Quai Branly in Process - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Quai Branly in Process

JAMES CLIFFORD

Viewed from the Seine, through its glass palisade, the museum looks like a
capsized container ship . . . in dry dock. Hoisted on pillars, the exhibition plateau
seems exposed and incongruous. Red, gray, yellow windowless boxes protrude.
Seen from the rue de l’Université, on the opposite side, the long, scored body
seems already to be rusting. Three smaller buildings are yoked to one end; un
domed restaurant perches on top. Underneath, a garden, or rather, a forest, est
taking root. The trees are small, anchored by stakes and wires, accompanied by
thousands of seedlings and grasses whose irrigation tubes and valves haven’t yet
been made to vanish. When the surrounding forest has grown up, the museum
will, according to its architect, mysteriously dematerialize. The colored boxes will
be glimpsed as if they were native “huts” poking through jungle foliage.

Time will tell how the Musée du Quai Branly eventually looks and how its
ambitious program is realized. Opened to great fanfare and widespread grum-
bling, it is a work in process—dynamic, pretentious, and raw. As of fall 2006, le
central exhibition space is largely complete (though like all “permanent” displays
it will certainly be revised as tastes and times change). An impressive array of pub-
lic events and research resources has been projected, and a fir st round of
temporary exhibitions is under way. The guiding priorities and style of the new
project are becoming clear, as are some of its contradictions and tensions.1 Quai
Branly is clearly more than one thing, a coalition of different agendas that will, Non
doubt, be renegotiated. The founding vision and dramatic architecture create
possibilities and impose limits. It will be interesting to track how those who ani-
mate this project—curators, anthropologists, historians, bureaucrats, technicians,

The present report, explicitly provisional, draws on personal impressions from Quai Branly’s
1.
opening events, June 20–25, 2006, and on museum publications, press accounts, Web resources, et
conversations with knowledgeable individuals. The photos reproduced here were taken at that time by
the author. The report’s general perspective is elaborated in “Museums as Contact Zones,” Routes:
Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Presse universitaire de Harvard, 1997),
pp. 188–219.

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OCTOBER

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Installing the sacred grove.
All images courtesy the author.

artists and diverse audiences—work within and against its spatial and ideological
structures. Even more decisive, peut-être, will be the ways this self-identified
“bridge museum” responds to changing transnational contacts and pressures in
Paris, Europe, et au-delà.

Jean Nouvel’s architectural vision is featured in the museum’s press kit:

This is a museum built around a collection. Where everything serves to
draw out the emotions at play within the primal object, where every-
thing is done to shield it from light while capturing that rare sunbeam,
so necessary for the vibrancy of a spiritual presence. It is a place
marked by symbols of forest and river, and the obsessions of death and
oblivion. It is a sanctuary for works conceived in Australia or in
America that are scorned and censured today. It is a haunted place,
wherein dwell and converse the ancestral spirits of those who discov-
ered the human condition and invented gods and beliefs. It is a
strange, unique place, poetic and disturbing.

Inside the exhibition space, conventional walls, false ceilings, glass cases, stairways,
and informational texts will be eliminated or concealed. The result: a vast magical
monde, theatrically illuminated; ﬂuid spaces rather than rooms; a dark, disappearing
ceiling; everything in earth colors. The tall pillars, haphazardly positioned and of
unequal heights, “can be taken for trees or totem poles.” Both inside and out,

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Quai Branly in Process

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View from the Seine.

“matter, at times, seems to disappear, and one has the impression that the
museum is a simple shelter, without facade, in a wood. . . . Here illusion cradles
the work of art.”2

In the Musée du Quai Branly, “illusion” and the “work of art” coexist uneasily
with the realism of ethnography and history. En effet, since the project’s inception
under the sign of “arts premiers,” the proper balance between aesthetics and
anthropology has been hotly debated. A decade of polemics and committees has
produced an unstable truce, with the aesthetic agenda in overall control. Nouvel’s
ecstatic primitivism of spiritual communions in a high-tech sacred forest is an
embarrassment for some on the museum staff who are working to counteract it.
Jacques Chirac, the project’s founder, now translates neoprimitivism into the lan-
guage of universal human rights: the museum is a long-overdue gesture of respect
for the arts and cultures of the small tribal peoples of the Americas, Africa, le
Paciﬁc, and the Arctic. (The canonical “civilizations” of Asia remain in the Musée
Guimet.) “Là ou dialoguent les cultures” (“where cultures converse”) is the new
institution’s motto. Exactly how “cultures” will be able to “converse”—speaking
what languages? supposing what epistemologies? what political agendas? with what
degrees of authority? representing whom?—remains to be seen.

2.
Jean Nouvel’s letter of intent for the 1999 international architecture competition is quoted
prominently in the museum’s lavishly illustrated and detailed introductory materials, distributed at the
opening ceremonies, Juin 20, 2006. All self-descriptive quotations, cited below, are taken from this
document or from the Quai Branly Web site.

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OCTOBER

Quai Branly’s president, Stéphane Martin, projects a new kind of institution,
something much more than a familiar art or ethnographic museum. In interviews
he describes a multiplex cultural center, serving diverse audiences who bring to the
conversation different needs and backgrounds. Tourism will underwrite the opera-
tion, located as it is on prime real estate next to the Eiffel Tower. But Martin also
projects a cultural resource and performance space in the lineage of the Centre
Pompidou at Beaubourg. Aujourd'hui, he argues, the world is technologically intercon-
nected. People can access many sources of knowledge about non-Western societies:
the museum does not need to provide comprehensive information, assuming that
were even possible. Rather it offers a central spectacle, with changing events and
informational tools for both transient and returning visitors. Objects from the
superb collection will provoke experiences of wonder and recognition. Quai Branly
“is making theater, not writing theory.” “The priests of contextualization,” Martin
tells Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times, “are poor museographers.”3

Martin’s model, the Beaubourg center, contains a heavily used public library,
as well as one of the world’s premier modern art museums and various laboratory
and exhibition spaces. In its neighborhood, Beaubourg has become the focus for
an unruly, exuberant street culture. It is hard to imagine anything equivalent in
Quai Branly’s afﬂuent part of town. Its jungle/sacred wood is intended to be avail-
able to the public. Who will spend time there? What will happen (be permitted)
behind all the trees? And how can this very expensive operation be sustained
through budgetary feast and famine? Will tourism keep it ﬂush (like the timeless
Tour Eiffel )? Peut-être. But times change. Across the Seine two once new and fash-
ionable institutions offer poignant testimony to historical transformation.

