Elite art museums, specially in the West, have positioned themselves as civilising temples, housing aesthetic triumphs of humanity. Yet, as cultural critics have long noted, these institutions are deeply rooted in historical colonialism. As museums scramble to adopt the language of decolonisation and diversity, we must ask: do these superficial updates actually change anything, or do they simply offer a comfortable distraction from deeper systemic crises? Writes Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, an scholar in postcolonial studies.
By Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
I start in the name of the encamped Rohingyas. [T]hey are the absolutely stateless Asians. They represent, for me, a limit to our work. We cannot access a museum narrative for them.
I invoke the great Asian museums of Baghdad and Damascus, in existence 2000 years ago. To re-imagine a museum narrative there we would have to inhabit the transition from the great Asian Antiquity through Ottoman Modernity into its colonial suppression. We would have to situate the transition within the looting of these museums during the Gulf War. In four days between April 8 and 12, 2003, an estimated 15,000 items, among them Syrian ivories and more than 5,000 cylinder seals, disappeared. An early copy of Gilgamesh and a magnificent sun dial by Ibn Al-Shatir (who reformed and improved the Ptolemaic system by eliminating cumbersome eccentrics and equants in the lunar and planetary models, helping Copernicus 150 years later) — the oldest polar-axis sun dial still in existence, disappeared!
We, people of colour, clearly want to be “political” on our own behalf in re-imagining the museum. But how do we calculate decolonisation and Euro centrism here as Kurds and Syrians, re-patriated by their governments, still want to try to re-enter Europe? We are an Asia Society and should not forget this as we build on our own problems.
Re-imagining the museum we sometimes romanticise the respectful fear of nature, — because technology was not bigger than nature yet – to be found in the Fourth World. When I presented the importance of agriculture over against map making at the Whitney an altogether capable member of the museum staff did not recognise a plow because, unlike a tractor, it was too small for her to notice.
How shall we integrate our re-imagining into a general activist position against the Anthropocene and acknowledge the modernity of the Fourth World?
In 1997 I wrote a piece called “Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet1. I think we ought to acknowledge the imperatives when we think about re-imagination. Imperatives come from outside rather than be generated only from our own problems as perceived from the inside. Our imperative today, in re-imagining the museum, may be the re-imagination of a completely fungible future rather than our perceived demands for inclusiveness and diversity alone. I speak of course in the name of my grandchildren that the imperative today is to re-imagine the possibility of a monstrous future. We are now being played out by a greater planetary narrative where human accountability is way short of trivial.
Generally speaking, the response to my keynotes is from fair to middling, and then ignored or forgotten, because it is assumed that my long-term suggestions are not practical. I was in rural India without internet at the time of the closing response, but managed through my Acting Assistant Director of the schools, Anirban Bhattacharjee, radicalised member of the rural gentry, and Surya Parekh in New York to find a way of equipping our smartphones so that I could check to see if that was the case this time as well. However, let me assure you that I have not remained within an educational institution for 56 years without depending heavily also on short-term solutions, even as I see their limits: the quick solution in this case, to decolonize and deconstruct, is of course to network, network, network – to locate a “diversified” artist-base, — I have a different thinking about the Trans, about which I have written for some years, which I can neither include nor reject within a 2,500-word limit. Each of the other diverse groups generally insists that examples from my local my language is the best decolonising tool, considering colonialism as cultural violence, exclusionary violence, etc. and thus de-constructible through better employment practices and allocation of resources. The structure of the museum remains the same with some decentralisation of governance, the structure of the shows remains the same with some interactivity introduced. You insist the narrative is being changed. It is good, however, to remember Wittgenstein’s remark in his late fragments, that “Images tell us nothing, either right or wrong, about the external world,” especially since the word “images” attempts to translate the German word Vorstellung – more like arbitrary representation for conceptualisation, precisely as for the production of conceptual art2.
(I did catch Apinan Poshyananda’s beautifully curated response on the Indian smartphone. He did acknowledge my intervention by referring to the “spectralisation of land,” which was indeed my main point; and then went on to a paper he had prepared in advance. I hope to sit down with him some day and tease out a response regarding the future for our grandchildren and theirs.)
If you follow the short-term strategy astutely, you get much better shows. But the summit can only give you a check list for hands-on online work at the museum. We can go toward the world at large only so far within a self-declared summit situation. The question is “who are the we” who, as agents of an art institution, might seek to re-imagine the museum in the context of a metonymic “Asia,” from a summit? We must ask this question because we have claimed theory – decolonise and deconstruct –and so we must broaden. As Samir Amin suggested fairly recently, we have to change our mind-set from the fight against colonialism that was started with non-alignment in Bandung in 1955 and recenter ourselves to confront globalised neoliberalism, which turns nation-states into global capital-managers while encouraging the nationization of identity in the name of anti-colonialism3.
