Joseph Frank, the "Primitivism" of Modernism, and Mid-Aughts Indie Music

[The cover art to Animal Collective's 2005 album Feels, which mixture of the abstract and primitive will prove salient, as I hope to soon prove]  An essay that has surprisingly been on my mind lately is Spatial Form in Modern Literature, an influential 1945 study by critic Joseph Frank that was on my Comps reading list last year.  In it, Frank posits that so-called "primitive" art arises in civilizations not from any lack of skill or development, but from times of great turmoil.&nbs...