'Devolution #1' Re-Visiting "Primitivism"

"Devolution#1" (performance- Re-visiting the primitive)

A reconsideration of the "primitive" notion with references to its 19th century contexts in history is intended to express my ideas through a series of performances, happenings and installations. To me recognition of representational forms is not the only process of understanding. Rather, presenting and surrendering one’s soul on a spiritual level in the act of making something artistic to raise one’s self to another level of experience is the essence of being –"The Primitive Being."

Stanely Diamond in chapter 4 of In Search of the Primitive
Expresses an inductive model of primitive society in contrast with civilization.
“These cultural-historical antitheses, and the consequent split in consciousness evident everywhere in modern society cannot be transcended until a revolutionary transformation occurs, equal in scope and depth to that which initiated civilization about 5,000 years ago. The point of this work is that nothing less will suffice. If we are ever to outlive the trauma of history, I believe it can only be through the resolution of the primitive-civilized conflict in our society and in ourselves. It is the task of anthropology to help trace the contours, and confront the imperatives of that conflict, while giving us a glimpse of another human possibility. Otherwise, the discipline is pointless.” (in Preface).
In Foreword: by Eric R wolf NYC 1972.
The crisis in the Western world and its imperial hinterland, which is also the crisis of humanity, cannot be confined to social, economic or technological “problems”; it inheres in our definition, our very understanding of man. We live in what we pridefully call civilization, but our laws and machines have taken on a life of their own; they stand against our spiritual and physical survival. Our politics oscillate between the consolidation of bureaucratic controls and outbursts of impotent, if symbolic, fury. The rule of law, as Stanley Diamond says, represents “the chronic symptom of the disorder of institutions.” Science, which was to liberate us, imprisons us in abstractions; passion and compassion atrophy in the hands of professionals who turn their concepts into fetishes. So-called students of man, who study man because he has become the problem, are driven by a search for abstract model within which to capture and hold fast flow of human reality. What began as a fraternal endeavour to understand men in their concrete similarities and differences, in order to comprehend human possibilities, is rapidly becoming one of the “policy sciences,” a discipline of human control, the very denial of humanity. Prometheus yields to procrustes both in our culture at large and in our study of it.”