Decolonization Be Messy: Why we must turn museums upside down
For the past few weeks, I have been observing the photos of beheaded statues, their bloody stone hands, their heavy posture falling under the strength of beautiful crowds from Antwerp to St. Paul, Bristol to Fort-de-France. The imagery of toppled colonizers and slaveowners resonates throughout the diaspora, echoing not only the attention currently drawn by the Black Lives Matter movements, but also decolonial struggles on the continent such as Rhodes Must Fall. But after a few instants, I usually shake off the pleased shudder of legitimate desecration and keep going back to thinking about all that is still standing. All the awkward binds between past and present, the colonial and violent continuities of the spaces in which it is decided who is honored, who is erased, and who is represented how in institutionalized memory.
Museums are among the big players in this game of historical representation and validation. Since the 1980s and the emergence of New Museology as a field of study, new questions came under scrutiny: what’s the purpose of a museum? How does it relate to power? What object make it into an ‘art’ museum and what is booked under ‘artefact’, ‘folklore’ or objects of ethnographic interest? What does this distinction mean? What is being collected, by whom, and according to which criteria? Who decides who makes it into the collective future, which works are preserved by the institutions and where in the world works are kept and shown?
Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the answer to most of these questions echoes the typical distribution of power. Museums as we know them today are largely a Western, modern construct. They operate within the idea of some total framework of knowledge about nature and animals, peoples and their art, beliefs and ways of living. The museum should, according to this idea, allow any visitor to identify their place in the world and its history. Though they may not recognize themselves in the people of the Middle Ages or of another culture, through their contextualization in a museum, visitors recognize them as a part of the grand adventure of humanity, of which they might represent either different stages or variations. This is particularly obvious for ethnographic and world culture museums, which often refer to themselves as ‘universal’ museums.
There’s a kind of paradox that makes museums such weird institutions: they claim to represent the whole of humanity in a boundaryless continuum, and yet play a decisive role in determining what is art and what is not, who observes and who is being observed, who is in, and who is out. They are made to collect, observe and classify the world in order to understand it. They are also, historically, spaces in which the white, colonial gaze onto Black people, indigenous people and people of color has materialized. Colonial museums, now called new, opaque names like Africa Museum, Tropenmuseum, or museums for world culture, keep displaying objects taken from contexts of extreme brutality, and largely withstand even the most official claims and demands for restitution. Meanwhile, museums all over the continent, from Dakar to Lomé, remain sparsely filled, and the Western representation of the Other, as opposed to the national, European or white us, remains only marginally changed. It’s not just that museums are a place in which differences are shown or illustrated: they have been an instrument in the production of categories and difference. It’s a similar dynamic in art museums, which hold the power of conferring value, and the status of ‘art’, to some objects and deny it to others, and to display some representations while omitting others.
“...while the statues are falling, I keep wondering: will we smash the museums down?”
The current political moment – by which I mean not the long-lasting struggle for Black survival and joy, but its global and mediatized resonance – has once again drawn attention to the political power and the strong consequences of the ways in which Black bodies are shown. Whether it’s seeing Black bodies brutalized, in pain and dead, or exoticized, sexualized and fetichized, the imagery that surrounds Blackness determines the experience of Blackness. When museums perpetuate representations centered on the white, often male, experience, and the existence of non-White people as objects of dominant artists’ look on them, they are making use of their power over representations and imaginaries. When museum policies – through acquisitions, but also entry fees, for instance – decide who is in and who is out, they uphold their role as structures of differentiation, and exclude primarily those most likely to be excluded from, or ranked lower within, society at large. And isn’t this, according to their history, doing exactly what they are meant to do? And can they really ever do anything else? The existence of museums and collections is so inherently bound to violence, extraction and exclusion that it makes the idea to change the institutions from within or by reform, somewhat hard to swallow. But what makes these interrogations so bleak is, at the same time, what makes the thought of decolonizing museums, if done right and in profound ways, so powerful.
And so, while the statues are falling, I keep wondering: will we smash the museums down? Or can they change enough to be relevant and fair in the current and future contexts? This question isn’t new (in one of their artworks from 1989, the feminist artist collective Guerrilla Girls asks: « When racism & sexism are no longer fashionable, what will your art collection be worth? »), but it is becoming increasingly pressing. The role of the African diaspora in these processes is central and complex. We are descendants of, parts of, that Other who has also become the audience. We walk through these exhibition rooms as impromptu witnesses to something that was meant to be about us, not for us. The depictions of Black women, exotic and sensual regardless of age and consent, by 19th century painters, or the exhibitions of their anatomy in scientific museums, or the murals that adorn a colonial museum turned museum of immigration are different facets of the same phenomenon. What does it mean when the institutions keep existing, when these objects keep being shown, or change only superficially and flabbily?
Of course, museums are, like many other cultural institutions, catching up – at least, in theory and/or marketing. While ethnographic museums change their names, move their collections to new buildings or renovate old ones, and ‘rehabilitate’ ethnographic collections as art, art museums in the West organize exhibitions that address the question of the white gazes on Black bodies and hire Black curators. Some take measures to directly change their collections: in April 2018, the Baltimore Museum announced that it would sell seven works from its collection, including Rauschenberg and Warhol, in order to create a fund for acquisition of works by women and artists of color. Is this what ‘decolonizing the museum’ looks like?
