Die Schau des Fremden


Book Description

Im Zeichen postkolonialer Kritik sind Museen der Volks- und V�lkerkunde heute eine umstrittene Gattung. Museen werden aufgel�st, Sammlungen umorganisiert, neue Institutionen gegruendet. Dieses Buch nimmt die Entwicklungen in Frankreich, Deutschland, Belgien und USA von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart in den Blick. Es bringt Kuratoren, Kunsthistoriker, Anthropologen, Soziologen und Historiker in einen inter- und multidisziplin�ren Austausch ueber neue Wege der Visualisierung des �Eigenen� wie �Fremden�. In light of postcolonial criticism, the museum of ethnology, anthropology and folklore has become a contested territory. Some museums are being dissolved, collections reorganized, and new institutions created. Focusing on France, Germany, Belgium and the United States in the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the present, this essay collection creates an interdisciplinary dialogue between curators, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and art historians. It sheds new light on the manner in which a modern museology negotiates the problematic heritage of the field and finds new ways to exhibit �self� and �other�. Inhalt Vorwort I. Einleitung: Cordula Grewe: Between Art, Artifact, and Attraction: The Ethnographic Object and its Appropriation in Western Culture II. �sthetik der Attraktionen: Weltausstellungen und V�lkerschauen: Alice von Plato: Zwischen Hochkultur und Folklore: Geschichte und Ethnologie auf den franz�sischen Weltausstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert Gabriele Duerbeck: Samoa als inszeniertes Paradies: V�lkerausstellungen um 1900 und die Tradition der popul�ren Suedseeliteratur B�rbel Kuester: Zwischen �sthetik, Politik und Ethnographie: Die Pr�sentation des Belgischen Kongo auf der Weltausstellung Bruessel-Tervuren 1897 III. Das ethnologische Museum heute: Probleme - Projekte - Perspektiven: Reform als Praxis: Modelle der Neugestaltung: Enid Schildkrout: The Beauty of Science and the Truth of Art: Museum Anthropology at the Crossroads Elisabeth Tietmeyer: Das �Andere� und das �Eigene�: Geschichte, Profil und Perspektiven des Museums Europ�ischer Kulturen in Berlin Michel Colardelle: Mus�es de Soci�t� im 21. Jahrhundert - Was soll mit ihnen geschehen? Fallbeispiel Paris: Vom Louvre zum Mus�e du Quai Branly: N�lia Dias: �What's in a Name?� Anthropology, Museums, and Values, 1827-2006 Nina Gorgus: Georges-Henri Rivi�re: �Lehrjahre� am Pariser Mus�e d'Ethnographie, 1928-1937 Germain Viatte: Das Konzept: Ein Essay zum Mus�e du Quai Branly als projet mus�ologique Maurice Godelier: Die Vision: Einheit von Kunst und Wissenschaft im Mus�e du Quai Branly Lorenzo Brutti: Die Kritik: Ethnographische Betrachtungen des Mus�e du Quai Branly aus der Perspektive eines teilnehmenden Beobachters IV. Kuenstlerische Aneignungen: Ethnologie im Zeichen der Avantgarden: Marsha Morton: The Ethnographic Vision of Max Klinger Andrew Zimmermann: From Natural Science to Primitive Art: German New Guinea in Emil Nolde Uwe Fleckner: The Death of the Work of Art: Carl Einstein and the Berlin Museum of Ethnology Wendy Grossman: Photography at the Crossroads: African Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Till F�rster: Negotiating the Contemporary: Local African Artists in a Globalizing Art World V. Nachwort: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: Reconfiguring Museums: An Afterword.




