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

operating universal laws do contradict religious beliefs. How can we avoid their exclusion or at least disdainful or nostalgic stud ies? The museum of fine art has a solution to this . Its creation is based on the concept of universality of art. It postulates that all cultures have a creative potential. This creation can be rel igious in trad itional societies or profane in industrialised societies . It is still generally accepted, although the postulate is subject to criticism, that the resulting material culture is the bearer of the h ighest intellectual and spiritual values of the people in question . What must be done is to create a museum of living art where the works live in the rhythm of interventions by representatives of various rel igions. Such an institution is conceivable. In this vein, Dominique de Men il set up the chapel decorated by Mark Rothko in Houston . Utterly ecumen ical , it is open to all rel igious rites. But it is through the lack of images or identifiable symbols and by the d ilution of forms in great sheets of colour that Rothko has enabled the celebration of different rites . A lot of this century's art which has a large space in the museum of modern art leans towards the meditative . It reaches its completion in the d isappearance of the image, wh ich should not stop other museums from reconstituting a context for the religious images. Things are more difficult with objects acqu ired during the colonial period . The museum, in the framework of a country with external colonialism, like France, comes up against the issue of legal or moral ownership of the objects. It is at stake in the primordial battles of countries with internal colonial ism . The question of human remains is particularly sensitive. Recent US legislation obl iges all owners to return human remains or any object of th is nature, wh ich abound in American Ind ian culture . The Maori community takes offence a t t he d isplay and trading of the skulls of their ancestors. They claim that these skulls with tattoos that sometimes enable a precise identification are objects of veneration and that it is sacrilege to show them outside of their original context. Still, there is evidence that some Maori have traded with them since the n ineteenth century. The museums, as in this exhibition, have submitted to this request and no longer show them in glass cases . They have also submitted to bans on exh ibiting certain objects by other nations. A few years ago, the Maori successfully pressed for withdrawal of a skull at an auction in London . In contrast, the museums simply conceal them from the public eye , to show their respect for the demands of other peoples. However, some cultures, which are less prone to restitution claims, believe that sacred objects should be displayed in western museums for the purpose of enhancing knowledge and respect. The one side is marked by prohibition and absence, the other by exposu re and presence. This appl ies to the N i Vanuatu and the Australian Aborigines. At the Vanuatu exhibition at the Museum of African and Oceanian Arts in 1 997, visiting Prime Minister Serge Vohor expressed his rel uctance to stay long. The presence of some objects of a highly sacred value made him feel ill at ease. As the holder of the top rank with in the traditional h ierarchy, he knew the secret meaning of the objects used in ceremonies for conveying ranks. Once he was removed from these objects with their great magical powers, he insisted that he saw no harm in letting profane foreigners see this exhibition , which he considered a means of d iffusion and recogn ition of h is culture . Comparing a museum to a cemetery is an old cliche. It dates back to t he 'out of context' on which the museum was founded : as a place of preservation for works of art stolen from churches and from the dwell ings of the aristocracy during the Revolution, but also of astounding, extraordinary and exotic objects from newly d iscovered countries in the tradition of the cabinet of curiosities. Hoarding vast numbers of objects, the museums never ceased to reactivate them and to d isplay them from different angles and in d ifferent settings. So the comparison with a cemetery is untenable. Over the two centuries of its existence, the museum has infused an immense number of objects, and thus ideas and beliefs, with new l ife. As for exotic objects, they have never ceased to be a focus of the debate between the conservative and progressive sides, between those who only wanted to see the objects as vestiges of backward primitives and those who saw them as original creations of sophisticated societies in ways unexplored by the West. In addition, it would be easy to show, without giving into sophistry, that the life of art rests on death and man's understanding of it. Funerary art takes up a lot of space in museum collections. The relics and vestiges of ritual 92