discuss Schubert’s essay and apply his critique to LACMA
-discuss Schubert’s essay and apply his critique to LACMA -discuss Jewsiewicki’s essay and consider what alternatives emerge when museums respond to their specific cultural context -discuss Wong’s essay and consider how the growth of museums in China reflect the tension between the museum as a symbol and a museum’s actual substance
Note: for full credit, your essay needs to refer to ALL of the sources listed below. You do not need to memorize direct quotes, and you do not need to provide page numbers. Instead, be able to accurately paraphrase or summarize the author’s points that are relevant to your argument. Be sure that you credit the author in your essay when you refer to their points.
Karsten Schubert, “Democracy of Spectacle: The Museum Revisited,” The Curator’s Egg, 2nd ed., 2009.
Bogumil Jewsiewicki, “Museums for the People? Two Joint Projects for Haiti and the Congo” in Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective (Peter Weibel, Andrea Buddensieg, eds., 2007)
_ a i L Sammy Balo)i, UMHK’s (company) wmkers, photomontage, 0 the artist.
instead, it is the beginning of a process of negotiation between the for- mer mask, now unfit for use, its cultural memory, and the work of the artisan (artist) who makes it. The collector or curator sees it as the destruction of a heritage object (the new one will no longer have any sheen, will no longer be “authentic,” etc.). For those who participate in the theatricality of the presence of a mask, the cultural memory is actual- ized and thus preserved.
Starting with this idea – which I am not proposing as a princi- ple-, one has to examine the appropriateness between, on the one hand, the museum and its policy as a cultural institution and, on the other, the memorial and heritage-related practices of those societies whose nor- malization by the nation state and whose specialized institutions have not been successfully accomplished. This is not a question of claiming that the museum is useless, and even less so of talking in terms of inva- sion or cultural imperialism. I propose, more modestly, to examine the approaches through which an institution produced elsewhere can be adapted to the practices, places, and times peculiar to the society into
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which it is transplanted. In other words, is it possible to turn the museum into a locus of interactive appropriation of heritage and cultural memory, and possibly a place for the social re-conquest of a lasting self- control of people’s identity as represented in public space? I had the good fortune to have the funds and especially the cooperation of col- leagues enabling me to undertake a practical process of verification of this hypothesis in two stages.
2 Wiernoives ale Lit6tambashi In 2000 in Lubumbashi, a mining and industrial town in Katanga (DR Congo), traumatized by political and economic crisis and ethnic cleans- ing, we initiated a project called Memotres de Lubumbashi. The main objective was to share, in the public sphere, the diversity of cultural memories of this urban society formed by waves of regional and interna- tional immigration over nearly a century (the city had been founded in 1910, the mining industry in 1906). The intention was that the successive annual events (whose frequency depended on funding) would lead up to
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the “gift” of a permanent exhibition to the city at the end of the decade, designed to reintegrate the full diversity of memories into the social fab- ric. Like a sortie de masques, various actors of this society have-often in turn-been as much producers as spectators of the events that we organ- ized.
From the outset we benefited from the collaboration of a team of aca- demics, led by the historian of this urban society, Donatien Dibwe dia Membu, and from the use of an institutional site, the Lubumbashi Museum, made available to the project by its director Donatien Muya wa Bitanko, trained as an archaeologist. The team had extensive experi- ence in collecting and analysing accounts of workers’ lives. The museum, literally saved from destruction in 1993 by its director, had become a place of sociability for the population. An institution of colonial origins, it was called the maison de fetiches (house of fetishes) by the population in the 197os and 198os. In the 199os it managed to traverse the crisis experienced by the Congolese state by opening a part of its space for evangelic religious practices. The large hall and the museum courtyard were rented out to local churches for holding services.
Imposed by necessity, this temporary change of purpose handed the place back to society. Perhaps it exorcised it? The name maison de fetiches dates back to the dictatorship of J. D. Mobutu. With Belgian technical assistance, he had created an Institute of National Museums responsible for constituting the Zairian national heritage (at the time the country was called Zaire), of which the Lubumbashi museum was part. Conducted in an authoritarian way and often assisted by agents of the state and the single political party, the collection of “ethnic” art objects in villages was experienced as a confiscation of objects of power that the dictator put in the places he controlled. Historical fate had it that at that time in the Congo, only the Lubumbashi museum was able to exhibit some of these objects. This was because Lubumbashi was the capital of Katanga, the rebel province always suspected of secessionist tendencies. Popular deduction followed the same logic as that of the powers-that-be: displaying objects of power in a showcase neutralized them; in such cir- cumstances an object was devoid of power because it lacked the context and competence required to act. Moreover, exhibiting them in a place under control also meant a threat of them being used for the purposes of the master of the place. Informed, the people avoided the museum.
