The reconstruction of museums has long been equated with their expansion. This is partly necessitated by growth in the size of exhibits, as the spatial aspect has been essential to many post-war art forms, such as installation and land art. The dematerialization of art has not been able to stem the tide of demand for physical exhibition space. On the contrary, digital technologies have made it possible to document performances and reproduce ephemeral events in the form of numerous square feet of photographic print and thousands of characters of accompanying text, and to do so easily and almost uncontrollably.
So the drive to expand seems to derive from a transformation in the nature of art and to be inevitable. The trend is not specific to a particular geographic region or phase of development of the culture industry. It is happening in the United States (where a new Whitney Museum building by architect Renzo Piano was opened in 2015, and the renovated and enlarged San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened to visitors in 2016), in Europe (where the long-awaited new wing of Tate Modern opened in 2016) and in Russia (where a new building is being designed for the National Center of Contemporary Art, as well as a whole museum quarter for the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts). These are just a few, high-profile examples of a much broader trend: new museums opening today aim to achieve unprecedented capacity from the outset.
But capacity for what? If we are talking about works of art, then, as Hal Foster noted, Richard Serra, for example, undoubtedly produces great work, ‘but that doesn’t mean that its size should be the standard measure of exhibition space’. [1] Moreover, a significant part of the space in museums today is taken up by rest zones, food courts, and retail areas.
Limiting ourselves to museums of modern art, we notice that, despite offering new exhibition strategies and pondering the very phenomenon of museumification, they tend inexorably to expand their floor area. Take the flagship Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the first museums of its kind and the most famous of them all. First opened in 1929 it has moved several times from a smaller to a larger building and is now preparing to expand once again.
But there comes a limit to any expansion. And here we might recall the museum that lent MoMA its name (though Anson Conger Goodyear insisted that the borrowing was inadvertent) [2] and part of its collection, but which—most importantly for our purposes—was based on a model that was diametrically opposed to that of MoMA.
A museum of modern art vs The Museum of Modern Art
In 1920, artist and collector Katherine Sophie Dreier, together with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, founded Société Anonyme, Inc: The Museum of Modern Art: 1920. The first exhibition of this ‘experimental’ museum took place in May 1920 at 19 East 47th Street in New York City, where the heterodoxy of the idea was immediately apparent. The organizers sought to make a space akin to a dwelling, where intimacy and human scale contrasted with the grandeur of national museums. Katherine Dreier was dissatisfied with vast unitary spaces, such as that which hosted the Armory Show. She believed they left the visitor with no emotion except that of being lost and isolated from the artworks. The Société Anonyme wanted to exhibit art in less spacious premises that ‘articulated like small rooms’, [3] but not because it intended to exhibit art to potential buyers as they would see it when they had taken it home. The museum, despite its misleading name (‘société anonyme’ in French means ‘limited company’, suggesting Dadaist wordplay on the part of the founders) [4] emphasized the non-profit nature of its activities. ‘The Museum does not sell any works exhibited under its direction but gladly brings any prospective buyer directly in touch with the artist,’ stated the flyer to the exhibition of 1921. [5]
Dreier’s idea was that people should not come to art in order to worship it. To achieve a full understanding of art, one has to live with it, neither considering it as decoration nor evaluating the interior that results from its presence in terms of good or bad taste. ‘Today our greatest danger is our good taste,’ she stated, worried by how fashionable concerns were displacing the challenges and transformative potential of modern art. [6] So, for the Société Anonyme, the museum should evoke a home rather than a temple. [7]
Denying hierarchies was a fundamental principle of the Société Anonyme. The Société collected and exhibited not only the most challenging art of the time (abstract art not yet known to a wider audience), but also artists who would need years of struggle to arrive at the Olympian heights of other museums. The Soviet avant-garde was out of sight for Americans in the 1920s, for political reasons, but there was other art which, for a long period of time, was valued only for its exotic nature, such as the art of Latin America. ‘We have to change our attitude towards Latin races and recognise the great contribution which they have made and continue to make to civilisation,’ Dreier insisted. [8] Finally, thanks to Dreier, who was a suffragette, the Société Anonyme brought to the pubic gaze an unprecedented quantity of works by female artists: Marthe Donas, Suzanne Duchamp, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Lyubov Popova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Milly Steger, and others.
The Museum of Modern Art, with Alfred H. Barr as its director, also began by exploring new and unknown art, addressing itself to the not-yet-established living artists of the current time. But it quickly shook off any reputation for being an innovative and experimental institution, and returned to the stereotype of the temple-like museum. The radical difference between the identity of MoMA compared with the Société Anonyme is apparent from a MoMA eulogy that appeared in the The New York Times of 1932: ‘Novitiate has passed. Still young in years but rich in experience and accomplishment, it [the Museum of Modern Art] has demonstrated ability to play the role of modern chronicler and prophet in New York.’ [9]
The deliberately anti-hierarchical stance behind the Société Anonyme collection came largely from Katherine Dreier’s reflections on the relationship between idea and patent. Dreier articulated the problem of authorship in a new way. A museum had to contain ‘art, not personalities’. ‘The person who gets the recognition isn’t necessarily the only person who conceived the idea,’ Dreier stated. ‘There are all these other people who reinforce the idea and contribute to it who are unknown.’ [10]
Although rejecting hierarchies, the Société Anonyme could not forego making judgments, but it did not assume that any judgment was more correct than any other. Marcel Duchamp, talking to Pierre Cabanne about the Société Anonyme, confessed that he almost never went to museums, including the Louvre: ‘I have these doubts about the value of the judgments which decided that all these pictures should be presented to the Louvre, instead of others which weren’t even considered, and which might have been there.’ [11] So the anti-hierarchical stance of the Société is essentially a noteworthy extension of Duchamp’s famous question: what makes an object a work of art? ‘Is the museum the final form of comprehension, of judgment?’ he asked Cabanne. A work of art becomes such in the eyes of a spectator: ‘It is the onlooker who makes the museum, who provides the elements of the museum.’ [12]
We can see, in this context, why the Société Anonyme could so nonchalantly relinquish its own exhibition space: the museum only kept its original premises until 1923, after which the collection was kept at Katherine Dreier’s home. [13] Although this deterritorialization was forced, it was in perfect harmony with the museum’s ‘horizontal’ program. Instead of establishing itself on a particular plot of earth, the Société used other institutional venues to acquaint the maximum number of people with the art that it promoted and, thereby, to perform one of its main stated missions, that of education. Indeed, the museum was committed to such a nomadic style of life even when it still had a permanent location. As reported in American Art News on May 21, 1921, the Société’s exhibition of ‘extremist’ art, held in the summer of 1921, was scheduled to arrive in Massachusetts in the autumn, and afterwards to make a tour of other American cities. [14] Subsequent projects, which sometimes included lectures, discussions, and conferences, were held in venues from Manhattan to the Brooklyn Museum, where a significant exhibition opened in 1926, to art galleries in Buffalo and Toronto and in schools and universities. To some of these places the Société Anonyme returned more than once.
The Société Anonyme, in Duchamp’s words ‘contrasting sharply with the commercial trend of our times,’ [15] was finally sunk by the financial crisis of the 1930s. In 1941 it handed over its collection to Yale University Art Gallery and in 1950 the collection was dissolved.
The New York Museum of Modern Art thus obtained a monopoly on contemporary art. Funded by the Rockefeller fortune and moving to larger premises three times in the first 10 years of its existence, its ethos as a museum was the antithesis of the Société Anonyme. MoMA’s aim was to become the only museum of contemporary art, absorbing weaker structures. In an extensive memorandum entitled ‘Theory and Content of an Ideal Permanent Collection,’ which Alfred Barr sent to the Board of Trustees in 1933, he noted the existence of other collections of modern art, including the Société Anonyme, and recommended keeping in touch with their owners in case they could be persuaded to transfer their works to the Museum of Modern Art. [16] The MoMA ethos, rather than that of the Société Anonyme, would be the prime model for other cultural institutions exhibiting modern art, first in the United States and then in Europe.
