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InterviewBenjamin H. D. Buchloh; Jean-Hubert Martin

To cite this Article Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. and Martin, Jean-Hubert(1989) 'Interview', Third Text, 3: 6, 19 — 27To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09528828908576210URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528828908576210

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INTERVIEWBENJAMIN H.D. BUCHLOH - JEAN-HUBERT MARTIN

Benjamin Buchloh: In the discussions of the lastfew years, the question of culturaldecentralization has emerged as increasinglyimportant: from the decentering of traditionalconceptions of the author/subject constructionto the challenge of the centrality of the oeuvreand the concept of the work of art as a unifiedsubstantial object. But it ranges further, fromthe critique of the hegemony of the class cultureof bourgeois Modernism to the challenge of thedominance of the cultural production of theWestern Capitalist world and its market overthe cultural practices in the social and geo-political 'margins'. Cultural decentralizationaims at a gradual recognition of the cultures ofdifferent social and ethnic groups within thesocieties of the so-called First World as muchas at the recognition of the specificity of culturalpractices within countries of the so-calledSecond and Third World. Does the projectMagiciens de la Terre originate in these criticaldiscussions or is it just another exercise instimulating an exhausted artworld by exhibitingthe same contemporary products in a differenttopical exhibition framework?

Jean-Hubert Martin: Obviously the problem ofcentre and periphery has been reflected inEuropean-American avantgarde culture inrecent years, but our exhibition projectMagiciens de la Terre is a departure from that.First of all, already on the geographical levelwe want to reflect on contemporary artproduction on a global, worldwide scale. But

the questions of centre and periphery have alsobeen asked with regard to authorship andoeuvre, especially since, in a number of thecontexts with which we will be dealing, theartist's role and the object's functions aredefined in a manner entirely different from ourEuropean way of thinking. As for the problemof marginality, it is difficult and delicate toinclude artists from different geo-politicalcontexts in an exhibition of Western (Euro-American) contemporary art, the dominant artof the centres. But we come to recognize thatinorder to have a centre you need margins andthe inverse is true as well. Therefore Magiciensde la Terre will invite half of its approximatelyone hundred artists from marginal contexts,artists practically non-existent in the awarenessof the contemporary art world.

B.B.: How will you go about this projectwithout falling precisely in the worst of alltraps, seemingly inevitable: to deploy onceagain ethnocentric and hegemonic criteria inthe selection of the participants and their worksfor the exhibition?

].-H.M.: I agree, this is in fact the first trap onethinks of but I would immediately argue thatit is actually an inevitable trap. It would beworse to pretend that one could organize suchan exhibition from an 'objective, un-acculturated' perspective, a 'decentered' pointof view precisely. How could one find a'correct' perspective? By including artists on a

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proportional scale, or by having the selectionsmade by cultural functionaries in each country,whose principles are infinitely less elaboratethen ours? Or by political commissaries fromthe UNESCO, according to the size of thepopulation of each country? I do not believethat this is possible. It would throw us back intothe worst mistakes from the beginning of theParis Biennale when the artists were selectedby national commissaries who only chose whatthey considered to deserve the official stampof cultural and political authority. It was boundto become a disaster of officious and officialculture. Therefore, I have argued for the exactopposite: since we are dealing with objects ofvisual and sensual experience, let us really lookat them from the perspective of our culture. Iwant to play the role of somebody who selectsthese objects from totally different cultures byartistic intuition alone. My approach — in a way— will therefore be the opposite of what yousuggest: I will select these objects from thevarious cultures according to my own historyand my own sensibility. But obviously I alsowant to incorporate the critical reflections onthe problem of ethnocentrism, the relativity ofculture, and intercultural relations whichcontemporary anthropology provides.

B.B.: Which are the self-critical and correctiveelements in your method and procedure? Areyou actually working with anthropologists andethnographers on this project, and withspecialists from within the cultures that youapproach from the outside?

J.-H.M.: Yes, I have collaborated withnumerous anthropologist and ethnographersin the preparation of this project. Thiscollaboration has proven to be very fertile sinceit has helped to assess the role of the individualartist in the various societies, their specializedactivities and the functions of their formal andvisual languages. By the way, our exhibitionproject emerges at a moment when manyanthropologists have started to ask themselveswhy they have privileged myth and languagetraditionally over the sign of visual objects. Thecorrective critical reflections I am primarilythinking of are ethnographic theories ofethnocentrism as they have been developedover the last twenty or more years. I have also

benefitted from the advice of ethnographersand specialists of local and regional cultureswhen it came to obtaining precise informationin order to prepare research and travels. Insome cases we have conducted theseexploratory travels in the company ofethnographers. We went for example to PapuaNew Guinea in the company of Francois Lupu.

But let us not forget, after all, I have to thinkof this project as an 'exhibition.' That is, if anethnographer suggests a particular example ofa cult, let us say in a society of the Pacific, butthe objects of this culture would notcommunicate sufficiently with a Westernspectator in a visual-sensuous manner, I wouldrefrain from exhibiting them. Certain cultobjects may have an enormous spiritual power,but when transplanted from their context intoan art exhibition they lose their qualities andat best generate misunderstandings, even if oneattaches long didactic explanatory labels tothem. In the same manner I had to exclude anumber of artisanal objects, since many of thesocieties we are looking at actually do notdifferentiate between artist and artisan.

B.B.: Another crucial problem of your projectas I see it is that, on the one hand, you do notwant to construct a colonialist exhibition, likethe one in Paris in 1931, where the objects ofreligious and magical practices were extractedfrom their functions and contexts as so manyobjects displayed for the hegemonic eye ofcontrol, Imperialist domination andexploitation. On the other hand, you neitherwant to simply aestheticize these heteronomiccultural objects once again by subjecting themto the Western Modernist concept of'Primitivism'.

J.-H.M.: Our exhibition has nothing to do withthat of 1931 which clearly originated from theperspective of economic and politicalcolonialism. The exhibition of 1931 has,however, inevitably served as a negativereference point for the authors of the catalogueand will be critically discussed. Concerning theproblem of the cultural object and its contextI would like to make two arguments. First ofall, when it comes to foreign literature, musicand theatre, nobody ever asks this question,and we accept translation — which we know

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to be most often a falsification — as a form ofmediation. Now you might argue that these aretemporal and aural forms of artistic experience,different from the spatial and visual objects we •are dealing with. Here different modes ofreception clearly apply and a Western viewersees in a manner altogether different from anAsian viewer, even though the moment ofretinal experience is actually identical. But,nevertheless, to argue therefore that it isimpossible to present visual — spatial objectsoutside of their cultural context seemsabsolutely horrible to me when, in fact, sincecenturies this type of communication hasoccurred within the fields of literature ioiexample. That is my first argument...

B.B.: If I may interrupt here, it seems evidentthat your problem is that of Modernist arthistory which has traditionally onlycontemplated the objects of high culture, eventhough Modernist avantgarde art is constitutedin the dialectic relationship with mass culturefrom its very beginnings. The objects and theusers of mass culture — if considered at all —were at best compartmentalized into a differentdiscipline (sociology, or more recently that ofmass cultural studies). In the same manner thattraditional art history has always excluded theplurality of cultures within bourgeois culture,your attempt to select only the 'highest artisticquality' from the cultural practices of 'theOthers' runs the risk of subjecting them to asimilar process of selection and hierarchization.

].-H.M.: This is another point to which I willreturn. But let me first make my secondargument. A criticism instantly voiced withregard to this project is the supposed problemof decontextualization and the betrayal of theother cultures. Yes, the objects will be displacedfrom their functional context and they will beshown in a museum and an exhibitioninstitution in Paris. But we will display themin a manner that has never before beenemployed with regard to objects from the ThirdWorld. That is, the makers of the objects willbe present for the most part, and I will avoidfinished moveable objects as much as possible.I will favour actual 'installations' (as we say inour jargon) made by the artists specifically forthis particular occasion. Works of art are always

the result of a ritual or a ceremony, and thatis just as true for a famous painter of the 19thcentury where — in a manner of speaking —we are looking at a 'mere residue' as well. Onealways speaks of the problem of 'context' whenit come to other cultures, as though the sameproblem would not emerge for us in theconfrontation with a Medieval miniature oreven a Rembrandt painting when we visit themuseum. Only a few specialists really knowanything at all about the context of theseobjects, even though we would claim that theseobjects constitute our cultural tradition. I knowthat it is dangerous to extricate cultural objectsfrom other civilizations, but we can also learnfrom these civilizations which, just like ours,are engaged in a search for spirituality.