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Tshibumba Kanda, Patrice Lumumba as Congo Jesus Chris, 1974, Lubumbashi, © the artist, collection Jewsiewicki.
During the five annual events (2000 to 2004),2 each lasting a week, we tried to bring into the space of the museum current urban practices of (re)production of the urban memory, both individual and collective, and to attract the actors/consumers of these memories. We were committed to subverting this place where the power of the state deployed its capac- ity to act, and to turn it into a space of performance, of theatricality. From 2000 the approach, of the greatest simplicity, was as follows: we invited to the museum popular painters, musical groups, and choruses that performed during funerals (the only social event still generally observed3) or religious festivals, as well as people who agreed to share a life story (they usually held the position of witnesses, as practiced in sev- eral local Christian churches) and to put down photos and personal objects, thus constituting a personal or collective place of memory. Sec- ondary school pupils were encouraged to produce drawings or to write short texts, a selection of which were shown during the event and in the presence of authors. Every day the public was invited into the museum hall or courtyard to participate in a performance, discuss an issue, or
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react to a personal testimony or object of memory. For a full week the
museum was thus filled with city dwellers and their lives, with the mem-
ories whose actuality prompted interaction and debate. Since the museum had no room that could actually be arranged to
present a show, plays by amateur troupes were put on in a school and a
community hall. In view of the longevity (over forty years) of the Mufwankolo Theatre4-a troupe of amateurs whose director and lead-
ing actor produced plays directly related to local life and its challenges- its performance was included in every event. The plays were in Swahili
and catered to the local public. Another amateur troupe, a student the-
ater, performed during three annual events. The actors from both the
troupes were among the most regular participants in all the activities of
each annual event.
Bwalia, Adolescent’s dream, zooz, Lubumbashi, 0 the artist, collection jewsiewicki.
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Burozi, Kazi (industrial work), x992, Lubumbashi, © the artist, collection Jewsiewicki.
Apart from the topics addressed (the diversity of the city’s memories, the memories of women, heroes and ancestors in urban practices, the memory of colonization and grieving the colonial past, and the memory of wage labor -kazi- in a period of deindustrialization), the main effort concerned occupying the museum with practices that actualized memory and with heritage artifacts. It was therefore necessary first of all to bring “popular” cultural products and productions into the museum, and to have their legitimacy acknowledged, in the same way as that of pre-colonial ethnic art objects (statuettes, masks, etc.) or artifacts found at the numerous archaeological sites in the region. Following competi- tions for popular painters in the city (all self-taught or trained through apprenticeships), a selection of popular paintings was exhibited at every event, along with the drawings by high-school pupils.5 This proximity of two pictorial productions, one “professional” (in the sense that painters
I 0 I
live from their art), the other amateur, highlighted the shared imagina- tion. Since the painters participated in the activities, from the interac- tions there emerged the link with the work on memory as it appeared in life stories, in recollections associated with objects, and in theatrical pro- ductions. Each event was a particular experience, even if the main lines confirmed the theatricality of the work on the shared memory. Within a shared imagination, by combining visual, sound, narrative, and perform- ance (whether it was strictly-speaking theatrical or work on the body and clothing), the historical traces of the past, which here are objects and buildings, were offered as materials for the memory work.
The work with popular painters and musicians (especially Edouard Masengo whose career stretched over more than forty years), the two genres of urban artistic production most present in city-dwellers lives, made it possible to assess the place of images and music in the urban her- itage.6 It is important to emphasize from the start that in urban Congo, a picture hanging on the wall of a living room is an invitation to dialogue, a
Mates, Rend moi mon ancetre (Give me back my ancesto collection Jewsiewicki.
oo, Lubumbashi, © the arti
sharing of experiences that take shape from accounts of experiences.? Music, which one listens to in the Congo with one’s body rather than only one’s ears, is a commentary on life and on the actor in life. The tune of a song can be tossed out like a proverb; a song can be as much of a challenge as a praise seeking gratification, and so on. In the post-colonial city, cultural memory is transmitted and elaborated in music’ and in painting9 (in the Congo, painting is the public image par excellence; pho- tography belongs more to the individual sphere).
