MUSEUMS AFTER MODERNITY

BY ROBERT HOULE

Modernity was developed and elaborated upon in strictly worldly and secular terms; it’s Judeo-Christian heritage articulated in terms of creation, sin, redemption and waiting for the Last Judgment. By the end of the 19th century Europe had experienced two revolutions: an industrial revolution and a political revolution. Under the banner of democracy, America and France became republics and by the beginning of the 20th century the West had endured two world wars. Paris, the artistic and cultural mecca, saw an exodus to New York. But the time had not yet come for the victory of modern art; American culture still opposed the avant-garde. The intellectual elite of New York turned to the analysis and use of myth as a way to move beyond the aesthetics, a mythology capable of taking the place of science, discredited after Hiroshima, thus enabling the modern artist to overcome his inability to create, leaving literature as far superior to science.

Today, in the wake of 9/11 and as we face an uncertain future caused by climate change and globalization, the West, after the last throes of colonialism, is in the midst of a new imperialism; intent on the expansion of Western capitalism rather than direct political domination, the United States is nevertheless underpinned by overwhelming military force, raising the spectre of perpetual war. It is an empire whose ideologies of freedom and democracy dominate world polities, changing the way we define a nation state to a postmodern state. And it is this postmodernity that lies at the centre of contemporary intellectual debate in the West; there is a sense that its ways of seeing, knowing and representing have irreversibly altered in recent times. But this change of appearance does not signal a permanent shift in the course of culture and society. The reification of differences between the aesthetic and the anthropological in terms of the classification of objects and the establishment of their relative value continues to remain an issue. The discourse is still very much a work in progress. Although the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition in 1941 entitled “Indian Art of the United States” followed by “Primitivism in the Twentieth Century: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” in 1984, both exhibitions did little to resolve the issues of an indigenous heritage, amnesia to any notion of breaking from the past as championed by rationalism. [Figure 1 – Max Ernst’s collection, now part of the Branly collection, currently being exhibited at the Louvre].

The issues of representation became more polemical as the end of Modernity was bantered and predicted. And within a postcolonial context, museum representation encountered new challenges to conventional mainstream curatorial practice. Representation and power, artifact and art, America and Europe, the historical relationship between the first peoples of North America, Canada and the United States, and anthropology museums is in need of re-evaluation. The exhibiting of its cultures had been the outcome of collecting material cultures and classifying them within the museological methodologies started by the curiosity cabinets of the empires of Great Britain, France and Spain, and new paradigms of engagement are required. A collaborative strategy of inclusion and shared insights into the nature of the human subject and of human society precludes any notion of subjugation, conquest; without doubt, Manifest Destiny means territorial sovereignty. Art of the Americas through the politics of representation, recognition, identity and multiculturalism has become a cultural capital long outside the main narrative. [Figure 2, Lothar Baumgarten’s “America” at the Guggenheim].

Today, self-representation of the First Nations of Canada and the American Indians of the United States is beyond “cannibal tours and glass boxes” if that voice is given an opportunity to play its role and responsibility to engage the museums and the public away from the unstabilizing apocalyptic prediction of extinction and contamination. The salvage paradigm approach of presenting art of Americas as artifacts of past civilizations perpetuates concepts of the “primitive” and the “vanishing race”, which has only served to increase its scholarly and monetary value without any real criticality to the relationship between the museum world and the cultural production of American Indians and First Nations. Otherwise, we will continue to have selected objects presented as anonymous works of disappearing cultures, objects whose anthropological past is secured in a putative pre-contact authenticity. The real challenge is to frame art of the Americas as having value without having to inform or be assessed according to Western aesthetic criteria. Any sense of existing cultures validates the mantra of our continued belief of our place in the scheme of things, a Native America.

The epistemological collision of five hundred years ago is now buffered by Modernity with its postmodern strategies of deconstruction and identity, and within this framing one must include globalization, cyberspace, iPod nation and the new nation state. The encounter our ancient sovereigns experienced has taught us to be practical about Western cultural influence, and now there is a discourse in the museum world about how to change the way it exhibits. And the construction of several new museums in Europe and North America has made the topic less theoretical, architecture is transforming the diorama into a site-specific installation. The Guggenheim in New York and the Bilbao attest to major shifts in how art is displayed; the Branly and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in how cultures are exhibited; the Louvre and the National Gallery of Canada in how non-Western art is integrated. The challenge for those exhibiting cultures is to engage in the poetics and polemics using new methodologies. [Figure 3 & 4, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Douglas Cardinal; le musée du quai Branly, Jean Nouvel)

Artists and curators have long interrogated the museum as a muse; however, for various reasons this has not been the case for those whose cultures are represented by its ethnological collections, with the exception of the National Museum of the American Indian. There have been some changes. Sometimes, the current practice of displaying traditional North American Indian art alongside historical paintings from the same period is not so much an accommodation as a reaffirmation of an unwillingness to relinquish influence and power from the hegemonic fit existing in the temporal and stylistic categories of Western art. Does using chronology and geography as buttresses of American and Canadian art history give validation to national identities?

Museums like the Louvre, the National Gallery of Canada, le musée du quai Branly and the Canadian Museum of Civilization have done exhibits worth comparing and analyzing. Both Branly and the CMC, le musée de l’Homme and le musée national de l’Homme have been de-genderfied in name; their new homes are architecturally radical yet responsive to each of their environments. And both the Louvre and the National Gallery of Canada have borrowed art of the Americas from the Branly and CMC respectively. The rooms for the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the Louvre have a triple mission of presentation, conservation of the collection and research and education. However, its text: “Further, it is a witness of the fact that hierarchy no longer exists between the arts no more than it does between peoples,” is on a wall of the gallery which has a separate side entrance away from the main pyramid threshold, while the National Gallery of Canada has borrowed some works from the Canadian Museum of Civilization to put together its “Art of this Land”, interspersed throughout the Canadian galleries. These steps, however laden with cultural pitfalls, are positive despite the fact that the galleries’ narrative does little to question the aesthetic assumption of the art museum, which frames all works within its walls in terms of Western conceptions of artistic value.

January 21, 2007