Clémentine Deliss E-Book

Clémentine Deliss

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Hatje Cantz Text
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 190

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

For quite some time now, ethnographic museums in Europe have been compelled to legitimate themselves. Their exhibition-making has become a topic of discussion, as has the contentious history of their collections, which have come about through colonial appropriation. Clearly, this cannot continue. That the situation can be different is something that Clémentine Deliss explores in her current publication. She offers an intriguing mix of autobiographically-informed novel and conceptual thesis on contemporary art and anthropology. Reflections on her own work while she was Director of Frankfurt's Weltkulturen Museum (Museum of World Cultures) are interwoven with the explorations of influential filmmakers, artists and writers. She introduces the Metabolic Museum as an interventionist laboratory for remediating ethnographic collections for future generations.  CLÉMENTINE DELISS has achieved international renown as a curator, cultural historian and publisher of artist's books. In her role as Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, as a curator, and as a professor and researcher at eminent institutes and academies, she focuses on transdisciplinary and transcultural exchanges. She is Associate Curator of KW Berlin and Guest Professor at the Academy of Arts, Hamburg.

Leseprobe

The Metabolic Museum

Clémentine Deliss

Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial.

Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna,” 1966

Colophon

Managing editor

Lena Kiessler

Project management

Anja Tschörtner

Copyediting

Kimberly Bradley

Production

Vinzenz Geppert

© 2020 Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin, and the author

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Co-produced with KW Institute for Contemporary Art      

isbn 978-3-7757-4780-6 (Print)

isbn 978-3-7757-4801-8 (eBook)

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Manifesto for the Post-Ethnographic Museum

Walking Through

Artists and Anthropologists

Blind Spots

Spatial Taxonomies

The Archival Underbelly

First Guests

Laboratories and Workshops

Agency and Collections

Models of Inquiry

Experiments in Transgression

The Consequences of Remediation

A Museum in Reverse

The Lure of Objects

Vital Relationships

Models of a Museum-University

Manifesto for Rights of Access to Colonial Collections Sequestered in Western Europe

Notes

Colophon

Prologue

A few years back, some close friends encouraged me to apply for the directorship of an ethnographic museum in Germany. At first, I was cautious. I had been working independently as a curator and publisher for more than twenty years, traveling from city to city to set up new projects with artists, and I was keen to retain my autonomy. At the same time, I needed to settle down and transfer my experience onto an environment I could qualify with my own model. I was selected for the job and moved to Frankfurt, where I lived for five years. This is the narrative of my endeavor to transform the modus operandi of a contentious genre of European museum and develop a post-ethnographic institution.

Sometimes renamed museum of world cultures, the ethnographic museum is the most extreme rendition of a cultural institution that retains “colonial presence” even today.1 While I focus on the crisis of this particular museum, I hope to address other types of venue that hold collections and recognize the necessity to rethink their constitution in the twenty-first century. If museums have to be pioneering and fight against routine, habit, and conservatism, what model of critical and reflexive methodology can be deployed on existing, forgotten, soiled, or non-restituted collections?

The subjective, dialogical activity undertaken in collaboration with artists, designers, writers, anthropologists, and lawyers at the Weltkulturen Museum between 2010 and 2015 consolidated the modus operandi of my earlier transdisciplinary curatorial practice. In Frankfurt, I sought to generate movement within the museum’s institutional structure, affecting how we worked and where the priorities lay for a museum, both internally and toward the public. Located in three nineteenth-century villas, our domestic research centered on the tens of thousands of artifacts and the vast photographic archives housed within the museum.

This book was written in great part while I was a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin. Practically airlifted out of Frankfurt, I was given a room of my own, safeguarded from inquisitive journalists, and encouraged to write up this experience as if it had been my own fieldwork in the museum. With the help of my notebooks, I was able to reconstruct the logic of each resolution that I took on a day-to-day basis until that day in April 2015 when the city of Frankfurt unfairly dismissed me.