® Cultured Links Between and Haiti: Memory Practices in Art This role of painting and music in cultural memory is also the justification for the opening of a second research/action project on the heritage of sensitivities and aesthetic preferences in the Congo and Haiti. Music and dance have been the main mediums for the re-humanization of a world that in the Americas the masters imposed on the slaves, vic- tims of the trans-Atlantic trade.° The reasons for choosing the Congo and Haiti were as much practical (the meeting with Carlo Celius who for three years was a post-doctoral grant-holder attached to the chair which I hold) as historical. The influence of the language, rituals, and imagina- tion of the societies of the west coast of today’s Congo is considerable in popular Haitian culture. The last groups of slaves who arrived at Saint- Domingue were from this part of Africa. The contribution of Kikongo to Haitian Creole is well known, as is the place of the Kongo ritual in voodoo. Finally, the place of black music from the Caribbean, especially Haiti and Cuba, in the emergence of urban music in the Congo, followed by the appropriation of the latter by black societies in the Americas (and much further afield), attests to the depth and scope of the sharing of sen- sitivities, but also to the common sound heritage, between the west coast of Africa and the black Americas. Despite their separation for a long century, in two decades of the second half of the twentieth century a shared musical heritage has allowed black societies on both sides of the Atlantic to revive the broken link of their cultural memory. A heritage of the same nature could exist in the visual domain.
To test this hypothesis and to extend the experience of familiarizing the museum as an institution, we embarked on a project, with Carlo Celius, to bring Congolese and Haitian popular urban painters and their
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Port-au-Prince workshop. Photo: Carlo Celius.
publics into contact.” The project consisted of two parts. First, we held a series of painting workshops in Port-au-Prince and in Pau (France), which enabled some Haitian painters to work in the company of Con- golese painters. The first week-long seminar in Port-au-Prince was organized by Carlo Celius in 2005 and attended by three Congolese (one from Lubumbashi and two from Kinshasa) and five Haitian painters (all from Port-au-Prince). The second, which lasted only four days, was held in Pau in France and attended by only two painters, one Congolese and one Haitian. It has still not been possible to organize the second part of the project: a workshop and an exhibit to be held in the Congo. Unlike popular Haitian painters, whose work has been exhibited for a long time in galleries, exhibitions, and museums, especially those who started working before the interminable transition from Duvalierism to democ- ratization, popular Congolese painters are isolated. To ensure that the project in itself was not a culture shock, a preliminary workshop was organized in 2004 in Lubumbashi for five Congolese painters. One of
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them was unable to work in the presence of the others and soon with- drew. Carlo Celius and I imposed no specific requirements on any of the workshops except the first, between the Congolese, where the theme was the same as that of the 5th Memoires de Lubumbashi event, that is, memory of violence, violence of memory. Yet every time, one of the painters proposed the painting of a collective work. This was done at the end of the workshops, and all the collective paintings were composed of sections painted individually by each participant.
The individuality of the creative approach probably stems from the mode of commercialization, which causes painters to compete to appeal to customers. It may seem paradoxical that urban painting, in which the collective memory and imagination are so keenly present, results from a profoundly individual and individualistic approach. Yet anyone who knows urban music soon sees the strong parallel between the two approaches of creation and reception, not to mention consumption: highly individual and strongly competitive production, and shared reception. A painting or song is always received in the presence and company of other members of society; people share the stories and nar- ratives inspired by a painting, while listening to a song is accompanied
Port-au-Prince untitled collective painting (sections by Bwalia and Prefete Duffaut). Photo: Carlo Celius.
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by observed and shared body movements. The scope of this article does not allow for an analysis of the apparent paradox between the individu- alism of creation and shared reception. Seen from the historical perspec- tive of the remembered experience of slavery and colonialism (in the Congolese popular imagination colonialism is remembered as slavery), the paradox fades, especially if it is related to the two dominant modes of internal conflict resolution: Congolese witchcraft and Haitian voodoo.
The Port-au-Prince week-long seminar was introduced by three Con- golese urban painting exhibitions organized by Carlo Celius with the collaboration of several local cultural institutions and museums. For the first time, the Haitian public was able to see popular Congolese painting. The usual museum public of the Haitian capital was somewhat reserved in its reception, whereas the paintings were almost immediately mean- ingful to ordinary people. The violence and very crude pictorial lan- guage shocked the cultured public, even though in 2005 all Haitians had some experience of violence. For the same reasons, the “populace” identified with these images.
The experiment has currently been suspended for financial reasons: it has not been possible, at least for the moment, to organize its Congolese part. There has been no exhibition of Haitian popular painting in the Congo, planned in the two cities in which the painters live. Above all, there has been no exhibition of paintings done during the workshops. It is therefore not possible to analyze the reception of these works, and even less so to make any assumptions on a shared collective imagination and pictorial memory.
