long journeys to share even their way of life. Primitivism was an essential ingredient in the formation of new avant-garde art and, in 1911, Wilhelm Worringer, a leading figure in the historiography of art, was unequivocal in his defence of it. In the 1940s, the sculptor Jorge Oteiza travelled to the Colombian Andes in search of an original statuary. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss published his most important works on the social structures of primitive cultures in the 1960s, and around the same time, the architect Aldo van Eyck travelled and later wrote about the Dogon people. All these authors refer to the myths developed in these cultures, which are directly related to the earth and to an eventual collapse of UE onto the earth. This essay addresses some of the ways in which this relationship between what floats up there and what happens on the surface of the ground is made concrete, a relationship of enormous importance for the architecture and art of our time.