Primitive Art: Breaking New Ground : ‘ART/artifact,’ at UCLA, examines the degree of racism and the image of white superiority in past exhibitions of African objects

“ART/artifact,” a new exhibition at UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery, is an unusual, if not downright peculiar business.

Galleries are chockablock with African objects organized by The Center for African Art, New York, but we are informed by the catalogue that the showing is not really necessarily about Africa or art at all. In fact, one catalogue essayist insists that such artifacts are not art, ever. The major thrust of the exhibition has to do with the way primitive art has been displayed in Euro-American cultures. This seems a bit like putting on a play that is about the design of the set. No need to evaluate the actors or the script, folks, just pay attention to the deep meanings of the drapes.

Actually, the script is crucial to this enterprise, which is co-sponsored for its local appearance by UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Faced with a hard choice you would understand the intentions of this exhibition more clearly by reading the catalogue than by attending the galleries.

Not that the physical setting is bad. Designer Tom Hartman and the Wight Art Gallery crew outdid themselves to re-create the four principal settings in which primitive art has been displayed: As souvenir in curiosity rooms; as educational information in natural history museums; for aesthetic pleasure in art museums; and as merchandise in commercial galleries.

There are wall labels--including one as fatuous as “How do Souvenirs Become Art?”--but you can’t really get the point without reading the catalogue. The essays carry varied, contradictory and sometimes important subtexts. Crucial here is the question of the degree of racism and the expression of white superiority that historically had fueled the collection of such work as posited in the essay by R. M. Gramly, a curator at the Buffalo Museum of Science.

Since white self-afflatus crested in the 19th Century at the height of Euro-American imperialism, there was inescapably a large dose of white self-congratulation behind it. The fact that this exhibition exists proves that intelligent and caring people are now trying to purge past sins. So does the hotly debated issue over the degree of cultural damage or human disrespect that may have been wreaked on primitive cultures by the white man’s mania for collecting.

Anthropologists get into a righteous rage when art collectors jerk objects out of their native context without proper documentation, rendering them useless to scholarly understanding of the cultural woof and warp. Susan Vogel, director of the African Center and organizer of “ART/artifact,” bemoans in her catalogue essay the way we display primitive art, further skewing its meaning.

The anthropologists’ point seems more important than Vogel’s, somehow.

The show (on view to May 20) bears on large issues, one of which is white guilt. We are passing through a period when the white race is totting up its sins and feeling terrible, having apparently brought the planet to the brink of extinction. Surely, polluting the planet is bad stuff, and certainly the analogy can be extended to include racism, but historical mea culpas will not solve either problem. Humankind is ever imperfect. Each generation must play the hand it’s dealt and try to fix things without rancor toward the past.

This exhibition tries to be constructive but it seems to be attempting the undoable. The mind set at work here implies that there is some way to present primitive art to establish a single monumental interpretation of it. But, of course, everything is subject to interpretation.

The earliest display-style re-created is a “Curiosity Room” from Hampton University circa 1905. Its craftsman style makes it the homiest of the spaces. It is filled with a mounted crocodile, stuffed heads of winsome gazelles, an African shield surrounded by a brace of spears and cases with souvenirs as commonplace as a beaded hat and as intense as a Bambole figure. It will strike some imaginations as an Ed Kienholz tableau about a rapacious hunter and colonialist. Others will see it as the memorabilia of a “Masterpiece Theater” colonel who was adventurous, energetic, curious and intelligent. Those who feel that simply collecting African art is somehow automatically insulting should be reminded that Hampton is a black university with an African collection.

The main feature of the re-created natural history museum room is a life-size tableau of a tribal ceremony. How would the depicted figures feel if they saw it, flattered or humiliated? Suppose we went to an African museum and saw our club’s initiation rite re-created George Segal-style. Might be sort of fun. To the seeker after facts, the room is educational. To the aesthete, it is a bore.

The modern art museum room suggests a scaled-down version of the primitive wing of the Metropolitan Museum where Vogel was curator of African art for 10 years. Its spot-lit plexi cases certainly do not treat their contents with disdain. A cynic might find the work mythologized and overdramatized. This is particularly true here because the material, while good, does not come up to the overwhelming tribal masterpieces at the Met so the display seems overdone.

Even though this art exhibition is not about art, its organizers seem to be doing their own form of special pleading by using objects of mainly middling quality. How can anybody appreciate the aesthetic side of the argument when the material is just so-so?

A re-creation of a commercial primitive art gallery presents a forest of quite similar Mikenda memorial effigies that seem intended to dramatize the “reduced to ordinary merchandise” polemic of the display. It seems a little sentimental. Even Van Gogh survives being occasionally put on the auction block.

But, then of course, it may be that none of this is art at all. Maybe we’ve been walking around all these years in the grip of an aesthetic illusion. That’s what Arthur C. Danto thinks. He’s a distinguished professor of philosophy at Columbia University, an occasional critic and the essayist who says that African artifacts are not art even if Picasso says they are.

Actually, Picasso was less carried away by the formal qualities of the objects he found at Paris’ Musee de l’Homme than in what he derived from them about the role of the artist as shamanistic magician.

Danto’s argument may be philosophically sound, but I don’t think one can get around the multiple meanings of the word “art.” Among other things it’s an honorific we use to describe anything that seems to outstrip ordinary categories. If a carpenter does extraordinary work we praise him by calling him an artist. If one African mask stands out with special power among many similar ones then it becomes an artistic masterpiece.

The creative enterprise just won’t work unless the meaning of the word “art” itself remains slippery, allowing for discovery of artwork whether it’s a Duchamp bicycle wheel or a venerated Japanese tree.

There is also creative misinterpretation. I once read a catalogue for a primitive exhibition that included a picture of a native happily wearing a Quaker Oats box as a hat. The author was furious on the native’s behalf, stewing on about how this was insulting to the poor chap. But he had picked it out as something he found colorful, pretty and meaningful at least as headgear. Maybe he saw something we missed. Of course scientists have to keep the facts straight but if the artist in each of us finds marvel and substance in a work considered ordinary by its maker we may have found something in it he missed.