Refinding the path: The Stedelijk Museum
Dreier, Duchamp and Man Ray did not blaze a trail, but they marked a path. In America the path quickly grew over, but not in Europe, where it was kept open after World War II thanks to the directors of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I will discuss the immediate post-war period of the Museum’s
existence under the directorship of Willem Sandberg (1945–1963). Sandberg was an admirer of Alfred Barr, [17] but he was also the person who kept the vision of Dreier’s Société alive and at the forefront of international museum life.
Sandberg began work to reconstruct the Stedelijk immediately after World War II. However the only increase in the museum’s exhibition space between then and 2004 was the addition of a small wing in 1954. [18]
The reason why spatial enlargement was not significant (and even not desirable) for a museum with a collection among the best in the world is clear from something Sandberg said in a lecture at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1973. ‘Today we don’t want to live with what we are expected to venerate. We really don’t know if museums, and specially museums of contemporary art, should exist in eternity. <...> Ideally, art should once again be integrated in daily life, should go out on the streets, enter the buildings, become a necessity.’ [19]
Sandberg put forward the same propositions as Katherine Dreier. Firstly, museums should not be perceived as temples and the hierarchical thinking that goes with such a view is to be rejected. Secondly, and relatedly, art is to be lived with rather than worshipped. And if the Société Anonyme made its exhibition spaces akin to rooms in a home, Sandberg suggested an even more radical path away from aggrandizement of the museum building. He said, bluntly: ‘This should be the major aim of the museum: to make itself redundant.’ [20]
Seen in this light, the strategy shared by the Société Anonyme and the Stedelijk is perfectly consistent: it played down the role of buildings and fostered cooperation with other institutions in order to display exhibits outside the limits of the museum’s own architecture. [21] The Stedelijk’s artworks travelled to meet new viewers instead of becoming entrenched on their own territory. The Museum of Modern Art had, by the 1960s, intermittently raised the question of whether it should lend artworks from its collection to other museums and galleries, [22] but nothing had come of it. The Stedelijk and its collection had been guests elsewhere as often as they had been hosts on their own turf. Without emphasizing this information, and providing it among other statistics on Stedelijk activity in his usual lower case lettering, Sandberg noted in 1961 that 50 exhibitions a year were held in the museum building, while 50 more were hosted by other institutions. [23]
Some of the Stedelijk’s external projects were one-offs, but others led to new things. In 1958, for example, Willem Sandberg found common ground with Paolo Marinotti, head of the International Centre for Art and Costume in Venice’s Palazzo Grassi, and together they immediately conceived the idea of the exhibition Vitalità nell’arte (Vitality in Art). It was presented in 1959–1960 at the Palazzo Grassi and the Stedelijk Museum, before moving to the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen. [24] Sandberg pursued the cooperation with Marinotti in a thematically related joint exhibition entitled Natuur en Kunst (Nature and Art). These projects expanded the boundaries of the museum, but the expansion was not in terms of space but in terms of what the museum was capable of doing. Natuur en Kunst, as if saluting Duchamp, displayed natural objets trouvés, such as pieces of wood and stone, handcrafted objects made out of shells and wood, as well as amateur paintings. [25]
Sandberg also cooperated enthusiastically with the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The exhibition Bewogen Beweging (Moving Movement, the cover of the exhibition catalogue featured Bicycle Wheel by Marcel Duchamp) curated by Moderna Museet director Pontus Hulten in 1961 spent six weeks in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk before moving to Stockholm, changing its name to Art in Motion, and then arriving on the already familiar territory of the Louisiana Museum. [26]
Bewogen Beweging, exhibition catalogue. 1961
The extent to which the museum wall was for Sandberg a vague and conditional boundary (the wall in Sandberg’s new wing was of glass) is also exemplified by his attempt to work with the Situationist International. [27] In 1959–1960, Sandberg and the Situationists planned a three-day drift (dérive) to be simultaneously effected in two rooms of the Stedelijk, transformed into a labyrinth, and in the streets of Amsterdam (the plan did not come to fruition due to potential dangers of the labyrinth installation). [28]
Evolutionary perspectives
It would be an easy step from the Dadaist background of the Société Anonyme and Sandberg’s utopian remarks about the superfluity of museums as institutions to a nihilist rhetoric, espousing anti-museum concepts. I prefer, though, to use the similarity of structure and operation between the Société and Sandberg’s Stedelijk to help define a particular type of museum, which can be seen, from the perspective proposed by Svetlana Boym, as ‘off modern’. It is something that ‘involves exploration of the side alleys and lateral potentialities of the project of critical modernity’, [29] revealing potential paths of development that had not been noticed before.
The philosophical concepts that Dreier and Sandberg relied on do in fact have a common source. Dreier was fascinated by theosophy and spiritualism, and was influenced by the work of Henri Bergson, and this background helps to explain the selection of artists, whose work was included in the collection of the Société Anonyme: Naum Gabo, Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, and Kurt Schwitters. Sandberg’s thinking was also much influenced by Bergson’s biological metaphorics, and not only by the work of Bergson himself (a quotation from whom provides the epigraph to a book, to which Sandberg contributed, on pioneers of modern art in the Stedelijk collection), [30] but also by the writings of his devotee, the poet, critic, and anarchist Herbert Read. In particular, Read’s concept of vitalism was directly related to the themes of the above-mentioned exhibitions by Sandberg and Marinotti. [31]
Two other admirers of Bergson deserve mention here, namely Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose text A Thousand Plateaus expands the horizon of Bergson’s metaphysics. [32] If we look at the rhizome structure they describe, it constitutes just the type of decentralized, comprehensive, anti-hierarchical organization championed by the Société and by Sandberg. And the working principles of the Société Anonyme and of the Stedelijk during the time of Sandberg seem to prefigure the Deleuze-Guattari idea of nomadism.
The type of museum that we have described here is unlikely to, and probably should not, serve as a model at the present time. But, it can become a resource for cultural “exaptation”—a concept, also borrowed by Svetlana Boym from biology, which describes what happens when a particular trait evolves to serve some new function that was not part of its original purpose. [33]
The exaptation from the ‘Société-Sandberg’ museum that could be most relevant today relates to museum governance. The vertical, tree-like structure that defines most institutions today means that, the larger a museum grows, the more rigid its hierarchy must be in order to manage this structure. As a result, what museum directors require above all nowadays is exceptional managerial skills, and other aspects of a museum’s work risk being sacrificed to managerial efficiency. Rejecting such an authoritarian model, where the core objective is to control the dependent units, in favour of a heterogeneous, anti-hierarchical type of organization implies, as a minimum, the opportunity for a museum to reallocate its resources and focus on its original purpose of dealing with artists, art, and exhibitions, and, as a maximum, restitution of the museum to artists and return to the governance model of the artist-driven space, which was used in the first museum of modern art.
Translated from: Shpilko O. Iskusstvo, a ne personalii // Dialog Iskusstv, №4, 2016. P. 70–73.
In Paris on 15 June 2020 a group of visitors paid their tickets and entered the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacque Chirac (named after the former French President). Navigating among exquisitely illuminated artefacts from around the world the group started a Facebook live stream. They then transformed from regular visitors who follow the logic of the museum into people who contest the museum. One of them – Mwazulu Diyabanza, a Congolese activist committed to the restitution of African heritage (well known, since the event here described, to the artistic world at large and in particular to European museums dealing with non-European artefacts) [1] – dislodges a 19th-century African / Chadian wooden funeral pole from its holder and explains to the camera that there is no need to ask permission to take back a stolen object from a thief. Speaking on camera, grasping the pole and walking towards the exit, Diyabanza makes various statements that he repeats again and again, mantra- or echo-like, regarding European colonization, the looting of objects and the urgent need to return them to the dispossessed communities. His action is a physical protest against the system that allows looted objects to be displayed in national museums, perpetrating colonial violence in its institutionalized form. Diyabanza points out that, by selling expensive entry tickets, museums are making a profit from the display of looted objects. The message is very straightforward: the objects need to be brought back to the communities that lost them. By physically taking the artefact Diyabanza highlights the huge divide between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ museums. Outside the museum colonization has technically ended, but inside the museum objects looted during the colonial era are still there. Diyabanza’s refrain is that this state of things must change, and by constantly repeating the same sentences, he emphasizes that his words fail to reach either the museum staff or the police, who are called by the museum administration to stop him doing what he is doing.