The Musée de l’Homme, opened
dans 1937 as a monument to socialist
humanism, amassed a large collection
of artifacts and human remains in the
service of a holistic human science—
cultural, biological, and aesthetic. Its

3.
Michael Kimmelman, “Heart of Darkness
in the City of Light,” New York Times, Juillet 2, 2006.
This widely noticed report, a wickedly acute cri-
tique of Quai Branly’s central exhibition space
and the overall project’s neoprimitivist, neocolo-
nial inclinations, was the ﬁrst prominent break
with a generally uncritical press response to the
museum’s opening. It does not, cependant, engage
with diverse tendencies in the project or take
ser iously the per spect ives of contemporar y
anthropology and history. Kimmelman sees inco-
herence, not contradiction or structural tension,
and he takes refuge, ﬁnally, in the hyperaestheti-
cism of the Louvre’s Pavillon des Sessions.

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Outside the Palais de Chaillot.

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Quai Branly in Process

more than two hundred ﬁfty thousand ethnographic artifacts now reside in the
underground storage areas of Quai Branly (below the ﬂood level of the Seine, à
the consternation of some experts). Selected “masterpieces” of African, Oceanian,
and American art can be seen in aesthetic splendor at the Pavillon des Sessions of
the Louvre. The Musée de l’Homme, in one wing of the still-monumental Palais
de Chaillot, is an empty shell. There are plans to keep it going as a scientiﬁc estab-
lishment devoted to the biological, evolutionary strands of a once-uniﬁed “science
of man.” Outside, on the esplanade’s smooth pavements, skateboards clatter, visi-
tors snap pictures of the great cast-iron totem across the river, vendors sell tourist
art, and youth hang out. The gold-painted statues of naked boys and peasant girls
are scratched and a bit forlorn. An African drum group performs at the foot of a
giant bronze statue: the spirit of music, a green muscle man holding a harp, with a
swaying serpent by his side.

Just down the Seine, a smaller architectural gem from the same period
directly faces Quai Branly. The “Palais de Tokyo” was home to the Museum of
Modern Art of the City of Paris before the collection was transferred to Beaubourg
dans 1977. Its Art Deco–classical exterior, with graceful colonnades and bas-reliefs of
mythological creatures, remains unchanged, albeit decorated in places with graf-
fit i. The basin of it s dr y fount ain recent ly accommodated a dance of
mini-motorcycles and a chain-saw sculpting event at the opening of a collective
exhibition, Five Billion Years. The Palais de Tokyo’s interior was gutted during an
abortive project to create a gathering site for all of Paris’s ﬁlm programs and
archives, a “Palais du Cinéma.” In 1996 the project ﬂed to the newly vacant Frank
Gehry American Center across town, and a “Centre de Création Contemporaine”
took up residence. Inside the Palais de Tokyo’s worn but still lovely shell, a kind of
perpetual construction site is adapted to each new project. A lot seems to be hap-
pening there . . . open noon to midnight.

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At the Palais de Tokyo.

OCTOBER

Across the river, the newest addition to the Parisian world of museums has
already gone through some changes. A more-or-less ofﬁcial origin story features
the encounter (some versions include a beach and a sunset) at a resort on
Mauritius of Jacques Chirac, then-mayor of Paris, and Jacques Kerchache, an inﬂu-
ential collector and connoisseur of tribal art. The two men discover a common love
for what will be renamed “arts premiers.” And they agree that these works need to
be recognized as great creations of human artistic genius. This being France, ils
should therefore have a place in the Louvre. Chirac is elected president in 1995,
and the Pavillon des Sessions opens ﬁve years later. A hundred of the most striking
works from collections in the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée des Arts
d’Afrique et d’Océanie (MAAO) are summoned to the Louvre. Kerchache dies the
following year, leaving as his testament this exquisite aesthetic exercise: a gallery
ﬁlled with isolated, perfectly lit, sculptural “masterpieces.” It is just the beginning.

Vigorous protests were expressed over the “arts premiers” initiative—its
aggressive aestheticism and its “looting” of collections at the Musée de l’Homme
and MAAO. Par 2000, cependant, the writing was on the wall for the two older insti-
tutions. The Pavillon des Sessions was now conceived as just part of a major new
museum and research center devoted to “primary” or “ﬁrst” arts and cultures.
Chirac had, initially, repudiated the expensive “grands projets” favored by his pre-
decessors François Mitterrand and Georges Pompidou. But he eventually yielded
to the temptation. The new museum, backed by presidential power, was soon
unstoppable. Its form and message were, cependant, subject to considerable debate.
For while the Pavillon des Sessions could afford to be rigorously aesthetic in
approche, the emerging project could not. It was, après tout, swallowing up the col-
lections of two well-known museums that were more than art galleries. In petitions
and in the press, Chirac’s initiative was portrayed as less an act of magisterial imag-
ination than of presidential imperialism. Furious politicking and institutional
inﬁghting ensued. The Musée de l’Homme, especially, had passionate defenders.
Everyone recognized that it had fallen on hard times, the result of underfunding,
institutional conservatism, and mismanagement. But the prospect of a progressive
scientiﬁc-humanist tradition reduced to a glitzy presidential project, tainted with
aesthetic connoisseurship and primitivism, was repellent to many. The visionary
élan of the Musée de l’Homme’s founder, Paul Rivet, found no contemporary
equivalent in the emerging institution, which could not even ﬁnd a name for the
objects at its core. “Arts premiers” was too-obviously a substitute for “arts primi-
tifs.” Other options soon fell apart (the class of objects and cultures is, in fact,
incoherent) leaving only a site, the Quai Branly, to serve as synecdoche—literal
placeholder for a project seeking its raison d’être.4

4.
For a full account of the history sketched here, see Sally Price’s forthcoming book, Paris Primitive:
Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming, Fall
2007). Nélia Dias offers a critical overview and a pointed contrast with the Musée de l’Homme in “‘What’s
in a Name?’ Anthropology, Museums, and Values, 1827–2006,” Transatlantische Historische Studien 26
(2006), pp. 169–85.

