the world's altars and the contemporary art museum

38

| The World’s Altars and theContemporary Art Museum1

An internationally renowned French museum director and exhibition organizer, Jean-Hubert Martin,has been the General Director of the Kunst Palast Museum in Düsseldorf since January 2000. Beforethis appointment, Jean-Hubert Martin had won great esteem worldwide, in particular as a result of theMagicians of the Earth exhibition in 1989 in which he brought together exhibits from every corner ofthe world and, for the first time, presented non-Western art on equal terms. He has also receivedworldwide recognition for his work for the Biennales held in Lyon (2000), São Paulo (1996),Johannesburg (1995), Sydney (1993 and 1982), and for a host of other remarkable exhibitions.

by Jean-Hubert Martin

ISSN 1350-0775, no. 218 (vol. 55, no. 2, 2003)museumINTERNATIONAL

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)

Sacred themes are making an unexpected return tothe museum, and doing so in ways that raisenumerous questions that run counter to a greatmany prevailing ideas. Intellectuals usually evolvewithin a rational framework that excludes theexperience of religious faith.

Religion is thought of as nothing but anarchaic relic from a bygone age or somethingrooted in the developing world. The old linearvision of history was based on the contributions ofthe philosophy of the Enlightenment. At a timewhen the advance of knowledge gave credence tothe conviction that the world could be masteredthrough the establishment of universal laws,museums were being filled with objects stemmingfrom blind Christian and other beliefs. Thesevestiges of the use of the ‘opium of the people’attracted the attention of the ethnologist orhistorian of religions on the one hand, and that ofthe art historian or aesthete on the other.

Starting from the time of the FrenchRevolution, the élites, followed by the Marxists,

believed in a linear form of history which wouldlead to the gradual demise of religions and otherforms of superstition through the spread of rationalthought. The unavoidable conclusion to be drawnfrom the present, however, is that this well-orderedadvance towards a future governed by reason is farfrom being a reality. On the contrary, the presenttrend is one of fundamentalism and the revival ofreligions.

When the museum was first created duringthe French Revolution, it was encyclopedic andopen to the life practices of the entire world, nomatter how diverse they were. In the West, thewatershed that took place in modern art startingfrom Gauguin led, on the one hand, to borrowingsfrom so-called ‘primitive’ art, thus revealing newaesthetic canons, and, on the other, to thesegregation of the performing arts of non-Westerncultures. European artists made ample use of theformal solutions provided by black art, butrefrained from making the least effort to becomeacquainted with their colleagues.

But the cohesion of the encyclopedicmuseum was lost and, while avant-garde artiststried to assert themselves vis-à-vis the weight of theconventions of the past, non-Western arts sufferedas a result. On the basis of judgements concerningtaste – an object that is new has never been giventhe same value in Europe as an object that is worn,aged and bears a sheen – and prejudicesconcerning the phenomena of acculturation, workswere termed false, folkloric and inauthentic by theWest, with the result that artists from the Southfound themselves excluded from the modern artmuseums. When it came from the past, the art ofpeoples without a written language gradually won

full recognition and came to be thoughtcomparable to that of the societies with a writtenlanguage which were wrongly reputed to besophisticated. By contrast, the contemporary art ofthe former was marginalized in hybrid categorieswhich were termed ‘in transition’, in allseriousness, by some critics. Such sharpjudgements take account neither of the singularnature of original personalities nor of the existenceof flesh-and-blood creators transmitting a cultureand complex set of ideas. Religious art is valuedwhen ancient, and there is general recognition thatit engendered humanity’s greatest masterpieces. Bycontrast, it is suspect when contemporary andnever authentic enough in the eyes of the Westernexperts who cannot rid themselves of the nostalgiafor a time before the destructive presence of thewhite man.

The illogical nature of the museum systemis witnessed by the fact that religious art gains fullrecognition only when it belongs to the past. Ofcourse, a few Christian themes can be found fromPicasso to Beuys, in as much as they were producedby famous individuals from the history of art, butthere is no place for the other religions in thecontemporary art museums. The ethnographicmuseums represent them sometimes as thespectacular testimonies of the ways of life andmodes of thinking of other societies. The Altäre

exhibition, organized in the Kunst Palast Museumof Düsseldorf in 1999,2 was the first time ever thatthe countless artistic expressions engendered byreligions were displayed in an artistic context in acontemporary art museum, a display that wouldhappen as a matter of course if such expressionswere from an ancient time. One exception standsout, however, the Face of the Gods exhibition

| The World’s Altars and the Contemporary Art MuseumJean-Hubert Martin

ISSN 1350-0775, No. 218 (Vol. 55, No. 2, 2003) |museumINTERNATIONAL 39

organized by the esteemed Robert Farris Thompsonat the Museum for African Arts in New York.3

