"Les arts premiers" in Paris: le monument de l'autre.

The month of June in Paris marks the customary beginning of la saison des fetes, as arts institutions and organizations seek to capture not only tourist dollars but also the attention of locals before they vacate for summer holidays in the countryside. It is traditionally the time when Parisians celebrate the remarkable cosmopolitan nature of their city of lights, lingering late into the summer nights at outdoor film festivals, concerts, and performances and sharing aperitifs at exhibition openings. The offerings are always rich, diverse, and plentiful. But this summer one event dominated the season and the press coverage--the opening of the musee du quai Branly, the nation's monument to "arts premiers," an institution which was more than a decade in the making.

The birth of the musee du quai Branly relied on the death of two of the city's other cultural landmarks, whose collections it was to inherit and expand. One was the renowned Musee de l'Homme at the Palais de Chaillot on the Place Trocadero, built for the 1878 Exposition universelle, home to French anthropology and site of the infamous Picasso "encounter" with so-called primitive arts. The other was the Musee des arts africains et oceaniens (MAAO) located at the Porte Doree, a much newer institution founded by Andre Malraux in 1960. The MAAO was located on the highly charged site occupied first by the Pavilion of the 1931 Exposition coloniale (to which its art deco facade still alludes) and, from 1935-1960, by the Musee d'outre mer, housing collections from French overseas colonies.

The Quai Branly displays approximately 3,500 works of art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, from a collection that numbers over 300,000. Of these, 70,000 claim a provenance from the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, or Madagascar. While many of these artworks will be familiar to those who knew them at the other two institutions, advocates argue that at the Quai Branly they will be seen, for the first time, within a setting of prestige in which one can appropriately appreciate the beauty and power of their artistic form. And yet it is impossible to deny the sordid history that made their gathering in this new institution possible. These collections are testaments to the intimate relationship between France's colonial interests and its belief in the universalism (and superiority) of European Enlightenment values, and their joint pursuit within the colonies through the missions civilisatrices. They also testify to the support for and growth of the science of ethnology and practice of ethnography within the upper echelons of French society.

Private previews, a slew of parties, VIP conferences, photo-ops of visiting dignitaries (among them Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, and Abdou Diouf), and public ceremonies of blessing by those whose cultural heritage lay within made the Quai Branly one of the most sought-after locations on the Parisian landscape in June. But to many French academics and museum professionals, the glitz and glamour of the opening fetes barely disguised the shaky and controversial foundations on which the Quai Branly rested. For it was born of a great scandale, one replete with intrigue, deception, hubris, favoritism, political patronage, court action, strikes, and union busting.

In an effort to free the arts premiers from their sullied fate as fetishes and scientific specimens within the ethnological labs of the Musee de l'Homme, a context French president Jacques Chirac and his colleagues considered "politically intolerable" (Dupaigne 2006:32), the president formed the first of many commissions whose task it would be to assess the best strategy for recuperating and revaluing these lost masterpieces into the world of great arts. Chirac declared in a 1995 campaign speech that the "Arts premiers must be at the Louvre, which cannot remain a great museum while ignoring the arts of 70% of the world's population. I will make it so in the coming year." And as president he would be able to make this dream a reality, even in the face of great protest. (1)

In 2000 the Pavilion des Sessions at the Louvre was opened, featuring 140 masterpieces gathered from private and state collections. This site was to be a preview of the new museum under construction and would function as a permanent satellite (in what Chirac calls an ambassadorial function) for these artistic traditions at the Louvre.

Those interested in a more detailed account of the scandale of the museum's difficult birth should refer to Bernard Dupaigne's angry, though surprisingly dry text, Le scandale des arts premiers: La veritable histoire du musee du quai Branly (2006), released to coincide with the opening of the museum. But it would seem to me that the issue of how the museum was created has obscured perhaps the important questions as to why it was created.

Initially the campaign to dismantle the collections of the Musee de l'Homme and those of the MAAO centered upon the fine art versus ethnography debate. Were these objects to be considered for their formal qualities and aesthetic prowess or to be presented for a set of cultural, aesthetic, and religious beliefs that were specific to indigenous peoples? But neither art history's universal formalism nor ethnography's particularism placed the makers of these objects within the tide of modern history.

