Art, Anthropology, and Contested Heritage

Ethnographies of TRACES

Arnd Schneider

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350088122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

This book presents innovative ethnographic perspectives on the intersections between art, anthropology, and contested cultural heritage, drawing on research from the interdisciplinary TRACES project (funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 program). The case studies in this volume critically assess how and in which arrangements artistic/aesthetic methods and creative everyday practices contribute to strengthening communities both culturally and economically. They also explore the extent to which these methods emphasize minority voices and ultimately set in motion a process of reflexive Europeanisation from below which unfolds within Europe and beyond its borders. At the heart of the book is the development of a new way of transmitting contentious cultural heritage, which responds to the present situation in Europe of unstable political conditions and a sense of Europe in crisis. With chapters looking at difficult art exhibitions on colonialism, death masks, Holocaust memorials, and skull collections, the contributors articulate a response to the crisis in current economic-political conditions in Europe and advances brand new theoretical groundwork on the configuration of a renewed European identity.

1

Working with TRACES

Arnd Schneider

The true museum is one that ages with its objects.¹

Introduction

The ethnographic case studies presented in this book are part of a large, multidisciplinary research project, TRACES, which was funded through the EU Horizon 2020 program. The project comprised eleven partners (universities, museums, independent research organizations, and NGOs) working in locations across Europe.² The role of the ethnographers, themselves coming from different disciplinary backgrounds of anthropology, archaeology, architecture, and visual arts, was to critically engage in reflexive participant observation with the projects. The results of their work are presented in the longer ethnographic chapters in this book, coupled with shorter, more hybrid interventions from the projects themselves, consisting of narrative text, conversation dialogues, and images. These projects, which are at the center of TRACES’ practical “experimentation”, are extensively featured in the ethnographic case studies in this volume. The projects were developed through a new way of transmitting contentious cultural heritage: the Creative Co-Productions (henceforth CCPs), consisting of multidisciplinary teams between emerging scholars, artists, and cultural workers. This innovative approach responds to the current economic-political conditions, a Europe in crisis. It reflects and takes further cutting-edge theoretical groundwork on the configuration of a renewed European identity, epitomized by the idea of reflexive Europeanization (Römhild 2009; Römhild 2019).

The project research of TRACES was carried out by (CCPs) based in Romania, Poland, Slovenia, Austria, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. “Absence as Heritage” (CCP1; featured here in chapters 4 and 5) looked at an abandoned synagogue in a multi-ethnic part of Transylvania (Romania), “Awkward Objects of Genocide” (CCP2; chapters 6 and 7) investigated art and craft objects relating to the Holocaust, but made after the Second World War and which are now in private and public collections in Germany and Poland. “Casting Death” (CCP3; chapters 8 and 9) focused on the making and public status of death masks in Ljubljana (Slovenia), whilst “Dead Images” (CCP4; chapters 10 and 11) investigated the extensive skull collections in the Natural History and University museums in Vienna and Edinburgh. “Transforming Long Kesh/Maze Prison” (CCP5; chapters 12 and 13) worked with prison art made by former republican and loyalist inmates in Northern Ireland. Finally, Arnd Schneider, together with artist Leone Contini, carried out research and developed an exhibition “Bel Suol d’Amore—The Scattered Colonial Body” (presented here in chapters 2 and 3), at the Pigorini Ethnographic Museum in Rome (part of the Museum of Civilizations).

Art, anthropology, contested heritage

Research featured in this book, then, is set in a triangular relationship between art, anthropology, and contested cultural heritage. Not all sides of this imaginary, relational triangle necessarily have the same length. Moreover, standing back from the triangle, they do not seem to have the same status. Ethnographic work with contemporary artists is now a widely established field. Rather than being merely research on artworlds (Becker 1982), this has now evolved into research with artists, much of this in a collaborative vein (Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010, 2013; Schneider 2017). At first sight, art and anthropology appear somewhat as the heuristic and epistemological means with which to explore a third field, that is contested cultural heritage. This latter, however, cannot be conceived just as a passive recipient of other disciplinary interventions. Rather, it is a dynamic social field, characterized by contested issues, even conflict, and which is actively involved in the research process. In addition, art and anthropology are not just the tools performing an enquiry, but also stand in a specific relationship to each other. Over long stretches of its history, anthropology conceived of art to be researched as a passive object knowledge, not something to be engaged with, affected by, or even to collaborate with.