The institutions may be more or less rigid,but the artists are constantly on the move bothintellectually and physically. Many people believethat the space accorded to Christendom indicates apolicy that is too narrow. The increasingly frequentcontacts with other cultures, especially in urbanand international contexts, lead to the discovery ofother kinds of rites, customs and traditions. Thedogma of universal modernity is losing groundbecause of the increasing numbers of artists fromthe margins who are claiming increasing attention.The most conspicuous signs of this change havecome from the African-American sphere which haslong been rich in symbolic and plastic-art creationspossibly as a result of the oppression to whichAfrican Americans were subjected over a longperiod. Mestre Didi, working in Bahía, has alwaysasserted that his palm-vein figures were as muchworks of art as liturgical objects. He sees his workas an artist as being analogous to that of aCandomble priest and forming part of a genuineprogramme of resistance to the dominant culture.The Santeria religion has provided José Bedia, aCuban living in Florida, with constant inspirationfor his sombre and turbulent style of drawing. Morerecently, the artist Charo Oquet mounted anexhibition in a Florida gallery displaying altarsmade of veiling, and thus removed the modernistborder between religion and aesthetics. Theexhibition Magicians of the Earth has helped theseartists to achieve a degree of visibility.4

Consequently, art should no longer bedefined solely in Western terms, given that freshhorizons exist in historical, chronological and

quasi-evolutionist terms. European ethnocentrismimposed the classification of what are calledtraditional societies on a scale of values of which itformed the pinnacle, and this led to arbitrary andfalse comparisons in the phenomenological context.Western thought, which is undeniably unique inhaving comprehensively gathered knowledge on allthe world’s cultures, decreed the universality of art.It thus lent support to a general feeling that theformal expressions of the sacred represented thehighest human values and could be shared to acertain extent. At the same time, it showedinconsistency by its exclusion of most of the formalproductions of the colonial period. The loss ofground of the linear and evolutionist conception ofhistory now obliges us to adopt a spatial ratherthan a temporal perspective in dealing with art. Theresulting impact is inevitably great: What terms arewe to use in our appreciation of a Tibetan altar or amandala of coloured powder?

As an object, it belongs first and foremostto the religious sphere. Fortunately, the object inquestion belongs to a religion credited by the Westwith the highest spiritual values and, not being toofar removed from a Christian altar in terms of form,is considered with interest. This would not be thecase, however, for many other altars, objects andplaces of worship belonging to other cultures,whatever the value of their formal properties maybe. This type of object, which is refused the statusof art, is termed ethnic, especially in the English-speaking world. This is a semantic absurdity whichunderscores the inconsistency of post-colonialtaxonomy. An awkward problem also arises withthe excessively Eurocentric connotation of the word‘exotic’. Per se, a German or French altar is as‘ethnic’ as a Tibetan one. This shows the extent to

| Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)

FORMS OF THE SACRED

40

which our use of words indicates an enduringrefusal of equality. Only geographic and specificcategories are valid in as much as the entire entityformed by otherness in relation to the West isdefined by exclusion and difference in relation to aunit.

The altar comprises a set of objects used forsymbolic and ritual purposes. Each element meanssomething in relation to the entire set which isorganized in a specific way. The maintenance of thisprecise order and the repetition of the acts ofworship ensure communication with the afterlifeand deities. The altar, as a complete entity, has oftenbeen either ignored or dismantled. Christian altarshave thus not been displayed whole in museumssince they were first created at the beginning of thenineteenth century. Retables, paintings andsculptures, candelabra, chalices and tableclothswere all selected separately for the purposes ofhistorical study and the safeguarding of historicalvalues, and each type of object was kept in aseparate section of the major museums. In addition,the buildings themselves (temples, churches andsanctuaries), which can sometimes house severalaltars, cannot be taken inside museums and canonly be shown in the form of images.

‘Contextualization’ is a frequently usedterm in museum display, but it breedsmisunderstandings and confusion. Manycommentators see the difference between the artmuseum and the ethnological museum as one ofthe greater contextualization of objects in one typeof museum as opposed to the other. The differenceis thought to lie in the texts affixed to the objects.Two remarks should, I think, be made on thissubject: the very nature of the museum implies that

any object housed in it is ipso facto detached fromits original context, with the exception of certainworks created since the nineteenth century for orwithin the context of the museum. None the less,as scholarly and intelligent as an explanatory textmay be, it can never replace the original context.

