Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens at the Phillips Collection

Let me begin by saying that I've always loved Man Ray... his aesthetic, the mood, the suave and the surprise. And I can appreciate the Modernists' periodic obsession with "primitive" art for its effects on their formal abstraction, the increased knowledge and circulation of non-Western art and the coincidental recognition of living artists and performers of African descent in the US and Europe, bastions of whitewashing and paternalism, etc. Yet something remains askew - the Phillips underlined effectively the ethical shortcomings and dilemmas of Man Ray and the Modernists' patronage of African and non-Western art... whether intentionally or not. The fetichizing of the African body, from the buxom female to the male endowment was taken out the context of spiritual metaphor and into cultural ideals, as seen in Man Ray's series of Black celebrities posing with a contemporary Africanized female bust in positions of seduction and longing. The Phillips displayed the West African and Oceanic artifacts from the European collections of the 1920s and 30s, both in the Modernists' photographs, and in the flesh - well, wood - behind glass casings, with labels detailing their ethnographic origins and cultural uses. Alongside the sculptures and amulets were the Modernist perspectives and archives, labelled as artistic endeavors, their details explained in terms of aesthetics and artistic legacy. What wasn't addressed was the divide between these two perspectives, the ethnographic and the artistic. Without taking a stance, it was crucial for the exhibition to address the very crux of the Modernist mission - to see these works as art, as secular inspiration and creative beauty - not necessarily in the exotic, Orientalist sense or that of "low-culture" craft, but in terms of the politics of exhibiting themselves. The white patrons of African Art were shown among their collections, but little mention was made of the actual collecting practices, or how this African Art was extracted. The fetichization of the African work of art was indeed catalogued, with myriad forms of archiving by artists such as Man Ray himself for the European collectors, in European reviews and art newspapers... but the Phillips did nothing to dispel the ongoing politics of this fetichization, rendering the Modernist pedestals within their very own galleries.