I am grateful to the many friends, colleagues, and allies who supported me both during and after my time at the museum. In particular, I would like to thank Michael Oppitz most warmly for having faith in my approach and for accompanying me when my professional world fell apart; Paul Rabinow for his friendship since the mid-eighties when we were both in Paris, his guidance from afar, and his incisive and inspiring work around the concept of remediation. From the perspective of art practice, I thank all the artists and writers who trusted me as a curator, keen as I was to divert them from any banal orthodoxy of institutional practice by drawing them into unforeseeable situations and encouraging conceptual work with these sensitive and vital collections. In particular, I would like to highlight the stimulating and inspired collaborations that took place in the museum with Buki Akib, A Kind of Guise, Marie Angeletti, Farzanah Badsha, Benedikte Bjerre, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Peggy Buth, CassettePlaya, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Sunah Choi, Hamish Clayton, Clegg & Guttmann, Minerva Cuevas, Mathis Esterhazy, Patricia Falguières, Heather Galbraith, Bryce Galloway, Gabriel Gbadamosi, Matthias Görlich, Werner Herzog, Pramod Kumar KG, David Lau, Armin Linke, Antje Majewski, Tom McCarthy, Tina Makereti, Markus Miessen, Shane Munro, Gabi Ngcobo, Otobong Nkanga, Peter Osborne, PAM (Perks and Mini), Francis Pesamino, Simon Popper, Ciraj Rassool, Olivier Richon, El Hadji Sy, Syafiatudina, Luke Willis Thompson, David Weber-Krebs, and the many art students of the Städelschule who exhibited in the Weltkulturen Labor’s Green Room.

Lothar Baumgarten, James Clifford, Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs, Peter Pakesch, Dan Peterman, Issa Samb, Teimaz Shahverdi, Sebastian Schellhaas, and Richard Sennett were trusted interlocutors who accompanied me while I tried to fine-tune new relations between museum collections and contemporary meanings. Finally, I would like to show my respect to the many friends in Frankfurt who helped me through various phases of this journey, in particular Ann Anders, Rüdiger Carl, Konstanze Crüwell, Jutta Ebeling, Uwe Fischer, Susanne Gaensheimer, Bärbel Grässlin, Tamara Grčić, Raphael Gross, Wolfgang Günzel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Phyllis Kiehl, David Hofferbert, Michael Hofferbert, Stefan Mumme, Yvette Mutumba, Alexandra Papadopoulou and very Frankfurt, Philippe Pirotte, Tobias Rehberger, and Bernd Vossmerbäumer.

Manifesto for the Post-Ethnographic Museum

Frankfurt/New York, October 2013

Anomalous and anachronistic:

It’s about working with a collection

that belongs to another time

that belongs to other people

that is deeply connected to the histories

of European colonialism and trade

that is contested and will continue to be contested

whose potential for referentiality is far from expended

whose restitution is undeniable.

Domestic research:

It’s about working with existing architecture not against it

moving between apartments, studios, archives, and labs

finding structural solutions for the installation of artifacts

repositioning collections both conceptually and physically.

It’s about rethinking possibilities

of research inside a museum

through self-critical and recursive inquiry

slow, prone to change, not always visible

reintroducing a laboratory into the practice of a museum

developing new assemblages based on historical collections

building a workshop for the production of prototypes

constructing an exhibition out of this continuing procedure.

Remediation over time:

It’s about daring to change

the anthropological classification of the collection

suspending the logos of ethnos

and earlier organizing principles:

region, religion, ethnic group, culture, society, and function

developing alternative metaphors through dialogical research

healing a deficient situation

shifting medium, enabling interpretation.

Curating neighborhoods:

It’s about inviting artists, designers,

lawyers, writers, historians,

and anthropologists in residence

those who connect to the original source of the collection

those who come from elsewhere

rubbing shoulders through their engagement with the collection.

It’s about making rooms available to visitors

encouraging the public to usurp the museum

to shelter in it, study, and meet

taking in exhibits through the corner of one’s eye

fully deploying the educational brief of the museum

checking the open access digital studio.

The Museum-University:

It’s unequivocally collection-centered

working outward from actual exhibits

deconstructing earlier archives

and histories of ethnographic museums

introducing external impulses,

an epistemological generalism

a democratic intellect

a non-standardized education

as independent as possible

providing a new platform for professional development

connecting the next generation of global cultural protagonists

from curatorial studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies,

contemporary art, design, performance, art history, anthropology,

creative writing, law, ecology, mathematics, and more,

breaking open the disciplines of the past and their collections.

