Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

THE MUSEUM, A LAY OR RELIGIOUS SANCTUARY Jean-Hubert Martin The exhibition 'La mort n'en saura rien' curated by Yves Le Fur for the Musee des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oceanie from October 1 999 to January 2000 is provid ing an outstanding and exceptional d ialogue between Oceanian and European cultures .* The show focuses on the skull as an important rel ic in both cultural areas. Human remains were painted , adorned and decorated in European Christian and in Ocean ian trad itions in the most d iverse ways. Nevertheless some structural patterns emerge from the display of these terribly moving 'items'. Asking who is the wild one in these aesthetic inventions using the human head is certainly not the least important issue raised by the exh ibition . Today, the sacred is making an unexpected return to the museum. The avenues it has explored are the source of manifold considerations that call a number of domi nant concepts into question. Intellectual circles are used to reasoning with in a framework that rules out the experience of rel ig ious faith . Religion is regarded as a mere rel ic of another age or as a stronghold of countries with little industrialisation . The old l inear vision of h istory has its roots in the Enlightenment. But while the progress of knowledge confirmed the conviction that one could understand the world by developing un iversal rules, the museums filled up with objects made in blind faith , be it Christian or other. These vestiges of the opium of the people are open to two angles. that of the ethnologist or rel igious h istorian and that of the art historian or aesthete. Exact and human sciences started to fragment or dissect knowledge to a point where any qual itative judgement derived from emotional sensitivity was tainted with suspicion . This disenchantment with the world spread and led to attempts to isolate an allegedly autonomous category: sensitivity. The museum of modern art, agnostic by defin ition, attempts to promote humanist val ues such as those conveyed by artists . The foundations of the traditional museum of fine art - national heritage, references to its founding h istory, the cult of the ancestors and the search for our roots - are replaced by the exploration and revival of multiple forms of an archaism declared un iversal . Primitivism has replaced Greek Classicism . Here art i s established more than ever as an autonomous practice. In league with the ethnologists, artists are convinced that the producers of so-called prim itive objects create beauty without knowing it. They have the task of reveal ing aesthetic values without caring about the existence of these producers . In line with the recommendation of Michel Leiris, many ethnologists take sides with the indigenous peoples and try to support them in their battles and defend their cause. Th � militancy or cultural factor m ixes closely with pol itics, which often implies a g lobal ace£ . � J nce and adoption of signs of faith , regardless of their semantic analysis. The museum is capaole of disassociating itself from its own set of humanist values to embrace what is sacred to other cultures. It does so with a certain awkwardness, torn between science and rel igion . Ritual ceremonies or events have sometimes been transposed to th is setting. I n contrast, the confrontation between representatives of these cultures and objects from their past may yield some surprises. A culture shock both for the West obsessed by preserving rel ics of the past to reconstruct a universal history on wh ich it bases its power, and for various communities for whom the object is ephemeral and reproducible as long as their faith lasts, or for whom the remains of an ancestor are meaningless when taken out of their own context. The elite, followed by the Marxists, believed in revolution in a linear history that woul d gradually make religions and other forms of superstition d isappear, to be replaced by rational thought. However, we must admit that this grand progress towards a future of reason is still a far way off. What we are now experiencing is rather the opposite phenomenon of fundamentalism and the revival of religions. From its creation during the French Revolution, the museum was encyclopaed ic and open to all kinds of d ifferent practices from all over the world. A dual movement generated by the rupture of modern art, starting with Gauguin, both generated the appropriations of the so­ called primitive arts, yielding a new set of aesthetic values, and excluded the l iving arts of non-western cultures . 90