Photo by Martin Franken. © SMB, Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin

Unknown artist, adornment for the head and the neck, Brazil, Rigbatsa, 20th century. Macaw feathers and reeds, 26¼ x 18½ in.

October 2008 Field Guide

Firstenberg Curates California

Eugene Carchesio

Cinema Remixed and Reloaded

Dark Continents

Cildo Meireles's Dark Materials

Rivane Neuenschwander

Franz West

Open

Lois and Franziska Weinberger

Tadao Ando's Stone Hill Center

Le Futurisme a Paris

Nam June Paik Art Center

Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings

Franz Ackermann Painting: Now and Forever, Part II Dallas Cowboys Show Their Artsy Side Profile: Marcia Fortes+Alessandra d’Aloia Conversation with Dean Valentine Daniel Richter Dealers' Choice Berlin: Art Gallery Weekend with Ackermann & Wool

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The Caribbean poet and artist Derek Walcott has commented on the Northern perpetuation of a “sort of Graham Greene–ish fantasy of the tropics” in which the humid environs are simply too hot and languorous to produce anything of artistic merit. While this colonial attitude is outdated, its underlying biases still carry some currency in the postcolonial view that focuses on the economic stagnation of the tropics. This sprawling survey—organized by Berlin’s Goethe-Institut, the Ethnological Museum–Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and Museum of Asian Art—examines the lower hemisphere’s aesthetic production (and cultural construction by the North) in disparate ways, addressing the European projection of the tropics via works by contemporary artists from South America, Africa, and Asia, as well as through pieces by European and Northern American artists who explore the mythos attached to the region. The premodern—as exemplified by more than 200 artworks by mostly anonymous artists from present-day Ghana, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Samoa, Brazil, and Peru, among other nations—plays counterpoint to works by contemporary artists like Franz Ackermann, Pilar Albarracín, Daspu, and Fiona Tan. Coming two decades after the influential Pompidou exhibition “Les Magiciens de la Terre,” which itself claimed to provide a counterpoint to colonialist-tinged shows of “primitive” art from the tropics, this Berlin exhibition suggests that by removing modernism—and its roots in the so-called primitive—from the mix, native tropical work can be assessed on its own terms, not merely as the source of a grander art from the North, nor as an exemplification of the suffering and political malaise of the South.

"The Tropics: Views From the Middle of the Globe" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.