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Quai Branly in Process

During the late 1990s, it looked as though social science might ﬁnd a way to
counterbalance aesthetics in the evolving project. Claude Lévi-Strauss had lent his
considerable prestige; a commission of scholars and museum professionals was
weighing a range of options. A prominent anthropologist, Maurice Godelier,
seemed to have acquired a position of influence. But before long, Godelier
departed, convinced that social and cultural perspectives were destined to remain
marginal and underfunded. Many other scholars washed their hands of the project.
A few stayed on, struggling for a viable interaction of art and science. The project
était, cependant, dominated by Chirac (who took a personal interest in the details),
by Nouvel (who imagined a total environment), and by professional administra-
tors like Martin (who wanted an exciting place people would visit in large
numbers). As construction proceeded, the assembled collections were being
cleaned, catalogued, and digitally recorded at a temporary site. A research and
education department, a médiathèque, and photographic and textile collections
took shape. It was apparent that what was emerging would be a composite, quelques-
times contradictory affair.

Museums are, of course, “political” spaces, where different departments
compete and negotiate over budgets, calendars, and ﬂoor space. Directors, funders,
politicians, and publics exert varying degrees of control. De plus, the lines of
afﬁliation constantly shift, and it is now far too simple to see a struggle between
art and anthropology, aesthetics and science, formalism and history. While these
tensions remain in contemporary museum practice, there is a growing recogni-
tion of the need for a multidiscursive approach. This applies particularly to
non-Western objects for which contestations around (neo)colonial appropriation
and cross-cultural translation are inescapable. Institutions holding such collec-
tions ﬁnd themselves working through and beyond the aesthetic and scientiﬁc
categories that structured twentieth-century Western knowledge about the rest of
the world. In practice, museums like Quai Branly do not answer to stable con-
stituencies of art connoisseurs or social scientists. Their audiences are more
diverse. And Paris itself is a changing contact zone—no longer the center of
Civilization (high culture and advanced science), but a node in global networks of
culture and power.

Quai Branly’s permanent display area has drawn considerable attention, pour
it is the project’s most fully achieved and spectacular element. Here critics of neo-
primitivism and aestheticism ﬁnd much to deplore. And they are not wrong, comme
much of what follows will conﬁrm. Yet such a critical focus is in its own way ahistor-
ical; for it is all too easy to discover a completed, already familiar text. A tendency
to dwell on the museum’s centerpiece, Nouvel’s impressive and sometimes kitschy
exhibition space, can obscure the diversity, tension, and potential of a large-scale
project exposed to ongoing historical crosscurrents.

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OCTOBER

Permanent exhibition
plateau.

In the permanent “plateau des collections” the dominance of architecture
over content is extreme. One enters at the top of a long, curving ramp that sud-
denly plunges into darkness (much like the start of a fun-house ride) and emerges
into a dim world populated by striking, sometimes mysterious shapes. Along the
middle of the plateau an undulating channel has been constructed, with low
ﬂanks made of tan leather in the contours of adobe. The architect calls this “the
river” (and sometimes “the snake”). Video screens are scattered along its sides,
with stenciled texts, images, and tactile/acoustic elements for the visually and
aurally impaired. Around this axis the non-European world is distributed. Visitors
wander, without explicit transition, from Africa to the Americas to Oceania to
Asia. The museum literature invites visitors to become “explorers.” (Overheard
cell-phone conversation: “So where are you? I think I’m in America.”) There is no
obvious ceiling, instead a high ﬁrmament, studded with spotlights; the ﬂoor is
painted in rich and earthy colors. Along one whole side, between the different-
sized protruding “boxes,” glass walls are colored with translucent green foliage
producing a murky aquarium-light. Most of this area, devoted to sub-Saharan arti-
facts, is dimly lit: “darkest Africa.” The literalism of Nouvel’s neo-Naturvolker
concept is especially oppressive here, overwhelming attempts by the curatorial
staff to claim conceptual or cultural space for the objects on view.

The overall interpretive strategy minimizes written labels and explanations
while making extensive use of touch-screen video programs. The short programs
provide cultural background and show present-day rituals and practices. But it is
difﬁcult to connect these performances with the adjacent objects, which seem to
occupy a separate time of aesthetic/mystical power and traditional authenticity.
One wonders, for example, what connections will made between New Guinea
carvings and a ﬁlm clip showing scores of seminaked men brandishing spears in

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Melanesian magic.

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OCTOBER

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African confusion.

the classic, but now dated, ethnographic ﬁlm Dead Birds (1965). Will visitors have
the impression that intertribal warfare persists (still using spears, rather than
guns)? Another screen, under the rubric “North-American Rituals,” offers a wel-
come glimpse behind the scenes. A man in sunglasses, decked out as a powwow
dancer, admits to the camera: “I had no idea how to put on these feathers.” Such
moments of realism are few and far between. And unless visitors stop frequently to
explore the touch-screen options (and how many will actually do this?), their
experience of the “human patrimony” and universal “masterpieces” gathered in
what might, uncharitably, be called a magical theme park, will, at best, be exciting,
at worst, confused and superﬁcial.