The exceptions at certain historical moments seem to be confirming the rule. One can think here, among others, of the productive encounter of French Surrealism with anthropology in the 1920s and 30s, where the editor and philosopher Georges Bataille, anthropologists Alfred Métraux, anthropologist and writer Michel Leiris, art historian Carl Einstein, and artists André Masson and Joan Miró, among many others, worked in innovative ways on the journal Documents. Here, different artistic genres and anthropological approaches were juxtaposed in both formal and in theoretical terms. Montage and collage were used to transgress different disciplinary practices, where artists were appreciated through an ethnographic lens and subjects of anthropology and archaeology were reworked artistically, often with surrealist devices (cf. Clifford 1988; Ades and Baker 2006; Kelly 2012). Filmmaker Maya Deren’s excursion into Haitian ethnography in the 1940s and 50s is another example. Deren, an experimental filmmaker, famous for her film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), set out to make a filmic study of Haitian Voodoo, having consulted beforehand with renowned anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and the mythology scholar Joseph Campbell. However, she found writing more apt to capture her intentions to write an ethnographic monograph, whereas her film rushes were only edited posthumously. The book she published eventually, Divine Horsemen (1953), is written in a very personal voice and clearly shows her attempt as an artist to succeed in cultural description and analysis. More recently, the work of artists such as Susan Hiller, Lothar Baumgarten, and César Paternosto, as well as many others since, has involved fieldwork and crossed the boundaries between art and anthropology (Clifford 1988; Schneider 1993, 2006, 2011; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010, 2013).

In sum, the three poles of the triangle of art, anthropology, and contested and contentious heritage in institutional settings stand in dynamic relationships with each other and across disciplinary boundaries, and none can be thought of as independent of the others or in isolation.

In this triangular setting, and when seen from an anthropological perspective, heritage and contested heritages obtain specific features. In fact, recent decades have seen a veritable boom in heritage studies, and contested and contentious cultural heritage in particular. No attempt is made here to summarize this vast literature, but a few significant contours, symptomatic for certain trends and issues, might be delineated. Anthropologist Helaine Silverman (2011) states that “[a]ttention to contested cultural heritage is, fundamentally, awareness of the construction of identity and its strategic situationality and oppositional deployment” (2011:1). She identifies a number of paradigmatic shifts which have helped in shaping this awareness, chief among them Edward Bruner’s early insight that self and society are never fully formed and fixed, but rather always in production, process—insights which were also applied in the seminal and sea-changing volumes Exhibiting Cultures: The poetics and Politics of Museum Display by Karp and Levine (1991) as well as the follow-up volumes Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (1992), and Museum Frictions (Karp et al. 2006). The work of Sharon Macdonald (2013, 2019), has been absolutely crucial in this field—the memory–identity–heritage complex being one of the pivotal concepts and areas of research she identified for the contested arena of heritage practices in Europe.³ The principal idea here is that heritage is to be understood as a relational process between multiple identities and history, characterized by contestation, and ultimately shaped by social relations and practices, and not constituted by fixed identities and immovable patrimonies.

Museums are “sites of passage and contestation” (Clifford 1997: 210) and, for a considerable time, anthropologists working with (and in) museums have written about indigenous and first-nation communities (often called “source communities”—though this term has been questioned more recently, see below) who lay claim to objects in museums of which they or their ancestors were originally divested through colonial appropriation. Periodically, over the last decades, this debate has been addressed in terms of the politics and poetics of presentation, possible collaboration and decision-making, categorization, and display of objects, coalescing at certain turning points, such as the “ART/artifact” exhibition at the Center for African Art (later Museum of African Art) in New York in 1988 (Vogel 1988), and the polemics surrounding the new Musée du Quai Branly in Paris since 2006 (cf. Price 2007), as well as the soon to be opened Humboldt-Forum in Berlin (now planned for 2019), and other institutions (see also Plankensteiner 2018: 25, 35–6). In various ways these issues can also be found in our examples, especially when they refer to institutional collections and their problematic and contentious heritage (such as the skull collection in the Vienna Museum of Natural History investigated by the project “Dead Images,” or folk art in Polish ethnographic museums referring to the genocide of Jews during the Second World War, researched by the Krakow project “Awkward Objects of Genocide”).

