Introduction
The Primitivism exhibition at MoMA in 1984 titled “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern must have sparked uproar for some audiences not for the kind of art displayed in the exhibition but for how the art was displayed in the gallery. The modern pieces came from artists like Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, and Constantin Brancusi, which represented the modern aspect of the exhibition. The other aspect was over 200 pieces of indigenous African art in the form of objects that represented the tribal in traditional African culture. The conspicuous issue was that no information was put down for African art, including the dates, origins, or meaning of the art. The modern side had full information about the pieces. Clifford's critique in the Predicament of Culture was based on two forms: the flaw in the comparative method used to compare the modern and African tribal pieces and the historical context that the tribal pieces had no European or western influence. The matching of the two fields in art and omission of detailed information on the African pieces represent the egotism of the western culture towards a primitive culture.
Misinterpretation in the Exhibition
The argument for the exhibition can easily decree that the omissions were deliberate to showcase the permittivity of modern culture towards the African one. It is not uncommon for western culture to refer to Africa as a primitive land and not knowing what it is all about. The phenomenon must have been apparent in the mid-1900s to late 1900s, when the exhibition may have been relevant. Therefore, even though what was termed as the modern world is responsible for the colonization of Africa and the enslavement of its people in their world, the understanding of the modern world towards its emancipators was at most too minimal but regularly unknown. The aspect of not knowing is what probably William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe were trying to portray as primitive.
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The egotism of the Modern Culture
However, given the context of the time frame and the events that had taken place in most of the African countries, the subject and display of the artifacts must have been a sore subject. Most African countries were recovering from colonization, and western influences were all too grave scenarios that were not meant to be obscured in the 1900s. An in-depth analysis into Clifford’s critique shows that the title of the exhibition was misinformed because the comparison between a tribal and modern must be of the same subject, one showing the past and the roadmap for progression that led to the modern pieces. Therefore, there was no comparative aspect between the African pieces and the works of Picasso and other modern artists in the exhibition. The pureness of the African pieces is in their making because they must have been made before the two worlds interacted. Its purity cannot be compared to art that has influences from the western and eastern cultures on relative terms. The time frame was when most of the African states had just gained independence and the losers were still pained by the ordeal. The omission of detailed information for the African art must have been a deliberate attempt to call Africa primitive and display its primitivism through the kind of art it made against their advanced art pieces. Another possibility is that they portrayed that there was no information on the pieces because Africa was not yet civilized enough to understand that what they had was art.
Bibliography
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
