I'm an artist living in Finland. I like to talk to other artists and writers and creative folks about their work.
This blog is my original art and words and such, with the occasional reblog of relevant things.
They/them/their.
Last ICOM-IMREC seminar video! Thanks for bearing with me! This has been super interesting and important to me, and I’m glad to be able to show everyone here that repatriation and restitution are actually topics that are important to museums at the highest level of international museum collaboration – even though there is still so much work to be done and how far from perfect the system and the institutions involved are (especially the UK, UK has been called out a LOT during this two-day seminar).
This whole session and discussion after is super good, but I want to highlight the talk by Shaaban Abdel-Gawad (timestamp 19:47), the director general of the repatriation antiquities department in Egypt. I know Egyptology is very hip on Tumblr so I really recommend listening to him tell about all the horrible ways people are still destroying and stealing Egypt’s cultural heritage. Also the end of his talk is this breath-taking cavalcade of stolen things they have recovered from all over the world. After watching it I feel pumped, like I want to help Egypt get their stuff (and people!) back.
Yet another ICOM-IMREC seminar post, this time I want to highlight Laura Evans’s talk about reproductions (starts at 56:20). The main topic of her presentation is about a museum in Scotland returning an artifact to the source community and displaying a copy of the artifact made by living artists from that community instead, but I found the beginning of her talk really eye-opening.
She references Water Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and how museums in Europe latched on to the idea of the aura, which means that a work of art cannot be reproduced because you will lose the aura and no matter how many posters of the Mona Lisa you make, only the real one has the aura and that’s what’s important.
And Evans points out how other art forms like music, literature, and theatre instead depend on reproductions and even variations for dissemination and even just proper, real experience of the art. Reading the original surviving folios of Shakespeare plays is not the correct way to experience Shakespeare plays, seeing them performed is. And there are things we can’t learn about Shakespeare plays without seeing the plays performed in different ways.
I have at some point admired the “Draw This In Your Style (DTIYS)” thing that is a part of the Instagram art/illustration culture, and how it is like theatre where making your own version of a thing is valuable and interesting for everyone involved. And I have experienced it first hand how a high fidelity digital reproduction of an artwork or a museum object makes it possible to look at and appreciate the object more and better than physically looking at the object, because the tools of reproduction can make visible things that are hard or impossible to see.
I have in the past done a lot of “remixes” of artworks from art history, and I think I want to do that again, it feels like there is something important there that could be teased out…
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Also please note that if you are starting the video from the beginning, they have made some kind of a weird mistake or choice where the panel related to the previous presentations is in the front of this video, and the panel related to these presentations is in a different video. So please skip to timestamp 33:00 or thereabouts, the first half an hour is super dense law stuff referencing presentations not included here.
Another super-important keynote in the ICOM-IMREC seminar about decolonialising in museums, especially going in to detail about what are the consequences for both museums as well as the source communities of these stolen artifacts being in museums instead of with the source communities.
I really really recommend watching the third presentation by Roshi Naidoo, which begins at timestamp 29:30. Below is a transcript of it, because the automatically generated captions on YouTube are bad, and also in case anyone is not in a place where you can watch a video or don’t have the time or such. But if you can, please do watch her give her presentation in her own voice. All errors in the transcript are my own.
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Hello everyone and thank you very much for inviting me to this very important conference. My paper is called “Let’s Go Around Again: The museum carousel and its Others.”
I sit down to write a conference paper on the above subject. I’ve written this paper before. Well not exactly this one, but variations on the theme of how institutional cultural policy around decolonisation and diversity in the UK museum sector regularly falls short of addressing its own structural racism, favouring instead the performance art of showcasing their latest flagship initiative. They are initiatives which speak to the issues, yes, often very convincingly, but they also deliberately and skillfully elide key questions, such as the positionality of its leaders, policy makers, or curators, the ways in which white supremacy lurks in its funding-outcomes-evaluation project cycle -model, or how the complexities and nuances of Black subjectivity, creativity, agency, and joy are sacrificed on the altar of neat deliverables and social media-friendly posts, aimed primarily at legitimising the museum as a force for social good, rather than dismantling power hierarchies.
What should I do? Make these points again and update them for 2023 and the current decolonial turn? This would be a valid way to approach this, but I’m uneasy, and must address why. Being told that this time is different, and that the museum carousel at least understands the circular motion of the ways in which it addresses and engages with its others. But do they really understand? This is how I see the dance.
When the funding runs out for the project perpetually situated at the edges of museum concerns, and they move on to the next “issue,” the kind folk who populate the museum wring their hands in frustration, agreeing that this cycle is terrible, and ask “but how can we stop it?” Museum folk are nice, we know that. They want to change, we know that too. And nice people who want to change can’t be part of the problem, can they?
The activists, outsider curators, consultants, academics, etc. say the following:
-Make changes at the core of museum work. -Forensically consider what is being said in these projects and the theoretical ideas behind them. -Learn about the cultural politics of race and representation, and about intersectionality. -Understand the breadth, depth, and complexities of our colonial past and present. -Consider your positionality and anxious responses when confronted with calls for powershifts. -Stop funding short term projects and fund structural change. -Do your “reaching out to communities” -work in tandem with considering how you recruit for actual paid jobs in the sector. -Stop instrumentalising our artists, historians, creatives, etc. for your own institutional self-aggrandisement. -Concert(?) that we may have no interest at all in reforming the museum and may go elsewhere in search of cultural, political, and social liberation.
I could go on, and the list of recommendations, reports, and interventions spanning decades, which attest to this, are lying still in filing cabinets of many museums.
So there is an answer, but when we furnish them with this, they become like the wise monkeys, and they speak over us to ask the question again, this time formulated with an intellectual and critical paradigm that fits the policies, processes, and practices that they’ve always worked within. Now back in their comfort zones they will suggest their own answer. We are met with a white noise of babble, and can just pick out the names of strategic reports and government policies couched in excruciatingly dead sector speak, along with references to communities, and phrases such as “lived experience” delivered blandly and without context or understanding. The slogan is that “Museums Must Decolonise.” However, the message also is “but the museum will tell you how to do it.”
We come back and try again. “There’s a huge body of work that can help you,” we say, “but it has to begin with you considering your fragility and the responses you bring to the table whenever we bring this stuff up. Maybe start with this YouTube clip, it’s only an hour long.” But this is already too much, and no one is listening. Museums instead will do the same thing over and over again, yet expect a different outcome. Or maybe the outcome they get is actually the desired one.
I too am on this roundabout, and also complicit in keeping it going. In this circuit then I know the role I must play. There’s a wave of interest in all things decolonial and anti-racist comes into being. It means I can earn a living and someone might look at my apparently fractured CV and understand the thread of continuity that runs through it. I phrase things in sector-friendly language, hold my tongue when asked what I think of a project, which is at best just barely acceptable but at worst peddling homogenised essentialist myths, grateful that at least - as always - it is only a temporary exhibition, and will be gone soon.
I will accept that museums are on the beginning of a journey, and must be treated with patience, and will therefore sit on the knowledge that endless white innocence is a historical trope, which is enacted to maintain power. I will appear unthreatening - to an extent - but not unthreatening enough to be offered a full-time senior job in the museum to address the things I’ve raised - the things that management has assured me is so important to them and key to their strategic vision going forward.
There is a game being played. A set of rules and gambits to observe, and I too am part of the problem. As I star in my own microcosm of these cyclical events, I know what will happen. I will be applauded and commended for my provocative, thought-provoking paper. People will ask me afterwards to discuss things at the break. I will be invited onto an advisory board or to a confidential meeting with a high up somewhere - usually for no fee. Then we will hit a wall, and I will go away again until the next time.
So in response to that, and as a small attempt to break the cycle, I’m not going to give a traditional paper of the sort I’ve always given. Instead I’m going to present you with three small vignettes of what life working on the ground in the UK museum sector is like, and show how an understanding of what is happening in these interpersonal, anxiety-ridden, multi-layered moments may be more helpful than what I have presented to the sector in the past. I’ve merged and anonymised incidents, but each reflects a plethora of other identical moments. And all examples describe a climate that mitigates against change, despite claims to the contrary.
So, vignette 1:
The meeting decides that, although they recognise that there is a lot of theoretical work in the field of decolonisation, that what people in the sector really want is action and guidance on practice, help with the doing, not so much for the thinking, self-reflection, which is just holding things up. The inference they never spelt out is that you’re a bit too academic and out of touch with the on-the-ground museum folk. We’re just keen to work with local communities, to reinterpret their collection, change the racist label on an object, and open up their doors to more people.
Your suggestion, that a bit of thinking before this process may be essential to the success of this venture, has not gone down well. Besides there isn’t the time or the money. You’ve subtly been labeled as over-intellectual and weirdly positioned as too white-identified and middle class as a result - despite being a working class person of colour - and therefore in opposition to the communities they’re working with. They don’t need a politics of nuance to be brought to bear on the knee-jerk essentialism that accompanies their project.
But, to express oppositional thinking and awareness of how structures of power confine and define us is part of the DNA of minoritised groups, and to dismiss this discussion as elitist, academic, or ivory tower in nature woefully misunderstands the intellectual traditions and resistance that we inhabit. Soon the self-same community is going to tell the museum that they’re sick of being used as a resource and will bring the same critical skills to bear on the mooted project. The relationship will break down, resulting in the shedding of well-meaning tears of regret, and bafflement about what went wrong. Rather than learn from this though, do the reading and self-reflection, they will repeat this mistake the next time.
This is white supremacy at work. Not as visible as a hateful comment on the website, true, but part of the same network of thinking that refuses to see people in all their complexity, and as having value and identity outside of racism’s structures, and totally unaware of the histories of agency and resistance that people of colour inhabit.