Walking Through

In the period leading to my move to Frankfurt, I walked through as many ethnographic museums in Europe as I could. I wanted to witness their status in contemporary civil society, understand the contradictions evoked by their outdated modes of display, and learn more about the power structures behind the inordinate mass of artifacts held under lock and key. I began by focusing on the immediate constituents of the museum experience. I sought to match the body of the visitor with the corpus of the collection and the broader metabolism of the museum. I wondered in what manner members of the public move through an exhibition. How long do they engage with the displayed artifacts? What is the relationship between seeing, feeling, and thinking? Are they provided with a chair purposefully placed in front of a vitrine for lengthier contemplation? Or do they stand upright as if facing a screen, ready to swipe on, and rarely moving closer or bending down to peer at the underside of an exhibit? At the British Museum, a guard told me of the fainting fits and panic attacks he witnessed, regularly forcing him to give up his chair. This was the public’s biggest complaint: that only one small bench was available to sit on in a room with an expansive exhibition.

The museum as a spatial configuration of inhabited meanings adapts only very gradually to change. Timing is a curatorial unit, place is clearly demarcated, artworks are hung according to norms, lighting and air humidity are coordinated with conservation requirements. Visitors readily accept this monitoring environment, which anchors and regulates their perception. If a video is projected, there may be the opportunity to lie on a carpeted floor, slump on a mattress, or find a stool to sit on. Hours can be spent in this way because new media are recognized as requiring a longer period of intake than a painting, photograph, sculpture, or set of artifacts. Robert Harbison noted in 1977, at a time when video works began entering the museum, that the “immersion in the object that stops time is achieved by treating it as an existence to be lived in rather than something to be stopped in front of or looked at, and one can almost tell from people’s movements whether they have entered a painting or are only staring at it.”2

The bias against the body of the spectator dates back to the European Renaissance, when architects and designers saw the gallery as a “fixed theater of spectatorship” intended “to regulate strictly the viewer’s range of motion and object of focus.”3 As museum spaces gradually evolved over the course of the eighteenth century from private house museums into public institutions, those “unruly social bodies” who once engaged in “flirting, playing, eating, drinking, talking, laughing, and napping” on ottomans, benches, or at tables, were gradually evicted.4 By the early twentieth century, the curatorial trope became one of “disembodied opticality,” whereby seating no longer featured beyond a short stop-off point along the scenographic route through the museum. Indeed, with the advent of the white cube environment, the fear of a “reembodiment of the spectator” works to rid rooms entirely of any means of repose or study, leaving only banal exit signs to indicate the “intrusive” presence of human biology.5 As Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders explain, “art’s visual consumption owes much to the flow-management philosophy of department stores, which rarely provides seating in the main shopping areas. A seated patron, after all, is not likely to be a consuming patron; consumer culture requires bodies on the move, not bodies in repose. Simply put, the bench is anathema to the capitalist space of the modern museum.”6

Today, the museum—now hygienist—is obsessed with its own dirty data, cleansing and disinfecting its contaminated past, particularly the bloody residue attached to the traumatic memories of slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust embodied in its collections with their absent proof of legitimate provenance. Collections have become the toxic witnesses to genocidal practices.7 Forms of human engineering in museums accelerate and support the necropolitical constitution evoked by Paul B. Preciado when he speaks of the museum becoming “a semiotic-social corporation where immaterial goods are produced and commercialized.”8 “What bodies can the museum institution legitimate?” he asks. Whatever they are—national histories or artworks—they become pawns or foot soldiers in the battle for sovereignty. The museum, writes Preciado, “is a factory of representation” that supports the “social prostheses of the royal body on which its sovereignty is built and negotiated.”9 Identifying Preciado‘s “somato- political” dimensions of the museum leads back to the corpus of the museum and its sequestered collections. Here organs generate meanings under excessive structures of containment, built from that which Ann L. Stoler so succinctly defines as “imperial duress” that is, the effects of “pressure exerted, a troubled condition borne in the body, a force exercised on muscles and mind.”10 For Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, ethnographic objects are the “bearers of a reserve of the imagination as well as the material manifestation of forms of knowledge (savoirs). Fishing nets that encode algorithms from fractals to anthropomorphic statues in passing by amulet-filled vests: the work of decoding the various forms of knowledge they conceal as well as the comprehension of the epistemes that have produced them still remains largely a work to be done.… It is indeed a question of re-activating a concealed memory.…”11