Diyabanza and his fellow activists are stopped at the museum exit. So the action and its message, diffused through Facebook and Youtube, went much further than the actual object, which failed to leave the building. Diyabanza’s words are not lost. They have been recorded and made available to the world. A few months later Diyabanza and other members of the group were fined for attempted theft.
Fig. 1. Mwazulu Diyabanza in the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. 2020. Source: https://youtu.be/uqcD4d-jtc8
The action by Mwazulu Diyabanza and his companions is an invitation to reflect on museums, the connection between institutions and the artefacts stored inside them, and what an anthropological museum could become if re-thought. This visitors’ rebellion can be inscribed within ongoing restitution debates and also within antiracist movements around the globe, such as Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter. It amounts to a wide-ranging critique of white supremacy and the institutionalized racism that dominates all facets of Western knowledge production and institutions. Material and immaterial power structures are attacked in order to interrupt these survivals of violence.
2. The ethnographic museum as graveyard
In his essay ‘Those who are dead are not ever gone’, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung resorts to the metaphor of choking in order to illustrate the present state of the ethnographic museum. In the very first ‘act’ of his essay he writes: ‘The institution of the ethnological museum or world museum seems to be in the midst of a serious crisis of choking.’ [2] Almost every act of the essay starts with the sentence: ‘The very strange thing about choking is that one can choke even while eating the most delicious of foods out there’. This metaphor adds up to a number of current critiques of the museum related to the understanding of museum collections and museum spaces as extensions and continuations of colonial violence.
The ethnological / anthropological museum or museum of world cultures – call it how you prefer – is a disturber. This museum is neither neutral nor unbiased. Museums are ‘sites of forgetfulness and fantasy’. [3] Regardless of the person of the architect and how much glass and sustainable materials are used for the façade, it remains a ‘museum of others’. Even built ex novo, this institution cannot free itself from its legacies and the history of conceptualization of ethnographic museums through the lens of colonial science and exploitation.
The idea of the ethnographic museum as a place of death is not new. It was expressed and visually represented by many authors, including Alain Resnais and Chris Marker in their 1953 documentary, Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die). The museum was represented as a place of death for the African artefacts shown in the movie:
“When men die, they enter into history.
When statues die, they enter into art.
This botany of death
is what we call culture.” [4]
Resnais and Marker’s film clearly shows ethnographic museums – specifically the Musée de l’Homme in Paris – as places that display the material effects of colonialism: the military pillage, violence and dispossession of communities around the world. The artefacts stored in the museum are not only the material evidence of colonial actions but also of colonial thinking. But to portray the museum overcome by a fit of choking (the image used by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung) is to represent the situation from a different viewpoint: if the objects are not set free, the West will choke to death on its own violence.
The ethnographic museum is testimony to the production, justification and embodiment of ‘race science’. The vicious circle starts and ends with the European colonial mindset that was invented and kept afloat through the idea of superiority. This overarching idea takes roots in the dichotomy of ‘civilized’ and ‘non-civilized nations’ separated by a temporal gap. ‘Primitive’, i.e., non-Western cultures and their cultural production are placed somewhere ‘behind’, in both a temporal and a developmental sense. Even if Western and non-Western cultures exist simultaneously in time, they are not interpreted as contemporary.
The logic of the ethnographic museum oscillates between national affirmation through the lens of Others and the violent encounter with the rest of the world. ‘The ethnological museum as an institution emerges from ideas of collection, display and learning with deep roots in Europe’s troubled encounters with those societies that were under imperial rule or came under some sort of Western sovereignty.’ [5] The objects brought to Europe and then placed in the museum are physical testimonies of the controlled representation of societies through essentialization and categorization, produced ad-hoc by colonial thought. The analytical categories applied are not those of the societies to which the objects belong, but derive from Western thought and the Western intellectual tradition. Such subjective interpretation producing a narrative on behalf of these objects and origin communities is a crucial feature of ethnographic museums because it mixes up different ontologies and imposes an opportune interpretation of the artefact. As Appadurai states: ‘The misunderstanding of the Savage Sublime is thus a three-way misunderstanding between the disciplines of ethnology, natural history, and art history, each of which is in fact a product of the Age of Empire and has a different stake in the proper understanding of the objects of the Other.’ [6]
Enlightenment ideas of knowledge and violent encounter with the other are closely interlinked in the ethnographic museum. The incongruity between the Enlightenment affirmation of the importance of knowledge and the production of knowledge that serves particular political, economic and personal interests is very striking. What we see is that the idea of Enlightenment and the production of tailor-made knowledge demonstrating the superiority of Europe over the rest of the world are actually not at odds. One is the cause and effect of the other. ‘Not to mention that the very duration, temporality, and meaning of these objects has been under an exclusive control and authority of Western museum institutions that decide how long one can have access to these objects.’ [7] Speaking on behalf of others, ‘learning’ and ‘dialoguing’ with the rest of the world in the context of domination and exploitation, and diffusing this knowledge through institutions as museum, archive and university in fact silences those on behalf of whom the speaking is done and controls the flow of information.
– The museum as a site of temporal and spatial separation
Mwazulu Diyabanza extends his hand in a symbolic gesture and takes the funeral pole from its stand. The object is not physically separated from him, there is no glass or other obstacle between him and it. But the gesture is a symbolic abolishment of the distance that exists between the visitor and the artefacts. In this specific moment Mwazulu Diyabanza is not only a visitor to a museum but a representative of those who were dispossessed, those who no longer accept colonial narratives and colonial spaces. The gesture is a decolonial act against continuous separation and placing at a distance (visual, physical and ideological) within a museum.
The colonial legacies of ethnographic museums, expressed through the politics of separation, echo the seminal lines that Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth on the compartmentalization of the colonial world. The idea of the colonial world and colonial epistemology is based on separation:
‘The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obviously as superfluous to recall the existence of “native” towns and European towns, of schools for “natives” and schools for Europeans, as it is to recall apartheid in South Africa.’ [8]
Dan Hicks further develops the idea of compartmentalization through the idea of the museum as a space of containment. This containment is linked both to the idea of dehumanization of Africans and at the same time to the ‘normalization of the display of human cultures in the material form.’ Hicks uses the term ‘chronopolitics’ that describes not only the denial of being part of the ‘contemporary’ world and being given a separate temporality, but also the collapsing of space into time: ‘It appeared that the further from metropolis the European travelled, the further back in time they went, until reaching the Stone Age in Tasmania, or Tierra del Fuego, etc.’ In museums and archives the conceptualization of time and space becomes very evident and also very significant. Both types of institution emphasize the temporal and spatial situatedness of the Other. In this they echo Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, where the narrator, Charles Marlow, tells the story of a steamboat journey up the Congo river, penetrating ‘the heart of Africa’. On a discursive level Conrad clearly shows how this journey into the continent, further from the coast, brings the European traders to a dark place, where the life of local populations seems to be ages behind Europe. And together with this gesture that Fabian has called ‘denial of coevalness’ – the verbal assertion that two living human groups were living in incommensurable time periods – there was a parallel process of material change, through which whole cultures were physically stripped of their technologies, had their living landscapes transformed into ruins, and had these moments of violence extended across time, memorialized, through the technology of the anthropology museum. [9] ‘Museums are devices for extending events across time: in this case extending, repeating and intensifying the violence […] anthropology has been constructing its object – the Other – by employing various devices of temporal distancing, negating the coeval existence of the object and subject of its discourse.’ [10] The objects brought from Africa, Asia or the Americas are part of the construction of temporal and spatial dimensions that negate coevalness to non-Western cultures. This negation is at the root of the conceptualization of ethnographic museums as places that display so-called ethnographic objects, which are not granted space in museums of fine arts. ‘Since the modern age the museum has been a powerful device of separation. The exhibiting of subjugated or humiliated humanities has always adhered to certain elementary rules of injury and violation. And, for starters, these humanities have never had the right in the museum to the same treatment, status or dignity as the conquering humanities. They have been subjected to other rules of classification and other logics of presentation.’ [11] Following this logic ‘ethnographic objects’ are disconnected from the present and left exclusively in the past.