Of course museums struggle with these interpretative issues all the time, often settling on open-ended, uneasy marriages between these choices. These solutions are never comfortable, as they are reached with the knowledge that the collections themselves are evidence of the hubris and violations of Western dominance. But in the case of the Quai Branly, the aesthetics/ethnography debate seems but a facade for a much broader set of agendas and conflicts at work within contemporary France. Indeed these artworks are hostages to a cultural politics that envisions them as emblems of Otherness past and present, in order to address current postcolonial anxieties, assuage neocolonial guilt, and rewrite French colonial history. In fact the Quai Branly does its best to underrepresent the centrality of ethnography to the process of collection building.

At the most basic level, the musee du quai Branly is the legacy project for Chirac's presidency, comparable to Georges Pompidou's erection of Beaubourg, Francois Mitterand's patronage of the I.M. Pei Crystal at the Louvre, La Defense and the Bibliotheque Nationale, and Valery Giscard d'Estaing's project of the Musee d'Orsay. No-one would be the least bit surprised if the Quai Branly, named for its location to avoid offense with terms such as "primitive" or "tribal" arts, were one day to be known as Musee Chirac. And like Pompidou, this project represents more than a building to Chirac, but is rather imbued with a politics of change; in this case a move towards greater respect for and tolerance of difference (born from a belief in a tempered form of globalization which safeguards traditional cultures against Americanization). Chirac has often taken this antiglobalization stance throughout his time in office and it appeared again during his remarks at the Musee's inauguration:

   Now that the world is seeing the mixing
   of nations as never before in history,
   it was necessary to imagine an original
   place that could do justice to the diversity
   of cultures, a place that displays
   another view of the genius of the peoples
   and civilizations of Africa, Asia,
   Oceania, and the Americas. (2)

What is at stake at the Quai Branly is the contemporary French understanding of its modern history as one intimately shaped by colonialism, waves of immigration, debates on assimilation, acculturation, and integration, and belief in a humanism and in freedoms that were too often advocated through illiberal means. The unveiling of the museum takes place against a backdrop of unrest, rioting, and desperation within the banlieues of Paris, a time when the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, is cracking down on illegal immigration so that concerned citizens are shuttling children of immigrants between safe houses to avoid deportation, when "Fortress Europe" eerily echoes Occupied France. The museum's rhetoric of tolerance takes place at a time when the leader of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, garners press attention as the nation immerses itself in World Cup fever by asserting that "France does not see itself reflected in the make up of the national football team," noting that the coach has added too many players of color on the national side (Fiefeld 2006).

Often in his remarks about the musee du quai Branly Chirac has aligned the fate of the objects to the well-being of French revolutionary ideas of liberty, tolerance, and values of citizenship, arguing:

   I wish the museum to be an instrument
   for achieving a renewed sense of citizenship;
   an emblematic witness of our tradition
   of welcoming, openness, and tolerance.
   I wish that this museum will be a
   source of inspiration and confidence in
   the future of youth who will discover,
   here, some of the most admirable facets
   of human creation. I hope, above all else,
   that it will be an instrument of peace
   which will clearly witness the equal dignity
   of all cultures and men. (3)

The irony and incoherency of honoring and valuing inanimate objects more than citizens is not lost on France's immigrant and minority populations. As Aminate Traore (former minister of Culture and Tourism in Mali) has noted recently:

   Our artworks have the run of the city
   where we are, as a whole, forbidden
   from staying. As for the aims of those
   who would wish to see a political message
   behind the aesthetics, the dialogue
   of cultures behind the beauty of the artworks,
   I fear that they are [off the mark].
   An African mask on the Place de la Republique
   is of no use in the face of the
   shame and humiliation suffered by Africans
   and other cultures plundered in
   the name of development and cooperation
   (Traore 2006).

France has always valued its cultural institutions as key players in the critical exercise of promoting the great values of the republic and national culture to its own citizens and to others. This recognition of self is particularly necessary in the context of a multiracial, cosmopolitan France, with its continued status as a colonial metropole, its larger preoccupations with the Francophonie, and its ongoing political, economic, and military presence in Africa.

Journeys of Discovery--Denials of History

After his visit to the new museum and its opening colloquium, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman raged against the exoticist, offensive manner in which he saw the "arts premiers" presented. He wrote:

   If the Marx Brothers designed a museum
   for dark people, they might have
   come up with the permanent-collection
   galleries: devised as a spooky jungle,
   red and black and murky, the objects in
   it chosen and arranged with hardly any
   discernible logic, the place is briefly
   thrilling, as spectacle, but brow-slappingly
   wrongheaded. Colonialism of a
   bygone era is replaced by a whole new
   French brand of condescension (Kimmelman
   2006).

