Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2010

By Catherine Elliott Weinberg who holds an MA from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and is a London-based arts freelancer.

Introduction
On May 1, 2009, the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University reopened to the public after ten months and some £1.5 million worth of refurbishment. What perhaps is most striking is that, on the surface, not much seems to have changed. Entering the museum is akin to stepping into a time warp, so much does it look as though things have been left as they were since the museum first opened to the public in the late 1800s.
That it is still the Pitt Rivers Museum as it has long been known comes as a relief, especially to the many who regard this unique institution as an embodiment of the Victorian ethnographic museum, almost a “museum of museums.” In its crammed, dimly lit typological display, the objects are arranged by their function or manufacture rather than along the more usual chronological, geographical, or cultural lines. This both sets the museum apart and draws divided opinion. The installation harks back to the Renaissance Wunderkammer, the so-called “cabinet of curiosities,” a long outmoded way of displaying natural and “artificial” artifacts.