The makers of the film Statues Also Die deal with the ‘imprisonment’ of African masks behind the glass of Western museums. This spatial separation between the visitor and the artefact, but also between different artefacts, is clearly shown. The spatial appropriation and imprisonment of African objects is musealization. It is made possible by two processes related to the ontological misunderstanding of such artefacts. First, the misunderstanding of the roles and functions of the masks (or other objects) in the societies that produced them. Second, the use of the same explanatory grids for different environments and cultural settings. [12] Transforming socially relevant objects into museum artefacts deprives them of their original meaning, significance and larger context, and thereby silences them. At the same time, it allows the insertion of the artefacts into the Western canon of categorization. ‘Whereas museologization is a western stance that deals with alterity in time as history, ethnologization deals with it in space as distance. The combination of “ethnographic” and “museum” that assimilates African artefacts which are still attached to living people, points at the putting into the past of the distant. The imagery that museologization and ethnologization produces, appropriates the other as something primitive, barbarous or exotic.’ [13]
The physical divide between the inside and the outside of the museum is another dimension of separation. The action by Mwazulu Diyabanza underlines this dimension because he embodies a visitor who enters from the outside and contests the epistemic logic of the museum. The building is clearly delimited from the outside world by its built structure. The walls of the museum preserve the colonial temporality inside the museum, safeguarding an uninterrupted continuity since its creation. More locally, the separation is operated by the glass boxes or any kind of physical obstacle between the objects and the viewer.
The action at the Quai Branly museum in Paris underlines in a very clear way how different levels of separation can be overcome, how the external and internal dimensions of the museum can start communicating. Mwazulu Diyabanza enters from the outside – an outside, which, in this context, represents a space of protest and contestation of colonial legacies, opposed to the inside of the museum. ‘Outside’ is the space where the Rhodes Must Fall protests took place and it is the social space of the Black Lives Matter movement. Mwazulu Diyabanza symbolically brings the struggle inside the museum. His action can be read through the lens of separation and chronopolitics as contesting spatial and temporal dimensions of separation by actively challenging the structures of the museum. It can also be an invitation to build bridges between the outside and the inside. The attempt to bring the object outside the museum is an attempt to create a different epistemic context for it. The question that simultaneously arises is whether it is possible to keep the objects inside, but to re-create the museum environment around them.
3. Creating a different network of relations between visitors, museum institutions and artefacts.
The realization that something is wrong with the ethnographic museum is not new. Besides clear feelings of ‘malaise dans les musées’ experienced by many visitors and described by scholars, the debate has moved into the political sphere. In the recent past, the speech by Emmanuel Macron at Ouagadougou University in 2017 was an important milestone. Macron affirmed that all looted objects in French museums should be restituted. This speech was followed by the report commissioned by Macron in 2018 from two eminent scholars, Senegalese Felwine Sarr and French Bénédicte Savoy.
Their report ‘Restituer le patrimoine africain’ (‘Restitution of African Heritage’) is a landmark contribution to public discussion on the restitution of African artefacts. It starts by questioning what ‘restitution’ of African objects might mean in the current context before discussing concrete steps on how to proceed. Sarr and Savoy define restitution through the verb ‘to restitute’, that ‘literally means to return an item to its legitimate owner’. [14] The authors point out that ‘this term serves to remind us that the appropriation and enjoyment of an item that one restitutes rest on a morally reprehensible act (rape, pillaging, spoliation, ruse, forced consent, etc.). In this case, to restitute aims to re-institute the cultural item to the legitimate owner for his legal use and enjoyment, as well as all the other prerogatives that the item confers (usus, fructus, and abusus).’ [15] The act of restitution would acknowledge the illegitimate actions of the past but would also contribute to the rupture of colonial survivals in museums today. The Sarr-Savoy report is an important step towards the institutional understanding of the ethnographic museum as a place that must restitute pillaged objects to the communities that were violently deprived of their material heritage. ‘To openly speak of restitutions is to speak of justice, or re-balancing, recognition, of restoration and reparation, but above all: it is a way to open a pathway toward establishing new cultural relations based on a newly reflected-upon ethical relation.’ [16] This report has contributed to the discussion of how to move from the present reality of the ethnographic museum, full of the products of colonial violence, to a new type of museum that would be free from such violence. What will these museums become when the objects finally find their way back?
Although, for the moment, the artefacts remain in the museums and massive restitution has not affected museums in either France or other European countries, critical approaches to ethnographic museums and ways of re-thinking colonial legacies are being experimented with. Radical reassessment of history and social struggles against the persistence of colonial histories and heritage may lead to different solutions or responses.
The options are multiple and the possible remedies are various. First of all, there is the attempt to critically approach the museum and its legacy through decolonial practices. These may consist of rebranding and revisiting the collection and trying to establish a different type of interaction between the viewer, the objects and the institution. The second task is to bring down the statues and monuments of colonialism. The third and most challenging task is to find alternatives to museums or monuments as we know them at present, alternatives based on different epistemologies and different forms of knowledge production, which have been ignored or silenced by Western culture.
– Rebranding ‘world culture’ museums
In recent years a number of institutions have started to engage in decolonial practices that involve a rebranding of ethnographic museums. One example is the work carried out by Clémentine Deliss who was director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt between 2010 and 2015. The challenge of the ethnographic museum, as formulated by Clémentine Deliss is ‘knowing how to come to terms with the hiatus between the narratives of then and now, the different geopolitical and associative identities, and their relation to crises and war, epidemics, and anonymity? Moreover, how to do this with a collection that had been brutally extricated from its original referentiality?’ [17]
Deliss wanted to transform the museum from an end-point, a static frame of the past, and for it to be perceived instead as a process, a living organism. The final step in her re-thinking of the museum would be what she calls the ‘post-ethnographic museum’. ‘If we want to discuss the post-ethnographic museum, however, the necessity for new experimental research into these collections is paramount,’ she says. [18] The post-ethnographic museum is an ethnographic museum that has been profoundly reworked and rethought at all levels, starting from its architectural structures to its modus operandi as an institution in the cultural field. Deliss took steps to overcome the idea of temporal, spatial and epistemic separation in the museum by imbricating interventions from contemporary artists, writers and thinkers with the objects of the museum collection. She criticized the idea that only ‘ethnologists’ or other professionals working in museum depositories can assign and define the meanings of the objects. She invited new people to interact with them. The space of the Weltkulturen Museum organized ‘encounters’ between the objects – often labeled as sacred or ethnographic – and contemporary art. These steps suggested a radical change in the way a European ethnographic museum creates meanings. ‘The Weltkulturen Museum is about people, objects and their trajectories. For objects, too, are migrants, and embody partial or incomplete knowledge. The design for the new building should reflect the inherent tensions of our societies, recognizing that the museum offers less a static endpoint than a dynamic moment of connection in an ever-fluctuating assemblage of identifications between people and things.’ [19]
During her directorship Deliss worked on and elaborated the idea of a museum-university – a hybrid proto-institution that makes formal and informal university-level inquiry flow into former ethnographic museums, basing all new research on the potentiality created by assemblages of artefacts, documents, and photographic archives. [20] So the museum would be perceived as a space of learning, of knowledge production, and not of an imposed and controlled narrative.