His assessment is depressingly fair. Leafing through the museum's literature or wandering through the galleries, it takes no time at all to amass a stunning collection of stereotypical references and design motifs to support his overwhelmingly bleak appraisal. And as he noted, the museum's designers and curators appear to have embraced these exoticized visions without a hint of irony.

The logics of primitivism inform the museum narrative, guiding one's movements through the built space. The museum invites the visitor to start a journey of discovery into the worlds of the Other (l'Autre is always used in the singular). Its architect, the famed Jean Nouvel, who created the Institut du monde arabe and Fondation Cartier in Paris, decided upon four separate but connected buildings situated around a central garden, designed by Gilles Clement, and united by plays of light, color, and form. The symmetrical, otherwise unremarkable administrative space that fronts on the quai Branly is engulfed within a wall of plant life. This mur vegetal, designed by botanist Patrick Blanc and featuring more than 15,000 tropical plants, is arguably environmentally friendly and pleasant to the eye on a typical grey Parisian day. However it clearly evokes insidiously prevalent associations of jungle life with the arts and cultures of the Other.

From the plant wall, one follows the bend in the Seine toward the main garden space, itself protected behind a gently curving glass wall. According to Jean Nouvel, the garden is meant to function as a sanctuary, designed as a nonlinear, organic space, in order to suggest the "riotous nature of the non-Western and animist world" and to function as the first of several spaces of acclimatization as the visitor starts on this journey from familiarity to otherness.

The typical visitor will enter through Museum Building and proceed to the Auvent building--a white, glass-filled modernist space that houses a garden gallery, a tremendous glass tower of musical instruments, and a reception hall. The Museum Building proper is a long, softly undulating structure on stilts overlooking the garden below, envisioned by Nouvel as a serpent but also likened to une passerelle, or a footbridge. The structure mimics the many bridges that cross the nearby Seine but also suggests a bridging of cultures, of us and them, of now and then, of here and there. From the entrance hall a white ramp, encircling the glass tower of instruments, is meant to move the visitor from lightness to the dimness of the exhibition hall. For the opening, a multimedia piece by Trinh Minh Ha titled "l'Autre Marche" or "The Other Way" leads one through this transition.

The exhibition space is dark, the windows shaded with louvered shutters or covered with scrims of forest undergrowth. It is a cavernous area divided by a sinuous ramp bordered on either side by leather banquettes that Nouvel calls his riviere. The path of this river is meant to approximate the manner in which "the Other" understands and operates within time and space (Museum Guide Book 2006:292). Jutting out from the space are a series of warmly colored boxes, little supplementary exhibition spaces that are meant to be a "source of harmonious irregularity" and evoke huts rising out of the forest floor, according to the press dossier that accompanied the opening. These small exhibition spaces, which focus on certain themes or cultural traditions, function as contemporary cabinets of curiosity, playing on a sense of wonder through their narrow (thus restricted and intimate) access and their artificial, dramatic lighting.

Above this grand space are smaller galleries for temporary exhibitions and a multi-media gallery where one may gain access to all the contextual information lacking in the main exhibition halls. Finally one has the building on rue de l'Universite which houses the image libraries and the boutique. Perhaps most importantly, it showcases five commissioned murals by contemporary Aboriginal artists whose spectacular, multicolored creations adorn the ceilings and interior pillars and spill out onto the ledges of the windows. These works can be easily glimpsed from the street, their organic forms contrasting with the static, glass-and-concrete structure of the buildings they adorn. Appropriately, they will be most often experienced by the viewer in an atmosphere of commerce--thereby replicating the history of exploitation and sale in contemporary Australia that has formed the market for these works and made them controversial and compromised symbols of national pride.

This is not a museum created simply to house existing collections. It clearly promotes neo-primitivist readings of the Other and their collected artworks. As a highly ideological project it constructs the French nation as inheritor and protector of the diversity of the world's cultures. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the Museum advocates an essentialist reading of cultural traits and visual practice. In other words, it relies on the essential belief that objects can and do represent cultures and that to interpret and classify that culture is a means of understanding that people's contributions to a universalism.