Our objective in the Altäre exhibition wasto exhibit both the sacred objects and their uses.Art was used as the system of reference in theexhibition in order to counter the ‘natural’ difficultyof museum exhibition. Many artists, of whomBeuys, the shaman of Düsseldorf, is the archetypeand leader, have abandoned the exclusiveproduction of objects in order to devote themselvesto the creation of installations and settings in whichthe created or ready-made works are organized interms of the allotted space. The artist then bearssole responsibility for their arrangement andfunctioning, in the same way that the priest is thepossessor of knowledge who is responsible for theplacing and arrangement of ritual objects. Where



11. Victor Bravo Cajusol, Mesa,

Shamanic Healing Ceremony (Tucume, Peru)

© A

ndre

as S

tapp

ert/

Kun

st p

alas

t Mus

eum

11

altars are concerned, the artist disappears behindthe religious aura and the object itself, except in thecase of European Christianity in which thesignature of a master added rarity and worth to thehomage paid to God. The separation between artand religion is now complete, and there are only avery few recognized artists who have theopportunity to make an altar. A large number ofaltars, which could be called metaphorical objects,are none the less being created for museums andgalleries. Such altars were not taken into account inthe exhibition and, to avoid confusion, only thealtars originating from communities that use themfor prayer, worship and offerings were selected.

In most of the cases in this category, it isdifficult to equate the creators with artists in thesense in which we understand the word in Europe.So, why insist on displaying such altars in thecontext of contemporary art? If one accepts thebasic assumption that it is not only the West thatcreates art and that the art created elsewhere is notnecessarily created according to the norms ofmodernity but, rather, according to rulescomparable to those which prevailed in formertimes in Europe, one cannot but agree that religionsconstitute a primary source of plastic artexpression. The Magicians of the Earth exhibitioninsisted on the concept of the creative individual asa common denominator in creative workthroughout the world. The justified objection wasthen made that this risked ignoring or, at least,misrepresenting what distinguishes other culturesfrom ours, namely communal creation and groupwork. The main problem therefore lies in theassigning of a category, which is in fact a non-category, to this other. At bottom, all points of view,which are theoretical in essence, can be defended

using examples. The Altäre exhibition, whichbrought people and objects together around theincredible invention that are the deities, now as inthe past, proposed going beyond the theoreticalframework of categories to devote attention to theincreasing numbers of symbolic devices aimed atproducing meaning through the arrangement ofobjects in space. In formal and methodologicalterms, altars and contemporary art installations arecomparable. They both concern the arrangement ofobjects in space in order to produce meaning. Thedifference lies in the objective, the degree offreedom of the creator and the nature of the targetgroup.

Religion and art are two very differentfields, the one distinguishing itself from the otherby an emancipation which forms part of naturalevolution in the course of history. But althoughartists may assert their independence, they are notimmune from contacts and influences. The successof the performances, happenings and installationscan be mostly explained by the way artists havebeen fascinated by the discovery and study of theways of life and rites of non-Western societies.From Griaule to Jean Rouch, the descriptions andfilms of ceremonies, of the Dogons for example,have continued to fuel the artistic imagination. It istherefore legitimate to think that they tookparticular interest in these forms because theyfound tangible testimonies in them of a spiritualityand transcendence that they lacked in the contextof Christianity. Such approaches are not devoid ofa certain degree of nostalgia, but, in a worlddominated by materialism, they deserve credit forreminding us that human beings need to thinkabout their relationship to the world and theafterlife, bearing in mind that people rarely


FORMS OF THE SACRED

42

experience matter as being wholly inert. Althoughcontemporary Western art is aimed neither at thegods nor at named spirits and, therefore, seems tobe concerned only with humans, it can none theless fulfil a metaphysical role of immaterialtranscendence for a given public. Indeed, theworld of art has been compared by some to a sect,but such a comparison stops at their spiritualfunction.

