Playing to the Gallery: Masks, Masquerade, and Museums

Abstract

Polly Savage M asks pose vexing questions for museum curators, not only an uncomfortable leg acy of colonial collecting practices, but because they inevitably suggest an absence. This absence has been variously formulated by African art theorists; for Herbert Cole, arguing that African art should be seen as a verb (1969), the absent factor was the idea of process; for Robert Farris Thomp son it was motion (1974). For Susan Vogel, the original con text of a mask's reception was irretrievably in the museum (1991:15), and for Frederick John Lamp, involvement was lack ing, since, he argued, African performance must be experienced in the to be fully understood (2004:15). Hans Belting sug gests that masks literally reify absence, expos[ing] a new and permanent (because not perishable) face by hiding another face whose absence is needed to create this new presence (2005:47). These discussions have had a direct impact on museum prac tice, and in recent years, curators and artists have made various attempts to compensate for the perceived absences of mask display. Whilst discussions around both the politics of museum represen tation and masquerade practices in Africa continue to prolifer ate, very little critical attention has been devoted to the curatorial strategies which have recently emerged in response to these inter secting debates. This paper will examine the precepts and conse quences of three attempts to redress the fragmentary nature of the museum mask-object, before considering alternative approaches to the notion of masquerade in the gallery. These enquiries lead us back to a central debate on the contemporary role of the museum and the nature of the knowledge it promotes. In a paper given at a 2003 conference devoted to problematiz ing the absence of the non-visual senses from museum display, Jeffrey David Feldman introduced the notion of the lost body in the museum. Following Clifford's conception of museums contact zones (1997:192), Feldman proposed the museum object a contact point' defined the material result of the violent colonial process whereby the enters into but is then eliminated from museum discourse (2006:245). The remain ing objects, he argues, bear witness to the colonial encounter in the form of indexical traces of absent bodies. These bodies are excluded from the museum by the cultural routine of looking at museum displays [which] separates the from the object both pragmatically and conceptually (ibid., p. 263). Feldman's