– Bringing down the statues
The option of bringing down monuments to coloniality is compared by Achille Mbembe to demythologization of history and putting it to rest. [21] As Preciado writes for Artforum: the statues ‘stand for the values of virility, racial purity, wealth, and power, affirm the victory of the patriarchal-colonial discourse that commissions and installs them and occludes undesirable narratives.’ [22] When protesters tear down the statues, sometimes they are replaced with alternative heroes, as for example a Black woman or Darth Vader. Preciado underlines at the same time that a fallen statue opens up ‘a possible space of resignification in power’s dense and saturated landscape.’ But when the statues fall – and they must fall, as Preciado writes – their pedestals that remain empty continue to bear the symbolic value of a monument. The empty pedestal, according to Preciado, is also a symbol of something. He suggests leaving the pedestals empty as a free space of expression. ‘Let the museums remain empty and the pedestals bare. Let nothing be installed upon them. It is necessary to leave room for utopia regardless of whether it ever arrives,’ Preciado writes. This take on statues and their pedestals echoes with the opinion of Dan Hicks on museums. He underlines the importance of anthropological museums if they can successfully ‘transform themselves by facing up to the enduring presence of empire, including through acts of cultural restitution and reparations, and for the transformation of a central part of the purpose of these spaces into sites of conscience.’ [23]
Fig. 3. Sculpture of a black woman installed in place of the statue of Edward Colston
Dan Hicks suggests re-thinking museums, their anthropological display and what exactly the museum should evoke: pride or shame, etc. The visitors’ rebellion is a clear request for restitution, but, as Dan Hicks suggests, rather than being seen as an attempt to efface the anthropological museum, it is a call to recreate it as a site of consciousness. ‘In case of restitution the space of the museum can be re-worked and re-thought. Restitution is not subtraction; it is refusing any longer to defend the indefensible; it is supporting African institutions, colleagues and communities; addressing western museums’ roles as sites of conscience and remembrance, tackling the ongoing effects of racial violence, paying a debt, rebuilding a relationship. No museum can stop the world from changing around it. Dialogue is giving way to action. We don’t know how this ends for the ten thousand objects looted from Benin.’ [24]
Fig. 4. The statue of Darth Vader that replaced the statue of Vladimir Lenin in Odessa, Ukraine
Bringing down a monument, as in the Rhodes Must Fall protest, is only a first step in the decolonial approach to archives, museums and institutions. The same goes for Mwazulu Diyabanza’s seizure of the funeral pole in the Museum Quai Branly in Paris. The first gesture of active protest needs to be followed by global rethinking of how museums could exist outside the relationship of categorization imposed by the Eurocentric modern vision of the world, ceasing to control the narratives of the objects exhibited there.
– Finding alternatives
So what alternative can be found to the ethnographic museum? How can a part of the building be re-built if the rest remains intact? Can we keep the building but destroy its foundation? How can the foundation of the museum be rebuilt but the rest of the building be kept?
If colonial thought and colonial ideas are at the basis of the museum of Others, how is it possible to get rid of the colonial part but keep the rest?
4. Alternative forms of archiving for sound
‘Each time an individual moves an object from one place to another, they participate in the changing of the world. Who is to tell us that the leaf that falls from the tree is not our sister? An object is charged with history, with the culture that produced it originally and, as such, it is a constructed object […] Objects do speak, but they speak their own language. Like the wind speaks. Like birds speak.’ [25]
The Western materialistic approach to culture and knowledge is based on possession and storage of objects or documents in the museum or in archives as a physical proof of their existence. Such an approach is opposed to that of so-called oral cultures, which do not depend on written matter for transmitting and conserving knowledge. Obviously, the way knowledge is conceptualized is also directly related to the form of its transmission and conservation. ‘African societies have produced original forms of mediation between the spirit, matter, and the living. […] these societies generated open systems of mutual resource-sharing concerning the forms of knowledge at the heart of participative ecosystems, wherein the world is a reservoir of potentials.’ [26] European ethnographers used the Western understanding of knowledge and categorized the world accordingly, without taking account of different epistemic systems.
The only possible direction in thinking about objects coming from the African continent is to turn for knowledge and inspiration to African and diasporic creators. As stated by Chakrabarty, Europe should be provincialized. This approach to re-imagining museums would go further than re-branding: it would involve turning to different epistemic bases. One example is Nana Oforiatta Ayim’s Kiosk Museum, a mobile form of museum that proposes flexibility, inclusivity, participation and consciously goes beyond ‘apartness’. As Ayim says, referring to mainstream contemporary museums: ‘This apartness can create gaps between their representation of the stories they tell and the lived experiences of those stories.’ [27] Her mobile museum contained in a kiosk – a structure known to anyone in Ghana – was presented in several different cities around Ghana and also gained high international visibility at the Festival Chale Wote in Accra in 2015. The mobile museum project represents a critique of the idea of a stable, fixed museum space. It also overcame the controlled narrative proposed by the museum, using more egalitarian interaction between the museum, its visitors and the objects. ‘Visitors spontaneously assumed the role of curator or tour guide with lively accounts of their own experiences in the festivals. These moments helped to invert the typical institutional hierarchies of contemporary museums and contributed to the richness of the information generated in the kiosk.’ [28] The Kiosk Museum became a space generating knowledge through interaction instead of controlling knowledge. The question Nana Oforiatta Ayim asked was: what would be a suitable display of objects in the African contexts? Her practice shows how to draw inspiration from the realities of the continent instead of subjugating them.
Fig. 5. Moving museum by Nana Oforiatta Ayim. Photo: Ofoe Amegavie/ANO
It is crucial, in rethinking museums and archives, to emphasize the epistemic divide between material and immaterial. How can the immaterial and intangible be stored? Should it be stored at all? Are there alternative ways of addressing this problem other than materializing the immaterial?
It is inspiring to look at ways in which immaterial knowledge and oral heritage can be stored and transmitted. The Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye addressed this question brilliantly in her film Fad’jal, in which she shows her native village in the Sine-Saloum region of Senegal. The feature-length film reveals the life of the village through its agricultural and spiritual activities. Her decision to represent her own village is quite natural. The village is the archetypical place of ‘authenticity’ and ‘tradition’, a place which ethnographers and anthropologist are particularly interested in. If ethnographic museums want to represent the African environment, the basis of the representation would definitely be a village. It is interesting, therefore, how Faye frames her visual narrative.
Faye manages to mix ethnographic filmmaking with an insider’s meditation on familiar events. She shows how villagers work in the fields, produce salt, give birth and bury their dead – various regular activities that characterize the cycle of the year. At the same time in Fad’jal Faye interrogates and re-creates the history and memory of the village from a very personal point of view. Faye who studied ethnology in Paris and was a long-term collaborator of Jean Rouch, delivers a personal and at the same time distanced take on the reality that she is extremely familiar with. ‘Distance (chosen by Faye) is not detachment. Faye’s ambiguous position which unites alienation and rootedness, employs an aesthetic of distance rather than a Rouchian participatory style, which would have its basis in the desire to bridge the outsider’s position.’ [29] Faye’s ability to mix documentary and fiction is also very suggestive for the discussion of museums and archives. Faye’s gaze goes beyond separation and the politics of ‘putting at a distance’ that is typical of ethnographic cinema. Faye uses her distant mode of representation to show that her characters can only be accessible in their inaccessibility – this is her way of reconciling empathy and inaccessibility. Through long fixed frames she creates a new stance that goes beyond the ‘outside vs. inside’ dichotomy. Faye’s observational mode is a way of bringing opposite poles closer, mediating and finding a new visual discourse.