4. Conclusion The only conclusion that can be drawn at this point concerns the mode of exhibition and reception, and the proposal to transform the museum into a place of conservation via the intensification of use, rather than a place of withdrawal from “normal” use. All the painting workshops have been held either within a museum open to the public, or in another public place. The public has therefore had access to these workshops: people could observe, comment and argue- although we observed no cases of a direct impact of this active presence of the public. Among the painters, on the other hand, interaction, albeit rare, has sometimes led to changes in the work underway. Over a long period, with each annual
io6
event prepared by several weeks of fieldwork, the Memoires de Lubum- bashi have formed a niche in urban society that seems to have altered the way in which people perceive the former maison de fetiches. The Port- au-Prince exhibitions have only been a once-off event since Carlo Celius’s plan to take them to the provinces has not materialized. Even in Lubumbashi, the annual event lasts only one week of the year, which is very little in a city where the struggle for survival and the high death rate
are responsible for an alarming acceleration of social time. People live in the present; yesterday is already far away and no one has time to think of tomorrow. In Port-au-Prince the exhibitions and the workshop were a shooting star in a social time similar to that of the Congo, and in a period when everything seems to suggest that painting and its exhibitions in the Haitian capital are now giving way to installation art. Creators use wrecked cars and other waste metals to erect works of rare force and extreme violence in the streets.12 They have no buyers and even if the tourists returned, the installations would not correspond to their tastes. This change of medium has put artwork back into the streets of Port-au- Prince. Two decades ago people in the city witnessed pictorial produc- tion but seldom consumed it. Today they are consumers, possibly invol- untarily, of the installations erected in their space. This resembles the Congolese situation where popular painting has always responded to a considerable local demand, without painters disregarding tourists. The street has been the main gallery, and remains so even if poverty keeps the
customers away. Young itinerant vendors and painters in quest of cus- tomers have made paintings a regular feature of the urban landscape.
Will it ever be possible to transform the museum into an open space where individual creation-currently in the image of the capitalist econ- omy and adjusted to it throughout the world – is able to carry on encountering a shared reception, one which, without excluding per- sonal aesthetic emotion, is pooled in the theatrical mode of a sortie de masques? Will we be able to give the museum back to the public, and to individuals, as a place that offers an alternative to the narrative writing of the self, a writing that is indeed personal, but in a creative relation with others ?13
Translated from the French by Liz Carey-Libbrecht.
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Notes Zoe Strother, Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) proposes a better analysis.
2 Three recent volumes present various elements of certain editions: Memoires de Lubumbashi: Images, Objets, Paroles-Ukumbusho, et Femmes, mode, musique. Mesnoire de Lubumbashi, both eds. B. Jewsiewicki, Dibwe dia Mwembu and Violaine Sizaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, respectively 2001 and 2002), as well as Le travail bier et aujourd’hui. Memoires de Lubum- bashi, eds. Dibwe dia Mwembu and B. Jewsiewicki (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004).
3 See B. Jewsiewicki and B. White, eds., “Mourning and the Imagination of Political Time in Contemporary Central Africa,” African Studies Review, 48/4 (2005), pp. 1-85.
4 On the Mufwankolo Theatre see Johannes Fabian, Power and Performance (Madison: Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
5 Some drawings collected in the framework of a more general action, inspired by the Lubum- bashi experience, were published in Richard Banegas and B. Jewsiewicki, eds., RDC, la guerre vue d’en bas, special issue Politique africaine, 84 (2001).
6 Musique urbaine au. Katanga. De Malaika a Santis Kimbangu, ed. B. Jewsiewicki (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003).
7 B. Jewsiewicki and Barbara Plankensteiner, An/Sichten, Malerei aus dens Kongo, 199o-20= (Vienna: Springer, 2001).
8 A popular Kinshasa artist ten years ago and today a contemporary artist, Cheri Samba is a perfect example of this coming and going between images, music, talk and writing; see B. Jew- siewicki, Cheri Samba, Hybridity of an Art/Hybridite d’un art (Montreal: Amrad African Art Publishing, 1995).
9 See my book Mami wata. La peinture urbaine an Congo (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). See my article “Dance: The Passion to be Oneself in Dialogue with Others” in ed. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Remembering Africa (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 2002) pp. 171-183 and the conference that I organized in 2004 De l’heritage musical des esclaves aux musiques du monde, co-organised with the University of Montreal onyx s November at the Centre cul- turel Georges-Vanier, Montreal. The proceedings are available on VCD.
I I With Carlo Celius I prepared a presentation on CD of the project, including the paintings done during the workshops. See Agence universitaire de la Francophonie, Chaire de recherche du Canada en histoire compare de la memoire, Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, “Espace de memoire culturelle : peintures urbaines au Congo et en Haiti,” 2005.
12 In particular, I have in mind the work of Andre Eugene Jean Robert in Port-au-Prince, to which Carlo Celius introduced me. The “Musee d’Art” that Andre calls “E. Pluri Bus” con- sists of a street corner and a portion of a courtyard behind some houses, off the Boulevard Jn J. Dessalines. There are others, like Jean Herard Celeur and Frantz Jacques.
13 B. Jewsiewicki, “Subject in Africa: In Foucault’s Footsteps,” in Public Culture, 14,3 (2002),
PP. 593-99.
