These different display strategies were revised in the late 1980s, when the new context demanded a reconsideration of the still prevalent prejudices, recognizable in the concurrent exhibitions, Rooms with a View: The struggle between culture, content and the context of art (Longwood Arts Projects, 1987) We The People (Artists Space, 1987) and Art/Artifact (The Center for African Art, 1988).

Rather there were different agendas behind discursive and curatorial intentions, as can be seen in the North American, Soviet and French cases between the 1910s and 1940s. At the same time, the joint installation of modern and primitive art was not a homogenous practice with the same implications. However, if the average public was not prepared for the avant-garde, what kind of legitimacy could it bring to so called primitive art? Contrary to the reassuring vision of modern art framing non-western art, modern art’s frame was itself unstable, as noted by Constantin Brancusi and Marcel Duchamp, artists who imposed a deliberate indeterminacy in the public presentation of their works. The aestheticisation process was emphasized whenever they were displayed together with modern art or even staged as modern art.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many non-western artefacts underwent a reallocation from material culture to sculpture, from Natural History and Ethnographic museums to Fine Art collections, an operation made possible by the underlying colonialist ideology.

Boas primitive art