The passages below are copyrighted material, and should not be replicated in any form, except for the education purposes of this class. They are excerpted from:
Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990. Pages 77-79 and 82-83
... As a child, visiting the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History, I saw those ethnographic displays; most New York children never forget the canoe in the main hall at the Museum of Natural History, filled with realistic looking Indians and surrounded by their objects. Realistic statues of primitive peoples and displays of their objects function in the same way as the dioramas of African animal and plant life still so striking a part of this famous museum. Their function is "educational"—they preserve for Western eyes vanishing curiosities. We are not supposed to ask, as my children did when I took them to see the dioramas, "did they have to kill the animals to bring them here?" That is a given, the price of progress, of education—or so I said to my children when asked. But my young children had grasped an essential point. These "life-like" displays bespeak the death of animals, and the death of cultures. Their existence can be justified by their ability to "salvage" vanishing forms of life and by their educational value; but their ideological basis and their origins in conquest, killing, and appropriation remain suspect.
Today, it may cost us little to admit the shocking origins and suspect ideologies of the great ethnographic collections. Assembled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they can be seen as the fruit of colonialism—a fruit whose bitter taste we want to place in the past.... Now, we want to believe, attitudes toward primitive peoples and toward the things they have made, are better and purer.... And our museums and galleries help us believe this.
Today, museums and galleries of what we have agreed to call primitive art resemble jewelry stores. Objects are displayed, singly or in groups, in glass cases. Dramatic spotlights isolate the objects from each other and from us. We peer at them, sometimes walk around them, but with the glass marking a distance between us and them. Walls are a modernist white or a uniform, mysterious darkness—either way the walls ground the objects against a solid, neutral background, conducive to the contemplation of form. The displays aestheticize the objects and present them as the valuable, jewel-like things they have become. Floating in cases, spotlighted against light or dark, the objects cast a mysterious spell, invoke images of "unknown," "mysterious" places. These stark spaces work in two ways: they create a nude formalism which is somehow sensuous and erotic, even as it is primarily hermetic and cold.
For me, odd details often jar the purity of the display. Sometimes, when objects sit outside of cases, a discreet sign informs me that the object is "electronically protected"; to touch it would, presumably be shocking in more ways than one, though the temptation is strong. Sometimes the objects cut off by the glass case invite touch, were in fact made to be touched; they were once used as game pieces or fortune-telling pieces, and note cards tell me that they were worn smooth "by frequent use." Sometimes, tucked into a corner of the case is a temperature graph—protecting the object, like a medieval painting, from radical fluctuations; how odd that seems, for objects born in the heat of the tropics or in the arctic zones of the Eskimos. At other times, the display forces the observer into an uncanny, unnatural relation to the objects observed. At a recent exhibition of objects from the Staatliches Museum of Art in Munich, a display case held three mirrored figures once used to ward off evil. The face of one figure, with staring red eyes above a mirrored body, impressed me and seemed indeed to ward off the eyes I directed toward it; the other figures similarly deflected the gaze—returned it via the mirror—so that their function might have been guessed without the explanatory notes. Yet the display forced me to confront these objects head-on, even when a superstitious nature (like my own) might have rather viewed the objects obliquely or from behind, preferring not to risk being the person receiving the reflected evil. The display refused to acknowledge the physical power of the objects except in words, which said that primitives thought them powerful. The words are our words and thus safely place and contain what primitive hands and imaginations have wrought.
... Within the dominant narrative as told by art historians the "elevation" of primitive objects into art is often implicitly seen as the aesthetic equivalent of decolonization, as bringing Others into the "mainstream" in a way that ethnographic studies, by their very nature, could not. Yet that "elevation" in a sense reproduces in the aesthetic realm, the dynamics of colonialism, since Western standards control the flow of the "mainstream" and can bestow or withhold the label "art." The imperial tendency entered the art world quite early in its attention to primitive objects. "You don't need the masterpiece to get the idea," Picasso is reported to have said after his first visits to the Musee d'Ethnographie at the Trocadero in Paris; the Westerner could enter a cluttered display and cleverly pick out its "best" and "worst" pieces. As we saw [earlier] ... Roger Fry [a collector] could afford to buy an African piece that he described as "one of the most beautiful pieces of sculpture," and "was glad to have been able to buy it as [Western] things of that quality are usually out of my reach—they are too expensive." Then as now, the attribution of "best" and "worst" implies a price tag, as the objects primitives create become objects of desire for Western connoisseurs and enter an elaborate network of sale and resale quite different from their original conditions of production and circulation.
I do not want to underestimate the change that has occurred in the processing of primitive objects in Western art theory and museums. We have recently seen several instances in which major museums have returned pieces to their groups of origin, acknowledging cultural over monetary or scientific value; such considerations would have seemed laughable to many in past decades. At the end of the Second World War, Margaret Trowell could write that no full-scale survey of African sculpture existed in English and that volumes in French and German were for specialists only; today numerous studies have been published for specialist and amateur alike. Toward the beginning of this century, expensive installations of African and Oceanic pieces as art, like that in the Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, would have been unthinkable, as would the new National Museum of African Art on the Mall in Washington. Now a solely ethnographic approach, with pieces from Africa or Oceania grouped together in functional displays would also be unthinkable. A great deal has, indeed, changed. But it is far from clear whether we have really faced the inconsistencies in the West's double attitude toward primitive masks and sculptures as both artifacts and art.
When the ethnographic approach to primitive objects as artifacts survives in museums today (as in portions of the American Museum of Natural History), it generally exists nearby or as a supplement to the jewelry-store display of primitive objects as high art, often in halls that seem to be awaiting renovation. Within the same museum, the two kinds of display send very different messages: here, amid a jumble of similar items, sit primitive objects; there, amid stark walls and lighted cases, stands art. The fact that context controls the message "art" or "non-art" indicates one of the many continuing problematics in using the very term primitive art and the need to pay more attention to it.
At one level, the term art is desirable when discussing primitive objects as a corrective to patterns of thought that made colonialism possible. For many Western thinkers, the production of "art" is a basic element of "culture"; to others (Fry, for example) both "art" and a guiding "aesthetics" are required for a society to be a "culture." The attribution of "art" or "aesthetics" to a particular group is thus often connected, whether rightly or not, to political identity and hence to the problematic dynamics of the word primitive itself .... A group without an "art" and "aesthetics" can be thought to lack "culture" and "political integrity"; it can then be "discovered" and "developed" by "superior" groups, that is, those who possess both "art" and "culture." Any challenge to the designation of "art" for African, Oceanic, and Native American pieces thus flirts dangerously with modes of thought that made the appropriation of land from primitive peoples possible and contributes to their continuing economic exploitation.