Du Quai Branly Research Articles

Primitive art, early art or no art at all?

On 20 June 2006 a new museum in Paris opened its doors for the first time, the Musee du Quai Branly. President Jacques Chirac inaugurated the museum in front of an audience that included, among others, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and France's most famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. The museum is another enrichment of that fabulous city, already so well endowed with museums and monuments. The Fifth Republic, founded by General de Gaulle in 1958, has been extraordinarily successful in the creation of new museums. De Gaulle himself did not feel the need to have a special museum built in order to commemorate him. He may have thought that he would be remembered anyway, and he was right. But he certainly stimulated French culture and had Paris embellished in many respects. His famous Minister of Culture Andre Malraux not only ordered the cleaning up of the blackened facades of many Paris monuments and other buildings, but also actively stimulated cultural activities outside Paris or, as the French say, in the provinces. Malraux also took a great interest in non-Western art and in this way helped the founding of the Quai Branly museum. De Gaulle's successor, Georges Pompidou, was of course the source of inspiration for the Museum of Modern Art, also known as the Centre Pompidou and particularly famous for its revolutionary architecture. Another less extravagant but also rightly famous building is the Institut du Monde Arabe which dates from the late 1980s and was built by Jean Nouvel, the architect who also built the Quai Branly Museum.

Quai Branly in Process

Viewed from the Seine, through its glass palisade, the museum looks like a capsized container ship ... in dry dock. Hoisted on pillars, the exhibition plateau seems exposed and incongruous. Red, gray, yellow windowless boxes protrude. Seen from the rue de l'Universite, on the opposite side, the long, scored body seems already to be rusting. Three smaller buildings are yoked to one end; a domed restaurant perches on top. Underneath, a garden, or rather, a forest, is taking root. The trees are small, anchored by stakes and wires, accompanied by thousands of seedlings and grasses whose irrigation tubes and valves haven't yet been made to vanish. When the surrounding forest has grown up, the museum will, according to its architect, mysteriously dematerialize. The colored boxes will be glimpsed as if they were native huts poking through jungle foliage. Time will tell how the Musee du Quai Branly eventually looks and how its ambitious program is realized. Opened to great fanfare and widespread grumbling, it is a work in process dynamic, pretentious, and raw. As of fall 2006, the central exhibition space is largely complete (though like all permanent displays it will certainly be revised as tastes and times change). An impressive array of public events and research resources has been projected, and a first round of temporary exhibitions is under way. The guiding priorities and style of the new project are becoming clear, as are some of its contradictions and tensions.1 Quai Branly is clearly more than one thing, a coalition of different agendas that will, no doubt, be renegotiated. The founding vision and dramatic architecture create possibilities and impose limits. It will be interesting to track how those who animate this project curators, anthropologists, historians, bureaucrats, technicians,

The (Jean) Nouvel Other: Primitivism and the Musée du Quai Branly

The Musée du Quai Branly, located beside the Eiffel Tower in Paris, opened in June 2006. Constructed to house France's important collection of non-western art, the museum has been promoted as ‘decidedly post-colonial’ and a place of ‘reconciliation and sharing’. Historians have situated the creation of the museum within political debates over the restructuring of several of France's museums and, more broadly, the country's position in a post-colonial world, while focusing little critical attention on the building itself. The author argues that Jean Nouvel's architectural program for the Musée du Quai Branly—a ‘primitive shelter’ surrounded by a ‘sacred wood’—gives physical form to a primitivist aesthetic. The unproblematised binaries of self versus other and culture versus nature evident in Nouvel's design reveal a surprisingly unsophisticated theoretical standpoint. As a frame in which to view and understand the objects on display, the Musée du Quai Branly invites a primitivist—and colonial—reading of its collection.

The Musée du Quai Branly: Art? Artifact? Spectacle!