B.B.: This concept of an abstract transhistoricalexperience of 'spirituality' seems to be at thecore of your project. In that respct it remindsme of the exhibition 'Primitivism' and TwentiethCentury Art which took place at the Museumof Modern Art in 1984. There a presumedspirituality was equally placed at the centre ofthe exhibition, operating regardless of socialand political context, regardless of technologicaldevelopment of the particular social formations.Don't you think that the search for the (re-)discovery of spirituality originates in thedisavowal of the politics of everyday life?

].-H.M.: Not at all. As you will recall, the maincriticism levelled at this exhibition at the timewas that it was a formalist project. To me itseems important to emphasize the functionalrather than the formal aspects of thatspirituality (after all, magic practices arefunctional practices). Those objects which actin their spiritual function, on the human mind,objects which exist in all societies, are the onesof interest for our exhibition. After all, theworks of art cannot simply be reduced to aretinal experience alone. It possesses an aurawhich initiates these mental experiences. Iwould go even further and argue that preciselythose artistic objects which were created twentyyears ago by artists with the explicit desire toreduce the auratic nature of the work of art byemphasizing its material objectness, appearnow as the most spiritual ones. In fact, if youtalk to the artists of that generation you will

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often encounter their own involvement withthe concept of the 'magic' in work of art. Wehave to admit that there is a sphere of socialexperience which has taken over the space ofreligion, and while it does not fulfill religion'scommunal functions it involves large segmentsof our society.

B.B.: It sounds as though you are arguing thatthe failure of artistic practices of the Sixties toemancipate art from ritual (what WalterBenjamin called its parasitical dependence),could now be compensated best by ritualizingthese practices themselves. To mention anexample: when Lothar Baumgarten set out inthe late 1970's to visit tribal societies of theAmazon, which are now threatened withdestruction, he operated in the manner of anamateur ethnographer. But he also operatedfrom within a Modernist artistic tradition: tosearch and discover the values of exotic culturesin order to reconstitute the cult value of thework of art, its share in the ritualisticexperience. Paradoxically, in doing so, artistsof that tradition in Modernism have contributedto the conception of a highly problematic visionof the 'Other' in terms of 'primitivism'. Iwonder whether this is not the model uponwhich your exhibition is based as well. Is thatthe reason why, in the course of thepreparation of his contribution for yourexhibition, you sent Lawrence Weiner to PapuaNew Guinea?

J.-H.M.: There are enormous prejudices inwhat you just said concerning our exhibitionproject. The basic idea during the elaborationof our exhibition was to question therelationship of our culture to other cultures ofthe world. Culture here is not an abstractgenerality but describes a set of relations thatindividuals have among each other and withwhich we interact. I wondered whether itwould be possible to accelerate theserelationships and the dialogue ensuing fromthem. That is the reason why I suggested thatLawrence Weiner should go to Papua NewGuinea. Let me emphasize that first of all thisexhibition wants to initiate dialogues. I opposethis idea that one can only look at anotherculture in order to exploit it. It is first of all amatter of exhange and dialogue, to understand

the others in order to understand what we doourselves.

B.B.: Inevitably your project operates like anarchaeology of the 'Other' and its authenticity.You are engaged in a quest for the originalcultural practices (magic and the ritual), whenin fact what you would find most often, Ipresume, are extremely hybridized culturalpractices in their various stages of gradual orrapid disintegration and extinction as a resultof their confrontation with Western industrialmedia and consumer culture. Are you going to'distill' the original objects for the sake of anartificial purity, or are you going to exhibit theactual degree of contamination and decaywithin which these forms of cultural productionactually exist?

].-H.M.: On the contrary. I have never stoppedsaying that there is an original purity to bediscovered elsewhere. The fact that earlier artswere 'without history', has produced too manymyths. All the work shown will be the fruit ofexchange influences and of changes derivedfrom our civilisation or from others.

