It is generally agreed that ethnology museums are in a state of crisis today. Because of their history, they are closely bound up with colonialism, their worldview is antiquated, and their collections often bear the taint of stolen goods; the debate on restitution has smoldered on for years—and finds expression in Berlin, say, in the “No Humboldt 21!” campaign. Ethnology museums, as the art theorist and historian Susanne Leeb wrote recently, “served primarily as a means of scientifically studying ‘other’ cultures, of demonstrating power of control, and of advertizing for the colonial project.” The debate on the future and legacy of ethnology museums has gained further weight in the German capital as the opening of the Humboldt-Forum in 2019 draws closer.

Hence the symposium “Remembering as a Constructive Act – Artistic Concepts for Museum Collections” (Berlin, October 19, 2013) touched a wide range of acute museological and cultural-political issues: Can ethnology collections remain intact in future? What task do they have to fulfill when the peoples they deal with live in the call shop opposite? The job of thinking about the present world with its migratory movements has meanwhile been taken over by others. Following on from the field of cultural studies that has emerged since the 1960s, it has chiefly devolved to biennials and exhibitions of contemporary art, for instance, the “Project Migration,” an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Contemporary art ostensibly offers ethnology museums a way out of their legitimation crisis. What is the significance behind the increased courting of the cooperation of contemporary artists by institutions? What significance does it have for the institutions? What good does it do art? Or are critics such as Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie right when they maintain that artists who work with Western museums in re-presenting their ethnology collections render themselves “suspect of complicity”?

An example that Melissa Chiu referred to in the symposium shows that it depends on how such collections are treated. A huge advertizing banner hung from the façade of the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore in 1992. It promised passersby a “different history” that could be discovered in the museum. What lay behind this was a project by Fred Wilson, an Afro-American artist who had mounted a show titled “Mining the Museum” at the Historical Society which to this day has set a standard for what institution-critical interventions by contemporary artists can achieve in the context of history or ethnology museums. Wilson juxtaposed objects from the museum collection and other material sensitively and radically, and thus invited the public to engage critically with how history is presented in historical collections. Following the principle that more can be learnt about a museum by researching its depot than by just visiting an exhibition, he studied the Historical Society’s stock and talked with all the museum staff. This research laid the basis for his – in the meantime oft-cited –  installation “Mining the Museum,” which shows how only minor interventions can suffice to open up new angles on history. Wilson exhibited silverware, for instance, and – in the same showcase, formerly concealed in the depot—slaves’ leg irons. In this way he highlighted the connection between economic wealth and slavery both clearly and simply.

More than two decades later, artists seem to have roles to play in relation to museum collections other than institution critique. Such at least was the impression conveyed by Jana Scholze’s talk on the exhibition project “Tomorrow” at the London V&A museum. The museum invited the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset to design a big site-specific installation in the former textile galleries. The two artists who, among other things, have been casually citing the traditions of art-institution critique in their practice ever since the mid-1990s, created a fictional character, through whose private domicile museum visitors were led. In the fake, South Kensington apartment of Norman Swann, retired architect, objects from the museum collection were for once not presented according to traditional museological practice, but instead were put in the service of the narrative about the fictional character. “Tomorrow,” to follow Scholze, raises the issues of “how objects are dealt with in the museum” and of the “value added that the museum objects provide in contrast to other objects.” Because certain V&A objects were not available for the Elmgreen & Dragset show, similar antiques acquired elsewhere—alongside things brought in by the artists—were integrated in the exhibition.

Might “Tomorrow” be a possible model for alternative collections? In Frankfurt am Main, on the other hand, artists have actually become a central component in the practice of one ethnology museum. As Clémentine Deliss explained at the start of her talk: “My models and my method of work stem from contemporary art.” With the aid of pictures from the Frankfurt exhibition “Trading Style—World Fashion in Dialogue” (November 7, 2012–October 27, 2013), Deliss showed how historical, ethnographic artifacts from the collection were brought together with contemporary approaches in art and design at the Weltkulturen Museum originally founded in 1904. For the exhibition project four young fashion labels—A Kind of Guise (Germany), Buki Akib (Nigeria), CassettePlaya (Great Britain), and Perks and Mini (Australia) – were invited to spend time working at the Frankfurt institution and, over a period of weeks, on the basis of its extensive collection of pictures, films, and artifacts, and in dialogue with restorers and in-house researchers, to develop their own collections in the newly installed “Weltkulturen Labor” (World Cultures Lab). Historical photographs from the museum archive, for instance, were combined with image material from the various designers’ lookbooks and stylesheets in a bricolage-like technique indebted both to punk and mash-up cultures. As Deliss put it, in the combination of “anthropology, contemporary art, and fashion” the exhibits from the museum collection became “source material for new and substantive insights, both for specialists as well as a broader public.” This practice coincides with the institution’s self-understanding as a “post-ethnographic museum” (also reflected in the museum’s renamings – until 2001 it was known as the “Museum für Völkerkunde,” then “Museum der Weltkulturen,” and since 2010 “Weltkulturen Museum”).

