The Marco Polo Syndrome

"'Authentic African art is that produced by a traditional artist for traditional purposes and according to traditional forms'" (Crimp 222). The problem with this statement is that in our postcolonial world, Africa is no longer operating in such "traditional" ways. Their culture has been mixed into that of the Western world and has been heavily influenced by it. Does this prevalent idea that authentic Africa as what it "traditionally" is mean that Africa as it is now, influenced and altered by Western culture, is false? ... has ceased to exist in the present? Of course, this is ridiculous. Western Art ("our" Art) has also been heavily influenced by many, if not all, of the cultures it has encountered throughout the colonial era, but it has not ceased to be Western Art. Crimp blames this discrimination on "exoticism," our fascination with preconceived notions of the Other which results in a stereotyping of different cultures based on what we want to see when we look to them: "... to display their identity, to be fantastic, to look like no one else or to look like Frida" (Crimp 221).

It is an easy trap to fall into; a trap that many have fallen into within their own culture. Operating strictly within Western culture: If someone begins looking into the poetry of the Romantic era with no real previous exposure to this Art form, then as they learn what poetry is by looking at this, they gain a strict definition of it excluding all other types of writing. If one immediately afterwards looks at modernist or post-modernist poetry, lacking rhyme and meter tied together in a rhythmic pattern, it violates their preconceived notions of what poetry is, often causing an immediate rejection of this newer writing. The same can be said of someone familiar with a few Renaissance paintings walking for the first time through a gallery of modernist or postmodernist paintings. The reaction will almost always be one of rejection: "This isn't Art!" Given this reaction to viewing elements of only Western culture through the dimension of Time, we see this is the same reaction as someone seeing contemporary African art when expecting "traditional." Can the problem really be Eurocentrism, then, when the contemporary culture of Europe, when viewed with expectations based on its past, evokes the same reaction as the contemporary culture of Africa (or any Other), when viewed with expectations based on its past? We are originally presented with a limited view of cultures, including our own, which is never expanded upon until that moment of rejection. This limited view we are presented with becomes an assumption of a corresponding reality that we expect when viewing, and it is the betrayal of what we expect to see by reality that opens our eyes and allows us to learn once more. The problem is not simply that we want other cultures to be presented a certain way, but that we aren't aware that what we want from them is not what they currently are.

Mosquera, Gerardo. "The Marco Polo Syndrome: Some Problems around Art and Eurocentrism." Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 218-224.