The tragedy here, of course, is that there are some truly spectacular artistic creations held within these walls and yet they are caught within this bizarre web of exoticist interpretation. The Africa section is presented both geographically and thematically but contains such a large number of cases, arranged almost haphazardly, that a sense of chaos pervades. The Maghrebian collections are impressive--one relishes the embroidered textiles from Algeria and Morocco; the golden, multijeweled marriage necklace from Fes; the filigreed, openwork designs of earrings and pendants made by Jewish silversmiths; and then the richly colored and designed saddlebags, tent cushions, and beds from the Tuareg collections. Nok and Djenne materials are in the museum as a result of delicate diplomatic negotiations that were made possible by new French cultural property laws. One of the signature pieces is a pre-Dogon wooden androgynous figure from the Bandiagara cliffs that dates to the tenth or eleventh century. The piece serves as a reminder of the centrality of Dogon culture to French understandings of African mythologies and of the weight of Marcel Griaule and Michel Leiris's work in the Dakar Djibouti mission of the early 1930s.

At points in the African galleries one is treated to long allees of carved figures or masks that stretch for as far as the eye can see. There are fine examples of Bwa and Bobo masks, exquisitely carved Baule and Bamana figures, anthromophoric Dan spoons, elegant ibejis, and a fifty-piece section of Cameroonian materials from the Hartner collection.

Within the smaller, box-like exhibition spaces one can find the beautiful devotional arts in the form of Koranic pages, prayer boards, or Hebraic tablets; Kota and Fang reliquary figures presented as if upon a raised altar; or Gondar liturgical paintings from the church of Abba Antonios, which were removed by the Dakar Djibouti mission of 1931.

While the Benin holdings seem scarce in comparison to the British Museum and the South African materials thin, one leaves the Africa section, and indeed the whole exhibitions space, with an overwhelming sense of awe at the scale and depth of French colonial collecting practices and the stretch of French imperialist aims. One cannot deny that it is a significant gathering of important works of art and, in addition, of archival materials within the photography and historical collections inherited primarily from the Musee de l'Homme.

The museum already has plans to supplement its holdings with temporary exhibitions of contemporary practioners--from September 11-November 13, 2006, Romuald Hazoume will fill a small space with his La Bouche du Roi installation of recycled petrol jug-masks and Yinka Shonibare will create a piece titled "Garden of Love" on exhibit between April 2-July 8, 2007. It remains to be seen whether these artists will be able to achieve the critical distance needed to rupture the rhetoric of this museum and create the kind of dialogue needed around it.

To mark the opening, the Quai Branly sponsored a tightly orchestrated colloquium with a select number of critics, artists, and museum curators behind closed doors to continue debates on representation, repatriation, and interpretation. A few weeks earlier, the University of Chicago Center in Paris held one of the most enlightening events of the season--an open forum on "La France et ses Autres: Nouveaux musees, Nouvelles Identites"--to address the connections between Republican ideals, museum-, and nation-building in relation to populations of Others. (4)

The founding of the Quai Branly relates to two other museums charged with similar missions of representing France's relationship to its Others. First, the old structure at the Porte Doree will house the Cite nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration. Due to open on site in 2007, it has already been operating an impressive array of programs, film series, and publications. Needless to say, the reoccupation of the former colonial structure seems an exercise designed to exorcise the ghosts of colonialism.

Secondly, the holdings from the Musee des arts et traditions populaires (one that collected the works of rural Others in the provinces) will find a new home at the Musee des civilizations de l'Europe et de la Mediterranee currently under construction in Marseille. This new museum will be well connected to the already rich and well-established cultural matrix in Marseilles that studies the links to North Africa and the Mediterranean. It seems an odd mix of artifacts (Breton and Basque crafts, contemporary North African photography) until one realizes that the museum's organizing principle is France's encounter with the Others it has incorporated within its borders.

Ghost Sightings

Leopold Senghor was a young, impressionable student, new to Paris, when he was taken to see Josephine Baker perform at the Folies Bergeres and when he accompanied Caribbean friends to the Bois de Vincennes to see the displays at the 1931 Exposition coloniale. Both he and Josephine Baker would have been one hundred this year. For the former, Le Festival Francoffohies!! (a government funded organization) has sponsored both a series of programs to mark "the year of Senghor" (organized by the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie [OIF], of which Abdou Diouf, Senghor's successor as president of Senegal, is director), and a celebration of Baker's 100th with exhibitions, programming, and a new commemorative statue in the small town surrounding her chateau in the Dordogne.

What unites these two figures more than simply their birthdays are the complicated ways in which they were exoticized and revered in France--Senghor joined the French Academy and Baker received the Legion d'Honneur. Both had complex and paradoxical relationships to notions of primitivism, often appearing to promote stereotypes. Yet within their careers they cleverly manipulated the primitivist paradigm to reflect upon issues of nationalism, racialism, racism, gender, and political freedoms. The celebrations of their efforts seem an appropriate reminder to us of the complexity, diversity, and negotiated nature of representations of Otherness within modern France.

