Magazines - Tribal Art Spring 2009

By Bérénice Geoffroy-Schneiter

Introduction
Historic. Incredibly liberating. Audacious. On the day of its official opening last January 24, museum curators, dealers, critics, and collectors alike could not find enough praise to describe the electrically charged and provocative confrontation between African and Oceanic tribal art and masterpieces of Western art at the Beyeler Foundation near Basel, Switzerland. Within the context of a spare and fluid presentation style that plays on the transparency of the display cases and immaculate empty spaces, the installation, energetically orchestrated by curator Oliver Wick, loudly proclaims a subjective, audacious, and elated perspective. Gone are the literal comparisons between a cubist canvas by Braque or Picasso and an African mask, or the link—claimed or imagined—between an Eskimo work and a Miro. Far from reiterating the theses of the memorable William Rubin exhibition on the genesis of modern art (the 1984 Primitivism in 20th Century Art at New York’s MoMA), the exhibition at the Beyeler, which includes loan material that augments the collection of modern and tribal works assembled by Hildy and Ernst Beyeler, instead relies upon a contrasting series of aesthetic shocks and visual hiatuses. The experience is one of being constantly on edge, while alternately engendering admiration or incomprehension. Either way, this ephemeral installation has the immense merit of inverting the relationships of power between tribal art and modern art, and—finally—to realign how each is seen.