Roger Benjamin Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930 - Book Review

ROGER BENJAMIN

Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930

Berkeley: University of California Pres 2003 352 pp; 16 color ills., 123 b/w $4995

Scholars of Western imagery of lands and clans beyond the conventional West possess a position in the inquiry of 19th- and 20th-century art the two central and marginal, both straightforward and uneasy. Their focus is a class of art and visual agriculture that is by definition exceptional and different from the norms of a given abode culture. Defining the nature and boundaries of of the like kind exceptionalism in its own time is a challenge in its have a title to right. Such now familiar boundarys as Orientalism and primitivism, while they mark the beginning of a consensus, are by the agency of no means completely defined or delimited. In fact, as perhaps best demonstrated by the agency of a succession of major exhibitions, exoticism is an artistic phenomenon that can be rest much more widely diffused over the art of Europe and North America during the period, broadly imbricated beneath many forms in a variety of connections beyond those best known today. (1)

It is hardly surprising that the art of the period that began with European expansion and colonialism displays a considerable interest in the tribes and places then coming into view for the European public. on the contrary for just the same reason, considering it today becomes all the more complicated. For a great deal of exoticist imagery is replete with the proneness toward stereotyping, racism, and general assumptions of cultural inequality taken as given during the time. Exoticism, in its many varieties, is in this faculty of perception far more "loaded" than, say, Cubism, and thus a further challenge to the historian. The exotic, too, must be understood in its individual historical context, even if that may require a stage of suspension of more contemporary assumptions. At the same time, individual could hardly wish to ignore in what manner exoticist imagery still plays an ofttimes disquieting role in contemporary tillage in which entertainment, fashion, and cigarettes, as well as broader economic and flat military actions are sold and partly justified via figure of speechs and gambits much like those familiar to any pupil of modern exoticism. The application of mind of Orientalism, then, confronts us with an aspect of the 19th hundred that is in many ways still not absent indicating something of the stakes involved in writing today upon the representation of places and nations colonized by Western powers.

In art historical literature Orientalism has greatest in quantity often been conceived as a primarily 19th-century phenomenon (lingering, perhaps, into the early decades of the 20th century) This has many causes, among them the disciplinary and institutional distinction that has always kept art history a bit aloof from the art of the contemporary world. Not the least consequence of this development has been to relegate Orientalism to history, distancing its bear upons from those of contemporary representation and cultural life.

However, a countertendency is also at work: the result of postcolonial studies. On the inspiration of works like as the last section of Edward Said's seminal Orientalism of 1978 provocatively entitled "Orientalism Now," we have a clear antecedent for approaching the history of exoticist representation in present-center metes as a way of connecting with and making relevant the past to the not absent This does not in any way obviate the writer's debit to the historical nature of her or his material on the contrary rather complicates and enlarges its relation to the contemporary reader. In a way that might have the appearance out of place in other topics, a great deal of writing on the exotic today strives to make clear the writer's possess stance to the material in question.

Roger Benjamin's work clearly encompasses similar contemporary tendencies, and it is worth considering the one and the other in its own right and as a rejoinder to the quandaries posed in contemporary historiography of the exotic. As smooth its intriguing title suggests, Orientalist Aesthetics is conceived as a synthesis between the overtly political belong tos signaled in its first word (which, after Said, take care ofs to be taken not as solely descriptive but as a negative, judgmental term) and the more traditional belong to with aesthetic valuation, which has drawn out cast Orientalism as a paradigmatic art of the later-19th-century Salonniers. Just as it stands between past and not away Benjamin also roots his investigation between concerns of politics and aesthetics. Precisely by what means he positions himself within this framework is telling, as we shall see

Orientalist Aesthetics, an account of a variety of representational casts staged in and on behalf of French North Africa, is in many ways an important contribution to the literature upon Orientalism. Clearly the product of years of painstaking labor in museums, libraries, and archives, it is the first detailed application of mind to offer anything like a replete picture of the complexities of art and representation during half a hundred in French-colonized North Africa. The author go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs many European artists, from Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse from one side Eugene Fromentin, Gustave Guillaumet, and other established Orientalist artists (notably, Etienne Dinet, a great deal of of whose life and work was focused upon Algeria), to many others with shorter-lived interests in the area. Further, Benjamin allots an entire chapter to the work of sum of two units leading indigenous artists, Azouaou Mammeri and Mohammed Racim. who have drawn out deserved more notice. Another equally innovative chapter treats the circulation and promotion of indigenous decorative arts, like as ceramics, metalwork, and weaving. This flows in a fascinatingly heterogeneous array of things and artists, which by itself does abundant to dispel stereotypes of a monolithic Orientalism. Moreover, the discussion of formative interactions between artists, particularly between Dinet and Racim (pp 237-38) is lock opener to seeing them as active agents in the manifold fluid situation of colonized and colonizer.