The film starts with a scene in the French-speaking school. The scene is evocative of the type of education delivered in former French colonies. The school as an architectural unit separates the space of formal learning from the space of living, of daily life, of spoken language, of stories and memories. The scene in the classroom shows children going over their homework – a mechanical repetition of the same sentence dealing with the 17th century King of France, Louis XIV. This scene is the only representation of formal education and its role for the people of the village. The manner of speaking and postures of the children as they repeat the lesson show that there is no way they can relate to this obscure historical figure: ‘Louis XIV était le plus grand roi de France. On l’appelait le roi Soleil. Sous son règne fleuraient les lettres et les arts.’ [30] The scene ends with the end of the lesson. Shot from the inside, we see a fixed image of children flowing from the classroom into the school yard, leaving the space of imposed and constricted knowledge behind them.
Faye never takes us back to the school during the remainder of the film – it does not seem to be a productive place for her narrative. The colonial history is not Faye’s main interest, but it cannot be disregarded if an overall picture of village life is to be attempted. The school and the church are two closed spaces and built environments that can be contrasted with the other, mostly open, locations of the film. Showing the lesson in the formal school at the beginning contrasts with the rest of the film and builds a discursive comparison between different ways of transmitting history.
Faye focuses in the film on oral history and in particular on its transmission and appropriation. The film starts by citing the famous dictum of Amadou Hampate Ba: ‘In Africa when an old man dies, a library burns’. The oral history and its social and cultural form and role is foregrounded by the filmmaker. It is shown as a crucial interaction between different generations and their continuity through time and space. This thematic thread is focused onto a group of young boys – mostly adolescents – who gather around their maam (‘grandparent’ or ‘elder’ in the Wolof language) and ask him to tell the history of Fad’jal, the place they belong to and inhabit. The story is divided into several parts and alternates with the other visual scenes of the film. Finally, in order to close the discursive circle of the film, Faye shows how the children gather around the kapok tree and start re-telling the story (Images 6 and 7).
This polyphonic narration shows how it feels to belong to this history not only as listener, but also as narrator. In the final scene the elder is no longer present. He has accomplished his role. The young boys are now bearers of the village’s history and will take it further with them. We observe how a young generation enters into the possession of knowledge and its embodiment through the voice. There is no longer just one storyteller: each of them takes part in the story, telling it in small parts. This approach to history seems playful, but it is also an overt recognition of simultaneous belonging. The alternation of those who are listeners and those who are storytellers is shown as natural and vital. At the end of the film the boys have been entitled to speak. This does not happen in the classroom but under the tree. The children leave the classroom and step into their cultural and social world. The distance between formal knowledge and the places of their lives and their stories is not overcome.
The way in which Faye presents different modalities of knowledge transmission is highly suggestive for thinking about archives and museums. Her magnificent images establish a poetic connection between oral histories (oral forms of knowledge transmission) and trees. She shows trees and the vicinity of trees as spaces of oral history and knowledge sharing. The storytelling experience takes place under large trees that offer shadow and protection to the elder and the boys. The first scene shows them gathered under a large baobab tree (Image 8 and 9). On other occasions they are under a kapok tree, or in places where several trees stand close by one another. This ‘under-the-tree’ space marks a central point of knowledge transmission. It is simultaneously protected and open, a place where anyone who is interested can ‘walk in’. This is a place where the sounds and events of village life commingle with the narration of history, in contrast with the closed spaces of containment. For example, in one of the scenes, the elder stops speaking because the sounds of music reach them. He pauses and listens to the sounds coming from the village. Here Faye shows how the present and the past of the village are in communication, they are not separated from one another, but are interwoven.
The image of the tree as a place of knowledge, a place of transmission and protection is epistemologically opposed to the spaces of the school or the museum. The surrounding environment naturally embraces the ‘under-the-tree’ space, which serves as a symbolic and metaphoric archive of immaterial and intangible knowledge production, preserved within village society. The openness of the tree and its ability to embrace everything that is told and shared among listeners is quite different from the world of closed, classified and categorized archives, access to which requires special invitation or authorization. Faye’s image of the tree presents the idea of alternative archives: open, shared, and unrestricted by the walls and constrictions of buildings. The discursive space of the tree is an alternative to the space of containment, which Faye herself depicts in other episodes of the film in order to draw this contrast and defy the politics of separation.
As Western museums are to categorizing and classification, oral cultures are to sound. [31] It might be said that, for Black African and diasporic cultures, the central concept for the understanding of generative forces and their functioning is ‘sound’, as theorized by Louis Chude-Sokei in his seminal essay ‘Dr. Satan’s Echo Chamber’. [32] Chude-Sokei starts out from the idea of ‘word-sound’ as it exists in the Rastafari conception. ‘Sound becomes its own realm of meaning, of discourse, of politics where the word is necessarily tied to a cultural specificity that must always contend with its other, its sound. And a sound must in turn […] struggle with the implications of its echoes and the cultural practices of those far enough away to make their own local meanings out of the echo before it decays and is swallowed by infinity.’ [33] The echo chamber is a metaphor of the movement of sound, of diffusion of knowledge through sound waves that link places and cultures. Chude-Sokei refers in particular to the culture of reggae and dub music as it developed in Jamaica in the 70s. Based on the idea of echo and reverberation, dub music was a way of spreading sound and the information contained in it. This principle is also at the basis of oral cultures, as shown by Safi Faye in her film. The story is told by the maam and is then polyphonically echoed by the young boys. This telling of history and transmission of knowledge is the epistemic contrary to the idea of categorizing and containment of knowledge, which is standard in Western museums and archives.
The dictionary defines sound as ‘vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard when they reach a person’s or animal’s ear’. Turning to sound as a tool for communication and memorialization is particularly relevant in the West African context. Through sound, its echo and reverberation, stories are told and re-told through times and spaces. Oral accounts are not fixed, but change over time and also have a significant relationship with the present. The nature of this knowledge is ‘elliptical and resonant’, [34] non-fixed and variable.
Louis Chude-Sokei’s discussion, in his approach to reggae music, of culture and sound from a materialistic viewpoint also seems very relevant to the analysis of oral culture and knowledge transmission as demonstrated and analyzed in Fad’jal. The circulation of knowledge is a complex intersection of sound and culture and their echo through temporal and spatial distance. For Chude-Sokei, echo is also the sensation of a restless searching for roots and the never-ending tensions of dispersal. In the case of oral history, as shown by Faye in her films, there is no technology involved, but there is a clear centrality of the sound.
While, in Chude-Sokei’s analysis, the technological component is crucial, I look at orality through the pattern of echo and reverb without technological innovation, focusing on the crucial role of ‘sound’ for culture, its transmission, its diffusion and its conceptualization. Sound is linked to orality, to diaspora, to the echoing of knowledge and culture through time and space. ‘Sound in Jamaica means process, community, strategy and product. It functions as an aesthetic space within which the members of the national or transnational Jamaican community imagine themselves. This is an imagined community which, unlike the one mapped out by Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, operates not by the technologies of literacy, but through the cultural economy of sound and its technological apparatus which is distinctly oral.’ [35]
Repetition and echoing of sounds and their reverberation in the under-the-tree space allows the diffusion, conservation and transmission of knowledge through sound. While more in-depth research on connections and intersections between orality in West Africa and diasporic sounds remains to be done, the essay by Chude-Sokei has already illuminated the connection between oral history and knowledge transmission in the ‘under-the-tree space’ and its relation to echo and reverb. These practices can all be linked by what Chude-Sokei calls the ‘technology of orality’: ‘For those descended from oral traditions and whose dependence on it is due to the exclusive and racialist structure of Western literacy, a sensitivity to sound must exist in a way that it does not for the children of Prospero.’ [36] Colonial histories and histories told in the classroom do not echo in the children in Fad’jal, as do the stories that the maam tells. The scene in the school is focused on history and its telling, but although the children all repeat the same sentence, it is clearly visible that there is no connection between them and the information they repeat.
