Clémentine Deliss

The Metabolic Museum

Clémentine Deliss

• Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783775748018
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

For quite some time now, ethnographic museums in Europe have been compelled to legitimate themselves. Their exhibition-making has become a topic of discussion, as has the contentious history of their collections, which have come about through colonial appropriation. Clearly, this cannot continue. That the situation can be different is something that Clémentine Deliss explores in her current publication. She offers an intriguing mix of autobiographically-informed novel and conceptual thesis on contemporary art and anthropology. Reflections on her own work while she was Director of Frankfurts Weltkulturen Museum (Museum of World Cultures) are interwoven with the explorations of influential filmmakers, artists and writers. She introduces the Metabolic Museum as an interventionist laboratory for remediating ethnographic collections for future generations. CLÉMENTINE DELISS has achieved international renown as a curator, cultural historian and publisher of artists books. In her role as Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, as a curator, and as a professor and researcher at eminent institutes and academies, she focuses on transdisciplinary and transcultural exchanges. She is Associate Curator of KW Berlin and Guest Professor at the Academy of Arts, Hamburg.

Notes

Prologue

1 Ann L. Stoler, Duress. Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, 2016). In the preface, Stoler indicates how “colonial presence” is manifest in both “tangible” and “intangible” forms, hence her script for the “(post)-colonial.”

Walking Through

2 Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces (Cambridge, MA, 1977/2000), p. 147.

3 Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders, “An Aesthetic Headache: Notes from the Museum Bench,” in Interiors, eds. Johanna Burton, Lynne Cooke, and Josiah McElheny (Berlin, 2012), p. 65.

4 Ibid., pp. 69–70.

5 Ibid., p. 72.

6 Ibid., p. 75.

7 Ciraj Rassool aptly points out that ethnographic collections are “genocidal collections.” Conversation with the author, January 2019.

8 Paul B. Preciado, “Inside the Museum’s Body,” in The Beast and the Sovereign, eds. Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, Paul B. Preciado, Valentín Roma (Leipzig, 2018), p. 101.

9 Ibid.

10 Stoler 2016 (see note 1), p. 7.

11 Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics.” Report commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron, November 2018, pp. 42–47.

12 Achille Mbembe at the closing keynote speech of the MoMA conference “The multiplication of perspectives,” April 28, 2019, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/5429 (accessed May 7, 2019).

13 Issa Samb in conversation with the author, Dakar, March 23, 2010.

Artists and Anthropologists

14 “Maculate” is a term Ann L. Stoler used to describe anthropology in a paper given at the annual Adolf Jensen lecture series in the spring of 2014 at the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt.

15 James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, 1986/2010).

16 Joseph Kosuth, “The Artist as Anthropologist,” in The Fox, No.1, (New York, 1975). Reprinted in Joseph Kosuth, Art after Philosophy and After. Selected Writings 1966–1990 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), pp. 117–24.

17 Ibid.

18 As Bob Scholte wrote, “What seems to me to be urgently required is a genuinely dialectical position, one in which ‘analytical procedures (and descriptive devices are chosen and) determined by reflection on the nature of the encountered phenomena and on the nature of that encounter’ (Fabian, 1971). This would mean that every procedural step in the constitution of anthropological knowledge is accompanied by radical reflection and epistemological exposition. In other words, if we assume a continuity between experience and reality, that is, if we assume that an anthropological understanding of others is conditioned by our capacity to open ourselves to those others (Huch, 1970), we cannot and should not avoid the ‘hermeneutic circle’ (Ricoeur, 1971), but must explicate, as part of our activities, the intentional processes of constitutive reasoning, which make both encounter and understanding possible.” (my italics). Kosuth 1975 (see note 16), p. 26.

19 I am grateful to Wolfgang Stengel for having documented this moment.

20 Clémentine Deliss, ed., Object Atlas. Fieldwork in the Museum, exh. cat. Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main (Bielefeld, 2011), p. 394.

21 “In anthropology, it ought to be time to sacrifice the individualism as the subject position that has been at the core of anthropology’s approach to research, publication, pedagogy, and, above all, thinking.” Paul Rabinow, The Accompaniment. Assembling the Contemporary (Chicago, 2011), p. 202.

22 Michael Oppitz in conversation with the author, Berlin, March 5, 2018.

23 See Clémentine Deliss, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, exh. cat. Whitechapel Gallery (Paris, 1995).

24 The practice of painter and curator El Hadji Sy (*1954, Dakar) represents a conceptual and aesthetic nerve within post-independence African art. Exhibited internationally since the late seventies, he is equally known for his defiant attitude toward state cultural policy. In 1977, he took charge of an army barracks on Dakar’s waterfront. This became the first iteration of the Village des Arts, a creative hub for seventy artists, actors, musicians, filmmakers, and writers. There, in 1980, he founded the multidisciplinary project space Tenq, a Wolof term that signifies articulation, and continued to remodel this curatorial dialogue in other locations during the eighties and nineties. The international workshops that he organized under the same name in Saint Louis du Senegal (1994) and in Dakar (1996) enabled new networks to be forged between artists working in continental Africa and Europe at a time when digital communications and social media were nonexistent. To do this, El Hadji Sy reclaimed a disused Chinese worker’s camp near Dakar’s airport and turned it into a second Village des Arts. As an active player of the Laboratoire Agit-Art since the collective’s foundation in the mid-seventies, Sy was responsible for its visual staging and costumes as well as its strategic interpellation of Senegalese cultural politics. He was an originator of the interventionist artists’ group Huit Facettes, whose work in rural Senegal was presented at Documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002. See Clémentine Deliss and Yvette Mutumba, eds., E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Colophon
• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• Manifesto for the Post-Ethnographic Museum
• Walking Through
• Artists and Anthropologists
• Blind Spots
• Spatial Taxonomies
• The Archival Underbelly
• First Guests
• Laboratories and Workshops
• Agency and Collections
• Models of Inquiry
• Experiments in Transgression
• The Consequences of Remediation
• A Museum in Reverse
• The Lure of Objects
• Vital Relationships
• Models of a Museum-University
• Manifesto for Rights of Access to Colonial Collections Sequestered in Western Europe
• Notes