TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82artmet

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 7.3 KB | 140 lines

                                                                                February 8, 1982 

ART

Primitive Splendor at the Met


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