Northwest Masks: Portals to Another World

The first statement that greets visitors to the exhibition “Down From the Shimmering Sky: Masks of the Northwest Coast” sums up the primary function of the works on view and poses, implicitly, a primary question about their display. Masks are useful, writes Chief Robert Joseph, one of the curators of the show, because they offer “a continuum for Native People to acknowledge our connection with the universe.”

In this stunning selection of nearly 150 masks at the Southwest Museum at LACMA West, the continuum of time is also asserted through the integration of contemporary works with masks from throughout the past 200 years. Simmering under the spectacular surface of the show is another issue of continuity--that which exists or fails to exist between native cultures of our continent and us relative newcomers. This exhibition--like every other--serves, in part, as an outstretched hand, an invitation to reenter the world through the eyes of another. It is an invitation well worth accepting.

The First Nations of the Northwest Coast live along a broad coastal strip that stretches from southeastern Alaska down to the northern edge of Washington. Fears, hopes, desires and struggles course through their world, catalyzed by spirits and ancestors represented by the masks. According to origin stories of the First Nations, the First Ancestors came to Earth from above in the form of animals. During the potlatch, a ceremony of song, dance and ritual marking an auspicious occasion, dancers wearing masks animate important legends and episodes in the culture’s history, reinforcing that essential continuity between human, animal, spirit and earth.

The exhibition, organized by Joseph, anthropologist Peter Macnair and Bruce Grenville, senior curator of the Vancouver Art Gallery, where it originated, follows the First Nations’ division of the world into four dimensions: sky, undersea, mortal and spirit worlds. Whether representing a human face or the head of an animal or bird, the masks distill character or condition into graphically potent features--eyes like protruding cones that grab the world rather than passively receive it, massive raven heads that open to reveal a human face within. Predominantly paint on wood, they are embellished with bits of copper, bone, shell, horsehair, animal hide, feathers and beads. Their dynamic patterns and rhythms endow them with an intensely animate presence, even when hanging statically on the wall.

Many of the masks were made specifically for such display, as objects of trade and decoration (European explorers filtered through the area beginning in the mid-18th century). Many, however, were made for ceremonial use and were intended to be seen in motion, accompanied by the sound of dancing feet, drums, rattles and whistles. If song and dance are what make these masks effective within the society of their origin, what are we to make of them here, in the quiet, depersonalized surrounds of the museum?

The pure visual stamina of the masks carries the show quite ably, but more contextual information (some of which is in the catalog) would have made the experience even richer and more meaningful. To proffer such a suggestion is, admittedly, to crack open the Pandora’s box of museum practices distinguishing works of art from ethnographic objects. In recent decades, commercial motivations and sociological awareness have encouraged the hierarchical division between the two classes of objects (and the notion that they merit separate categories at all) to dissolve, but modes of display continue to diverge.

This selection of masks has been given the standard art museum treatment--displays with “dog collar” texts bearing name, owner and location. As exhibitions go, this is an extended hand that invites us to examine the face without getting to know much about the identity behind it. The show gets by on looks alone, but the work has myriad stories to tell--from myth to the political history of contact--that are silenced through this treatment. Or maybe not. Famed anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss experienced a revelation among the Northwest Coast masks in the American Museum of Natural History in the early’40s.

The “primal message” of the masks, he wrote, retains so much power that even “the prophylactic insulation of the showcases fails to muffle its communication.”

* Southwest Museum at LACMA West, 6067 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 933-4510, through May 6. Closed Wednesdays.