In the post-colonial context, debates about ethics of display of objects in Western museums are central here (which implies researching and questioning the moral relationships at the base of collections, Clifford 1997: 192), and the legitimacy of their “possession” in the first place. Linked to this, the discussion on provenance has gained renewed traction (furthered also by a parallel discussion of art looted principally by the Nazis, and others, during the Third Reich and more generally during the Second World War). These debates are informed by a fundamental rethinking, also in the public sphere, of restitution of art objects held in Western museums from former colonies to their rightful owners. In this context, one of the most outspoken critics of continued Western “ownership” is the French art historian, Bénédicte Savoy, who in her inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 2017 called museums “archives of human creativity,” emphasizing that “insider knowledge of museums had to become public knowledge” (Savoy 2018: 48, 56), and insisting that those “who have enriched us” (ibid.: 54, 57) must be included in the discussions, research and negotiations concerning the historic provenance, and the future of these objects, including their possible restitution (ibid.: 57–8).⁴

Sharon Macdonald, Henrietta Lidchi, and Margareta von Oswald take heed from some recent discussions around decolonial thinking, and propose to decolonize the museum (2017: 96, 97, 102) in order to explore its cosmopolitan potential. Their cosmopolitanism is precisely not linked to older, colonial Enlightenment ideals, but through readings of post-colonial advocates of cosmopolitanism, such as Paul Gilroy and Kwame Appiah. Macdonald, Lidchi, and von Oswald explicitly name the “contexts of unequal power, sometimes outright violence in which collections were made” and the “problematic depictions of ‘others’ exhibitions” (2017: 96). They state that the “extended legacy of colonial relations are questions about particular knowledge formations and modes of knowledge making, the nature of the ethnographic museum to whom it orients itself, and access to the collections and involvement in shaping their futures, in both the past and the present. Decolonizing the museum requires critical attention on all these fronts” (2017: 97). They are also critical of the “term ‘source community’ (or ‘community of source’) because of its potential restatement of a colonial model of discrete peoples and single origins” (ibid.: 99); similarly, the term “ ‘community’ … too easily ignores differences within groups” (ibid.). Certainly, museums are contact zones (Clifford 1997), and arenas of contestation. It is here that interrelations between issues of “research, authority, the archive and the public good” (Macdonald, Lidchi, and von Oswald 2017: 98) will have to be carefully gauged, and are brought to the fore.

Contested heritage and ethnographic research with TRACES

What can be learned from this discussion, taken from this more specific context of museums and contested heritage, for the context of the TRACES projects? Similarly, what can the projects contribute to this discussion? In fact, the research on provenance, the rights and claims of indigenous people, “original” owners, and source communities which has become ever more prominent in recent years plays an important role in the projects.

The colonial di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Working with TRACES
• 2 The Scattered Colonial Body: Serendipity and Neglected Heritage in the Heart of Rome
• 3 The Palm, the Couscous, the Face
• 4 Research on Research on Research: On Reflexive Relationality
• 5 Framing Faces: A Conversation Between Răzvan Anton and Julie Dawson Led by Matei Bellu
• 6 An Ethnography of Process: Following the Realization of the Awkward Objects of Genocide Project
• 7 Awkward Objects of Genocide Project—Difficult Encounters with Holocaust Folk Art: A Hybrid Record of Research and Exhibition Planning
• 8 From Something to Nothing: A Peculiar Ethnography of a Peculiar Art Project
• 9 Casting of Death Domestic Research Society
• 10 Dead Images: Multivocal Engagements with Human Remains
• 11 Disposing of Dead Images: Reflections on Contentious Heritage as Toxic Waste
• 12 Participatory Approaches to Places of Unresolved Heritage: Working with The Communities of Long Kesh/Maze
• 13 Dispersed Presence: Long Kesh/Maze Prison, its Artefacts as Catalysts of Testimony
• Index
• Copyright