[MSN] Musée du Quai Branly: A Heart of Darkness in the City of Light.

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

July 2, 2006
A Heart of Darkness in the City of Light 
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

PARIS — The other day Stéphane Martin, president of the new Musée du Quai
Branly, was in his wedge-shape office with the picture window overlooking
the Seine. Dapper, charming, with the weary politeness of a busy executive
who has better things to do, he fetched the latest salvo against his
institution, a book by Bernard Dupaigne, and casually tossed it across the
table. 

The most ambitious museum to open in Paris in 20 years, dedicated to
non-European cultures, Quai Branly provoked a ruckus from the instant
President Jacques Chirac came up with the idea for it more than a decade
ago. It was his monument to French multiculturalism and, perhaps, to
himself. 

Two beloved Paris institutions had to be dismantled, the Musée des Arts
Africains et Océaniens and the ethnographic department of the Musée de
l'Homme, France's sublime natural history museum. Anthropologists, not to
mention more than a few people who loved going to those museums, were
furious. The familiar aesthetics-versus-ethnology question came up: Will
religious, ceremonial and practical objects, never intended as art in the
modern, Western sense, be showcased like baubles, with no context? 

Given the current political climate, Quai Branly's eventual opening, after
years of delay, seemed almost as if it had been scientifically calculated to
ignite the maximum debate.

I couldn't tell whether Mr. Martin was being helpful or if he actually
enjoyed the fuss. What did he think of his museum? I asked. He thought it
was a "neutral environment" with "no aesthetic or philosophical line." I
thought he was kidding. 

He wasn't. If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they
might have come up with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a
spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the objects in it chosen and
arranged with hardly any discernible logic, the place is briefly thrilling,
as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded. Colonialism of a bygone era
is replaced by a whole new French brand of condescension. 

The dismay was obvious when I met museum directors, curators,
anthropologists and art historians at a conference in Quai Branly, just
before the museum's opening. For about an hour everyone on a panel talked
about the need for better, more flexible museums, which seemed to me an
obvious euphemism for the problem here, which nobody mentioned — until a
scholar, Christian Feest, smiled, raised his eyebrows and tilted his head
slightly. 

He couldn't help, he said, pointing out the elephant in the room: How would
Quai Branly overcome the obstacle of its own design? That shifted the
atmosphere, as if tension had been released, and during the break I
intercepted several African and American curators and a French art historian
who all shook their heads and confided, as if revealing a private
embarrassment, that Quai Branly was a missed opportunity and an inexplicable
enterprise. An Australian architecture critic then sidled over and nodded
toward Jean Nouvel, the museum's architect, who had been mobbed the day
before at the press opening. Now he was standing alone. Everyone was passing
him by on the way to hors d'oeuvres. 

The place simply makes no sense. Old, new, good, bad are all jumbled
together without much reason or explanation, save for visual theatrics. Quai
Branly's curator of Asian collections, Christine Hemmet, who was furious
about the dismantling of the Musée de l'Homme, took me to find a Vietnamese
scarecrow, circa 1970's, on the back of which was painted an American B-52
dropping bombs. She said she had wanted to install a mirror in the display
case, behind the work, so the scarecrow's back would be visible. But she was
told it would spoil the mise-en-scène.

Think of the museum as a kind of ghetto for the "other," a word Mr. Chirac
has taken to using: an enormous, rambling, crepuscular cavern that tries to
evoke a journey into the jungle, downriver, where suddenly scary masks or
totem poles loom out of the darkness and everything is meant to be foreign
and exotic. The Crayola-colored facade and its garden set the stage for this
passage from civilization. 

After a couple of circuits around the galleries my heart sank. I also
started to feel something else: that the debate has missed the point. The
dichotomy between ethnology and aesthetics is too simple. It's not possible
to draw a line between form and function, which are inseparably mixed in
ways that constantly shift.


