The Mask Stripped Bare by its Curators: The Work of Hybridity in the Twenty-First Century

This paper addresses the new hybridities that are emerging as 20th century installation paradigms of art and artifact are re-deployed in 21st century-museum installations of non-Western art. After more than two decades of sustained deconstruction and critique, the resurgent vitality of these modernist representational tropes can seem startling both to art historians and to anthropologists. Many scholars in both disciplines have come to view these paradigms as themselves artifacts of a modernist museology that has been superceded by more socially embedded and processual approaches to interpretation.As a point of departure for my discussion, I invoke the insights into industrialization, commoditization, purification, and voyeuristic pleasure advanced by Marcel Duchamp in his The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass) of 1915-23. His critique, in conjunction with later art historical and anthropological theorizations offered by Janet Wolff and Igor Kopytoff, provides useful tools for understanding and problematizing the continuing impulse to ‘strip bare’ non-Western museum objects. I argue that in the 21st century both art historians and anthropologists must develop ethically informed practices that can respond to the global environmental, social, and political convulsions that threaten members of both Western and non-Western societies. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s notion of the ‘imbroglio,’ I urge the necessity of incorporating an awareness of hybridity and networks of interconnection into museum representation. As an example of what such hybrid installations might look like, I discuss a recent exhibition of Chewa masks at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology.

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