Contemporaneity in Inuit Art Through the XXth and Early XXIst Centuries

In the Arctic, art production has undergone many changes during the twentieth century. These changes have been differently analysed by anthropologists and art historians. After the initial inventories of the artistic production, the notion of authenticity became central in academic studies. A second approach focused on a formal analysis of works of art while the current one pays attention to recent changes in Inuit art production in the context of globalisation. The author presents a critical analysis of the approaches of contemporaneity in Inuit art and proposes a periodisation of these approaches. The three contemporaneities underlined in this paper echo a Western periodisation: primitivism, Modernism and contemporaneity, in which the depiction and selection of objects, and therefore the periodisation, comes from Western categories of thought, and reveals an ethnocentric conception of works of art. The internationalisation of the art world tends to lead again to the Modernist assumption of a 'universal artistic language'. But despite similarities, specific representations of being and specifically Inuit conceptions of art still exist. If modernity has not caused the disappearance of every culture, Postmodernism, in its tendency to include and incorporate every artistic expression into a unique matrix, does not appear to reach the goal of promoting the diversity it pretends to celebrate. Thus, in Inuit art, forces of differentiation, as well as continuity in relation to both local and Western 'cultures', are at stake. They must be brought to light if we are to write an art history of non-Western art