The museum is undoubtedly associated with historical colonialism, dissimulating exploitation as civilizing mission. But colonialism can also provide a cultural excuse for finger-pointing which some of us describe as the Mugabe position. It also allows artists, museum administrators and museum goers to be distracted from the task of combating and restraining neo-liberalism by acknowledging complicity – by way of our funding — with the very structures we want to question. As for decolonizing by using native language, let me offer you বিউপনিবেশায়ন — the lugubrious Bengali gerund – created by elite literal translation of the English word “decolonization,” which I got from the very same Acting Assistant Director who helped me catch Apinan Poshyananda. There is no way that my subaltern teachers there will understand this Humpty Dumpty elite Bengali word for decolonization. Indeed, they will not understand colonialism, except as some dates and names given in textbooks. They will understand class/caste, because that still works. The intuition, acquired by the travelling researches of a loose group called “Radiating Globality,” is that in globalization and its spurious symmetry, the structures of corruption that existed in the pre-colonial longue durée have become operative in so-called postcolonial polities.
The two primary considerations in deconstruction are what has to be excluded in order to define one’s truth and how one’s truth is produced. My teachers, supervisors, and co-workers are part of a worldwide group — the largest sector of the electorate, considered only as body count for elections,– that must be excluded. Unless there is a sustaining structure to engage such people critically in, let us say museality, no short term solutions for inclusiveness will decolonize or deconstruct. Just as there are global medical and philanthropic organizations – providing clean water, medical care, education without any involvement with the quality of mind-making, etc. – undoubtedly very necessary – so also should there be a correspondingly large civil society engagement in the kind of education I described recently to a colleague in Britain as the humanities component at his university was being destroyed: an ethical healthcare system for the state, not a cash cow. Last year, I proposed to the Comparative and International Education Society a permanent and persistent revolution – a worldwide educational initiative on a thoroughly decentralized, cellular model, and an ongoing effort to keep it that way.
Incidentally, this health care, this educational initiative, are differently conceived from the healthy mind in a healthy body formulation predicated upon the Culture and Anarchy model of the Museum down from the British nineteenth century4.
Even as I speak of averting the possibility of a broken and monstrous future for the grandchild, Nayantara Chandra, born in 2017, I want to invoke the mother Sivani Chakravorty born in 1913, as her questions set me going on the matter of museums: In 1985 I took my mother for the first time to the Louvre. She was a smart, educated, learned, socially active, questioning person but she had only been to one museum, the Indian Museum in our hometown of Calcutta, built on a colonial model, where undefinable objects become definable and collectible, but the objects themselves were of course southern Asian antiquities. Buddhist and Hindu shading into Islam. She walks in, looks at the Winged Victory of Samothrace, reads the text, turns to me and asks if it is Greek, why is it here?
This is the broad question we ask today when we want to decolonize curatorial practice. (Of course she ignored the fact that Greek art, by virtue of being “the best European art,” was French, the greatest modern European civilization, because she herself was ideologized into the greatness of India.)
Mother wanted to see the Mona Lisa that had become so globalized that her question about Winged Victory would not travel there. I did not want to join the crowd, planned to meet mother at the Roman sculptures. She came back with a good liberal response: such a small piece of canvas gave so much joy to so many millions of people over the centuries! This is the broadest excuse given for expanding the audience at the Museum – in our local slang bringing in the barrio. My mother’s liberalism is shared by a certain class around the world: art as a source of “joy” with no sense of that affect’s class-specificity – leading to the question that relates to the much older one: whatever happens to my grandfather’s picture when it is hung in the museum? With my very same mother in his lap?
But Mieke Bal would know to ask: what about the snakeskin on your other wall?
Two Shona men came out of the woods on the northern border of the Zambesi, with the freshly killed snake bleeding still. They would eat the snake and throw away the skin. I bought the skin for $4, etc. etc. Many re-imaginings there.