Yet is this dialogue possible when the magnitude of artifacts, including their referentiality to colonial collecting practices, is quite literally impounded underground? Held in inaccessible storage units, belongings acquired, looted, or wrenched away in the name of science, trade, or diplomatic exchange are sedated and safeguarded through their juridical, carceral inscription within the annals of an other’s institution. In the never-ending ethnographic present, anthropologists, both then and now, continue to reflect the image of the slave onto their interlocutors from other cultures, erasing the individual identities and intellectual property rights of the artists, designers, and engineers whose works they acquired or looted.

Today we are faced with the “incalculability” of the act of restitution.12 As a result, the public exhibition with its tightly coordinated displays actually works to tame the tension inherent in these sealed-off storage spaces, as if the custodians were dealing with a feral, uncontrollable energy yet to be exploited. How else can one explain the elaborate retention strategies that work to prevent access to the contents of these depots? Such vast inaccessible holdings of ethnographica can be read as multiplex organizations of material ingenuity waiting to be re-encoded within today’s contexts, needs, and realities. The constellation of artifacts in a collection, each with its inevitably creolized imprimatur, rejoins the condition of today’s visitor who searches among numerous iterations of difference for that singular sensation of conceptual intimacy. As such, the public needs to experience exhibitions as multiperspectival reflections on the museum itself, its disputed collection, and its position within European history. On June 2, 2010, I wrote, “How can we know the intentionality behind an object without named and documented authorship? Can we empower the new observer to create an additional and nonexclusive interpretation? We don’t want a cathedral. We aren’t representing foreign policy. We can dare to articulate the possibility for confusion.”

At the interview for the job, I laid down my concept. It was still in development, but the key issues were clear to me. The new model for the museum would be the house itself, a renewal of a domestic environment of repose and reflection, of living, dialoguing, researching, and production in contrast to a corporate site of consumerist culture. I would introduce a laboratory into the museum, and initiate new inquiry along with international artists, writers, photographers, filmmakers, and lawyers, who would live and work quite literally in the museum. The door would be open to anthropologists, too, but the invitation was directed mainly toward outside disciplines and practices. Every selected object would generate printed matter referencing both historical records and new interpretations. By then I knew that I wanted students to work in the museum, we would set up an evening school, and there would be fellows with long-term affiliations.

Over the course of the interview, I was asked a rota of questions. Could I develop a concept for a new building and permanent display; what did I think of the current exhibition on the Sepik; how could I manage crises among personnel; and what would I do to make the museum more attractive? That day, I visited the museum in preparation for the interview and jotted the following notes:

Too much information on the walls and all in German; clutter hidden behind cardboard structures that act as decoration; blue linoleum laid onto the original wooden parquet flooring; no authentic photographs, only reproductions; stuffed animals presented alongside ethnographic artifacts; simulated installations that pretend to represent anthropologists at work; rubber plants dotted in different parts of the exhibition presumably to evoke a tropical atmosphere. The museum has gone to seed.

I began to recognize the museum as a complex body with a severely ailing metabolism, afflicted organs, and blocked channels of circulation. To transform this condition would require careful nurturing, but also radical operations. It was Issa Samb, the late Senegalese philosopher and founding member of the Laboratoire Agit-Art who provided me with essential guidelines for the task:

To work in the ethnographic museum, you have to begin with an inversion. You need to exhume the objects and place them at the forefront again. This will constitute the first level of analysis, the first reading. Then walk through the interior of the museum. Don’t start to classify anything yet. Just walk, look, and name the directors who preceded you and recognise their bias. By criticising their bias, you will begin your work. Today, every person who directs an ethnographic museum will need to proceed in this manner in order to help ethnography advance quietly towards its status as a science. In the world today, meanings for such sciences need to be redrawn, or it will always be the same. So, leave traces, mark your presence. It’s only in this way that all these objects will supersede their aesthetic status and finally retrieve their human dimension. You will be able to socialize each object that you find and, in doing so, you’ll restore life to them. No object in a museum is a useless object. Each one can elucidate proto-history and sociology. In reading them, one acquires a facility to understand the present. If you come across a prototype, isolate it straight away and give it a new number below the initial one. Prototypes change. Ethnographic museums confused culture with civilisation, human beings with their objects. Every person has a culture. Civilisation is a fabrication. You will need to make corrections here, corrections to notions of modernity and classification. We need a critique of classification because classification contains the germ of racism.13