This year also marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of France's Exposition coloniale of 1931. Much has been written recently in France regarding the history of this exhibition, and to coincide with the anniversary, the Mairie of 12eme arrondissement, which hosted the fair, has been holding a series of conferences, debates, cinema, and educational programs to inform contemporary Parisians about this past, which is both far away and uncomfortably close, still evident within the surrounding quartier and the art market for arts premiers that thrives in the city today. (For instance, at the Pierre Verite collection auction, a Fang mask sold for 5.9 million euros and buyers were treated to hundreds of artworks that had been amassed over the years that Verite had a gallery on Boulevard Raspail.) One program is concerned with literally erecting "totems memoires" around the Bois de Vincennes so that citizens can remember through texts and images the pavilions and architecture of the exposition. Another takes them on a tour of the few still-existing structures.

This reflexive exercise is also pursued within the contemporary gallery spaces of Espace EDF, in which a photography exhibition (also supported by Francoffonies!!) titled "En Francais sous image" promotes an understanding of the diversity of expression from artists within the Francophonie. The exhibition features the works by Cornelius Yao, Augustt Azaglo, Jean Depara, and Seydou Keita from the 1950s into the 1970s, and more contemporary works by Jellel Gastelli and Mohamed Camara.

Cultural theorist Irit Rogoff speaks about the ambivalences and disavowals that "always seem to surface when museums engage with issues of cultural difference. Whether the engagement has to do with lost histories, destroyed heritages, of the uneasy cohabitations of contemporary culture...." She urges that we consider museums as sites of contamination and desire that contain not only histories but also absences that should be made relevant to audiences. She writes, "I am arguing that museums' engagement with cultural difference cannot deal exclusively with that which has been lost, marginalized, or vilified. It must actually deal with the effects of those histories and dynamics on the cultures that perpetuated these elisions and remained seemingly inviolate in their wake" (Rogoff 2002:64). Perhaps the best one can hope for at the Quai Branly, with its insistence on its role as a popular university and site for research, is that it will provide a continual opportunity for reflexive thinking and highlight the illness afflicting societies that vilify difference while preaching universalism. (5)

The Musee du quai Branly, which opened in Paris in June 2006, has garnered reviews ranging from adulatory to outraged. African Arts hopes to explore this entire spectrum over the course of the next several issues, which we hope will include discussion from the administrators and curators of the museum itself. We invite our readers to weigh in with contributions to the Dialogue column of this journal. The Editors.

References cited

Dupaigne, Bernard. 2006. Le scandale des arts premiers: La veritable histoire du musee du quai Branly. Paris: Mille et Une Nuits.

Fiefeld, Dominic. 2006. "We Are Frenchmen Says Thuram, as Le Pen Bemoans Number of Black Players." The Guardian, June 30. www.guardian.co.uk.

Kimmelman, Michael. 2006. "A Heart of Darkness in the City of Light." New York Times, Arts and Leisure Section, July 2. www.nytimes.com.

Museum Guide Book. 2006. Paris: Musee Qual Branly.

Rogoff, Irit. 2002. "Hit and Run--Museums and Cultural Difference." Art Journal 61 (3):63-78.

Traore, Aminata. 2006. "Musee du Quai Branly: Ainsi nos oeuvres d'art ont droit de la cite la ou nous sommes, dans l'ensemble interdits de sejour." Africultures no. 66, June 26. www.africultures.com.

(1.) Of course, Chirac was not the first to call for these changes. His friend, collector Jacques Kerchache, who would eventually be the curator to put together the Salie des Sessions at the Louvre, wrote a manifesto for Liberation in 1990 demanding change. As early as 1909, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in favor of these expansions, and later, as Minister of Culture, Andre Malraux made a similar argument.

(2.) Jacques Chirac, address at the opening of the Musee Quai Branly, June 20, 2006. See www.elysee.fr for more details.

(3.) "Allocation de M. Jacques Chirac, President de la Republique, lors de la visite du chantier du musee quai Branly," October 15, 2004. www.elysee.fr.

(4.) A key number of staff at the Quai Branly and other cultural institutions as well as academics were present.

(5.) The museum's upcoming conferences and speakers series will address histories of colonialism, the great controversies surrounding notions of universalism, immigration, and other contemporary debates.