Out of this World - le musée du quai Branly

"Every aspect of a museum, gallery, or heritage site communicates. From the architectural style of the building or layout of a site, to the attendants at the entrance, the arrangement of the exhibits or artifacts, the colour of the walls, and the positioning and content of labels and text panels; all these things and more are engaged in a communicative process with the visitor." -Rhiannon Mason, Museums, galleries and heritage: Sites of meaning-making and communication

For these very reasons, even the central glass column filled with musical instruments which acts as the backboard to the musée du quai Branly can be controversial. In my opinion: it shows objects on display which--although for the most part made to be seen--are intended more so to use. It organizes objects by region with scientific numbers which further separates the visitors from the cultures the objects represent. For a museum which is meant to be so revolutionary, it's nearly as imperialistically-insulting as museums have always been. Daniel Sherman notes, "Rivet [the first director of the Musée de l'Homme] ;preferred to avoid evolutionary schemas altogether, noting that the people ethnographers would encounter in the French empire 'are as far, perhaps even farther, from their origins as we; it is just that their civilization has evolved in a different direction from ours'." In this case, few things have changed.

"Who, after all, is best qualified by experience' (what kinds?), by depth and breadth of knowledge (what knowledge?), to control and interpret an African collection," asks James Clifford in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. I expand the question to include any culturally-affiliated collection, which in those terms basically encompasses everything found with a museum. It matters because, "for example, depending on your point of view, an African mask could be viewed as an ethnographic exhibit, a tribal artefact, a piece of art, evidence of colonial looting, the subject of a repatriation case, or simply a commodity to sell," as described in ;Museums, galleries and heritage: Sites of meaning-making and communication by Rhiannon Mason. In creating a contemporary building surrounded by an "exotic" garden with a visitor route which simulates a futuristic river, any and all objects of the museum are placed in this context which further separates the museum experience, and thus the cultural significance of the objects themselves, from the every day life and identity of the museum visitor. Thus this museum is hardly "a contact zone."

And saying as such doesn't begin to address "looted third world art," to use the loaded terms of The New York Times. Perhaps it's too much to ask, but I believe a museum that claims to be ... should "be accountable in a way that went [goes] beyond mere preservation," in the words of James Clifford. If for no other reason than because, as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill acknowledges in Changing Values in the Art Museum: Rethinking Communication and Learning: "It is time for museum professionals to acknowledge and address the power of museums, to accept that museums are necessarily implicated in cultural politics, and that, therefore, professional practices have political."