Museums, whether they call themselves art museums or not — and Quai Branly
at least rejected loaded words like primitive or art for its title —
classify what they show to give objects particular meanings, to fix their
relationships to viewers. If you're in the Metropolitan Museum, you know
that an Italian altarpiece or an African mask is supposed to be visually
striking, beautiful even. If the same objects are across Central Park at the
American Museum of Natural History, they illustrate points about religion or
ritual or handicraft or materials. 

This doesn't mean that the artists or artisans who made altarpieces and
masks weren't aiming for something aesthetically potent or pleasing, even if
potency (and beauty) meant one thing to a Renaissance Italian, another to a
Dogon craftsman, and it means yet another to an Aboriginal artist who comes
to Paris to paint Quai Branly's gift shop.

Paintings and other objects, like people, have careers, lives. These objects
have meanings to those who brought them into the world, other meanings to
those who worked with or used them, yet others to historians who try to
explain them, to curators who organize exhibitions around them. They exist
in as many different forms as the number of people who happen to come across
them. Objects are not static; they are the accumulation of all their
meanings.

Claims of cultural patrimony and calls for the repatriation of antiquities
(Italians wanting back ancient art dug up in Italy, Greeks wanting back
Greek art) stem from nationalist politics and legal disputes, but they're
fundamentally about who gets to assign meaning. A British anthropologist on
the panel at Quai Branly mentioned a show of Polynesian art and religion in
England. He said the question had arisen, should modern-day Polynesians have
say over the show's content? 

But which Polynesians? The political activists who might want their idols
returned? The religious fundamentalist who might want them burned? They're
both native voices. Which gets authority over what the artifacts mean? 

John Mack, the British professor who moderated the panel, added that good
museums "destabilize the idea of a singular meaning," whether it's "beauty"
or "ritual." The implication was that they shouldn't do what Quai Branly has
done, which is for the museum to make itself the meaning of everything in
it. 

"Everything in a museum gets beautiful," Mr. Martin told me. "The priests of
contextualization" — he was talking about those people who think
Western-style aesthetic appreciation is another form of colonialism,
obscuring history and ethnography — "are poor museographers." That was
right. Endless wall texts, films and digital gizmos either bore visitors to
tears or treat them like idiots with short attention spans.

But context is necessary at places like Quai Branly — objects need to be
explained somehow — so in the end it all comes down to tact, which is the
measure of a museum's judgment.

At Quai Branly, half the time it was impossible for me to find out what an
object was. Some of the labels weren't finished yet, but the ones there were
hard to find, obscure or comically vague. The Asian displays are "based on
geographical and cultural sequences," one label said, whatever that meant.
Computer touch-screens, embedded into odd leather-covered pods with benches,
are often far away from the objects (lest they disturb the architectural
effect). I tried to learn more about a bunch of kachina dolls, some 19th
century, some mid-20th, one Zuni, the rest Hopi. (I picked up that much only
because a friend identified them for me; there was no label.) But no luck.
Everything about the place gradually discouraged the desire to find out
more. 

The legacy of Duchamp has turned everything in a museum into a readymade.
It's no longer possible to look at a Yoruba voodoo object as purely
functional, rather than also (perhaps) terrific looking, or to see a
Michelangelo as merely beautiful, rather than also as a product of a moment,
a society, a religious tradition. Even if it were possible, it would be
terribly unfashionable. 

The day after we spoke, I spotted Mr. Martin at the back of a photograph on
the front page of The International Herald Tribune. In it Mr. Chirac and
Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, both tall and
snappy in blue serge suits, were greeting Chief Laukalbi from Vanuatu and
his nephew, Jerry Napat, shirtless in straw skirts. Mr. Chirac, leaning
down, looked as if he was pointing at the chief, or maybe he was shaking his
finger. His posture was exactly the top-down one that the museum's galleries
take. 