Thinking about ‘sound’ and the images of Safi Faye’s film, the question naturally arises: Why can a tree not be considered an archive? Why can an archive not be imagined under the tree? Safi Faye shows us this space of spreading knowledge, echoing through time – from generation to generation – but also through space, overcoming physical distances with sound. Polyphonic voices, elliptical histories, accessible knowledge and travelling sounds are all features that both Faye and Chude-Sokei put forward. So, if knowledge and heritage are sound, if they are shared by people through their voices, why should this knowledge be attached to a physical support? How can such an archive be looted? And how can it be preserved? Only those directly involved in these processes can decide how, what and where they want to preserve.
5. Dissemination, dispersal and giving away…
‘Museums have of course assimilated post-colonial critique, and they are often good at dealing with asymmetries of power; but they are very bad at dealing with asymmetries of epistemology; […] So long as “ethnographic” museums do not deal with cultural difference in a more symmetrical manner, they will remain “colonialist” institutions.’ [37]
Any attempt to decolonize needs to be inspired by non-Western voices and ideas. This means listening to voices like that of Mwazulu Diyabanza. When Diyabanza and his comrades are surrounded by the police and museum staff in the museum hall, it becomes very visible that his voice and his words, repeated an infinite number of times, flow freely, but his ideas are not captured. Through his actions and words Diyabanza highlights that, in the context of Western management of ethnographic and anthropological museums, the ideas of theft, of heritage, of right and wrong, are much more complex than a simple dichotomy of legality and illegality. For so long as Mwazulu Diyananza can be condemned for theft, and for an offense against law and order, the colonial principles of containment and separation will continue to reign. Visitors who protest against museums by physically engaging with the institution are a response to the continued existence of the epistemologies of classification and categorization. Diyabanza really speaks the same language as the creators of the museum. He comes and takes as if asking all those who hear him: is it possible to steal from a thief?
Several conclusions can be drawn from the action in the Quai Branly Museum. First of all, there is an urgent need for restitution of looted artefacts. Second, the action is the physical and visual proof that the ethnographic museum has failed. Recourse must be made to different epistemic systems, new language and new images for critical rethinking of the museum. In this context, the image of tree-as-archive can work as a space of immaterial, oral culture, open and flexible. It is dynamic, it is not static, it does not ‘freeze’ the picture of the past, but reverberates between present and past. It can be a place of engagement, of joint work, it is pluralistic and open-ended. The museum space needs to become ‘museum in reverse’ based on dissemination and dispersal, on giving away rather than accumulating. [38]
What is the difference between a cinema and a gallery? Both are public entertainment venues which screen their films in darkened rooms, populated by an audience of friends and strangers. The contrast is in the way that the audience inhabits these spaces. When we enter a cinema, we take our allocated seat and sit static and silent in pitch black, as we absorb a feature film from beginning to end. We might break the quietude to gasp at a horror movie, laugh at a comedy, or even sob at the end of tragedy – yet these are solo, not intentionally sociable, actions. The promotional trailer is the only contextual material sought by the average viewer, and the aim of watching the film is not to engage in a dialogue. The viewer is isolated and immobilised in a sealed space, building an independent experience.
Meanwhile, the dimly-lit screening room of a gallery is fundamentally designed to encourage interaction and movement: audiences walk in through an open doorway or gently-hung curtain, they often remain standing as a curator will rarely provide audiences with a cushioned seat, even when showing hours-long artist films. There is no formal obligation to watch an artist film from beginning to end. We do not view this as a problem as no doubt the work in question will be prefaced by a guiding curatorial text and as we drift in and out screenings, we will overhear and engage in discussion about the work. Unlike blockbusters, films as artwork exist inside an institution as part of a collection or exhibition, and as part of an ongoing canon to be interrogated. With this discursive approach, we accept art-viewing as teamwork: introductory panels and guidebooks lay the foundations and raise the frame, our experience of the artwork bricks in the walls and gives the building its shape, and social interactions thatch the roof and seal any holes.
However, in 2021, we find ourselves acting as the master-builder of our experiences. The Covid-19 pandemic and its resulting lockdowns have seated the majority of us firmly at home: solo, static, silent, sunk staring at screens in our own cushioned seats. Our homes have become the cinema, and the doors are locked for the duration. And to entertain locked-down arts audiences, international institutions have transported digital artwork experiences online.
Rhizome, possibly the first internet art organisation having been established in Berlin in 1996, has uploaded the archive of its First Look programme to the web. Produced in partnership with The New Museum in New York, this means that at-home viewers can watch numerous digital commissions online, dating back to 2012.
Meanwhile, multidisciplinary arts organisation Performa has established its online channel Radical Broadcast. While Performa would usually be commissioning live works, running international tours or coordinating the next edition of the only live performance-based biennial in the world, Radical Broadcast has been designed to situate performative artworks online. To mirror the experience of a live, timed performance, its screening programmes always start at the same hour, regardless of your time zone – for example, their spring 2021 programme LEAN begins with screenings at 9am, whether you’re in Moscow or London.
Then there is Daata, which commissions and sells digital artworks by emerging and renowned international artists, and in 2020 presented the first exclusively online art fair, conversely titled Daata Miami. Although a keenly commercial venture, Daata’s commissions are available to stream for free, while its low-cost subscription service DaataTV was also established in 2020 to allow paid users to create their own digital art playlists.
In London, there is This Is Public Space, an online programme by non-profit public art organisation UP Projects. Like Daata, This Is Public Space produces new digital commissions, however these are designed to be experienced exclusively on the web – considering the internet as another kind of public space.
Aside from a surround-sound system and 8K display, there appears to be little to differentiate viewing digital artworks at home from inside a gallery (the human eye cannot actually differentiate between 4K and 8K resolution, anyway). Comfortably seated at our computers, without fellow audience members moving across the screen, fidgeting besides us or talking over artwork dialogue, are we not better set to immerse ourselves in the works here, to do them justice? In a sense, yes. A home setting seems as if it would optimise concentration – trusting that we have first switched off our screen’s email alerts, social media notifications, and news updates. With our fingers on the touchpad, we have full control over the work: we can easily arrive at or decide upon an artwork’s start time, we can zoom in, raise the volume or rewind anything that we miss, we can even pause to Google search anything that we don’t quite understand – or just sift through Instagram to find that actor we think we recognise…
This is where the problems begin. As contemporary human beings, we are already playing host to a distracted mind. In the digital age, we are surrounded by constant distractions, while ever-accessible online information frees us from having to commit anything to memory. Prior to the pandemic, the average human attention span had already dropped to less than that of a goldfish – eight seconds, in comparison to their nine – and the problem is only getting worse.
Over the past year of intermittent lockdowns and increased time online there has been a 300% rise in the Google search “how to get your brain to focus,” and similar statistics for “how to focus better,” and the disgruntled “why can’t I focus?” All over the world, people are living and working online and in isolation, which has furthered the severity of our attention deficit disorder. When we are alone and lacking in social comforts, we are more likely to reach for our mobile phones to check in with friends, or to immediately attend to the ping of an email or social media alert. It is natural to look for social interaction in times of loneliness and, in the short term, this habit just seems like harmless procrastination. However, it is deeply disrupting and physiologically near impossible to break. Each time we receive a message or online ‘Like’ our brain releases a rush of dopamine into its reward pathways. This chemical hit is by nature addictive, and it is the same reason that people return to other bad habits, like overeating, gambling or substance abuse – otherwise known as addictions. Unlike in private, in public spaces addictive behaviours are fairly easy to manage as they are not socially acceptable, which is the same for digital addictions. Tapping away on the glowing blue face of your iPhone would soon have you ushered out of a gallery screening room, and all commercial movies are prefaced by the title-card “Please Turn Off Your Mobile Phone.”