Artists and Anthropologists

I had visited the ethnographic museum in Frankfurt ten years earlier in the autumn of 1999 as the newly appointed guest professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. On one occasion, the dean of the art school, Kasper König, took me to meet the director of Frankfurt’s department of culture. They both knew of my background in cultural anthropology and wanted me to take on the vacant directorship of the ethnographic museum. At this first meeting, I declined. It felt anathema to the excitement of teaching art students. A couple of months later, the director invited me back to his office. Again, I refused. The main reason for not accepting the offer was informed by my studies of anthropology in the mid-eighties. At that time, the subject of analysis was not the foreign culture and its artifacts so much as the figure of the ethnographer. Anthropology, the “maculate,”14 soiled science, could be deconstructed by decoding the tropes employed to “write culture.”15 Neighboring literary criticism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis, this radical strain of semantic anthropology was barely engaged in defusing the charged condition of its founding institution, the colonial museum and with it, the hundreds of thousands of confiscated artifacts. Studying anthropology and art practice in Vienna in the early eighties, I read everything I could that was brought out by German publishers such as Syndikat, Suhrkamp, or the Qumran Verlag. I discovered texts by ethno-psychoanalysts Paul Parin, Fritz Morgenthaler, and Mario Erdheim, essays by transgressive thinkers like Hubert Fichte, the work of Michael Oppitz and Fritz Kramer, alongside the more mystically oriented research of Hans Peter Duerr. This theoretical material played a role in the German-speaking art world of the time. As art students we read anthropology because there was little else. There were no formalized courses in curatorial studies and no transcultural academies; nothing but a relatively conservative art history, which bore little relation to the heteroclite practices of Actionism, Concept Art, and performance.

Key to this interdisciplinary crossover was a text written in the seventies by American artist Joseph Kosuth titled “The Artist as Anthropologist.”16 In a sequence of numbered paragraphs, Kosuth cites economist Michael Polanyi, philosopher Martin Jay, sociologist Max Weber, and anthropologists Stanley Diamond, Bob Scholte, and Edward Sapir, and draws a map of contextual adjacency with which he aims to destabilize the narratives of Western modernism and scientism as the defining references in contemporary art. He argues for an “anthropologized art,” “an art manifested in praxis,” an “engaged” activity founded on “cultural fluency” whose criticality succeeds because it “depicts while it alters society.”17 Kosuth’s article—with its typically male figureheads—was more than merely a reading list for emerging artists. His intellectual stance corresponded with the aftermath of the first Independence period in sixties Africa, emancipatory movements in the US, the global student demonstrations of 1968, and the fallout of the Vietnam War. The relationship between contemporary art and cultural anthropology was built upon the articulation of linguistic and contextual propositions that might activate a recursive adjustment to ways of understanding and representing art itself.18

As a doctoral student in anthropology I was required to do fieldwork, so in 1986 I moved to Paris to investigate the storage rooms, archives, and ephemera of the Musée de l’Homme. I wanted to establish a link between those concentrates of Concept Art and Actionism that I had witnessed in Vienna as a young art student and the edginess and subversion that I detected within certain strains of twentieth-century anthropology. I named this connection eroticism, less with reference to gender studies or sexuality, but as a philosophical drive that motored both the ideational extremes of artistic research and various experiments in ethnographic inquiry. One afternoon at the Musée de l’Homme, I came across the incomplete collection of the dissident Surrealist periodical Documents (1929–31) edited by Georges Bataille and Carl Einstein. Here I recognized the prelusive moment, the uncertain and unresolved phase in creative practice, and its ability to activate entry points beyond explanatory or contextual forms of information. I decided to juxtapose the written and visual assemblages in Documents with the collecting activities of the team of French anthropologists who crossed Africa between 1931 and 1933 on the notorious Mission Dakar–Djibouti, amassing more than 3,500 objects for the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris.