Books: The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History

There was a time when conference reports were just that: verbatim copies of papers that are delivered, biographies of the speakers and a list of delegates. No more. Today’s conference reports have sharpened up their act. Increasingly, the expected end product appears to be a book with a few photographs and an edit that tries to give the publication a standalone quality.

There are now a number of these in museum publishers’ catalogues. Often they form part of an academic series but even where they don’t, there can be a familiarity about their unimaginative graphic design and an editing policy that allows some contributors to indulge themselves in a language that can seem incomprehensible to those outside the circle of wagons.

International perspective

The Postcolonial Museum has conference origins, this one held at the University of Naples L’Orientale in 2013, and supported by funding from the European Commission’s European Museums in an Age of Migrations project. Consisting of 20 chapters from 24 contributors, it provides a helpful, if sometimes slightly opaque, record of “two intense days of papers and discussion”.

According to its five editors, the aim of the book is “to propose a critical re-evaluation of the museum in the light of those transcultural and global migratory movements that question the historical and traditional frames of Occidental thought, complicating its assumption through the registration of heterogeneous planetary practices”.

Have they succeeded? On the evidence so far, probably not – and given the additional presence of the arts of memory and the pressures of history in its subtitle, they may take some time. But this is work in progress.

With so many contributors from around the world and five editors, this volume makes a laudable effort to cover the waterfront and its international perspective is to be welcomed. That said, I found this book hard work. While there may be something for everyone in its pages, the confusion of styles and the obscurantism of some of the writing seem likely to attract only the most dedicated readership.

Take, for example, the essay entitled The Artist as Interlocutor and the Labour of Memory. Surely one of its three authors could have found a way of simplifying a sentence that reads: “[Guy] Debord is distinguishing the qualitative, temporal objectification of useful labour from the quantitative, separated and fragmented (spatial) objectification of abstract labour, constituted by the act of exchange.”

Definitions

A significant weakness of the book is the lack of a shared understanding of the word “museum”, even in the broadest of terms. All too often the default button seems to be linked to the fine art gallery, the exhibition (intangible, temporary and, yes, sometimes forgettable) and the artist, rather than the museum (tangible and permanent).

Despite Ursula Biemann’s description of the Egyptian Chemistry project, it is not clear, for example, where science museums might fit into this debate. Or, indeed, many other categories of museum.

Lacking any real focus, the book is allowed to sprawl, both in its content and style. The density of much of the language doesn’t help and halfway through I was beginning to struggle.

As usual, the thicker the mist, the brighter seem the redeeming lights. It was a pleasure to burst on Viviana Gravano’s highly personal essay, premised on her contemporary experience of what she describes as “difficult heritage”, especially where this coincides with the concept of the dispersed museum; Gravano has her own problems with definition.

Those of us who have experienced for ourselves two of her examples, post-reunification Berlin and the death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, most notably through Margaret Bourke-White’s “unbearable” photographs, will have little difficulty in grasping her meaning.

Sadly, the lights are few and far between. A Museum Without Objects is a well-observed paper by Françoise Vergès, examining the situation in French national museums of ethnography in post-Branly France; and Itala Vivan’s What Museum for Africa? provides a valuable view of the situation in Africa – or at least part of that giant continent.

So where does that leave us? By the final sentence of the book, Iain Chambers, the editor-in-chief, appears to be in an optimistic mood. “Where others refuse to be bothered, the exhibitionary machinery of knowledge finally begins to stutter in the violent circuits of a moribund narcissism.”

At least I think that’s optimistic.

Timothy Mason is a museum consultant