٠ ‘Authenticity’ as a category of Euro-American invention ٠

© Jimmie Durham, Selfportrait, mixed media, 1986

© Alan Michelson,Up-Biblum God (detail),1987, mixed-media installation as part of the exhibition” Wet he People,”Artists Space,New York.

A MAP OF THE POSTCOLONIAL QUEST FOR THE OTHER’S ‘AUTHENTICITY’

AUTHENTICITY
DIVERSITY
COMMONALITY
CULTURAL DIFFERENCE
CONVENTIONS OF DISPLAY
MAINSTREAM INSTITUTIONS
EXPECTATIONS
AESTHETIC AND POLITICAL STRATEGIES
WESTERN AND NON-WESTERN
POSTMODERNIST AESTHETIC DISCOURSE
TRADITION
TRIBAL PROCESSES
TRIBAL ARTIFACT
UNCONTAMINATED ART
PLACE OF ORIGIN
ETHNOGRAPHIC SPECTACLE
CULTURAL MEANING
THE OTHER
EXPLORATORY GAZE
MARGINAL
MULTICULTURALISM
LEGITIMATE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL SPACE
A MASQUERADE OF IDENTIFICATION
EUROCENTRIC NARRATIVES
UNITARY SELF-IDENTITY
WILDERNESS
NATURE
LOSS OF EGO BOUNDARIES
AUTHORITIES
INSTITUTIONAL VIOLENCE
IDENTIFICATION
STEREOTYPE
EGO INTEGRITY
HIERARCHICAL SOCIETY
PSYCHIC CHARGE
FETISHIZED COMMODITIES
PSYCHIC CAPITAL
ALIENATION OF THE SELF
FEELING OF INAUTHENTICITY
RESISTANCE
ASSIGNED ROLES
EMANCIPATORY ACTION
UNASSIMILABLE ELEMENTS
ETHNOGRAPHIC GAZE
ETHNOGRAPHIC SURVEILLANCE
SYMBOLIC ORDER
CONTEMPORARY TRADITIONALIST
NOSTALGIA
TRANSGRESSIVE ART
RESISTANCE TO COMMODIFICATION

‘authenticity’ is a category of Euro-American invention – a function of the gaze, which displaces to the margin the otherness it fails to see at the center of our own beings.

excerpt from In Search of the “Inauthentic”: Disturbing Signs in Contemporary Native American Art
by Jean Fisher, in Art Journal, Vol. 51, No. 3, Recent Native American Art (Autumn, 1992), pp. 44-50