Quai Branly, Paris

The  Quai Branly is an amazing museum dedicated to art from cultures all around the world.   This, would once have been called an Ethnographic Museum.

It was set up as Jacques Chirac's Grand Project and is designed by Jean Nouvel.  It has been heavily critised for the way it deals with the source material, and has a very heavily and rigorously controlled editorship of all aspects of the Museum.  What is interesting is how the many decisions that have been taken - probably with good intentions, somehow open the Museum up to all sorts of post-colonial criticism. And yet, one has to admire the single-minded focus, the stance that has been taken and stuck to.  Forget context, we don't have room to discuss context properly, so we are just going to present these items as gorgeous works of Art.

The building is screened from the road by a large glass wall,  designed to make the garden visible from the road and to shelter those in the garden from the  roar of the Seine-side road.   But the wall seems more fortress like than a pervious membrane.  The garden beneath the looming building somehow seems to suggest that the collection belongs with the rural and with nature rather than with urban life, while it was probably intended to provide the City with another green space.   The building itself is like a giant space transporter, landing on a derelict plot in the heart of  Paris.  Its openness a symbol of otherness when it should make the Museum seem open and part of the Cityscape.

Is the problem then in our minds, willing to see everything in the light of french elitism, and colonial oppression rather than in the design itself which seeks to elevate the collection into art on a par with western art?

The entrance is a long spiral of darkness before meeting the collection - almost like an airlock allowing you to transform yourself from a Westerner to a being able to appreciate the exotic.

Inside the objects are displayed with enormous beauty. And yet the lighting and the materiality all suggest otherness. Everything  is  earthy - the walls look like adobe, the colour is from brown to red. The vast majority of the museum has banished any blues or greens as if these were alien colours.  It is only when you walk around to the  Far Eastern section that any vibrant colours are allowed, here are a few white lights, and some blues and greens but they look washed out as if they cannot compete wth the burnt umbers of the rest of the Museum.

There is very liittle contextual information,; videos are not very informative or welcoming, and each culture is treated exactly the same as the previous one - no differentiation, not explanation, no seeking to understand or educate or inform.  The entire purpose of the  Museum is to say these items are aesthetically pleasing as any Dufy, or Matisse.  But they are in a different building, isolated from  the rest.

It gives a feeling of french elitism at its most bold.

A totally amazing experience, but so open to criticism.

Read these two articles for an overview.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/arts/design/02kimm.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2006/nov/01/culturaltrips.paris


For a more scholarly view look at this pdf http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/mar/article/view/1905/1891
is a review of a book on the establishment of the Museum, and puts it in the context of French ideas on multicultural society. This French elitism, or the idea that French Culture somehow 'trumps' other cultures was expressed by Jacques Derrida who originally spoke with an Algerian accent but he said:

' at least in France, insofar as language is concerned, I cannot bear or allow anything other than pure French'


This viewpoint arguably, allowed the French to produce a Museum like Quai Branly, both magnificent, so single minded in its approach, cutting through all debate on context, and post-colonial critiques and focusing solely on the artistic merit of the objects; and yet so easy to criticize. I cannot see such a single-minded museum being built anywhere else but Paris.

I had an email conversation prompted by the above, suggesting that it was an aesthetic decision not an elitist one and I tried to defend my position:

But the aesthetic approach was a deliberate decision.

The creators said 'these objects are not mere objects, they are objects of desire of art, equal to a Picasso, a Leonardo. so lets treat them as art equal to Picasso - lets give them little labels and ignore context'

Then also an understanding that the other approach - to give them all background information would have been a gigantic task which risks overwhelming the objects, creating a monster of a museum, where labels have to try and sum up 'Japan' 'Dahomey' in a few panels, and videos, so the organising minds cuts through all that and says 'no we will forget context!'

That is to me a staggeringly arrogant and breathtaking decision making.

It cuts all the objects off from their past - what makes it a bad decision is that these objects all used to be in museums which had their own history in Paris, the designers destroy those institutions, they destroy that 'history' they cut the objects off from their history and their context.

They build a huge 'look at me' museum, they make it beautiful.

Its a marvelous piece of creation, its a breathtaking decision, its a destruction of the past.

And the decision to treat the objects like ART like PICASSO is completely undermined by two factors:

1. they are in a completely different museum, they are not in the Louvre, they are across the river, all together - so not at all equal, they are separate.

2.  the display aesthetic makes them as if they were built by people who live in mud huts in rural communities, it makes them rustic, it denies also a different aesthetic one were practicality, art, and spirituality and religion might all be together and not divisible.. The display aesthetic, the building, the entrance all makes them seem OTHER.

I accept that some of this is in the mind of the beholder but it undermines, to my mind, the bravery of the decision.  If they had been put in the Louvre and displayed white cube, it would have not been so open to criticism.  Maybe less beautiful too.