Since Deliss took over in Frankfurt, contemporary artists have regularly been invited to work on museum stock with a view to reactivating objects and recontextualizing them. This is an effective way of  “breaking the canon.” Deliss also met with disagreement from her audience here. Ought not visitors first to be familiarized with the canon in order to understand its critical deconstruction? Who then is responsible for broad-based education, the classical task of museums?

Maybe the museum as educator and the inclusion of artistic concepts do not contradict each other? The central questions occupying Stephen Little as a museum curator are precisely a result of the relations and misunderstandings between the present and ancient Asian cultures. Little explained one useful curatorial technique with reference to the exhibition “Taoism and the Arts of China” that ran at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. The exhibition addressed, first and foremost, the impact of Daoism on Chinese art, taking a look at Daoist philosophy “through the window of art” to inquire into how art functions in the context of a religion. Because Daoism continues to be a living tradition in China, “Daoism and the Arts of China,” according to Little, was also an exhibition about the present. Because “[i]f one understands Daoism, modern Chinese culture itself becomes easier to understand.”

How do artists themselves see the role assigned to them? Does it degrade them to uncritical service providers? In conversation with Christian Jankowski, the moderator Jörn Schafaff asked what it was like for an artist to be invited “to do something with a collection.” How does one deal with this kind of assignment? “Invitations are always welcome,” Jankowski explained. “The ambitions behind articular invitations vary. One must see if it makes sense. Naturally, I prefer having a completely free hand.” Jankowski, whose works often turn on the relations between artist, market, society, and institution, had previously screened his video “Cleaning Up the Studio” (2010) commissioned by the Nam June Paik Art Center in South Korea. Shortly before he died in 2006, Paik sold his disorderly New York studio as a total installation to the Korean museum. After his death, it was dismantled, shipped to Korea, and reassembled in its original state. For his video Jankowski paid a cleaning company named Beautiful Cleaning to clean and tidy up the video-art pioneer’s studio. “Cleaning Up the Studio” is a bit like a PR clip for the cleaning firm and can be read at different levels – as an artist’s commentary on the public’s addiction to authenticity, or as a story about the strange discomfort felt when a living artist uses what a dead artist has left behind as his material.

The reenactment of the pioneering exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” in Venice in 2013 was also an occasion for discomfort. For the reconstruction of the exhibition originally mounted by the young curator Harald Szeemann (d. 2005) at the Kunsthalle Bern in spring 1969 that formed the start of the curator’s international career, the Fondazione Prada commissioned the Italian curator Germano Celant, who had worked with Szeemann in 1969, the architect Rem Koolhaas, and the artist Thomas Demand. In her talk Beatrice von Bismarck inquired into the changes that occur when major exhibitions are reenacted. In the case of “When Attitudes Become Form” the reenactment seems like a reversal of the original exhibition’s anti-commercial intention, a project that had combined conceptual and minimal approaches, fluxus and arte povera.

Conclusions: Contemporary art cannot solve the pressing problems (such as restitution) of ethnology museums. Nor, if it is smart, will it contribute to concealing such issues or to stifling their debate. However, artistic projects such as “Mining the Museum” do seem able, as a critical instance, to change how publics view an institution and its collection and to initiate critical, open-ended discussion – the more independent their position in the process (cf. Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt) the better. Artistic interventions can help break certain preconceived or traditional readings. The interdisciplinary opening and extension of contemporary art seems to facilitate a plurality. Constellations are possible that can form the starting point for discussion. Only a radical opening up seems able to reanimate ethnological collections and link them to contemporary discourse.

Translated from German by Christopher Jenkin-Jones

Kito Nedo is a freelance journalist and art critic living in Berlin.

Link Program Symposium “Remembering as a Constructive Act”

The symposium “Remembering as a Constructive Act - Artistic Concepts for Museum Collections” took place on October 19, 2013 as part of the “Game of Thrones” project at the Dahlem Museums.

Participants:
Beatrice von Bismarck (Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig)
Melissa Chiu (Asia Society Museum in New York)
Clémentine Deliss (Weltkulturenmuseum, Frankfurt)
Martin Heller (Content planning Humboldt-Forum, Berlin)
Christian Jankowski (Artist, Berlin)
Stephen Little (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
Angela Rosenberg (Curator Game of Thrones)
Klaas Ruitenbeek (Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin)
Jörn Schafaff (Freie Universität Berlin)
Jana Scholze (Victoria & Albert Museum, London)

Concept of the symposium: Angela Rosenberg