The problem with this Symbolist alienation from modern life was that it sought to find a zone or space outside the modern, an impossibility given the grounding of Symbolist alienation in uniquely modern conditions and experiences and the extreme modernity of Symbolist art itself. Symbolist alienation was itself a modern experience, as was its search for a primitive realm beyond modern "reason," civilization, technology, social divisions, uprooted, uncertain identities, and anxieties about the future. Another way to see the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Symbolism and of all Western primitivist movements is to note the impossibility of the mind finding a space outside itself. Yet this is exactly what much Symbolist art pursued. It was modern, Western mind seeking imaginary zones and spaces outside itself and constructing a series of "primitive" Others in the unspoiled countryside, in animals, in non-Western cultures and primitive landscape settings, and in "pure,"......
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