I think there is a real misunderstanding aboutmy way of looking at these phenomena. I amin fact very interested in archaic practices (Iwould like to avoid the problematic term of the'primitive'). I am really against the assumption(underlying in a way also Rubin's exhibition)that we have in fact destroyed all other cultureswith Western technology. A text written by theAboriginal artists of Australia participating inthis exhibition has clarified this for me. Theyexplain the problem of decontextualizationperfectly well, only to continue by arguing thatthey commit their 'treason' for a particularpurpose: to prove to the white world that theirsociety is still alive and functioning. Exhibitingtheir cultural practices to the West is what theybelieve to be the best way to protect theirtraditions and their culture at this point in time.

B.B.: It sounds as though you are engaged insome kind of a reformist project, in search ofresidual magic cultures in the societies alien toours, and in pursuit of revitalizing the magicpotential of our own.

J.-H.M.: Obviously we live in a society where

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we always speak from our position about theothers and we judge their position from ours,and it is 'us' who think 'them' as still beinginvolved in magic. It is an a priori upon whichwe naively rely, when it is actually infinitelymore complicated than that and we have noidea how it really functions. In the samemanner that we do not know how magicthought functions in our society, andobviously, there is a lot of it.

B.B.: Is your exhibition going to address themagic rituals of our society as well? You seemto be looking for an irrational power that drivesartistic production in tribal societies, and youseem to argue that there is a need for oursociety to rediscover this power. By contrast,the actual mechanisms in which magic ritualsare practiced in our society, in the fetishizationof the sign, in spectacle culture and incommodity fetishism, do not seem to be ofinterest to you.

J.-H.M.: But I am also not in search of anoriginal purity, even though there are cultureswhich still have had very little exposure toWestern civilization and whose modes ofthinking are utterly different from ours. Itastonishes me more and more, the longer Ihave been working on this project, that evenin serious studies the ideal of an archaic andauthentic production is upheld, possibly eventhat of a collective production, when in fact thenumber of objects which would truly qualifyfor this category is rather small. We know thatfor the most part these practices have beencompromised or destroyed altogether...But inthe large cities of Asia and Africa, where theshocks resulting from the encounter betweenthe local cultures and the Western industrialcultures still reverberate, one finds numerousmanifestations that we would, once again, haveto identify as works of art. And one findsexamples from both spheres, objects of atraditional local high culture as much as objectsof popular culture.

B.B.: Don't you think we have to differentiatebetween the residual forms of high culture andlocal popular culture on the one hand and theemerging forms of mass cultural consumptionon the other?

J.-H.M.: No, I do not exclude the objects ofmass culture, but I am really interested infinding the individual artist or artists that onecan name and situate and that have actuallyproduced objects. I refuse to show objectswhich claim to be the anonymous result of acultural community. That to me seems preciselya typically perverted Western/European ideathat I want to avoid at all cost. If fiftycraftspeople produce more or less the sametype of cult object, that does not interest me.I am looking for the one that is superior to allthe others, more individual than the rest.

B.B.: You don't seem to mind that thisapproach re-introduces the most traditionalconception of the privileged subject and theoriginal object into a cultural context that mightnot even know these Western concepts,excluding from the beginning notions such asanonymous production or collective creation?

J.-H.M.: No, I will not exclude objects ofcollective production, in fact there are quite afew already included in the exhibition. But I dolike the joke which argues that the only reasonwhy we imagine Black African masks to beanonymous is because when they were firstfound in the various tribal communities thepeople who took them or collected them didnot care to take down the names of theirauthors. It is a typical Western projection tofantasize that these communities live in a stateof original collective bliss, therefore one doesnot want to credit them with having individualauthors. Let me give you an example: themasks which are identified as Geledes are onlyworn once a year for a particular ritual. A recentstudy shows that the makers of these masks arespecialists who make them for the variousvillages and communities who use them. Notonly are they specialists of this type of masksand identify their works with their signatureson the inside, but they also originate fromdynasties of mask-makers, and often theseobjects can be traced through two or moregenerations. Furthermore, what is peculiarabout these Geledes masks is that they actuallychange over time — as opposed to our Westernconcept of a fixed and stable type — and overthe last few decades they have incorporatedmore and more elements from industrial

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culture. This proves to me the vivacity of thatculture and its flexibility in responding to thecontact with Western civilization. Certainethnographers are distressed by this becausethey perceive these tribal communities ashaving lost their original purity. But I don'tthink that any society ever had this purity sincethey are all in constant flux and exchange withother societies. Admittedly, the Western worldis, of course, a particularly powerful influencein these contacts.

