Image: George Nuku, 2021, The red wall, lithographs of the Atlas du voyage de l’Astrolabe, reworked and polystyrene frame at Musée Hèbre Rochefort, France. Photograph: Clémentine Débrosse.
2020, 304 pages, Alice Procter, Cassell Books, London
Reviewed by Margaret Cassidy
Australian born Alice Procter grew up in Hong Kong and London and completed her university studies at the University College London in post-colonial practice and colonial material culture before starting to run unofficial and unauthorised art tours around a number of London’s leading cultural institutions called the Uncomfortable Art Tours. These tours and her studies inform Procter’s continued questioning of the contents and displays of art galleries and museums that play a key role in shaping identity and memory. She challenges the idea that there is a rational, objective way of seeing art, sees representation as culturally specific and that most visitors apply self-taught visual analysis skills.
Procter commences by reminding us that many institutions grew from personal collections and bequests as humans are hoarders. In her experience, modern Art History degrees in the United Kingdom ignore the colonial and imperial history that created the institutions and their collections. British Empire and colonial history are seen as having nothing to do with modern day Britain yet aspects of this point of view inform current curatorial practices. Describing some very specific personal collections that form museums in London, she asks the very important question What is missing?
She continues to Museum as Palace, commenting on the sense of veneration inspired in some museums with temple-like architecture and ritual around the experience of being quiet and polite, that they have ‘been compared to shrines, spaces that command a kind of adoration, as they construct an atmosphere of reverence around their treasures’.
Museum as Classroom is centred on classification and historically on white men as creators of knowledge. These include museums of science, design and natural history and Joseph Banks is introduced as the ‘cataloguer of the world’, ‘not only was his goal to see the Pacific, he wanted to share it with his peers back in England’. This time, the question is Who gets to do the talking? While Banks saw himself as ‘enlightened’, many pieces ‘collected’ in the Pacific were stolen or violently taken, although others were traded for European weapons and tools.
In another story from Oceania, Mai or Omai, a Raiatean man living in Tahiti, joined the crew of Captain James Cook’s second voyage and travelled to England where he became a celebrity and was received at Court. He is an example of the ‘noble savage’, ‘noble’ due to their willingness to assimilate and often convert to Christianity. Cook and Banks took this romantic dream to the South Pacific, especially Tahiti, seeing the local society as innocent and naïve rather than primitive. Procter compares the representations of Mai in his portraits as both ‘noble savage’ and ‘specimen’, a ‘living artefact in Banks’ museum’ with his tattooed hands and tapa clothing in William Parry’s portrait while she poses the possibility that Mai was in charge of his own identity and chose to be represented as Other by wearing tapa cloth in his portrait by Joshua Reynolds.
Procter tackles the subject of demands for repatriation of objects from former colonies by looking at European museums’ attempts to justify keeping these objects and asking the question Do some communities have more rights to their material cultures than others?
In outlining what she regards as continuing colonial attitudes prevalent in British museums, the Enlightenment Gallery of the British Museum created in 2003 is a ‘modern version of the cabinet of curiosities’ with only one cabinet holding objects from across the Pacific, collected over several centuries, from distinct and disparate cultures. She concludes that this is almost the entirety of South Pacific material currently on display in the British Museum.
Two recent exhibitions at the British Museum and the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra featuring the Gweagal shield and other Australian Indigenous artefacts demonstrate the continuing colonial point of view in the British Museum’s 2015 Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation show, where the objects are presented in chronological order of collection, linked to the collectors’ or explorers’ stories. In contrast, the companion NMA exhibition Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum presented mostly the same objects but in a vastly different way, by geographic region and incorporating First Nations voices and stories, emphasising the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language and culture.
As part of Procter’s discussion of Museums as Memorials, she uses the story of the mokomokai or mummified heads of Māori people to discuss human remains. While reminding us that the display of ancestors is culturally varied and not all mortuary practices should be veiled and made secret, she points out that mokomokai were created as part of a Māori funerary tradition, either to be kept privately and honoured by the family of the deceased, or made from the heads of enemies as military trophies to be displayed as symbols of strength. In every circumstance, display was tightly controlled by ritual and protocol. Te Papa Tongarewa, the Museum of New Zealand, is leading repatriation claims on European institutions, arguing that the remains are tupuna or ancestors rather than objects.
Left: Michael Parekowhai, 2015, The English Channel, The Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photograph: Jen Nicholl, Instagram.
Right: Michael Parekowhai, 2015, The English Channel, The Art Gallery of New South Wales. Photograph: Bill Rathmell.
The museum as playground is the last part of this book where the contemporary art gallery has become another trope, reflecting wealth and power (now often corporate rather than from a prince) even if it is in the form of a recycled or created factory or industrial space. While it is supposed to be a blank box with no sense of time or place and hence a ‘neutral’ canvas for the works within, they remain civic institutions, shaped by money, politics, power and the intentions of the trustees.
Procter does introduce ways contemporary and particularly First Nations artists are reframing and reinterpreting stories of historic objects including the Art Gallery of NSW’s The English Channel, an oversized shining steel sculpture of Captain James Cook “looking lost and despairing” created by Maori artist Michael Parekowhai in 2015. In many cases First Nations artists are becoming curators as well as incorporating traditional objects in contemporary works.
Alice Procter misses some modern curatorship practices emerging in Australian and other museums distant from the grand institutions of the centre of European empires; including the extensive involvement of the Yolŋu people in the recent Gululu dhuwala djalkiri: welcome to the Yolŋu foundations exhibition at the Chau Chak Wing Museum in Sydney as a balance to her focus on the grand institutions of London. She perhaps needs to venture closer to the edge in Europe to museums such as the Musée Hèbre in Rochefort, France which is currently displaying Maori artist George Nuku’s Voyage Autour Du Monde – L’aventure Maori De Dumont D’urville incorporating heritage objects in a modern installation and even to Paris’ Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac which has worked in collaboration with the Milingimbi community to present the current exhibition Gapu Guḻarri Yothu Yindi: Water Landscapes in Northern Australia. Another major exhibition developed in consultation with the traditional owners of the stories, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters has travelled from Canberra to the newly opened WA Museum Boola Bardip and will next be on show on the edge of Great Britain at The Box in Plymouth.