Tribal Modern

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Miriam Cooke. Tribal Modern

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Tribal Modern

Branding New Nations in

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Figure 1.Tribes, camels, and skyscrapers.

This statement calls for elaboration. Let’s turn briefly to the December 1984 New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition entitled “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.”4 A spectacular display of non-Western artefacts alongside works of Western modernist art, the exhibition sparked a craze for all things primitive/tribal—the terms were used interchangeably during the 1980s and 1990s. Widely reviewed at the time, the exhibition attracted negative reviews from some scholars. In “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief: ‘Primitivism’ in Modern Art at the Museum of Modern Art” (Artforum, November 1984), Thomas McEvilly derided the show’s Eurocentric, colonialist, even racist “privileging of European art over the indigenously tribal arts . . . as sources of the visual forms and motifs that informed key European Modernist painters.” Particularly offensive to McEvilly was “the mainstream practice of exhibiting and discussing non-Western production without naming the artists or dating their arts.” Tribal art became mere “footnotes to Modernist production.”5

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