The Fuzzy Logic of Encounter


Book Description




To the Collector Belong the Spoils


Book Description

To the Collector Belong the Spoils rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Through a constellation of three author-collectors—Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—Annie Pfeifer examines the relationship between literary modernism and twentieth-century practices of collecting objects. From James's paper hoarding to Einstein's mania for African art and Benjamin's obsession with old Russian toys, she shows how these authors' literary techniques of compiling, gleaning, and reassembling constitute a modernist style of collecting that reimagines the relationship between author and text, source and medium. Placing Benjamin and Einstein in surprising conversation with James sharpens the contours of collecting as aesthetic and political praxis underpinned by dangerous passions. An apt figure for modernity, the collector is caught between preservation and transformation, order and chaos, the past and the future. Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collection, citation, and paraphrase, To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement's artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past. By despoiling and decontextualizing the work of others, these three authors engaged in a form of creative plunder that evokes collecting's long history in the spoils of war and conquest. As Pfeifer demonstrates, more than an archive or taxonomy, modernist collecting practices became a radical, creative endeavor—the artist as collector, the collector as artist.




German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies


Book Description

Germany developed a large colonial empire over the last thirty years of the 19th century, spanning regions of the west coast of Africa to its east coast and beyond. Largely forgotten for many years, recent intense debates about Africa's cultural heritage in European museums have brought this period of African and German history back into the spotlight. German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies brings much-needed context to these debates, exploring perspectives on the architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture of German colonialism in Africa, and its legacies in postcolonial and present-day Namibia, Cameroon, and Germany. The first in-depth exploration of the designed and visual aspects of German colonialism, the book presents a series of essays combining formal analyses of painting, photography, performance art, buildings, and space with the discourse analysis approach associated with postcolonial theory. Covering the entire period from the build-up to colonialism in the early-19th century to the present, subjects covered range from late-19th-century German colonial paintings of African landscapes and people to German land appropriation through planning and architectural mechanisms, and from indigenous African responses to colonial architecture, to explorations of the legacies of German colonialism by contemporary artists today. This powerful and revealing collection of essays will encourage new research on this under-explored topic, and demonstrate the importance of historical research to the present, especially with regards to ongoing debates about the presence of material legacies of colonialism in Western culture, museum collections, and immigration policies.




Paris Primitive


Book Description

In 1990 Jacques Chirac, the future president of France and a passionate fan of non-European art, met Jacques Kerchache, a maverick art collector with the lifelong ambition of displaying African sculpture in the holy temple of French culture, the Louvre. Together they began laying plans, and ten years later African fetishes were on view under the same roof as the Mona Lisa. Then, in 2006, amidst a maelstrom of controversy and hype, Chirac presided over the opening of a new museum dedicated to primitive art in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower: the Musée du Quai Branly. Paris Primitive recounts the massive reconfiguration of Paris’s museum world that resulted from Chirac’s dream, set against a backdrop of personal and national politics, intellectual life, and the role of culture in French society. Along with exposing the machinations that led to the MQB’s creation, Sally Price addresses the thorny questions it raises about the legacy of colonialism, the balance between aesthetic judgments and ethnographic context, and the role of institutions of art and culture in an increasingly diverse France. Anyone with a stake in the myriad political, cultural, and anthropological issues raised by the MQB will find Price’s account fascinating.




Art History and Anthropology


Book Description

An in-depth and nuanced look at the complex relationship between two dynamic fields of study. While today we are experiencing a revival of world art and the so-called global turn of art history, encounters between art historians and anthropologists remain rare. Even after a century and a half of interactions between these epistemologies, a skeptical distance prevails with respect to the disciplinary other. This volume is a timely exploration of the roots of this complex dialogue, as it emerged worldwide in the colonial and early postcolonial periods, between 1870 and 1970. Exploring case studies from Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, and the United States, this volume addresses connections and rejections between art historians and anthropologists—often in the contested arena of “primitive art.” It examines the roles of a range of figures, including the art historian–anthropologist Aby Warburg, the modernist artist Tarsila do Amaral, the curator-impresario Leo Frobenius, and museum directors such as Alfred Barr and René d’Harnoncourt. Entering the current debates on decolonizing the past, this collection of essays prompts reflection on future relations between these two fields.