Let me confront mother’s liberalism, well-inherited by me: as acknowledgment of complicity (being folded together with what I critique), I have tried to use deconstruction as affirmative sabotage: do not excuse (saying “art can heal”), do not accuse (saying “museum is colonial”), but – enter that social formation that you are criticizing as thoroughly as you can (among our hosts this is not a problem, they are deeply and authoritatively imbricated in the curatorial work, it is a powerful auto-critique) – so, enter to find in it a toehold that will allow you to turn the whole thing around to serve purposes other than its original self-comprehension. The sexy name for this toehold is “the moment of transgression.” The pioneering introduction of land acknowledgments into the Metropolitan Museum allowed me such a toehold – the walls of the museum were transgressed or breached. The walls of the museum of the metropolis, the metropolis, had been breached, it has been located as mere built space. Let us listen to Mieke Bal on the Met:
The Met fits all the priorities of its own social environment: Western European art dominates, American art is represented as a good second cousin, evolving as Europe declines, while the parallel marginal treatment of “archaic” and “foreign” art, from Mesopotamian to Indian, contrasts with the importance accorded to “ancient” as predecessor: the Greeks and Romans. As “natural” as such priorities may seem — due to what is available, one might say; but why? the difference with the British Museum in this respect tells us that these random facts are not so arbitrary. The overall impression is one of complete control, possession, storage: the Met has the art of the world within its walls, and its visitors have it in their pocket. It is possible to attribute this odd combination to the racism inherent in the colonialist origin of the museum, safely referred back to an age before today’s alleged race and gender consciousness.
Bal’s piece was published in 1992. The Met has made many conscientious changes since then, as it has passed through different directorships. Yet it must nonetheless be said that it might not be enough to appoint the brilliant new Associate Curator, Patricia Marroquin Norby, Purépecha, and to “include Native American objects” now defined as “art.”
Let us read the acknowledgment, necessarily in English.
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art is situated in Lenapehoking, Homeland of the Lenape diaspora, and historically a gathering and trading place for many diverse native peoples, who continue to live and work on this island, we respectfully acknowledge and honor all indigenous communities – past, present, and future – for their ongoing and fundamental relationships to the region.”5
The Lenapes, like subaltern Africans, were multilingual, and Lenape itself is, like Yoruba, a collective singular name for a multiplicity. What is it simply to say: we are sitting on your land but we respect you.
The solution is not open-air museums, Yosemite, etc. In other words, not of creating the artificial natural. I approach the problem through end of Capital Vol. 1, where Karl Marx suggests that the capitalization (read spectralization-museumization) of land produces so-called primitive accumulation, making industrial capitalism possible. Thus, allowing the “Native American” the same modernity as ourselves, in today’s contested future, rather than propose “sustainable tourism” (I quote the World Monuments Heritage Fund), we should all learn to undo our minds to realize that (ourselves as) the world itself – and this is everyone — can only acknowledge that worlding was imposed on ownerless land, before it was even commonly held. For this, one of our tasks (worked through by earlier suggestions such as to the World Economic Forum and Comparative Education Society), is to impart to the indigenous subaltern a sense of the cartographic world, rather than dwell on the fact that most indigenous languages have a word for “world,” but not for “colonialism,” or “deconstruction.”
How is this tremendous epistemological performance, sustained by imaginative activism rather than cost-effectiveness, to be achieved? Will it hit us by creative chance (Aristotle calls this tuchè) as we perform the short-term tasks assiduously, without personal politics? Let us turn to the end of that citation from the mad mathematician/philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “when we arbitrarily conceptualize something…we are not surprised by those pictures enough to say ‘Look there!’” (trans. modified). We must wait for the re-imagined meta-museality as dictated by the planetary to surprise us.6
In summary: short-term solutions must be worked at. Decolonizing is ideologically imposed by neo-liberalism. Deconstruction, methodologically practiced, can lead to affirmative sabotage of land acknowledgment displacing itself to confront planetarity. Examples: mother, grandchild, snakeskin, rural schools, Asian antiquity.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University. She is author of , among other titles, Of Grammatology (1976), Selected Subaltern Studies (ed., 1988), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2012), Readings (2014), Living Translation (2022).
Footnotes:
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Imperative to Re-Imagine the Planet,” in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2012), p.335-50. ↩︎
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, tr., G.E.M.Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 109/109e. ↩︎
- Samir Amin (2017) From Bandung (1955) to 2015: Old and New Challenges
for the States, The Nations and The Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Interventions, 19:5,
609-619, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2017.1336460
↩︎ - Matthew Arnold, Culture And Anarchy (London: Elder, 1869). ↩︎
- Permission applied for. ↩︎
- lease consult Vijay Prashad, “In the Name of Saving the ClimateThey Will Uberise the Farmland: the Forty-Sixth Newsletter (2021), Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research for an example of the spectralization of land. Examples are everywhere. https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/agricultural-technology/
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