Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

Casual visitors to today’s national museums would probably say that, in their presentations of colonial histories, they have taken on board the criticisms leveled at a set of flawed but pioneering late twentieth-century exhibitions that first attempted to rethink the specter of the imperial legacy in narratives of art, history, and culture.¹ Multiple voices are now audible, articulating the different perspectives of both the colonizer and the colonized. Many revisionist biographies of the objects in their collections have been incorporated into museum exhibitions, sometimes in a piecemeal and fragmented way and very occasionally in a more substantial structural sense whose impact changes the overall historical narratives represented by the institution’s collections and modes of display.

      And yet, simultaneously, many old tensions have resurfaced in art and ethnology museums today, as well as in those national collections that see themselves inhabiting the middle ground of the universal survey museum where distinctions between such categories are deliberately blurred. Inevitably, conflicts erupt between a cultural relativist agenda and an essentializing maneuver which causes individual artifacts to be displayed as if they possessed immanent value and shared some spuriously identified aesthetic criteria. If we thought those days were gone, and that museums now recognized the social and cultural distinctions between attitudes to producers (“artists” or otherwise), models of consumption, and the subsequent (or negligent) attribution of value to their communities of origin, then we were wrong.²

      In the current political climate, in both northern and southern hemispheres, these outdated display conventions are particularly pernicious. On the one hand, museums of “world cultures,” such as the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the Museum of World Cultures in Gothenburg, have prompted a genuine attempt at understanding how globalization can result in a differentiated cosmopolitanism worldwide, generating an interest in diasporic culture as a corrective to the reification of “authenticity” conveyed by older art and ethnography displays (see Karp et al. 2006, particularly the introductory essay by Kratz and Karp, 1–31, and Clifford 2013).³ On the other hand, globalization is again being presented in the museum as the benign face of capitalism and as evidence of an unthreatening cultural diversity divested of the tensions and struggles which actually characterize it. Globalization’s promoters in today’s museum world are only too adept at negotiating the labyrinthine threads and connections between the objects in their museums’ collections and their communities of origin. Yet the beneficiaries of these negotiations are not always clear.

      An outstanding example is A History of the World in 100 Objects, a joint project of the BBC and the British Museum (BM) brokered by its director, Neil MacGregor. Broadcast in 2010 over 20 weeks, the project also produced an extensive website and a book of transcripts of the radio programs. MacGregor (2009) used the project to publicize his museum’s collections and promote its ability “to gather the whole world into one building,” in terms of “a universality of ambition that embraced not just its collection but also its intended public.”⁴ A History of the World in 100 Objects was in many ways an impressive initiative which was careful to incorporate revisionist histories of many of the objects in the BM’s collections.⁵ Significantly, however, these insights have rarely been integrated into the narratives of the permanent displays. The inconsistencies and gaps in the stories that are told through the selected objects are, however, revealing of how globalizing rhetoric can be used to maintain rather than disrupt neocolonial relationships.

How the museum tells the history of, for example, the encounter between Europe and polities that would later become colonized is the critical component for shifting our understanding of such histories and envisaging different relationships in the present. And, in this digital age, we also need to attend to what gets incorporated into the more ephemeral – though also more widely available – web version in relation to the narratives on display in the museum’s real-space galleries. To cite one representative example, the website from the BBC program includes a description of a brass plaque looted from the palace of the Oba of Benin after it had been sacked by the British punitive forces in 1897. It focuses on an important but highly selective aspect of the European encounter:

      The kingdom of Benin dominated trade with Europeans on the Nigerian coast from the late 1400s to the end of the 1900s. When Portuguese traders arrived in Benin in the 1400s they brought brass bracelets, known as manillas, to exchange for pepper, ivory and slaves. The artists of Benin transformed this European brass into plaques to decorate the Oba’s palace. (BM and BBC 2014)

      Both on the website for the program and in its galleries the BM remains mute about its own role in the acquisition of this precious material, which is still the subject of many demands for restitution from the Nigerian government. Indeed one text panel reads almost like a justification for the looting: “When the British reached Benin City in 1897, the royal palace was being rebuilt with brass sheeting, and some 900 brass plaques from the old building were found half-buried in a storehouse.” Additionally, although it is true that, “when these plaques were first seen in Europe in the late 1890s they astounded art critics who couldn’t believe that such technically accomplished sculptures were created by African artists” (BM and BBC 2014), even by the nineteenth century there was already considerable written and oral evidence in support of an African origin for the brass and ivory work from Benin City. This evidence was widely cited by academics and museum professionals at the time of the punitive raid and the subsequent exhibition of Benin work at the BM in September 1897 (Coombes 1994). The constant reiteration of Benin’s exceptionalism today (for example, at the Royal Academy’s blockbuster Africa: The Art of a Continent), often accompanied by the awed astonishment of modern commentators who write as if these artifacts have only just been discovered, has had iniquitous implications that serve various political and institutional agendas, silence a long history of contact and exchange between West Africans and Europeans, which the BM itself acknowledges in its galleries, and, conversely, could end up denying West Africans any independent invention.⁶

      There are other significant occlusions which speak to the relationship between the politics of display and globalization at the British Museum – a globalization articulated in the following example as benign cross-cultural exchange and resilient tradition. In the Sainsbury Africa Galleries, Sokari Douglas Camp’s sculpture Otobo (Hippo) Masquerade is promoted as a cosmopolitan expression of the Kalabari masquerade traditions in southern Nigeria’s Niger Delta region. Nearby, contemporary masks made out of recycled and unconventional materials from the same area are also shown to demonstrate the thriving continuity of the local masquerading practices (see Figure 0.1). The contemporary political context in the Niger Delta and its effect on the kinds of practices celebrated here are, however, nowhere to be seen. Nothing is mentioned about the destruction of the fragile ecology of the region by multinational oil companies, and no mention is made of the Nigerian government’s execution (in November 1995) of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other environmentalist activists from Ogoniland who protested against the oil companies’ pollution of the Delta region (Human Rights Watch, 1999, 2002). Nor is there any mention of the threat this pollution poses to the very masquerade tradition on display, whose imagery calls up the cosmology represented by the water-loving animal life in the Delta and whose resilience and inventiveness are celebrated by the BM.

      FIGURE 0.1 (a) Display of masks made by the Kalabari peoples from the Niger Delta in Southern Nigeria in the Sainsbury Africa Gallery at the British Museum, London. The explanatory labels exclusively foreground the importance of water spirits in the masquerades and the use of new materials: “These are various fish masquerades, made over a period of a hundred years and drawing on changing materials and techniques.” (b)

      (b) Detail of a Kalabari fish mask showing the incorporation of recycled cardboard boxes.

      Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Photos © Annie E. Coombes.

Radical revisions to conservative museum narratives are much