Making Culture, Changing Society


Book Description

Making Culture, Changing Society proposes a challenging new account of the relations between culture and society focused on how particular forms of cultural knowledge and expertise work on, order and transform society. Examining these forms of culture’s action on the social as aspects of a historically distinctive ensemble of cultural institutions, it considers the diverse ways in which culture has been produced and mobilised as a resource for governing populations. These concerns are illustrated in detailed case studies of how anthropological conceptions of the relations between race and culture have shaped – and been shaped by – the relationships between museums, fieldwork and governmental programmes in early twentieth-century France and Australia. These are complemented by a closely argued account of the relations between aesthetics and governance that, in contrast to conventional approaches, interprets the historical emergence of the autonomy of the aesthetic as vastly expanding the range of art’s social uses. In pursuing these concerns, particular attention is given to the role that the cultural disciplines have played in making up and distributing the freedoms through which modern forms of liberal government operate. An examination of the place that has been accorded habit as a route into the regulation of conduct within liberal social, cultural and political thought brings these questions into sharp focus. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, museum and heritage studies, history, art history and cultural policy studies.




The Museum of Other People


Book Description

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • From one of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists, an important and timely work of cultural history that looks at the origins and much debated future of anthropology museums “A provocative look at questions of ethnography, ownership and restitution . . . the argument [Kuper] makes in The Museum of Other People is important precisely because just about no one else is making it. He asks the questions that others are too shy to pose. . . . Required reading.” –Financial Times (UK) In this deeply researched, immersive history, Adam Kuper tells the story of how foreign and prehistoric peoples and cultures were represented in Western museums of anthropology. Originally created as colonial enterprises, their halls were populated by displays of plundered art, artifacts, dioramas, bones, and relics. Kuper reveals the politics and struggles of trying to build these museums in Germany, France, and England in the mid-19th century, and the dramatic encounters between the very colorful and eccentric collectors, curators, political figures, and high members of the church who founded them. He also details the creation of contemporary museums and exhibitions, including the Smithsonian, the Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, and the famous 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago which was inspired by the Paris World Fair of 1889. Despite the widespread popularity and cultural importance of these institutions, there also lies a murky legacy of imperialism, colonialism, and scientific racism in their creation. Kuper tackles difficult questions of repatriation and justice, and how best to ensure that the future of these museums is an ethical, appreciative one that promotes learning and cultural exchange. A stunning, unique, accessible work based on a lifetime of research, The Museum of Other People reckons with the painfully fraught history of museums of natural history, and how curators, anthropologists, and museumgoers alike can move forward alongside these time-honored institutions.




Ornament and European Modernism


Book Description

These in-depth, historical, and critical essays study the meaning of ornament, the role it played in the formation of modernism, and its theoretical importance between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century in England and Germany. Ranging from Owen Jones to Ernst Gombrich through Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl, August Schmarsow, Wilhelm Worringer, Adolf Loos, Henry van de Velde, and Hermann Muthesius, the contributors show how artistic theories are deeply related to the art practice of their own times, and how ornament is imbued with historical and social meaning.




Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism


Book Description

Hailed as a brilliant theoretician, Voldemārs Matvejs (best known by his pen name Vladimir Markov) was a Latvian artist who spearheaded the Union of Youth, a dynamic group championing artistic change in Russia, 1910-14. His work had a formative impact on Malevich, Tatlin, and the Constructivists before it was censored during the era of Soviet realism. This volume introduces Markov as an innovative and pioneering art photographer and assembles, for the first time, five of his most important essays. The translations of these hard-to-find texts are fresh, unabridged, and authentically poetic. Critical essays by Jeremy Howard and Irena Buzinska situate his work in the larger phenomenon of Russian ’primitivism’, i.e. the search for the primal. This book challenges hardening narratives of primitivism by reexamining the enthusiasm for world art in the early modern period from the perspective of Russia rather than Western Europe. Markov composed what may be the first book on African art and Z.S. Strother analyzes both the text and its photographs for their unique interpretation of West African sculpture as a Kantian ’play of masses and weights’. The book will appeal to students of modernism, orientalism, ’primitivism’, historiography, African art, and the history of the photography of sculpture.