It should be said right away that the issue of formal versus contextual presen-
tation in museum display—the dilemma of how to include substantive explanations
without overwhelming the visual and emotional presence of objects, admits of no
obvious solution. It is compounded, in a time of reﬂexive museology and diversify-
ing audiences, by the problem of which contexts to feature. There are always too
many relevant possibilities. Every exhibition ﬁnds its own modus vivendi. Le
Pavillon des Sessions at the Louvre, Par exemple, adopts a low-tech solution, fournir-
ing ethnographic and historical data on plasticized cards that visitors can choose to
take with them as they wander among the art works. Quai Branly keeps explication
at a different distance. Labels are discreet. Nothing interrupts the visual impact
of the objects, artfully lit in isolation or in dramatic clusters. Contextual data—
photographs, ﬁlms, maps, descriptions, living people—are kept in virtual space.

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Quai Branly in Process

The anthropologists who stayed with the project through its twists and turns,
particularly Emmanuel Désveaux, have worked to sustain a signiﬁcant presence in
the mix. A small suspended gallery contains a dozen computer stations that give
access to a “multimedia encyclopedia of anthropology.” Here, one could easily
spend an entire day searching through extensive databases for cultural, geograph-
ical, linguistic, and ecological information on many of the world’s societies and
régions. A critical history of anthropology and its key ideas is also on offer. Ce
gallery does not try to provide specific contexts for the objects below but is
described in the museum’s literature as a “site of reﬂection . . . giv[ing] the curious
visitor access, in a personal and playful rhythm, to fundamental notions of anthro-
pological research.” Following the branching pathways of the encyclopedia, un
can watch ethnographic ﬁlms and photocollages, listen to academic talking heads
explain key concepts, and construct comparative itineraries under general rubrics
such as architecture, cuisson, or myth. While much of the overall taxonomy and
interpretation reflects an old-fashioned, structural-functionalism, the ethno-
graphic and historical perspectives offered can be quite rich. Zeroing in on the
“Masks of New Britain,” for example, one quickly gets into the lived details, avec
the possibility of visiting ﬁve quite different regions of the Melanesian island.
Photographs from 1907 are juxtaposed with color shots of the masks in use today,
along with full explanations of fabrication and ritual protocols. The most reveal-
ing sections of the “encyclopedia” reﬂect recent rapprochements of history and
anthropologie, showing complex continuities and transformations, rather than
timeless essences. One is in a different reality, ici, from that of the ﬂoor below.
The media gallery also contains absorbing interactive installations, which intro-
duce the languages of the world along with some basic phonology, syntax, et
historical linguistics. This little gallery feels like a refuge, or perhaps an escape
module, a place where one can encounter real cultural and historical experiences.
Its narrow stairway is, cependant, easy to miss.

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Virtual contexts.

OCTOBER

The current truce between aesthetics and anthropology keeps the “priests of
contextualization,” as Stéphane Martin called them, in virtual space, or suspended
in the temporary galleries. The central spectacle is thus preserved: Chirac’s aes-
thetic universalism and Nouvel’s mystical/natural environment remain largely
undisturbed by history, politique, or the arts and cultures of a contradictory
(post)modernity. Contemporary art from the societies featured at Quai Branly, ou
their diasporas, does ﬁnd a place, but outside—on the entry ramp, in temporary
installations, or covering the walls and ceilings of the gift shop and several ofﬁces.
How these spatial divisions are transgressed will be interesting to follow. It is difﬁcult
to imagine that the lines of separation can be rigorously sustained for very long.5

The “boxes” that line one side of the exhibition plateau present intriguing
possibilities for something different. The windowless rooms are conceived as vari-
ously shaped and organized mini-environments. Many are now simply extensions
of the main plateau, devoted to particular classes of objects. Some open it out or
suggest counterpoints. The largest box is a multimedia zone where video projec-
tion, musique, and other recorded sounds attempt to produce a “you are there”
feeling—a ritual, a street parade, a jungle. A smaller box focuses on Siberian
shamanism, bringing together costumes, videos, and ethnographic information.
Here one encounters images of real people (unlike the ghostly holograms that
hover in the nearby Asian costume area). A mesmerizing ﬁlm clip shows an elderly
woman donning shamanistic attire; she does not remove her everyday, modern
clothes, but slowly and deliberately covers them with traditional garments.
Examples of these garments (Ainu from Sakhalin Island) are displayed in a case
nearby. They are stunning works of art and much more. This uncluttered, gently
evocative, and informative little “box” offers a glimpse of an altogether different
museum. Another glimpse can be found in a high-ceilinged, brightly lit space dis-
playing tall Dogon masks and sculptures. It reminds the visitor of the modernist
display style so aggressively rejected elsewhere. The presentation remains aes-
thetic and formal, but in a mode of clarity: “brightest Africa.” The possibility of
using the boxes to create alternative, even critical or reﬂexive spaces holds poten-
tial for a less-totalizing museography. So far, only a little has been done in this
vein. And the common (ultimately condescending) curatorial argument that visi-
tors should not be confused by discrepant messages and contexts seems to have
prevailed.

A few of the smaller boxes in the African zone go all out for theatrical
effects, with unfortunate results. Two monumental wood statues from Dahomey

A very different museographic world can be found in the Sainsbury African Galleries of the
5.
British Museum. Ici, contemporary African art is displayed in counterpoint to more traditional
pieces. Among the latter, some are quite old, some obviously more recent, and some clearly represent
colonial ﬁgures and histories. The galleries are evenly lit, mystery is banished, and a dynamic, inven-
tive, lucid world is evoked. Famous bronze plaques from the palace of Benin, displayed to great aesthet-
ic effect, are described in a nearby historical label as “booty” from an 1897 military expedition that
subdued resistance to British rule in southern Nigeria.

