On collecting - art and artifacts

This lecture was very interesting, I took some notes of what I understood and what I would like to explore more.
All in a higgledy-piggledy way...

First , a definition for ARTIFACTS: a representation of human culture - objects that represent a human civilization and culture.

About collecting and creating a collection, I like to associate it to the expressions personal environment, memories, one's own vision of (an aspect of) the world , a vision of his relationship with the world, mysterious love of things, identify something or someone, symbolic ( those terms are taken from the introduction of Art and Artifacts, The Museum as Medium, Putum J. 2001)


The hierarchy of art - how museums and collections give evidences of the hierarchy that occurs in art.
We talked about ethnography, the study of a human culture by another human culture, it is not neutral and will never be.

We looked at Africa.
Africa has been conceived by European as one entity.
When Victorian explorers, scientist and missionaries first arrived in Africa, Africa seemed to get "darker" they saw Africa through an imperialist ideology. an ideology of difference, the creation of others. the illusion of race. Race is a human creation, we are all Homo sapiens.

A practical example of the hierarchy of art ( which can be linked to the surrealist hierarchy of races) is the controversy around the Statue of the Queen Mother from the Kingdom of Benin, now part of Nigeria. The Queen Mother was really important to the Benin population as she was the mother of Oba the ruler of Benin; Oba was poly morph and only his mother could be very close to him and talk to him about his power.
There are several statues that were made of the Queen Mother and Oba himself, the statues were made in a very ingenious way using the lost-wax casting method ( a mold is created of the exact negative of the original objects, the mold is at least made of two pieces that can, then, be put together, bronze is then poured in the empty space in between the molds and create the statue or object wanted.) The art historians do not believe that the Benin population made the statues as it was made in a very clever way.

The debate is also about how museums present the artifacts, and the way they label them as the definition of Africa, but they are in reality only a tiny part of the huge puzzle Africa is. it is an ethnographic metonym. It is absurd to pretend that you can describe the immensity of a whole culture with a few hundreds objects.


Reading and people:
George Kubler The Shape of Time Remarks on the History of Things
Josephine Baker Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s
Robert Goldwater
Walter Benjamin
Patrick Balendger Race, Writings and Differences chapter 8 and 9, edited by Henry Lewis Gates Jr.
James Clifford The predicament of culture