B.B.: Let us discuss a concrete example. Howdid you approach the Algerian Republic, aSocialist state which was once a French colony?I am sure there are rather active Beaux Artsschools in Algiers and other cities, and Iimagine, if you travel through the remotevillages, you would probably find residualforms of artisanal popular culture and possiblyeven religious practices. At the same time Iwould imagine that there are emerging formsof a new Socialist culture. Which of the threedomains is of primary interest to yourexhibition project?

J.-H.M.: I would like to address the method ofour work first of all. The particular needs of thisexhibition require that a constant exchangetakes place between theory and practice, andthat both will constantly correct each other inthe course of the preparation of this exhibition.It is not that discourse on interculturalrelationships has been absent from Frenchthought; what is missing are the pragmaticforms of putting this discourse into practice.That is what I am trying to develop. To answeryour question, 'which of the three formationsare of interest to us;' well, I want to show asmuch as possible, as many divergentphenomena as possible, even if that mightmake the exhibition heterogeneous at times.

B.B.: To invert my question: will yourexhibition also present information on so<alledminority cultures living inside the hegemonicWestern societies? Will you show, for example,the particular forms of Black Modernism as itemerged in the United States since the turn ofthe century, or the cultural practices of Africanand Arabic minorities living in France at thispoint?

J.-H.M.: Obviously I have thought about thisand often one is obliged to start from there. Ihave for example encountered a painter fromthe People's Republic of China who came toFrance about four years ago and who now livesin Paris. He is now part of a Chinese artisticcommunity in France and he has given me anumber of leads how to approach thisphenomenon of Chinese emigrant artists asmuch as the art of his country. As far as yourexamples of Algeria or Morocco are concerned,I will approach these in a pragmatic manner,not a theoretical way. In these countries youwill find a widespread tendency to harmonizetraditional calligraphy with ficole de Parispainting. This transposition of calligraphy intoa Western easel painting technique leaves metotally cold. I prefer to show a real calligrapherlike the Iraqi Youssuf Thannoon.

I will first of all go by visual criteria alone,my vision and that of my colleagues withwhom I prepare and discuss this project. If weencounter visually astonishing material we willgo further and visit the artists and find outmore about the history and the context of thework. I want to show individual artists, notmovements or schools. In that sense I am tryingto do exactly the opposite of what the Biennalede Paris has traditionally exhibited when itrelied for its selections on the informationprovided by the cultural functionaries of theindividual countries who were all more or lessimitating mainstream culture of the Westernworld, the Ecole de Paris or New York Schoolpainting.

B.B.: The central tool by which bourgeoishegemonic culture (white, male and Western)has traditionally excluded or marginalized allother cultural practices is the abstract conceptof 'quality.' How will you avoid this mostintricate of all problems in your selection criteriaif you operate by 'visual' terms alone?

J.-H.M: The term 'quality' has been eliminatedfrom my vocabulary, since there is simply noconvincing system to establish relative andbinding criteria of quality when it comes to sucha project. We know very well that even thedirectors of the great Western museums do nothave any reliable criteria to establish aconsensus on this question. But of course one

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has to develop criteria; some are more tangibleand rigorous than others. There are criteria tobe derived from the physicality of the work,from the relationship between the maker of theobject and the community which relates to thatobject, the socio-political and cultural contextof that object.

B.B.: When exhibitions are organized in theUnited States from a critical perspectivechallenging mainstream hegemonic culture, thestandard prejudicial response one always hearsis: that is very interesting work indeed, but itlacks 'quality.'

J.-H.M.: Indeed that happens when one groupsartists together by country or geo-politicalcontext. But that is not my approach: we selectindividual artists from a wide variety ofcontexts, and it is the individuality of theseartists which guarantees the level of ourexhibition. That brings us back to the criteriaof 'quality'...