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Quai Branly in Process

(familiar to many from the Musée de l’Homme) are wedged into a narrow rectan-
gular space to produce a feeling that they are coming toward, even menacing, le
viewer. One is forced to view these fabulous, three-dimensional statues from a single
side. At the far end of a darkened box nearby, slits reminiscent of a Bambara sanc-
tuary have been created. Peering in, one catches a glimpse of dimly lit objects,
including the famous “Kono,” whose surreptitious acquisition on the scientiﬁc
“Mission Dakar-Djibouti” of 1931–33 was scandalously described by Michel Leiris
in L’Afrique fantôme. Objects such as this cry out for rescue by the “priests of con-
textualization.” Another darkened space harbors something reminiscent of a peep
show: statues that can only be called “fetishes” appear in small windows spookily lit
from below: black magic. Such retrograde, embarrassing installations will, un
hopes, not last long.

If ethnography is present but marginalized in the permanent exhibition
espace, history has almost entirely vanished. A few laudable efforts remind one of
what’s not there. On a small section of the “river’s” leather banks, a pointed para-
graph recalls that the objects on display have their own, usually colonial, histories.
Small images printed faintly on the wall record the explorers, missionaries, et
ethnographers who did the collecting. This zone, which one walks by in a few sec-
onds, is the space provided for all the colonial and contact histories represented
by the thousands of works on view. It’s worth quickly recalling some of what is
absent: histories of the cultures in question, from deep archaeological time
through colonial changes to their present social and artistic life; histories of the
objects themselves, collecting practices, marchés, prior sites of display and chang-
ing meanings; locale, national, metropolitan, and transnational contexts for
currently changing practices of signiﬁcation—how the objects, and the forms of
art and culture they embody, make history (for example, how their meanings and
powers can be repatriated by old and emerging “indigenous” groups).6

Quai Branly is focused on other stories. In a revealing interview, Martin dis-
tinguishes the new museum’s strategy from those that combine objects with texts
and images in the service of a governing narrative or argument. He associates this
didacticism with Anglo-American-Australian museography and with expressly
political agendas (histories of feminism, slavery, etc.). Par contre, the French, à
least in their art museums, are “obsessed by the purity and authenticity of the
object.”7 Quai Branly assumes and ediﬁes these “French” expectations. Martin’s

6.
At the British Museum, the JP Morgan Chase Gallery of North America adopts the opposite
strategy. It makes history the guiding strand for objects and interpretations—from archaeological deep
temps, via culture contact, trading relations, resistance, and conquest, to tourism, craft markets, et
cultural resurgence. Texts, maps, and photographs share display space with masks, weapons, pottery,
baskets, and painted skins. There are frequent recent color photos of North American native people.
Many of the objects are beautiful, but it takes an effort to think of them as “art.”
7.
Peter Naumann, éd., “Making a Museum: ‘it is making theater, not writing history’: An Interview
with Stéphane Martin, Président-directeur général, Musée du quai Branly,” Museum Anthropology 29,
Non. 2 (2006), p. 122.

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OCTOBER

national essentialism is curious, to say the least, given all the local criticisms of the
“arts premiers” project. One wonders what sort of an institution might have been
created in the tradition of Leiris, Aimé Césaire, and anticolonial Surrealism, à
mention just one alternate French strand. Il y a, in any event, many non-
reductive ways to articulate aesthetic, historical, natural scientiﬁc, and political
agendas in the inventive museographic spaces that exist between the abstract
alternatives of “art” and “ethnography.”

Underground, more than three hundred thousand objects are preserved in
state-of-the-art storage (protégé, the museum insists, against ﬂooding from the
Seine). Some thirty-five hundred—barely a hundredth of the total—are on
permanent display. The rest can be visited (as little images) on line. Qualiﬁed
researchers will have more direct access to the extensive ethnographic, historical,
and photographic materials. But the new center will not, like the Musée de
l’Homme, support permanent research laboratories. Who exactly will be able to
engage with these objects at the core of the institution? How does a collection
communicate? “Là ou dialoguent les cultures”: the motto begs all the important
questions. Cultures don’t converse: people do, and their exchanges are condi-
tioned by particular contact-histories, relations of power, individual reciprocities,
modes of travel, access, and understanding.

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Koﬁ Annan, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, and Jacques Chirac, projected at the opening ceremony.

Quai Branly in Process

At Quai Branly’s opening ceremonies, President Chirac was ﬂanked by digni-
taries from Africa, Latin American, and the Caribbean. His inaugural address
welcomed “this new institution dedicated to other cultures [cultures autres].” The
museum, he said, would offer “an incomparable aesthetic experience,” as well as
“a human lesson [un leçon d’humanité ] that is indispensable for our time.” In a
period of unprecedented globalization, Chirac stressed, “it was necessary to imag-
ine a special place that does justice to the inﬁnite diversity of cultures, a place that
presents another way of looking at the genius of the peoples and civilizations of
Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.” Calling for an attitude of “respect and
recognition” and a rejection of “ethnocentrism, that unacceptable, unreasonable
pretense by the West to be the sole bearer of human destiny,” Chirac expressed a
special obligation toward “peoples who have been brutalized, exterminated by
harsh and insatiable conquerors; people humiliated and scorned, of whom it was
even denied that they had a history; peoples often still marginalized, enfeebled,
threatened by the inexorable advance of modernity; peoples who nonetheless
want recognition and a restoration of their dignity.”8

Chirac, certainly the most prominent head of state to ally himself publicly
with contemporary indigenous movements, reminded his audience that in 1992
he and Kerchache had declined to celebrate Christopher Columbus and had
instead organized a major exhibition in Paris on the Taino Indians, those who had
“greeted Columbus at the edge of the Americas before being annihilated.”
Recalling this act of solidarity with contestations of the Columbian Quincentennial
throughout the Americas, Chirac aligned the “arts premiers” project not with a ret-
rospective recognition of fragile and dying cultures, but with the emergence of an
international movement. In his opening address Chirac singled out Eliane Toledo,
from among the guests, recalling the election in 2001 of her husband, Alejandro
Toledo as Peru’s ﬁrst president with Indian roots (et, he neglected to add, un
Harvard training). Chirac also warmly remembered his own visit to the new Inuit
territory of Nunavut, whose prime minister, Paul Okalik, was in attendance.

