In Media Primitivism Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, Collier argues that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity. Collier reorients modern African art within a larger constellation of philosophies of aesthetics and technology, demonstrating how pivotal artworks transcend the distinctions between the constructed and the elemental, thereby expanding ideas about mediation and about what African art can do.
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Delinda Collier finds alternative concepts of mediation in African art by closely engaging with electricity-based works since 1944.
Acknowledgments  vii Introduction. African Art History and the Medium Concept  1 1. Film as Light, Film as Indigenous  31 2. Electronic Sound as Trance ad Resonance  61 3. The Song as Private Property  93 4. Artificial Blackness, or Extraction as Abstraction  119 5. "The Earth and the Substratum Are Not Enough"  153 6. The Seed and the Field  183 Afterword  211 Notes  215 Bibliography  237 Index
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“Delinda Collier's Media Primitivism is a remarkable journey into the intellectual development of twentieth-century African art and how art objects themselves resist the categories accorded to them. Theoretically sophisticated and brilliantly argued, Media Primitivism poses a serious challenge to those who like their African art suspended in a primordial past.”
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781478009696
Publisert
2020-10-09
Utgiver
Vendor
Duke University Press
Vekt
476 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet

Forfatter

Biographical note

Delinda Collier is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art.