Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn/Winter 2008

(Excerpts from the article by Richard Michael Gramly)

"For one moment and in one place, we have an extraordinary collection, never together before and perhaps never again," said curatorial consultant and tribal art dealer Will Channing, who had come to Paris for the opening of the latest offering at the city's museum of primal arts, the Musée du Quai Branly.

Visitors thronged the September 29, 2008, opening night for a view of forty cases containing some 500 small sculptures and a bank of important Alaskan Yup'ik masks. The pieces in the installation were loaned by a number of American, European, Russian, and New Zealand museums, and most prominently by the Rock Foundation. This vastly international event was curated by Edmund "Ted" Carpenter, a veteran of twenty archaeological and ethnological expeditions to arctic regions since the 1950s.

In such an ambivalent and dangerous place as the northern Arctic, reality cannot always be demarcated from the ethereal. Out on the ice, living beings and spirits might well have encounters, with unpredictable results.

Reflecting this, the installation of Upside Down: Les Arctiques is conceived as a "sensory promenade" and is set up by artistic director Doug Wheeler and "sceneographers" Jen de Gastines Architectes in a way that intends to capture the feeling of a polar environment.

Carpenter has long argued from the podium and in his many writings that "The Eskimo have in their art, as in other aspects of their life, somehow perpetuated Paleolithic traditions into recent times" (Schuster and Carpenter, 1996: p.270). As such it is not surprising that a series of modern (i.e. non-archaeological) Yup'ik wood and feather masks are featured in the egress of the central area of the exhibition. It is implied that such masks had counterparts during earlier eras, though very few ancient examples have survived within the archaeological record.

Yup'ik masks are fragile, colorful creations, and thousands have been brought out of the Arctic since the nineteenth century. They show complex symbolism, which is seldom understood by their new owners. Among the fifteen that were chosen for this exhibition, there are several whose history and meaning are known and have been published. One is a muskrat mask from the Kuskokwim River region of Alaska, which was documented by Adam H. Twitchell (Carpenter 2005: p.60). Much more bizarre examples inspired artists of the Surrealist movement, who saw their distorted and split visages as expressions of an inner mind, or subconscious. Whether Yup'ik masks are here regarded as ethnological "documents" or primal art forms, they cannot fail to make a deep impression.