James Clifford Essay Review
Histories of the Tribal and the ModernIn James Clifford’s essay, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,” the appearance of tribal art(ifacts), some grouped with modern art, in several museum galleries comes under fire. He very critically addresses such museum’s attempts to classify and reclassify primitive art and modern art into one by pointing out only vague similarities. Clifford also highly objects to one museum’s, the Museum of Modern Art, use of the word ‘affinity’ in a gallery held in 1984 entitled, “Primitivism in 20th Century Art.” The driving force behind this essay is that the status of tribal artifacts has been forced to shift and deviate from their original classification as remnants of an ancient past with anthropological definitions, to those with more modern, aesthetic definitions. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) exasperated Clifford on numerous levels. Their 1984 gallery, “Primitivism in 20th Century Art,” coupled so-called tribal artifacts with modern works in order to show a correlation between the two. In particular, the word affinity was used, meaning a “deeper or more natural relationship than mere resemblance or juxtaposition.” Clifford felt that MOMA incorrectly represented this word; he said the e . . .
An example of MOMA’s misuse of the term was on the catalogue’s cover, which featured an image of Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror alongside an image of a Kwakiutl mask. Much of Clifford’s denigration with the exhibition is that the artifacts collected were from a broad range of cultures and tribes, which make the possibility of finding similar traits between them increase substantially. This situation was the same for Asante leaders in the Museum of Natural History. The collection and presentation of pieces at the Musee de l’Homme, the “African Masterpieces” catalogue especially, implies that they are art aficionados there because the “taxonomic split between art and artifact is thus healed entirely in the terms of aesthetic code. With the introduction of these new ideas, those same objects became artwork and the distinction between anthropologic and aesthetic had to be reinforced. ” This museum appears to be one with ethnographic specimens, but they were never labeled as such, just presented for what they were. xhibition was an intriguing but problematic exercise in formal coalescence. Sometimes the objects danced back and forth between sides; a certain piece could have functionality to it, but also have been created with an aesthetically conscious mind. He claims that her words would be his contribution to a show “affinities of the tribal and postmodern. ’ Although Clifford is very critical of much of the primitive and modern art mingling, he did mange to find a few exhibits that impressed him. Clifford states that the aesthetic-anthropological opposition is “systematic, presupposing an underlying set of attitudes towards the ‘tribal. The affinity idea is, according to Clifford, “wide-ranging and promiscuous, as are allusions to universal human capacities retrieved in the encounter between modern and tribal or invocations of the expansive human mind- the healthy capacity of modernist consciousness to question its limits and engage otherness. In the beginning of modernism, non-Western objects were strictly placed in the institutions and conversations of either artists or anthropologists. ” The paragraph goes into much detail about a scene of, not the actual ceremony, but of the crowd; how the audience consists of natives wearing native clothing driving vehicles native to that city and of rich tourists wearing furs and ski jackets driving Mercedes.
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