B.B.: But certain works (for example feministartists) distinguish themselves by preciselychallenging and criticizing that very notion ofabstract quality, because the term itself is ofcourse already invested with interest, privilege,control and exclusion.

J.H.M.: Certainly. We are going through aphase where all these concepts are transformedand re-evaluated and we are gradually movingon to different concepts. While this happens,first of all on the level of theory, we do not yethave any reliable means or any solid bases toarticulate these changes on the level ofexhibition practice. But that should not deterus from trying to develop them...

B.B.: In the course of the last ten years or soWestern Modernism as a hegemonic culturehas been criticized from the perspectives ofother cultural practices as much as from theinside. It seemed generally no longer acceptableto treat Modernism as a universal internationallanguage and style, governing all countries ofadvanced industrial culture as much as thecountries of the so-called Second and Third

World. This became particularly obvious in theincreasing attacks on International Style inarchitecture and the recognition that it wasnecessary to take national and regionalspecificities and traditions much more intoconsideration than hegemonic Modernism hadallowed. Does the project of your exhibitiondepart from similar critical perspectives?

J.-H.M.: Absolutely. That is precisely thereason why we want to build a trulyinternational exhibition that transcends thetraditional framework of contemporary Euro-American culture. Rather than showing thatabstraction is a universal language, or that thereturn to figuration is now happeningeverywhere in the world, I want to show thereal difference and the specificity of thedifferent cultures.

B.B.: But what are the real differences betweenthe different cultures- at this point? Westernhegemonic centres use Third World countriesas providers of cheap labour (the hiddenproletariats of the so-called post-industrialistsocieties), devastate their ecological resourcesand infrastructure, and use them as dumpinggrounds for their industrial waste. Don't youthink that by excluding these political andeconomical aspects and by focussingexclusively on the cultural relationshipsbetween Western centres and developingnations, you will inevitably generate a neo-colonialist reading?

J.-H.M.: That implies that the visitors of theexhibition would be unable to recognize therelationships between the centres and the ThirdWorld. Our generation — and we were not thefirst — has denounced these phenomena, andthings have after all developed at least a littlebit. One cannot say that we live in a neo-colonialist period. Obviously the WesternWorld maintains relationships of domination,but that should not prohibit us fromcommunicating with the people of thesenations by looking at their cultural practices.

B.B.: But isn't this precisely once again theworst ethnocentric fallacy: it communicates forus, therefore it is relevant for the exhibition.Worse yet: it smacks once again of cultural (and

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political) imperialism to request that thesecultures deliver their cultural products for ourinspection and our consumption, instead of usmaking an attempt to dismantle the falsecentrality of this approach and to developcriteria from within the needs and conventionsof these cultures.

J.-H.M.: I understand very well what you aretrying to say, but how would you actually goabout developing these immanent criteria? Ihave determined a number of them and appliedthem for the definition of the participants of theexhibition, but inevitably these criteria will bedifferent in each case and eventually maygenerate considerable contradictions. I do notsee how one can really avoid ethnocentricvision altogether. I have to accept it to someextent in spite of all the self-reflexive correctionswhich we tried to incorporate into ourmethods. What is important to recognize is thatthis will be the first truely internationalexhibition of worldwide contemporary art, butI do not pretend in any way that this is acomplete survey of the planet, but rather it isa sampling that I have chosen according tomore or less accurate and yet somewhatrandom criteria. I cannot select objects in themanner of ethnographers who chose theobjects according to their importance andfunction inside the culture that they study,even if these objects 'mean' or 'communicate'very little or nothing to us. Inevitably there isan aesthetic judgement at work in the selectionof my exhibition with all the inevitablearbitrariness that aesthetic selection entails.

B.B.: The other side of the ethnocentric fallacyis a cult of a presumed authenticity whichwould like to force other cultural practices toremain within the domain of what we considerthe 'primitive' and the original 'Other.' In factartists in these cultures very often claim, andrightfully so, to have developed their ownforms of high culture corresponding to that ofthe Western world and its institutional valuesand linguistic conventions, and insist thereforeto be looked at in terms of their own highcultural achievements, not in terms of ourprojection of authentic Otherness.

