After Gikandi

The main thrust of Gikandi’s arguments can perhaps be summarized as such: the primitive Other, even in the course of the Modernist reevaluation of traditions and long-held beliefs and ideologies, is valued (even valorized) solely as that whose use and purpose is servitude to the Eurocentric progress of civilization. Hence the disinterest that Gikandi claims of Picasso, one of the leading painters of the Modernist movement, in lived African culture as opposed to the African culture gleamed and examined as from behind the glass wall of an alienist’s profession or that of a specimen collector’s laboratory. Gikandi implodes the unhappy encounter between Picasso and Guyanese artist Aubrey Williams, and finds in it an implication that could perhaps scandalize the entire movement of modernism:

The practitioners of modernism had themselves started the process of containment, that they needed the primitive in order to carry out their representational revolution, but that once this task had been accomplished, the Other needed to be evacuated from the scene of the modern so that it could enter the institutions of high art. (457)

For Gikandi, it would seem, what matters is not whether Picasso’s art is impelled by a methodology; what matters is the degree of soundness that constitutes the basis for that methodology and its praxis. Gikandi writes of Picasso’s early paintings, that:

the African’s body, in its disproportional form and primitive sexuality, would allow Picasso to kill two birds with one stone, both classicism(which favored idealized bodies) and modern culture (which was coy about male sexuality). Consequently, in this early phase of his career, Picasso adopted African forms as a way of thinking through the limitations of the forms of representation favored by the art academy, namely a sense of order, proportionality, and idealization. The African body formed the embodiment of disorder. (462)

Thus, the irony behind that which can be gathered of Modernist movement’s underlying philosophy, through the use (by Gikandi) of Picasso as exempler of the quintessential Modernist, is that while the civilized, and invariably European, world becomes disenchanted with its ancient values and customs, and hungers for new modes of apprehending existence, its method of achieving progress should remain - whether it be outrightly admitted or not - so shamefully barbaric, or primitive.