"LA FABRIQUE DES IMAGES", [ethnocentristic] exposition d’anthropologie du musée du quai Branly, Paris

Fully perplex, I left yesterday, the ethnological Musée du quai Branly (by J. Nouvel).

I could not believe my eyes, when I saw the new temporary exhibition with the title "The Making of Images". 

To quote the Website of the exhibition: „After Qu’est-ce qu’un corps ? and Planète métisse, the 3rd major anthropology exhibition of the musée du quai Branly proposes the discovery of a "making of images" spanning 5 continents to the public. With 160 works and objects, the exhibition deciphers large artistic and material productions of humanity to reveal what is not seen directly in an image.“

While in the first section, the visitors was served with the usual ethological objects, such as masks and sculptures, the visitors received suddenly a blow from a kind of “ethnocentric club”, when entering the second section with the title “AN OBJECTIVE WORLD”: NATURALISM:

It is as if the curator (Philippe Casella) holds a remote control in his hands and is zapping from one TV channel to another: Dutch painting from the XVII, with the representation of money, Jules Mares bird flight, one of Droz android’s or Descartes facial reconstruction. Because of that, all the other ethnological artifacts even those from the entire museum are now scaled and rated with reference to the exhibits of the western modern world in this section. The blow was even more violent, because it was believed, that the Musée du quai Branly is a refuge of tolerance and intercultural dialogue. This ethnocentristic view is all the more astonishing because the curator of the exhibition, Philippe Casella, is officially posing as a student of Claude Levi Strauss. 

From the blow, I could not recover, so I had to leave the Museum. In passing the last two sections, I thought I still noticed some contemporary sandpaintigs of Indigenous Australians, Katschina Dolls and cheap-looking copies of “Western” illustrations of anatomy.

In hasty steps, I left the museum without a looking back, so I would not freeze to a pillar of salt.

Harry Count Kessler

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