J.-H.M.: That is the reason why we have

conceived of the exhibition as a situation ofdialogic relationships between the artists fromthe Western centres and those from the so-called geo-political margins. But the exhibitionwill also establish other types of cross-culturalrelationships. For example, the manner inwhich the repetition of identical modelsfunctions in Tibetan Tonka painting and in thework of certain Western painters whoconsistently repeat the model which theyestablished for themselves. After all, Tonkapainting is still a living artistic practice, eventhough we only know it from ethnographicmuseums. To disturb this kind of absurdity isonce again one of the goals of our exhibition.Let us not forget that many of the societies thatwe are looking at do not know or agree withWestern divisions of culture between high andlow, ancient and recent. The AustralianAboriginal culture does not separate highculture from popular culture at all. There issimply one traditional culture which they nowdeploy to defend their identity against theincreasing onslaught of Western industrialculture. Even if they are called Bushmen, theyobviously drive cars and have guns, but theyteach their children how to use bow and arrowand how to pursue their cultural traditions asa form of political resistance against theviolation by Western industrial culture. That isalso the reason why they were eager to acceptmy invitation to show their work, outside ofits original functional context so to speak, butnevertheless in its function to defend theiraboriginal identity.

B.B.: That raises another problem. How willyou avoid the total aestheticization of this, andall other exhibited forms of culturalmanifestations emerging from non-westerncontexts, once they enter your museum orexhibition? How can you supply your visitorswith sufficient visual and textual informationto avoid this problem without strangling theactual experience of these objects?

J.-H.M.: Obviously I do not want to constructa didactic exhibition with an overwhelmingamount of text panels. It is self-evident that allof the artists will receive the same treatment inboth exhibition and catalogue. And thecatalogue will, of course, provide the crucial

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information as well as the didactic assistanceneeded for such an exhibition.

B.B.: Your restriction to 'aesthetic' criteriatherefore depends also on merely pragmaticfunctions, to enable you to construct anexhibition from this heterogeneous mass ofobjects.

J.-H.M.: Obviously, I will work with anarchitect, and we already have numerous ideasabout various forms of installation whichconvey to the viewers the complexity of thesituation; that they are not looking at thetraditional museum objects, but that they areconfronted with objects from totally differentcontexts. But we have to keep in mind that thisis an exhibition, not a discourse. I know thatexhibitions cannot claim innocence from thediscourse, and our exhibition will be critical andvisual at the same time. What interests me inparticular are the visual shocks that thisexhibition can possibly produce and thereflections which it could provoke. But most ofall I would like to see this exhibition operateas a catalyst for future projects andinvestigations.

B.B.: I could imagine that your project wouldprovoke a lot of scepticism if not anger amongthose authorities in the art world whose roleit is precisely to defend the rigorous divisionsand criteria of hegemonic culture at all cost?

J.-H.M.: In the art world, yes, but not amongartists, who have generally responded withgreat enthusiasm and interest.

B.B.: Even if this project threatens to displacethem a little bit from their centrality in thereception of contemporary art?

J.-H.M.: I don't think they are worried aboutthis, and they don't have to worry about itanyway. I believe that every creative individualis deeply interested in the activities of othersin the world. After all, an element of curiosityand surprise is part of artistic experience ingeneral, even though over the last few years,when it came to the big international groupshows, you didn't even have to see the list of

participating artists in advance, you couldpretty much tell beforehand who was going tobe in these exhibitions. With our project, thisis quite different. There will be many surprisesand the artworld will not always like it, but theywill certainly see things that they have neverseen before. I am aiming at a much largerpublic. In fact I have already noticed whendiscussing the project with people from outsideour little museum and gallery world, that thisexhibition really has something to offer whichgoes way beyond the traditional boundaries ofour usual conception of contemporary culture.

B.B.: Could one say that you also aim todecentre the social parameters traditional to theart public?

J.-H.M.: Absolutely. I want to show artists fromthe whole world, and to leave the ghetto ofcontemporary Western art where we have beenshut up over these last decades. A larger publicwill certainly understand that, for once, thisevent will be much more accessible to it, andthat it comes to an exhibition founded on totallydifferent principles. If we do not try to makethe effort at least to engage in this evolution,we risk serious blockages.

Downloaded By: [Panzarowsky, Gina] At: 14:23 9 February 2011