Maeve Day 10

On Saturday morning, I decided to do some research on the African art/artifact situation because much of my earlier research was specific to Native American and Alaska Native works. I found a booklet that the British Museum created for teachers titled "What is African art?" that I thought was an interesting glimpse into how an ethnographic museum (other than the Penn) might treat the subject. The booklet began with two sections on "What is African?' and "Who defines Africa?", going on to pose the question, "is Africa really a cultural entity at all?" These first sections elaborated a bit on how ancient Egypt and other North African cultures are often grouped with the "classical" civilizations and separated from Africa as a cultural entity. They really skim over the impact of the slave trade (it is referred to as "the greatest emigration" from Africa, and though it is acknowlegded, it is made to sound like a mildly unpleasant situation instead of actual slavery) in the section titled "Where does African art come from?", but they claim that anthropologists were the first people to start treating African artifacts as art. Unfortunately, this section was kind of confusingly worded and extremely brief. The booklet seems to struggle with its messages, with sentences like "colonial adventurers continued to bring new surprises" contrasting with a long section explaining why "primitive" is an inappropriate word to use to describe African art.
One of the most interesting things about the booklet was the section "what does the West see in African art?" which addressed the myth of the primitive and basically scolded Western artists and art historians for their exotification of African art, saying it exposes more about Western culture than it does about African culture. After noting that "to give their subjective impressions an apparently objective value, some [art historians] even proclaim universal standards of art criticism and good taste," the booklet points out that knowledge of a work's culture of origin always enhances appreciation of art, therefore appreciating and displaying African art should involve some information on the cultural background. One of the most interesting things about this second half of the booklet was how it challenged me to think about African art--though I knew on some level that European/Western cultures place far more value on the visual than on other senses (especially in art), the questions "is African sculpture really the kind of art which Europeans take it to be?...in viewing such things in this way, are we not indulging peculiarly Western fantasies of African art and culture?" made me realize what had felt so strange about the display of the "power figures" from Look Again. The main takeaway that I had was that these things are seen as particularly African--more so than textiles or other artistic creations--because they can be used to mentally confirm a contrast between European and African styles and used to support exotic or primitive imaginings of Africa. Another interesting note, especially for museum display, came from a quote about how "we take [the objects] out of the dark, still their movement, quiet the music, and strip them of additions, we make them accessible to our visual culture, but we render them accessible to our visual culture, but we render them unrecognizable or meaningless to the cultures they come from" (Susan Vogel, African Art in Anthropology, 1988). The booklet went on to expound upon the ways that art historians treat African art differently from Western art, even though this is clearly founded on centuries of racist ideology. The final question the booklet asked that really intrigued me asked, "is art for the gallery really less 'applied' to the social purposes of its time than earlier traditions of African or European art?" Basically, if a divination kit and a Calder mobile were both created to serve a specific social purpose, and they both happen to also be excellent examples of how people can bring materials together creatively for a purpose, are they both art? Or are they both artifacts?
As the exhibits still seemed fairly deserted, Dani and I had lunch in the main building before giving ourselves a quick tour of the regular exhibits to familiarize ourselves with the normal labels. I can't seem to upload my pictures right now, but almost every work we saw had paragraph-long labels. They usually described something about the artist and a brief description of the artwork, but they also sometimes elaborated on the motifs in the work or even the cultural history that inspired it. In the Mexican Modernism gallery, most of the motifs were somehow divorced from any cultural relevance and presented as either universal art trends or an individual artist's experiences. However, the ancient Chinese gallery contained actual explanations of what the materials and symbols meant, cultural context for production and design, and bits of historical information about the various Chinese dynasties. I noticed that a few labels presented the concept of images representing ideas as a particularly Chinese touch to art, just like how the Vlisco exhibit implies that Africans are the only people who recognize symbolism in fashion and fabrics. Why is it not exotic that a Netherlandish painting of a religious scene includes a pelican, which represents devotion to one's children and Christ's sacrifice to humanity? The label on that particular painting explains that "according to legend, the pelican pierces its breast to feed its offspring its own blood." When other cultures use imagery in their art, it is treated as a surprising thing instead of being treated as how art works.
Even the contemporary Korean art gallery contains labels contextualizing the art, because while it's all fine and dandy to appreciate art on a purely aesthetic level, it cannot be ignored that visitors bring a certain history with them to museums that informs how they view the art. When I look at a painting of a girl all in white floating in a pool of flowers, I think of Ophelia--but as a painting in the Mexican Modernism gallery showed me, that is not always what is being referenced. When I look at medieval art, the fact that I grew up in a Catholic household in a country that prioritizes Christian imagery informs my understanding of the scenes--and when I look at a vaguely labeled power figure in an African art gallery, it is my assumptions about Africa that inform my thoughts. I think the prompts are a really cool idea, but it seems a little questionable to have implemented them in an African art gallery, where people already don't know much about the subject. The medieval European galleries have just as much explanation on their labels as the Asian galleries, and it doesn't come across as a studiously anthropological display method, so it just seems to me that the absence of information in the Look Again gallery serves to further the othering of African art.
Around 2:30, we returned to the Perelman to lurk around the contemporary exhibits and hear what we could hear. I went down to the Kere exhibit because it seemed to have the most visitors out of the five exhibits. There were a bunch of families with children of various ages who were watching the videos and playing with the interactive straw activity. It was pretty difficult to hear in there, in part because of the children, but also because the Perelman is generally an echo-y building. While sitting in one of the video viewing areas, I overheard both of the couples near me discussing how sustainable, community-based architecture could be applied in the United States. Everyone seemed to enjoy walking through strings.
After lurking for a while and determining that it wasn't really going anywhere, Dani and I decided to use the last of our exhibit maps to do some final visitor tracking. The visitor I followed stayed for over an hour, talking about each exhibit with her companion and really getting in close to each object. They left around 4:15, and I went to lurk in the photography and Vlisco exhibits for a little while before deciding that the emptiness of the exhibits meant it was time to go home.