Decolonization is in, but its meaning can still be left out. And like an empty shell, decolonization begins to float around next to inclusion and diversity, a signifier of good intentions more than the revolutionary call to action it ought to be. The inclusion of Black and other marginalized artists into museums is extremely important in terms of allowing Black artists to live from their work, to keep making art, and to keep diversifying representations of people of African descent in the arts. Museums are increasingly forced to acknowledge their responsibility in establishing and perpetuating hierarchies and categories that contributed to the legitimization of oppression and colonialism. That, too, is a step. But it’s not decolonization as long as the mechanisms of exclusion, the supremacist categories behind museum’s existence, the stolen land and labor on which they are built isn’t acknowledged, until steps towards reparations are made, until staff is changed. Besides: do they really get to decolonize themselves? To ‘rehabilitate’ others? Do they really get to be the ones leading the conversation? Do they really get to choose their interlocutors?
As part of my research on two ‘world culture’ museums, the Humboldt-Forum in Berlin and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, I encountered a series of projects, funded by the European Union and lead museum directors and staff (the last of which is called SWITCH), which stressed the objective of reaching out to what institutions sometimes call “source communities”, that is, the communities that objects come from, and specifically for many of these museums, diaspora groups. This emphasis on the diaspora as an interlocutor of choice is interesting. I truly believe that the diaspora is, by its presence in the audience, through its initiatives and efforts, though the pressure it applies, changing expectations towards museums. I truly believe that for museums to recognize that they cannot keep going without other actors is a positive thing. Yet there is something off, for me, something potentially divisive, something that makes me think about the precarity of the role of the (in particular European) diaspora and how it relates to the continent. Some suspicion, at first: could it be that museums are engaging with the diaspora, which is more likely to act as advisors, maybe fill one, at most two position within the museum, rather than with African museums or governments that might ask for their objects back? Are we – members of the African diaspora – being mislead by the sirens of representation and inclusion? Are we making it easy for museums to call themselves decolonized, or de-centered, at minimum cost? And in centering the new museum discourses, branded as ‘decolonized’, around the diaspora, that is, those of us who can actually, physically and economically make it into the audience, are we reproducing some sort of hegemony of Western-produced discourses and representation?
“...a decolonial practice means asking whether our seat at the table is enough, and who it is really inclusive of.”
For those of us working in, on, or around, museums, a decolonial practice means asking whether our seat at the table is enough, and who it is really inclusive of. Or what kind of privilege it still entails, and how that informs what we do in these positions: advocate for the re-orientation of funds towards African museums, or take radical stances on restitution, for instance. Decolonizing the museum, within the diaspora, goes hand in hand with a constant re-assessment: What’s the value of infiltrating this space? Like in the opening scene of Black Panther at the British Museum, we keep on asking: what do we do when we are the ones who somehow made it in? What do we work towards? Who do we work for?
I’m thinking we’re here to make a mess. Museums rely on order, on categories and classification – the biggest threat to their survival as is, and the biggest opportunity to smash them productively, is that they become messy. That the categories don’t add up. That nothing gets called art anymore, that European art is called an artefact and exposed as such, that there is no such thing as European art anymore. We stop speaking of ‘beauty’ and trying to fit into it, as curators like Alanna Lockward have suggested.
In fact, maybe there are no such things as museums anymore, either. Maybe there’s messy rooms inside old and new buildings, and we can leave out explanations or context rather than just listen to the Western authoritative, scientific or rational script. We acknowledge its existence and place it next to a bunch of other discourses. Maybe we call museums the places in which we gather to sing and talk, maybe we ignore the audience, maybe we take art for a walk to the streets, to the parc. We redefine what’s meant to be touched, what’s meant to be played, what’s meant to go back to where it came from or go somewhere completely different. We use institutional means to keep exchanging objects and representations throughout the diaspora and the continent, to keep connecting. Maybe we make a mess of legal property and instead speak of belonging.
The consequences can go far beyond museum walls. Museums are a strong site from which to rethink the universalism they claim. Museums in the West entertain the fiction that they operate as holders and preservers of universal heritage, on behalf of the rest of the world. The 2002 “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums”, issued by 18 museums, of which 17 were located in the West, shows how universalism serves to justify their existence. Like a password to escape scrutiny, it aims to mask the Western, white and male origin not only of museum-making, but of universalism itself, and in doing so, underlines the urgency to decolonize both, the museum and the idea of universality. That, too, can come from turning the museum and its justifications upside down.
We’ll keep making spaces, for us by us, and then keep making space for our spaces in the bigger spaces we infiltrate. Whatever window they open for Afro-diasporic people in the art world, we expand it into doors so that everyone can fit – visions and experiences of Blackness, of African-ness and of diasporic belonging so wide and confusing that it won’t be contained in a museums marketing campaign. The only thing that is off-limits, is for ‘decolonizing museums’ to be a buzzword or a PR strategy – it’s got to get messy.