Vignette 2:
The museum consults a community about their gallery reinterpretation, and makes changes based on this. Other people, from what the museum understand as the same community, points out that the new display is rubbish. No one in the museum has thought about what expertise was actually needed for the refit, and that not everyone who is a person of colour will think the same thing or have the same response to the artifacts on display. There has been no respect paid to the expertise on colonial history or the politics of representation. “But we did really extensive consultation,” they retort. The subtext and the silence in the meeting is “you can’t please these people.” This then becomes an issue of racial “infighting,” not an issue of white supremacy at work again.
Vignette 3:
A senior museum person, signed up to all the diversity, decolonial, and anti-racist initiatives, confides that in the current museum climate, there is nothing that speaks to him as a straight white man. He also complains that “ethnic minorities” haven’t applied for posts, so how can museums be berated for not recruiting more widely. It is a familiar moment in both your years in museum work and in life in general. You’re being asked to actually reinforce this: to shrug and agree that identity politics has gone too far, or to telegraph your sympathy through silence. You have two moves here. One is to do just this and deal with the “why didn’t I say?” later. The other is to speak. The fiction in the sector is that these moments or “difficult conversations” can always be embarked on. They can’t, and I really admire those who have the tenacity and/or use their privileged position to do this.
My experience of this moment is that once I say, for example, - kindly, usually - that:
A) Whiteness is an identity politics, albeit rendered invisible, and that you need to understand your anxieties, or B) What else is decolonisation about if not about understanding the workings of straight white men? or C) Why does other people expressing their agency and subjectivity oppress you? or D) Where is your sense of solidarity or even curiosity?
…a familiar pattern of attack both in content and affect will ensue, no matter how nice the person in question is. Before I’ve got the first words out and it becomes clear I’m not agreeing, I’m spoken over. Immediately I’m accused of misunderstanding. The hurt party is now the man, who I’ve unfairly labeled as racist - even though I have not - by not understanding what was being said. A long list of mitigation engulfs me, and even though each confirms the view that white fragility is at play, I cannot speak again, and small fractured parts of sentences emerge from my mouth and disappear into the air. There is no listening, no desire to learn, no humility in these moments that so many of us endure. The psychic damage done to us is not an issue, and the fact that this is a scene that I’ve played over and over again can’t be discussed.
This is not simply a recollection of one incident but of many, and all from people who are not culture warriors or rabid fanatical right-wingers attacking the museums through concerted political campaigns. It comes from nice, liberal, kind people, who would be welcoming to a Black person in their museum, and would bend over backwards to accommodate their needs, or to discuss an issue of the provenance of an artifact with them, people who are keen to do decolonial work with the local community. But this mismatch of such people enacting decolonisation work as merely procedural, without doing the most important decolonisation work, which happens between their ears, is one of the keys to unlocking this problem.
So, in conclusion, if my readings of the sector here have any validity, then there are various ways in which we can interpret these patterns. We can see this as evidence of the endurance of the bedrock contradictions of Enlightenment ideology, which historically has always been able to hold together the notion of “freedom for all” while oppressing the majority. Are we being managed as troubling others, in ways which may both give voice to us, but also seek to contain and limit those voices? Is the museum attempting to manage a fear of its own engulfment and loss of authority through hysterical reactions to the fact that we are not coming for inclusion but for power? Are museums hiding behind institutional speak as a means of avoiding the messy emotional labour that comes with genuine decolonial work, which confronts those deep circuits of economic, social, political, and cultural power, and white authority in particular?
Recently I went to see The Procession at Tate Britain in London, a piece of work by the sculptor and contemporary artist Hew Locke. This spectacular, vibrant, colourful, detailed, thought-provoking, large-scale installation - set between the classical pillars of the gallery’s foyer - echoed with the centuries of labour, misery, and resistance that lives in that structure, and in the built environment of our colonial cities. Perhaps this is just a thread that can’t be pulled on.
Thank you very much and I look forward to hearing your questions.
If you are interested in painting conservation, check out this YouTube playlist of really short videos of the process of conservation being done to Artemisia Gentileschi’s Allegory of Inclination.
The second keynote from that seminar, and this one is if possible even better than the first one. Anyone who is interested in decolonisation of museums, especially repatriation of objects, should listen to this, Wayne Modest does an incredible job at illuminating the issues, and gives really concrete examples of problems he has encountered during his career, etc.
Hello Mormons, it is time to vote for your favourite in the Around the World Mormon literature contest!
If you weren’t aware of it, there is an organisation called the Mormon Lit Lab that is promoting new literature for a Mormon audience, and they do contests of new lit ever so often, and this most recent contest was an international affair with entries in different languages.
I am in the running but don’t feel like you have to vote for me. :)
PS if you are Mormon and are inclined to write original short fiction or poetry, consider participating in the next Mormon Lit Blitz, which is accepting submissions until the end of August!
If you are interested in decolonisation or anticolonial activity in museums, Bruno Brulon Soares is probably the most important current voice in that conversation.
If you are interested in decolonisation or anticolonial activity in museums, Bruno Brulon Soares is probably the most important current voice in that conversation.
