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Chapter 4 Black Arts: Conjure and Spirit In moving from the 1920s and 1930s up to recent times, we find a much wider range of representations of Indian and Mrican American magic and religion. Native American and Mrican American artists themselves have reformulated the terms in which they are represented, and anthropological approaches have become more reflexive and dialogical. But even if the power to define "others" and the terms in which their beliefs and practices are represented may have partly moved away from white anthropologists and collectors, to be replaced by greater self-representation and a greater openness to cultural and racial hybridities and impurities, the increased interest in spirituality has also brought with it new forms of commodification. As a result, we need to see recent reformulations by artists and writers notjust in terms of the earlier hierarchies outlined in my earlier chapters, but also in relation to the circulation and commodification of objects and ideas in contemporary commercial and New Age as well as artistic and ethnographic spheres. Within this context claims for "power" increasingly often move between the aesthetic and the spiritual/magical and efface, or at least blur, any clear distinction between the two realms. In these final two chapters, I will be examining a number of such claims and looking at the confluence of art and conjure in the case of Mrican American works, and of art and ceremony in the case of Native American works. Beginning with recent revisions of the Modernist primitivist aesthetic and the idea of assemblage, I look at the ways in which Mrican American artists (particularly Betye Saar and Renee Stout) have used techniques of assemblage to incorporate abjected and discarded material into their work. I explore in detail the claims being made by them and their commentators for spiritual power and the relation of this to the claims made for music and spirit as Mrican American cultural resources in Ishmael Reed and Houston Baker. I then use the work of Nathaniel Mackey to further explore claims made for music as a privileged site of Mrican American culture and spirituality. In the last chapter, I touched on the conjunction of Modernist aesthetics and ethnography, focusing on Picasso's encounter with the "fetish" objects of the Trocadero and some of those moments when the projects of ethnographic collecting and Modernist assemblage richly coalesced, only to diverge again Black Arts 103 into different realms. This Modernist engagement with the primitive has been extensively retheorized and discussed as part of a larger postcolonial critique of Western conceptions of the Other. Of particular relevance for my inquiry, though, is the revisionism expressed in the responses to a number of exhibitions , most notably the Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity if the Tribal and the Modern, which triggered a stream of critical discussion, much of which accused it in effect of repeating the Modernist assumptions. The idea that, as Hal Foster puts it, "the primitivist appropriation of the other is another form of conquest" has been widely elaborated and explored .1 Creating a similar if more circumscribed controversy was the Sacred Circles exhibition, which sparked a hostile reaction from Native American artists, who complained about the exclusion of contemporary work. This omission served to reinforce assumptions that "real" Indians or Indian art were only in the past, and the protestors also questioned the assumptions in the exhibition that ritual and ceremonial objects, and even objects of practical use could be presented unproblematically under the category of art.2 The work of a whole range of contemporary artists has since productively explored the issues ignored by such an approach, as in the work ofJimmie Durham, whose writings also offer a useful commentary on the issues.3 There have also been continuing disputes over the legitimacy of exhibiting ritual or ceremonial objects at all, whether as art or ethnography.4 These various debates centre on issues of the ownership and use of objects and the power to control their display and reception, but I want to concentrate on only one aspect of this, which is the sort of power claimed for objects, alone or in combination, and the relation between artistic and magico-religious techniques and approaches. We can begin by revisiting Picasso's encounter with masks discussed in the last chapter via the contemporary artist Fred Wilson, who is of mixed Mrican American and Carib Indian descent. Wilson's Picasso/ Whose Rules? consists of a full-size photoreproduction of Picasso...

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