TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/caps/82/82artmet

Text File | 1990-10-10 | 8KB | 130 lines

Primitive Splendor at the Met

February 8, 1982

Totems and idols reign in an elegant new space

The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
which opens with suitable fanfare to the New York public this week,
is certainly the most spectacular permanent exhibition of "primitive"
art (though not the best collection of it) that can be seen in any
museum anywhere in the world.  Never before has white Western culture
paid such lavish homage to the black, brown and red cultures that,
since 1500, it colonized, cheated, evangelized, enslaved and, not
infrequently, destroyed.  There are too many bones beneath this
monument to enable anyone to contemplate it without deep ambivalence.

The Met's architects, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates,
designed nearly an acre of elegant, muted space with such tact that
the architecture never overwhelms or interferes with what it
displays.  Its climax is a slope-walled glass house--a twin to the
gallery that houses the Egyptian Temple of Dendur on the other side
of the museum--that contains the largest of the wooden figures.
Enormous trouble was taken to safeguard the perishable organic
materials of tribal art, the hair and wicker and wood and feathers,
against the vagaries of New York's climate.  Between them, the
building and installation cost a total of $18.3 million.

The result is both a masterpiece of museological taste and a tour de
force of cultural displacement.  The New Hebrides slitgongs and the
row of towering, slender Asmat mbis totems, some of them 21 ft. tall,
seem to inhabit a world of pure form, primitive Apollonianism
heavily inflected by Roger Fry.  Even the crust of old blackened
blood left by ritual libations on some of the African idols is
politely referred to, on the museum's labels, as "sacrificial
material."

This section of the Met, which completes the last phase of its
expansion, has been a long time coming.  It was conceived by the
late Nelson Rockefeller as a memorial to his son Michael, who died in
1961 at the age of 23 while collecting artifacts made by the Asmat
people of western New Guinea.  Young Rockefeller is thought to have
drowned at sea; no trace of him was ever found.  Though his
contribution to anthropology was slight, he brought back quite a lot
of Asmat art, and the works of this previously obscure swamp folk
have been given an immense memorial prominence.

But of course, the new wing contains a great deal more than Asmat
art, or even New Guinea art in general.  Nelson Rockefeller was a
voracious collector of primitive art as such, and almost everything
he owned--the 3,500 or so objects that were the nucleus of his Museum
of Primitive Art, along with his smaller private collection--went to
the Metropolitan in his son's memory.  To this bequest have been
added several very choice groups of objects from other sources:  the
Wunderman collection of Dogon sculpture, ancient Peruvian ceramics
from the Nathan Cummings collection, and a number of pre-Columbian
objects from the Alice Bache bequest.

The ensemble splits into three board geographical areas:  Africa, the
Americas and Oceania (that vast and anthropologically complex area
from Easter Island to the Torres Strait, embracing the scattered
island cultures of the Pacific as well as Australia and New Guinea.)
The sweep of the collection reminds one that at almost any time in
the world's history up to now, the overwhelming majority of art made
for any purpose at all was what we call primitive:  that is, in the
words of Douglas Newton, curator of the Med's new wing:  "Primitive
culture has been the major part of human experience."

"Primitive" is a bedeviling word, hard to shake.  In the past few
decades it has lost most of its racist overtones, but has nonetheless
retained an air of condescension.  Its most neutral usage, suggested
by Newton, is "the art of those peoples who have remained until
recent times at an early technological level, who have been oriented
toward the use of tools but not machines."  The key phrase is "until
recent times"--without it, most European culture up to about 1600
could fairly be called primitive.  Above all, the word cannot mean
crude or inarticulate.  Few European medieval ivory carvings are as
exquisitely realized, in detail and in the round, as the Met's ivory
Bini mask of a Nigerian ruler; and the technical finesse of pre-
Columbian gold ornaments, brought back by the conquistadors from
South America, astonished Albrecht Durer in the 16th century as much
as it does us today.

The Met's collection, as it now stands, is strong in New Guinea and
Melanesian art.  And its African material, particularly in the areas
of Senufo.  Dan and Dogon tribal art, is superb.  But the coverage of
Australian and (more surprisingly) Northwest American Indian art is
sketchy.  This may be because the roots of Rockefeller's own taste
were set in the culture of European modernism--in the admiration for
the primitive that formed the experimental work of Picasso, Braque,
Matisse, Brancusi.

What influenced such men was, above all, the vestiges and souvenirs
of African art, sluiced back into France as mere curiosities by the
currents of imperial trade at the turn of the century.  To compare
such objects with their European responses, at this late date, is to
enter a strange chamber of mirrors:  we now tend to see African art
in terms of cubism; one musical instrument in a glass case at the
Met, a Zaire harp, is quite simply a cubist guitar plucked out of
Picasso's paint of 1915 and materialized in three dimensions.
Primitivism owes its prestige, in the West, to modernism.

But suppose that a hundred years from now, a Chinese student whose
cultural ground was five generations of dialectical materialism were
asked to give a rendering of the Apocalypse of St. John.  Suppose
that such a person knew next to nothing about the Christian
eschatological belief, had never met a priest, thought all visions
were delusions and had never used a metaphor in his life.  Such a man
would have difficulty with such a text; and we have the same kind of
difficulties with primitive art.

It was made for religious purposes that we comprehend dimly at best
and can never, in any case, share.  In its innumerable forms, it
appealed to a moral universe--fairly horrible sometimes, but moral
all the same--altogether remote from ours.  It presupposes a
different way of experiencing the world, society, authority and myth:
not just somewhat different, but radically so.  Its assumptions about
the role art plays in society are sundered from those postulates we
normally carry with us.  Our only contact with it is on the aesthetic
plane--that, and in the enjoyable frissons of strangeness, coupled
with the more sophisticated pleasures of art-history comparison.

So we end in the position of enjoying, for disinterested reasons, a
whole range of art whose main impulse was not aesthetic at all, but
magical.  Our pleasure, one may be sure, would have seemed ludicrous
to the people who made these objects.  What they wanted to evoke was
awe, fear and the sense of power--the rawest musculature of the
social contract, twitching reflexively before the image.  No wonder
Nelson Rockefeller liked to collect such things.

--By Robert Hughes