Georges Pompidou had his center. François Mitterrand left behind I. M. Pei's
pyramid, the Bastille Opera and the new National Library. So Mr. Chirac's
grand projet is this $300 million megamuseum-cum-cultural-center, aspiring,
as he put it during the museum's inauguration, to the notion that "there is
no hierarchy among the arts just as there is no hierarchy among peoples." 

No hierarchy, except that at the Pompidou you find Western artists like
Picasso and Pollock; at Branly, it's Eskimos, Cameroonians and Moroccans. No
hierarchy, but no commonality either. Separate but equal. What links
Vietnamese textiles with contemporary Aboriginal paintings with
pre-Columbian pottery with Sioux warrior tunics with Huron wampum? Only the
legacy of colonialism and the historical quirks of French museum collecting,
which Quai Branly's design blithely plays for entertainment. 

Mr. Nouvel says he used the conceit of a "sacred wood," where people would
discover objects "liberated from Western architectural references such as
barriers, showcases, railings." A spiral ramp, light and open, segues into a
darkened tunnel that delivers visitors to a realm where the walls are black,
the floors red, and everything's very, very dark, except the objects,
installed by global region willy-nilly, under spotlights. Windows are
scrimmed with photographs of trees to evoke the underbrush. A pathway (Mr.
Nouvel calls it the "river") meanders between curvy leather walls, a motif
continued in those leather-clad pods with the touch-screens and the benches.
He calls this motif the "snake." 

Jean-Pierre Mohen, the director of collections, has explained that the
jungle theme is meant to seem mysterious and chaotic, but, like the jungle,
to slowly reveal its logic, symbolizing the complexity of non-European
societies that are closer to nature than we are. It is the old noble-savage
argument. Heart of darkness in the city of light. Whatever. The atmosphere
is like a discothèque at 10 a.m.

The critic Walter Benjamin, who remarked that "there is no document of
civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism," said he
could not "contemplate without horror" the works we call "cultural
treasures."

That was going too far. Cultural treasures are souvenirs of conquest but
they are also occasionally souvenirs of exchange. Souvenirs are objects
whose value derives from the narratives we assign them, stories we tell
ourselves and others to explain where they came from and why they matter to
us.

Quai Branly's story is the spectacle of its own environment. Spectacle
becomes its attraction. I have no doubt that, as an attraction, it will be
very popular. The museum is expecting more than a million visitors annually.


But I stopped into the Louvre after the conference. Several years ago Mr.
Chirac overruled objections from Louvre officials that their museum was for
European art, not a universal museum, and he ordered the Louvre's Pavillon
des Sessions turned over to 100 historic works of African, Asian, Oceanic
and American art. They were installed in a setting of pure aesthetic bliss. 

The galleries, nearly empty the day I went, are spare, serene and
beautifully lighted, enshrining each object behind almost-invisible sheets
of glass. Every work is given the dignity of its own space, which seemed to
me a metaphor for how to treat all civilizations. There were amazing Eskimo
masks and Cameroonian and Nigerian maternity figures, nothing quite like
what I'd recalled at Quai Branly. I lingered over a 19th-century Zulu spoon
from South Africa, slender, abstracted into the shape of a woman, its rim
blackened by fire, with an arched neck and graceful little cones and
half-circles for breasts and buttocks. An 18th-century Mbembe sculpture,
from Nigeria, of a squatting man, hands on knees, gazing out with his chin
up, made me want to learn more. 

I discovered it was part of a drum made from a hollowed tree, according to
the large plasticized text panel that visitors are invited to pick up near
the entrance to the gallery and carry around. This drum had spiritual
powers, the text said, and would announce great events or warn villagers
when trouble was coming.

After I left the Louvre, I could picture nearly everything I had seen there,
but Quai Branly, except for the architecture, was a blur. The Pavillon,
prizing aesthetics above all, clearly isn't the only way to show things, but
it's true to its purpose, and it works. Quai Branly doesn't — if success
means something beyond novelty and theatrics. 

http://www.nytimes.com/