MEDIA PRIMITIVISM, technological art in Africa

262pp., b/w & colour illus., paperback, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2020

ISBN: 9781478009696

Delinda Collier explores technological art in Africa to challenge narratives that have conceptualised African art as unmediated, primary, and natural, arguing that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity.

From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, she reorients modern African art within a larger constellation of philosophies of aesthetics and technology, demonstrating how pivotal artworks transcend the distinctions between the constructed and the elemental, thereby expanding ideas about mediation and about what African art can do.

“Delinda Collier's Media Primitivism is a remarkable journey into the intellectual development of twentieth-century African art and how art objects themselves resist the categories accorded to them. Theoretically sophisticated and brilliantly argued, Media Primitivism poses a serious challenge to those who like their African art suspended in a primordial past.” Steven Nelson, author of From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa

“Media Primitivism is an important book that will resituate both media history and the historiography of African art. Delinda Collier convincingly argues that, from electronic music to world cinema, African technologies are not additions to electricity-based media but function as the very basis of them. The historiography is thrilling, the aesthetic analyses compelling, and the theoretical synthesis at times breathtaking.” Laura U. Marks, author of Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image

Delinda Collier is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art.