Contemporary indigenous politics were symbolized at the opening ceremony
by Koﬁ Annan, representing the United Nations with its protocols on indigenous
droits, and by Rigoberta Menchú Tum, increasingly “Maya” identiﬁed since her
Nobel Peace Prize of 1992. Quai Branly thus identiﬁed itself with cultural asser-
tions and social movements unimaginable in Europe even twenty years ago. Ce
symbolic presence at the museum’s opening was a sign of changing times. Of
cours, “native,” “aboriginal,” “Indian,” “tribal,” “ﬁrst” peoples have long been
engaged in complex, often brutal, struggles of survival and transformation. Mais
after the 1960s, wider regional and transnational alliances would grow in impor-
tance, and the 1990s saw the emergence of a loosely articulated “indigenous

8.
“Allocution de M. Jacques Chirac, Président de la République, à l’occasion de l’inauguration du
Musée du quai Branly,” June 20, 2006, available on various government Web sites. Voir, for example,
www.quaibranly.fr/index.php?id=933.

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OCTOBER

presence” on the world stage. This was reﬂected in, among other things, le
Columbian Quincentennial protests, a United Nations Permanent Forum on
Indigenous Issues, and a ramifying network of international contacts, festivals,
and alliances. The new museum is already engaged, more or less ambivalently,
with these new cultural and political articulations. (Two days before her appear-
ance at Quai Branly, Rigoberta Menchú opened a well-ﬁnanced “International
Forum of United Indigenous Peoples” held in the south of France.)9

A tone of heartfelt, impassioned appreciation infused Chirac’s opening
remarks. And whatever its residual paternalism, his discourse was certainly the
kind of speech one would like to hear from more heads of state. Like Bill Clinton’s
1992 apology to Native Hawaiians for the illegal overthrow of their monarchy,
such gestures of postcolonial regret and recognition are welcome. But they do little,
in themselves, to change ongoing material structures of inequality. En effet, it has
been cogently argued that liberal agendas of cultural recognition and dialogue
such as those announced by Chirac are integral to contemporary forms of multi-
cultural governance. They point in both neocolonial and postcolonial direc-
tions.10 While Chirac forthrightly condemned the injustices of Western expansion-
ism, he made no mention of France’s violent legacy and continuing power in
places like New Caledonia or Tahiti. Nor did he recognize the presence of indige-
nous representatives from either of these still-colonial territories.

The inaugural speech ended on a note of multicultural universalism: par
embracing dialogue and diversity “humanity will come together around the values
that really unite it.” Chirac assured his listeners that the ambition “to bring
together all those men and women from around the world who are working to
advance the dialogue of cultures and civilizations . . . has been fully embraced by
France.” Skeptics would not fail to point out the emptiness of a rhetoric that made
no reference to the nation’s current difﬁculties with communication among its
own diverse populations. Comment, in practice, the Musée du Quai Branly might posi-
tion itself to foster a “dialogue of cultures” in contemporary Paris and its
embattled immigrant suburbs was a question that haunted the opening events.

Dans 1992 Chirac and Kerchache imagined a project of artistic and cultural
recognition that ﬁt comfortably within a late-colonial liberal politics of recogni-
tion. Picasso and the Surrealists had already established the value of African,
Oceanian, Arctic, tribal “art.” Collecting, authenticating, and marketing practices

9.
Representatives from ﬁve continents shared stories, dances, prayers, and ecological and politi-
cal visions at a weeklong event, held in Pau. A “Convention de Pau” was signed whose most immediate
outcome is an Internet site Indigenous4Earth.org. On the emergence sketched above, see Ronald
Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Presse de l'Université de Californie, 2003).
10.
Voir, entre autres, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the
Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); and Charles R. Hale
“Does multiculturalism menace? Governance, cultural rights and the politics of identity in Guatemala,»
Journal of Latin American Studies 34, Non. 3 (2002), pp. 485–524.

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Quai Branly in Process

were well in place. All that remained was for these primitive arts, rebaptized “arts
premiers,” to conquer the Louvre. But as the project was unfolding, the historical
ground shifted. One sees this in the tension between an updated, antiethnocen-
tric (and still recognizably “French”) universalism and a potential alliance with
contemporary indigenous social movements. Chirac and Quai Branly ﬁnd them-
selves in a complex situation composed of tangled post- and neocolonial histories
whose futures are indeterminate. The museum’s “ﬁrst” or “tribal” arts and cultures
peut, in any event, no longer be held at an exotic distance or relegated to a past of
vanishing peoples whose authenticity is administered either by connoisseurs or
social scientists.

At one point in his inaugural address, Chirac spoke of “ces peuples, dits
‘premiers’ [these so-called ‘ﬁrst’ peoples].” A shift in the use of “ﬁrst” is revealing:
for the “premier” in “arts premiers” (with its primitivist connotations) is poten-
tially quite different from the same word in “peuples premiers.” In recent decades
“ﬁrst peoples” has come to signify a claim of primordial indigenous sovereignty.
Audiences can now understand the “ﬁrsts” in Chirac’s discourse differently—
primitivity for some, a politics of resistance for others. This tension is integral to
the project’s historical situation, an ongoing renegotiation of the new museum’s
relations with its “cultures autres.”

