[MSN] Opening Musee Du Quai Branly is likely to be greeted with less unadulterated glee in some African countries.

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Art: Musee Du Quai Branly 

Business Day (Johannesburg) 
NEWS
June 12, 2006 
Posted to the web June 12, 2006 

By Alex Dodd
Johannesburg 

LISTED as an absolute must-do on the European happenings circuit, this
month's opening of MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY in Paris is likely to be greeted
with less unadulterated glee this side of the equator, where postcolonial
temperatures tend to run a lot hotter. 

The museum, to be opened formally by French President Jacques Chirac on June
20, has been built to house 300000 artefacts from Africa, Asia, Oceania and
the Americas. Of these, 429 pieces originate from SA. 

Being hailed as a masterpiece, the building is designed by leading French
architect Jean Nouvel to occupy a Unesco world heritage site on the banks of
the Seine, near the Eiffel Tower. 

"Not since the Pompidou Centre in 1997 has Paris had such a large, new,
modern museum," beams Sophy Roberts in the Financial Times glossy How to
Spend It. Clearly, How to Spend It is not the correct platform for the
voicing of postcolonial discontent, but there are likely to be some murmurs,
if not loud indignant cries, of "return the pillaged colonial loot" from
this less polite, more wounded hemisphere. 

"Wounded" is perhaps too polite a word. Embittered might be a better way of
describing arts and culture department spokesman Sandile Memela's reaction
to the recent Picasso and Africa show at the Standard Bank Gallery, which
stirred up a hornet's nest of race sensitivity in relation to cultural
production. As that debate simmers down to a mild boil, along comes the
opening of Musée du Quai Branly to test the inclement global waters once
again. 

The new museum unites the collections of the National Museum of Arts from
Africa and Oceania with those of the Ethnological Laboratory of the Museum
of Mankind. The Musée de l'Homme is a much-contested institution in these
parts, having housed the remains of Saartjie Baartman, the Khoisan woman who
was exhibited as a curiosity in the salons of 19th-century Paris. Baartman's
remains were returned to her land of birth on May 3 2002, but up until 1974
her skeleton, preserved genitals and brain were on display in the museum. 

The world has come a long way since then and this museum is being launched
to "celebrate the universality of the human spirit through the diversity of
art and to encourage a new perspective, more respectful and more open to
sharing and to dialogue, to these cultures and these civilisations". The
official vocabulary has that tender texture of kid gloves about it. And
crucially so. The tinderbox of current Parisian street politics must have
contributed to the careful wording. 

The list of guests from SA seems less diplomatic. It's not that there's any
problem with who's on the list (William Kentridge, Jane Alexander, Marilyn
Martin, Breyten Breytenbach and Lindsay Hooper, curator of the African
collection at the South African Museum), but who's been left off it. That
not a single black person cracked the nod for an event as sensitive as this
one seems ill advised, to say the least. 

"The creation of the Musée du Quai Branly is the result of a political
desire to see justice rendered to non-European cultures," reads a statement
by Chirac, "to recognise the place their artistic expressions occupies in
our cultural heritage, and also to acknowledge the debt we owe to the
societies that produced them, as well as to their countries of origin, with
many of which France has especially close ties." 

At a press conference held in Johannesburg last week, French ambassador Jean
Félix-Paganon pointed out that Musée Quai Branly had followed a strict code
of ethics for acquisitions and that the curators regularly consulted the
"red list" on works originating from countries at war or experiencing
conflict. "Of course, these conventions have no retroactive effect," he
said. "But is the frieze of the Parthenon considered colonial loot? It would
be unreasonable to judge the past against the standards of today." 

Responding to concerns about the museum institutionalising difference, he
said museums were frequently specialised according to place and period.
"There is a museum of Asian art in Paris, Musée Guimet, and nobody says it
is racist. The spirit behind this museum is to treat the works as equal and
living, and not as artefacts or ethnographical testimony to a culture." 

The museum has been conceived of in a discursive, multifunctional spirit,
being at once a cultural centre, a research and teaching venue, a site for
live shows and a multimedia library. 

"Everything is controversial, particularly in SA," said the wise diplomat.
"There will probably be polemics, but it is good to have debates. When the
Eiffel Tower was built, it was considered an insult to good taste. Now it is
considered as the symbol of Paris." 

http://allafrica.com/