Designed by Jean Nouvel, the Musée du Quai Branly, the just-opened museum of African, Amerindian, Pacific, and Asian cultures, covers a city block on the Left Bank of Paris's museum row. Both in landscaping and internal layout, Nouvel wished to frame the building within his understanding of the cultures on display inside, but also within its setting in the metropolitan capital. Objects collected in the imperial age now are displayed in what French officials see as the postcolonial era. But how were the pieces on display to be shown: as works of art or well-made cultural artifacts? Nouvel took the lead in evoking a vision of the cultures on display that is closer to Joseph Conrad's dark tales than to enlightened contemporary scholarship and museology on these societies. Neither an art nor an ethnography museum, the Musée du Quai Branly is a spectacle about the societies of the global South.

The Aestheticization of Ethnicity: Imagining the Dogon at the Musée du quai Branly

On 23 June 2006 the Musée du quai Branly opened in Paris. The brainchild of then French President Jacques Chirac and art dealer Jacques Kerchache, Branly stood out in the Parisian landscape as the first national museum to display African, Asian, and Oceanic objects together in a new framework as “art,” rather than within a traditional ethnographic context.1 Kerchache had prepared the terrain for this curatorial shift for almost a decade, first by having African and other objects brought into the Pavillon des Sessions of the Louvre as what he called “arts premiers” or “primary arts,” and then by critically dismantling French ethnographic collections and the scholarly communities behind them.2 In spite of outraged critical response to these maneuvers in France, the president of the republic and his favorite art dealer had prevailed.3 Collections from both the historic Musée de l'Homme and André Malraux's Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens had been moved to Branly, their research teams in part disbanded, their archives temporarily obscured.4 With this action, Chirac had appeared to respond to France's postcolonial troubles, contemporary racism, and the demonstrations in the banlieues that had rocked the French capital in fall 2005. Branly, he had pronounced in his inaugural speech, would “restore the dignity” of violated peoples, serve as an acknowledgment of diversity, and ensure “a dialogue of cultures and civilizations.”5

Cultures of the World a la Francaise:Le musee et les cultures du monde.;Du musee colonial au musee des cultures du monde.

It's awkward terrain, filled with potholes and landmines: the representation of cultures (lowercase, plural) in the heart of a city that occasionally makes claims for being the world capital of Culture (uppercase, singular). Things were simpler when was and ethnography was ethnography. In Paris, that meant channeling objects of one clearly designated sort into the Louvre and its peer institutions, while objects of another (equally unambiguous) identity were assigned to the de l'homme or the somewhat more art-oriented (but equally dark and dusty, not to mention colonialist) national des arts africains et oc6aniens. All that has changed, and the French are scrambling to work out a viable flowchart responsive to the newly enlightened sensibilities of the twenty-first century. Much of the discourse parallels similar discussions held elsewhere in the world, but France's vision of the role of museums also has distinctive features. Most notably, the reach of the state, as one commentator has pointed out, is particularly long, even going so far as to legally prohibit the marriage of a curator to the son or daughter of an auctioneer (Constance Dedieu Grasset, Museum Fever in Curator 39[3]:188-207, 1996). Not surprisingly, terminology heads the agenda. In France, the notion of a of man suffers less from gender-related stigma (1'homme still maintaining its respectability as a general reference to humanity) than a sense of outdatedness and a failure to embrace cultural diversity. So when Jacques Chirac declared that the cultural legacy of his presidency was to include the establishment of a museum of what might once have been called art primitif a whole series of alternatives, generally shifting from singulars to plurals, were floated: Mus6e de l'Homme, des Arts et des Civilisations, Musee des arts premiers, Mus6e des arts et des civilisations, and (in an attempt to avoid all the thorns implied in such designations) the straightforwardly address-based Musee du Quai Branly. (Overseas outposts of the French empire picked up on the trend as well; for example, a projected Mus6e R6gional de Guyane of the early 1990s was rebaptized later in the decade as the Mus6e des cultures guyanaises.) Together with Chirac's museum proposal, the hotly debated decision to bring selected masterpieces of primitive into the sacred space of the Louvre has stirred the emotions of concerned citizens in Paris, and a great deal of ink has been spilled in the press over questions of art, anthropology, museology, and cultural identity. There have also been symposia, roundtables, conference volumes, heavy tomes of committee reports, and more, all aimed at working out a new relationship between museums, collections, and the public. The two works under review here constitute important contributions to the discussion.