Alone time not only depletes our attention span by digital proxy. Experiments over the past fifty years all point to the conclusion that social isolation directly leads to a lack of focus. The nature of these studies range from French scientist Michel Siffre’s 205-day quarantine in a cave in 1972, to analysing behaviour change in prisoners in solitary confinement, and the biannual English Longitudinal Study of Ageing which has surveyed over 18,000 isolated elderly people since 2002.
Like our digital addiction, this is biological: a cognitive decline due to hormone imbalances and reduced levels of healthy, signal-firing matter in the brain. Isolation can cause dysregulated signalling in the prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making. It can even decrease the size of a person’s hippocampus which has a major role in learning and memory, and lead to higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol which further impairs these functions. And, the amygdalae, two almond-shaped brain areas which process emotional response, are often smaller if a person is lonely. Put simply, when we are unusually isolated we cannot make clear decisions, learn or remember in the same way, and our emotional reactions are skewed.
In addition to lessening our ability to think straight through social distancing, the Covid-19 pandemic has created a climate of instability and fear. Though we may not feel palpably afraid, many of us will have spent several months in ‘fight or flight’ mode. This becomes visible in actions such as jumping across the pavement from a passer-by, the rush to sanitise one’s hands, and understandable upset and worry if you or your loved ones are unwell. However, our body’s desire to fight or fly often manifests in a less noticeable way, quietly arising as we read the news. And, with a constant flow of digital information travelling into the palms of our hands and onto our laptop screens, this news is more inescapable than ever. Rather than be sustained long term, fight or flight is designed to protect us from immediate danger and so we become hyperaware, scan for threats, and are less able to produce complex thoughts – as we don’t need to, when running from a predator. Rendered animalistic via fight or flight mode, cognitively impaired through ongoing isolation, and perpetually distracted by the dopamine draw of our digital devices, focus is a problem in 2021.
When the master-builder cannot concentrate, building anything well-considered is rather difficult – and, acting solo, he has no teammates to fill in the gaps that he has missed.
Still, while lacking in sociable ‘IRL’ colleagues, it could be argued that when viewing artworks online we have immediate access to the most efficient and knowledgeable workforce there ever has been: the Internet. This is true. As we watch alone with our screens in arm’s reach, technology is readily available to fill in the gaps. A new tab or two, to sit alongside the artwork. A new window, sandwiching over the work with a different browser. A quick spin through Instagram on your smartphone. We are free to Pause, research, Play, as many times as we like. As one Google transforms into eleven different websites, checking site authors’ Twitter profiles along the way, it may take us three hours to watch a twenty-minute film work – though in lockdown, it can feel as if we have all the time in the world to spare.
To build our own unique, independently researched experience may seem positive. In the gallery, our view is primarily shaped by a curator’s text, written by one individual or two. In turn, their opinion has been shaped by the art world, its trending themes and gallerists’ picks (based on market worth). Among a mass of contextualisation, it can be difficult to identify whether or not you really like an artwork – especially if everyone and everything that surrounds you tells you that it is great. Art is still allowed to be subject to taste. Giving viewers space to form subjective understandings and to think alone is surely a good thing. The ability for this to rise out of an online context is, nevertheless, naïve.
In recent years we have seen the danger of grounding one’s worldview in the worldwide web. Online, a complete and universal knowledge may seem available yet there is no single online realm. Instead, we are all presented with different realms, populated by different personalities and different facts. The content that we read online depends upon the resources that we use, our location and online histories. For any given search, the first page of my Google results will most likely be different to yours. If you use a different search engine to me, backed by different advertisers with different vested interests, your results will be different again. My social media platforms will suggest I read alternate articles to you, and follow other people, based on whatever and whomever I already like or Like. The internet is a series of strands which lead users in whichever direction means a higher dwell-time and more impressions. Because, our attention is monetised.
If our personal realms simply educated us in separate areas of knowledge, that could be useful and we would build between us a varied and balanced workforce. However, our attention is being channelled towards online personalities and information which are carefully curated. Replacing the truth with a more appealing and popular (or populist) version is what people do online. And regardless of platform, your newsfeed is only designed to hold your attention – it does not know what is fact or fiction, what is balanced or extreme. At its most shallow, this means that the actor you searched on Instagram has deleted their posts about that failed movie role: their climb to stardom, untainted. However, the implications of online deceit can be far darker than a hidden box office flop. At its most extreme, the concentrating mechanisms of the internet lead into a tight echo-chamber of congratulatory or cynical chorus. IRL, this has apparated in events such as political uprisings instigated through Facebook; the election of the world’s first President to rally and rule via social media; and the transformation of ordinary people into Covid-19 conspiracy theorists. Fake news spreads six times faster on Twitter and polarisation is at a 20-year high.
When real-life teamwork is outsourced to an online workforce, the structure of our experience is left vulnerable to poor craftsmanship. It is the real-life social environment of viewing art in public that can prevent us from reaching for our phone. It is the real-life social environment of viewing art in public that enables us to fill in the gaps with discussion. And it is the real-life social environment of viewing art in public that enables us to interrogate information around an artwork together, to listen to opposing opinions, in a way that we cannot when accumulating content alone online.
Here the question arises, in lockdown and in lieu of real-life social environments, could we purify the home cinema: rid ourselves of digital distraction, and attempt to absorb artworks as unique insular experiences? This is a possibility, yet remains far from the context in which most video art was intended to be seen.
Or, do we work towards creating a social environment online? It’s possible to host group film screenings together on Zoom or Google Hangouts, with one user sharing their screen and the rest watching. Only one person at a time can speak over the film and their words slice through the film’s audio, as these platforms cannot play multiple sounds simultaneously, yet at least there is conversation. Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Scener and Amazon also enable communal viewings, some hosting up to 50 people. However, the chat is text, snatching the focus from watching to reading. Or, it’s possible to coordinate joint screenings of any movie by simply chatting on a shared WhatsApp or WeChat group and clicking Play in unison, swimming while viewing in the deep blue dopamine pool. Still, in each of these scenarios, your teammates are not diverse colleagues at work, but friends.
Are these options good enough, or do we instead go to the root of the problem? In the present moment, our brains are programmed to distraction by time online, our ability to concentrate has been damaged through isolation, and further aggravated by the ‘fight or flight’ mode caused by the absorption of digital news, some of which is misinformation. Perhaps, rather than continue to develop our digital options, we could pause and think about which media used to comfort and satiate people in times of quiet, and could help our contemporary condition.
Here, reading, rather than viewing, might be the key.
The very act of decoding symbols into letters, letters into words, and words into thoughts has been proven to restore the parts of the brain dissolved by screen time. To read requires a multitude of actions: word analysis and auditory detection, vocalization and visualization, phonemic awareness and fluency. This is before we even reach the importance of comprehending a narrative text. When we read a book, we absorb sentences and paragraphs in a linear way, and process the narrative sequentially; we must remember yesterday’s reading to understand today’s – all of this exercises our memory. And, while we tend to split our online attention, bouncing sporadically from tab to tab, reading requires sustained, unbroken focus which exercises our attention span. Reading can even enhance our ability to empathise and supports feelings of socialisation as, while we read, neurons in the brain react similarly to if we were experiencing the written sensations. In this sense, reading does not only show us character scenarios, but biologically places us in the bodies and company of the characters. Crucially for the current moment, reading is proven to reduce stress and anxiety more than walking, drinking tea, listening to music – and of course, spending time online. And, it has always been carried out solo, silent, static.
Together, we will return to the dimly-lit spaces, 8K screens and surround sound of the galleries, in which artworks were meant to be seen. In the meantime, we can take a moment to heal our minds and hone our skills as a brighter, more able workforce, with a focus, attention to detail and patience. If we are to take one thing from the home cinema, it might be to “please turn off our mobile phones” but instead of viewing, to switch on the lights and try picking up a book.