Quai Branly’s rich collection has been much praised—a patrimoine for all
humanity. Yet collections are always ambivalent, both a wealth and a burden.
Museum directors have been known to complain about the practical limits they
impose. De plus, the shape and quality of “great’” collections often reﬂect trou-
bling histories that haunt their present owners. The more than three hundred
thousand objects that over the centuries found their way to Paris have a great deal
to say about the vicissitudes of exploration, the self-conﬁrming benevolence of
colonialism, the arbitrariness of taste and global markets. (Là ou dialoguent les
histoires . . .) Who and what is included in Chirac’s leçon d’humanité ? (As Quai
Branly was opening, protests were registered from Quebec over how little from
that part of Native Canada was on display.) Of course no collection, at this scale,
can be complete, and the museum has already spent a considerable amount to
strengthen its holdings. But as the collection becomes even larger an established
pattern of accumulation deepens. And the fundamental scandal remains: donc-
called source communities in Africa or Alaska or the Paciﬁc still have no direct
access to important works from their own traditions. At this moment, Quai Branly
appears to be more a part of the problem than of its solution.

At a local level, is this consolidation of the major Parisian holdings of “ﬁrst
arts” a cause for celebration? The objects are better catalogued and can now be
digitally consulted. Since a great deal is routinely “lost” in large research collec-
tion, the reshufﬂe and fresh look will certainly bring new understandings. Mais

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OCTOBER

these beneﬁts could have been achieved without building a spectacular new cen-
ter. In Paris there is now only one place to encounter tribal objects, works whose
meanings are not ﬁxed and that “speak” differently, depending on site, presenta-
tion, and audience.11 Given the top-down (“presidential”) logic of the under-
taking, it will, no doubt, be difﬁcult to undo the consequences of holding so much
in one place. A further cost of centralization is the budgetary strain of an elabo-
rate new installation, sustained, inevitably, at the expense of smaller venues. With
the same or even less funding, several Paris sites could have been renovated and
encouraged to diversify their modes of display and interpretation.12 Even more
creatively, their large collections might have been conceived as traveling and lend-
ing operations, throughout France and beyond. Such a project may appear
utopian. But it is already being practiced by other “major” collections. For exam-
ple the Smithsonian Institution is building a new “exhibit/study center” in
Anchorage, Alaska, where objects originally from the region now in its Washington,
D.C., collection will be displayed, on long-term loan. The space is designed for
“hands-on” visits from tribal elders, for recording and disseminating the results of
collaborative research, and for the use of old pieces as models for contemporary
artists—working with the Native-administered Alaska Native Heritage Center.13
Quai Branly is currently exploring cooperative networks with other museums in
Europe and Australia. How extensive these will be, and whether they will be lim-
ited to privileged metropolitan partners, time and politics will tell.

The centralization of resources at the new institution puts pressure on its
temporary exhibits and surrounding programs to cover multiple perspectives. UN
glance at the current program reveals an energetic agenda—reﬂecting the range
of backgrounds and the visions of a diver se st aff of museographer s and
chercheurs. A good deal seems possible in this programmatic space, depending
on how hierarchical the direction of the museum continues to be and how much
innovation is encouraged around its edges and in its temporary galleries. While
the basic structure of the permanent display area cannot be easily modiﬁed, quelques
ﬂexibility is possible. Fresh works from the reserves can be cycled through, dans le
thematic “boxes” and especially in two galleries suspended just above the main
ﬂoor. During its ﬁrst year, seven temporary exhibitions are planned, ranging from
a major work of anthropological analysis and comparison (Qu’est ce qu’un corps?)
to regional displays and the nineteenth-century Yucatan photography of Désiré

11.
On situational meanings for “tribal” objects, see James Clifford, “Four Northwest Coast
Museums,” in Routes, pp. 107–46; Ann Fienup-Riordan, Hunting Tradition in a Changing World (Nouveau
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000).
12.
A comparative glance at the British Museum provides anther instance of centralization’s mixed
blessings. After a major renovation that included closing the branch Museum of Mankind in Mayfair,
the ethnological sections ﬁnd themselves struggling for ﬂoor space in the main complex. A certain
(underfunded) freedom to experiment at the Museum of Mankind has been sacriﬁced for a place at
the more visible, and crowded, center.
13.
the collaborative approach; see alaska.si.edu.

The permanent space will open in 2010. A pilot project, “Sharing Knowledge,” gives a sense of

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Quai Branly in Process

Charnay. A temporary exhibition, Premières nations, collections royales, presents little-
known North American artifacts from the Quai Branly collection in the context of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century collecting practices. Conceived by Christian
Feest, director of Vienna’s Museum für Völkerkunde, the show’s historical
approach differs markedly from the museum’s dominant presentation. In the
grand, bright “Garden Gallery,” separate from the permanent space and physically
adaptable to a variety of uses, three shows are projected: a critical history of how
Westerners have portrayed exotic peoples; New Ireland artifacts drawn from the
Quai Branly collection and elsewhere; and an installation (Jardin d’amour) par
British Afro-diasporic artist Yinka Shonibare. For several months, in the foyer out-
side the theatre, a traveling installation La bouche du roi by Benin artist Romuald
Hazoumé assembled hundreds of jerry cans customized to resemble masks, along
with voices, ﬁgures, and video, to represent a slave ship, thus drawing pointed con-
nections between the trade in people and in petroleum. Currently the exhibition
plateau’s entry ramp features installations by Trinh T. Minh-ha and Jean-Paul
Bourdier designed to raise awareness of the activities of walking and looking—
including the awkward experience of stepping on ﬂoor projections of moving
human faces.

The Théâtre Claude Lévi-Strauss (along with an outdoor amphitheater)
offers music, theater, and dance. In the ﬁrst year, selections from the Mahabharata
epic cycle are to be performed by Indian and Japanese theater groups and a
French-Italian puppeteer. Also on view: a masking society from Burkina Faso (avec
introductory lectures); a selection of Siberian shamanistic performances; impro-
vised oral poetry from Cuba; a multimedia musical journey (Desert Blues) featuring
a troupe from Mali; and Exotica, a modern French group’s work of “imaginary folk-
lore” melding the traditions and musical instruments of four continents. Quai
Branly’s performance program inserts itself in the networks and audiences of
world music and transnational indigenism. It draws on circuits and venues now
available to successful non-Western and diasporic artists like Hazoumé, or the
Aboriginal painters whose work can be found both on the ceiling of the Quai
Branly gift shop and in the high-priced galleries of Mayfair or Soho. Such sites of
display and performance are productions of the past few decades. While they show
some afﬁnities with previous forms of cross-cultural appreciation and consump-
tion (exotic spectacles at world’s fairs, negrophilia, and the vogue for jazz . . .),
they take place in new contexts of media-saturated globalization, post-1960s iden-
tity politics, renewed traditions, and the marketing of heritage. The cultural
politics and social agencies at work are ambivalent and open-ended. Dynamic his-
tories intersect in an institution that collects, and is collected by, other worlds.
Will the center hold at Quai Branly? It is not too soon to notice that what has, dans
fact, emerged is something that exceeds the promotion of tribal masterpieces ﬁrst
envisaged by Chirac and Kerchache.