The idea of staging an exhibition on altarshad already taken root during the preparation ofthe Magicians of the Earth exhibition in Paris in1989. One of the proposals made at the time was todevote a part of the exhibition to the sacred artsand plastic art expressions of worship. But, as isusually the case in the preparation of events inwhich a great number of new and untried ideas areexchanged, some of the proposals were put intoeffect and others were not. Later, when I wasappointed Director of the Museum of the Arts ofAfrica and Oceania in Paris in 1995, I waspleasantly surprised when one of my colleagues,Philippe Peltier, proposed the very same theme tome. Despite the great interest shown by a Frenchsponsor, Agnès B., the project was obstructed bythe incomprehension and conservatism of theDirection des Musées de France. It was reactivatedby the opening of the Kunst Palast Museum ofDüsseldorf, and put into effect in record timethanks to the collaboration of fellow travellersBernhard Lüthi and Aline Luque and theenthusiastic commitment of the museum’s newteam. The team that designed the exhibition wasrichly made up of ethnologists, artists and arthistorians. The artists Loko and Chang activelycollaborated by their contributions from theirrespective West African and Korean cultures.

During the preparation there were numerousdiscussions which were fierce but fascinatingbecause they touched on all the ideas that drivepresent-day relations between the peoples of theworld. Nonetheless, the principal and constantguideline of the preparation was that selection andother criteria should be based, first and foremost,on aesthetics, and although the exhibition wasintended to cover the entire world, there was neverany claim that it would represent all the differentreligions. Indeed, this was not its aim. If such hadbeen the case, an impossible system of proportionalpresentation would have been required.

The exhibition comprised some sixty veryvaried types of altars. The most archaic ones weremade of earth with a streak of rice flour, as in theexample of the Hindu ‘onatoppan’ from Kerala inIndia. Others were extremely sophisticated andrequired highly developed manufacturing skills, asin the case of the altars of the dead from Linares inMexico. The extraordinary capacity to add to thesigns that bond communities was demonstrated bythe Korean altars, in particular: a pig’s head withbanknotes in its mouth was enthroned in front of anew Hyundai in a consecration ceremony aimed atwarding off accidents. A ‘cleaner’ and moreimmaterial version of the same type of ceremony,aimed this time at the inauguration of an office,consisted of the pig’s head appearing on a computerscreen. These consecration rites, aimed at ensuringprosperity, date back to shamanism. Most of thealtars presented at Düsseldorf were installed byartists, priests and officiating clergy of the differentreligions. Many were consecrated during theceremonies held at the exhibition which was aimedat portraying real-life activities, rather than emptydisplay.



The modern art museum has become anobstacle to the diffusion of non-Western arts. Itabandoned aesthetic criteria a long time ago – anunfailing source of many and varied discussions –in favour of artistic activities that give priority tothe relation of meaning and object and a criticalattitude towards society. Beauty has stopped beingits sole concern. None the less, arguments aboutgood taste are what are regularly advanced againstthe presentation of non-Western works which oftenseem to be too ‘new’ in the eyes of our experts.

Another question concerns the possibilitiesof exhibiting these objects. Can the museum, whichis the sanctuary of lay and republican values, betransformed into a religious sanctuary in the nameof human rights? The museum and its systematicapproach demonstrate a desire to acquire objectsand knowledge that has ensured it its influence. Itwould be illusory to foresee its demise. None theless, its opening to the practices of religion, and notonly its vestiges, can provide it with a novel futureas a place for promoting and disseminatingminority values. Consequently, a museum of theperforming arts, in which the works would bedisplayed live through the activities of theofficiating priests of the different religions, still hasto be created. Such an institution can be envisagedon condition that museum evolution isaccompanied by a new history of the arts that isrelativist and less static and that stops usingEuropean art, its evolution and modernity, as thesole criteria of reference.

| NOTES

1 This text was drafted using the following articles: ‘Le musée,

sanctuaire laïc ou religieux’ in the catalogue of the exhibition La mort

n’en saura rien. – Reliques d’Europe et d’Océanie (Paris, 12 October

1999–24 January 2000) and the introduction to the catalogue ‘Altäre’,

Kunst Palast Museum (Düsseldorf, 2 September 2001–6 January 2002).

2 See the site http://www.museum-kunst-palast.da/eng/sites/s3s2sO.asp

3 The exhibition ‘Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African

Americas’ was held at the New York Museum for African Arts between

24 September 1993 and 7 January 1994. See

http://www.africanart.org/html/past exhibitions.htm

4 The exhibition took place at the National Modern Art Museum at the

Pompidou Centre (Paris, May–August 1989).


FORMS OF THE SACRED

44



12. Located in the very heart of Manhattan, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York,

built in a neogothic style, is an important religious centre of the city, and an example of traditional sacred

architecture in a contemporary environment.

© U

NES

CO/A

lexi

s N

. Vor

ontz

off

12

the world's altars and the contemporary art museum

Documents