'Primitive'

The texts focuses on the colonialities of arts education practices such as developmentalist rationality, the historical equivalence of the child with the so-called 'primitive', the gardening practices and the straightening devices of education. It starts by analyzing the cover of the 1951 Unesco Courier and asks how this image seems so familiar to us?

The text is in Portuguese and can be downloaded here

This is a workshop in which we will introduce the Project The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education. We will focus on the archive that is being constructed and strategies to work with and against this archive. We will mobilize archival materialities and work through some questions with the participants: How was the creative child constructed within western arts educational discourses at the intersection of discourses on race, class, gender, and ableism? Which subject positions are being mobilized? What are the colonialities we can name and deconstruct?

This article from Louise Maitland is based on comparing the western child with the ‘primitive’. The illustrations in the article are “traced copies of the original drawings”. Maitland affirms what, by the end of the 19th century, became a common argument among western ‘white’ educators, psychologists, and art educators: “On comparing the drawings of primitive races with those of children, we find that they possess many points of interest in common.

This book was submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature at the University of Chicago by the candidate Lilla Estelle Appleton to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. As the title makes evident, the study is made through the equivalence of the child with the ‘savage’, simultaneously making those so-called ‘adult savages’ comparable to the child.

From the 1870s onwards, children’s drawings started to be systematically collected and analyzed by child psychologists to study the child’s mental growth process. Drawing as an instrument to study the child’s mind soon created an equivalence between what the child was (the drawings mirroring her mental processes) and what she should become. By the end of the 19th century, Corrado Ricci, in Italy, collected more than one thousand drawings.

This is a text from a conference given at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris by Ernest Hamy, who was the first director of the Ethnographic Museum of Trocadéro. Hamy's thought dwells on the comparison of children's drawings and 'savage' drawings. 

"The words sound wrong, somehow, like 'baking ices', 'polishing mud' or 'sliced lemonade'. This was the way Roger Fry started the text on Teaching Art. 'Art Teachers' seemed to sound also wrong, and yet, he vented, large amounts of money were being spent in 'breeding' the type. "What has been overlooked is the fact that Art cannot, properly speaking, be taught at all". The canons, the conventions, and historical facts could be taught, but "one cannot teach a thing which does not exist". The text argues against the possibility of teaching the intuitive powers of creation.

This text from the English art critic Roger Fry was published in 1917 in Burlington Magazine to publicize the exhibition at the Omega Workshops. Fry draws the equivalence of the child with the so-called 'primitive' and the loss of those qualities by the 'civilized' child once submitted to schooling practices.