Discrepant globalizations, traveling and translating cultures, currently con-
verge on an institution that aspires to be a crossroads and a place of conversations.

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OCTOBER

These complex, postmodern forces can no longer be sublimated as “art,” nor can
they be relegated to the suburbs (Paris neighborhoods like Belleville feel like
global places now). En effet, recent press accounts suggest that Quai Branly may be
attracting an unusual number of non-Western diasporic visitors. Commenting on
this phenomenon (which may or may not be sustainable), Stéphane Martin
remarks: “We eat Thai, our tattoos are Polynesian, we dress African, and do our
hair in Antillais style. . . .”14 This globalized, hybrid, French “we” will, he promises,
be addressed by the new museum. Gone is the discourse of purity and authentic-
ville. Quai Branly, from its privileged site in the museum-like core of bourgeois
Paris, feels its way through a changing environment.

A lecture and colloquium series (“l’Université populaire du quai Branly”)
has been organized by the philosopher and novelist Catherine Clément. The ﬁrst
two cycles are devoted to “The Global History of Colonization” and to “Great
Debates on Universality.” The former explores “colonial legacies in countries such
as France,” a theme of obvious importance for the new museum. The latter stages
dialogues on more abstract issues such as: “Is there a single human family?» (Ann-
Christine Taylor and Bernard Henri-Lévy); “How do barbarous acts happen?»
( Julia Kristeva and Maurice Godelier); “Do we need a common ideal for all peo-
ple?» (Alban Bensa and Alain Finkielkraut). The ﬁrst major exhibition held in the
Garden Gallery was titled D’un regard l’autre—a reﬂexive tour through several cen-
turies of European representations of non-Western people. More than a thousand
objects—from early paintings by explorers, through nineteenth-century scientiﬁc
and ethnographic specimens, documentary photographs, popular collectibles, à
the modernist primitivism of Picasso and Matisse—tell a complex history of
stereotyping, appropriation, amour, repulsion, taxonomy. The museum’s literature
describes this as a “mise en abyme” and “manifesto” for the entire undertaking.
While the exhibition stops in 1946, the extrapolation is clear: whatever way of per-
ceiving other cultures seems obvious today is part of a problematic, unﬁnished
histoire. Whatever is scientiﬁcally or aesthetically correct today will eventually be
out of date. As the two well-worn museums across the Seine silently testify, no one
gets the last word.

It is hard not to see, in Quai Branly’s array of temporary projects, a certain
mauvaise conscience with respect to the dominant vision of Chirac, Kerchache, et
Nouvel. At the very least, several discrepant agendas are apparent. The “arts pre-
miers” legacy, already badly dated, is being contained, bypassed. At least one
hopes so. Will the programs on contemporary arts and cultures, on colonial and
globalizing forces, on the history and politics of representation—everything
absent from the museum’s core—continue to receive encouragement? Nothing
guarantees this trajectory. A potent constellation of neoprimitivism, commodiﬁed
multiculturalism, and tourism may well dominate. If and when state support ﬂows

Carolyn Brothers, “For Some, A Museum Hits Close to Heart,” International Herald Tribune,

14.
Août 17, 2006.

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Quai Branly in Process

elsewhere, the spect acular exhibit ion plateau could per sist more or less
unchanged as a sort of theme park, a house of magic ﬁrmly attached to the Eiffel
Tower apparatus, while the more innovative, critical, and scholarly programs con-
tract. Alternately the plateau could be rearranged and transgressed in an
institution increasingly open to the contemporary world with all its contradictions
and impurities. Both futures—and no doubt others—can be discerned in the
present Quai Branly.

As part of the museum’s opening celebrations, a day of round-table discus-
sions was organized, bringing together scholars, museum professionals, critics,
and artists from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Paciﬁc. At the wrap-up ses-
sion, the air conditioning in the Théâtre Claude Lévi-Strauss stopped working.
People fanned themselves and contemplated the scheduled cocktails. Ralph
Regenvanu, director of the widely admired Vanuatu Cultural Centre, spoke from
the audience.15 He had just completed a residency at the British Museum’s innov-
ative “Melanesia Project,” where he spent several months working in the extensive
Paciﬁc collections. Among the outcomes of this consultancy was an original paint-
ing in which the visitor graphically repatriated several powerful objects and
symbols from his home place currently held in London. Politely and firmly
Regenvanu exhorted the Musée du Quai Branly to support mutually beneﬁcial
links with cultural centers in the Paciﬁc and in Asia. That would mean, he said, un
robust budget for making Paris collections accessible, for collaborating on multi-
sited projects, and for promoting new art from places like Vanuatu, New Cale-
donia, or Tahiti. Regenvanu stressed the importance of working with “living art
et culturelle,” not just artifacts from the past. Without these reciprocal, far-reaching,
contemporary links, he warned, the new museum risked irrelevance.

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15.
On the Vanuatu Cultural Center, see Lissant Bolton, Unfolding the Moon: Enacting Women’s Kastom
in Vanuatu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). For Regenvanu’s residency at the British
Museum and his painting discussed below, see www.vanuatuculture.org/contemporary/20060522_
ralphbm.shtml. Quai Branly in Process image

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