Clémentine Deliss. Clémentine Deliss

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ apply the concept of remediation, developed by Paul Rabinow, in a humble, reflexive attempt to heal the injuries and occlusions of the past.³³ This methodology, recognized within advanced anthropological circles, would require the introduction of alternative media and modes of representation in order to activate a process of regeneration and redesign. “The core idea,” writes Rabinow, “is that concepts arose from and were designed to address specific problems in distinctive historical, cultural, and political settings. When the settings change, and as the problems differ, one cannot take these things up once again or simply reuse them without changing their meaning and efficacy.” This procedure, which necessitates teamwork, is a dialogic and recursive condition through which certain practices are “reconfigured, modified, rectified, and adjusted.” However, such remediation is necessarily hostile to the “nostalgia (or worse) of an unconditional allegiance to tradition.” It focuses instead on the reformulation of the contemporary, “an orientation that seeks out and takes up practices, terms, concepts, forms and the like from traditional sources but seeks to do different things with them from the things they were forged to do originally or how they have been understood more recently.”³⁴

      By gathering artifacts into new assemblages, one would activate taxonomic transgressions, clashing entrenched identifications and highlighting the underlying structures of power generated by listings, narratives, visualizations, and omissions, dating from different periods and authors. Earlier monographs drafted by anthropologists and experts from area studies would still be central to contextualization. Testimonials from the original producers and users of these artifacts so rarely recorded or documented, would remain paramount. However, all these interpretations would need to be expanded with contemporary readings that crossed disciplines and instituted a new constellatory mapping, or object atlas. Extending Aby Warburg’s system of the Mnemosyne Atlas onto three-dimensional phenomena was a way to disconnect existing denominational and classificatory systems, or at least to place them into jeopardy. To articulate the complexity of the museum through its collections would necessitate a curatorial methodology that explored different propositions, be they aesthetic, art critical, cultural, historical, scientific or personalized. One approach to this decolonial dialogue would be through experimental exercises between artworks with recognized makers and artifacts with undocumented authors, both being subject to discursive procedures of allocation, evaluation, and marketability.

      In 1990, I had curated an exhibition for the Steirischer Herbst in Graz, which included selected works by neoconceptual artists alongside various items purchased in markets in West Africa.³⁵ Lotte or the transformation of the object was a response to the formalist anachronism of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art, and a critique of the naïveté of Magiciens de la Terre held in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and at La Villette in 1989 and which opened the floodgates of the Eurocentric art world to the numerous axes of global art production. At the time, I was interested in the crisis affecting ethnographic museums in Europe. In parallel was another debate: the suppression of art-critical interpretations that engineered a discursive closure around the reception of contemporary art from the African continent. Catalogues produced in the nineties more often omitted the art criticism written by Africa-based intellectuals and writers.³⁶

      To articulate this lacunae through an exhibition, I drew in different commodities made from mass-manufactured objects, which I garnered from markets in Kumasi, Freetown, Abidjan, and Ouagadougou, but equally from other commercial spaces such as galleries including Jay Gorney Modern Art in New York, and Max Hetzler and Gisela Capitain in Germany. This juxtaposition was a ruse based on formalist friction aimed at drawing attention to the failure of Western museums and curators in the late eighties to recognize and respect art-critical and academic positions from the African continent. I sought to align the undocumented ethnographic artifact with the Readymade, and recast this modernist tension in the context of early Institutional Critique. The exhibition indirectly referenced the nonexistence of the named artist in European ethnographic collections. As a result, all the exhibits in the Lotte exhibition, including works by Haim Steinbach, Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, Rosemarie Trockel, and Lubaina Himid were presented in the exhibition without wall labels. Today, it would be practically impossible to omit references including not only the name of the artist, but also that of the gallery (or galleries), agents, and coproducers. In the early nineties, this experiment in visual thinking deployed artworks and artifacts on equal level in order to throw light onto the narrow referentiality of an art world suddenly confronted with alternative modernisms and a new geo-aesthetic cartography.

      By the turn of the millennium, curating had developed into a booming academic discipline that extended earlier museum studies once taught in provincial universities to include master’s courses on exhibition histories and a burgeoning multilayered critique of ethnocentricity. But this new complexity to exhibition making had not evolved at the same pace within European ethnographic museology. Britain and France quickly airbrushed over the predicament, cutting down on custodians and research facilities by centralizing their respective collections. In London, the Museum of Mankind celebrated its upgrade to the grandeur of the British Museum and in Paris, Jacques Chirac created his own “secret garden,” a monument and memorial to the cultures of the world designed by architect Jean Nouvel. Germany lagged behind but banked on its construction of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin to enter the club of state-funded, universalizing museums. By 2010, the typically DIY style of ethnographic exhibitions had been superseded by an entire industry of interior architects and exhibition designers, who also played their hand in the mises- en-scène of department stores. The Cologne ethnographic museum, Rautenstrauch Joest, reopened following an extensive refit by a leading German firm costing several million euros that came replete with interactive tables designed in pseudo-Rococo style, silky white fringed curtains to veil ritual objects from too much inspection, and elaborate wall texts, all there to perversely compensate for the absence of contemporaneity and legitimacy surrounding this ethno-colonial institution. The gamble was that these costly makeovers would provide a smooth transition into the twenty-first century and help to address new audiences. We were back at the capitalist aesthetics of the emporium.

      Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

      Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

      Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

      Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEBLAEsAAD/2wBDAAMCAgMCAgMDAwMEAwMEBQgFBQQEBQoHBwYIDAoMDAsK CwsNDhIQDQ4RDgsLEBYQERMUFRUVDA8XGBYUGBIUFRT/2wBDAQMEBAUEBQkFBQkUDQsNFBQUFBQU FBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBT/wAARCASwAvYDAREA AhEBAxEB/8QAHQABAAICAwEBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAcIBQYDBAkBAv/EAFsQAQABAwMCAwQFBAsLCAcJ AAABAgMEBQYRBxIIITETQVFhCRQicYEVMpGzFjM3OEJScnR1obQXIzZVYnN2grGy0iQlQ2WSlJXB NDVGY4OEkxgmOURTVqLT4f/EABsBAQADAQEBAQAAAAAAAAAAAAABAgMEBgUH/8QAOhEBAAIBAgQC BwYGAQUBAQAAAAECAwQRBRIhMUFREyIyYXGxwQYUNHKBkRUzU6HR8OEjQlJigkMk/9oADAMBAAIR AxEAPwD0Fc77AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAA

СКАЧАТЬ