57576662 indexing in a thenticity art an artefact ayele durand
TRANSCRIPT
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INDEXING (IN)AUTHENTICITY
Art and artefact in ethnography museums
Carine Ayélé Durand*
Abstract
Over the past three decades, ethnographic museums have increasingly collected and displayed
contemporary artworks in order to challenge assumptions about the (in)authenticity of cultural
minorities. Yet, this paper argues, by perpetuating ambiguities and contradictions in their collect-
ing and display practices, they have often failed to fully acknowledge the complexities attached
to the notion of cultural continuity. Drawing on examples from the Etnografiska Museet in
Stockholm and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge, it is sug-gested that the collecting of contemporary artworks in ethnographic museums might not be
sufficient to make these institutions socially and politically relevant. As some of the Sámi and
Mäori artists involved have indicated, direct engagement between artists and museum staff, and
with the public, is fundamental to conveying that their artworks are at once “traditional” and
“contemporary”.
*Department of Social Anthropology,University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Email: [email protected]
Introduction
This paper takes as its focus the collections
of objects used to represent in museums what
were once described as “primitive” cultures.
It considers a current trend among ethno-
graphic museums to develop collections of
contemporary (“ethnic”) art as a strategy for
demonstrating their social relevance. Despite
curatorial good intentions, it is argued, some
museums have perpetuated persistent biases by
failing to demonstrate that indigenous cultures
and art production are at once “traditional and
contemporary” (Thomas, 1999, pp. 16–17). By
exploring the way these matters were addressed
at the Etnografiska Museet (Stockholm,
Sweden) and the Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology (MAA; Cambridge, UK), this
paper shows how the process of selecting and
acquiring contemporary artworks places muse-
ums in a complex position in relation to debates
about cultural continuity. If they purchase
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INDEXING (IN)AUTHENTICITY 249
pieces that look too “modern” as exemplar of
contemporary cultures, they risk suggesting to
their audience that those peoples have lost their
cultural distinctiveness to the ravages of coloni-
alism and globalization. On the other hand, ifthey collect things that are too traditional, they
are accused of perpetuating the notion that such
cultures live in a timeless ethnographic present.
As experiences from my ethnographic research
demonstrate, museums have increasingly sought
to address this apparent impasse by involving
representatives of indigenous peoples and cul-
tural minorities themselves in collecting (as well
as exhibition) processes. So far this has typically
involved giving artists a strong degree of artisticfreedom in producing commissioned works, and
encouraging them to present their work in their
own terms to the museum-going public.
Art in museums of ethnography
From the mid-1970s on, the emergence of an
international indigenous art market has aroused
the interest of ethnographic museums in ethni-cally conscious art. The collection and display
of such productions have been encouraged to
increase the contemporary social and political
relevance of museums. It has also helped them
to strengthen their relationships with indig-
enous peoples and other cultural minorities on
the one hand, and to offer something new to
their public by assembling historical objects and
new works of art on the other. As several exam-
ples will show however, it is still difficult for
European museums that have lacked constant
relationships with indigenous contemporary
art producers to avoid perpetuating the view
of contemporary indigenous art as inauthentic.
Over the past three decades, the collect-
ing of contemporary artworks produced by
indigenous peoples has redefined the role of
institutions, which were established to assem-
ble material records of “vanishing” cultures
and traditions in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries (Haas, 1996; Phillips & Steiner, 1999;
Stocking, 1985). At the same time, indigenous
artists, scholars and museum practitioners have
increasingly called traditional display practices
into question, which had “despised as inauthen-
tic” or “relegated to the category of ‘touristart’” objects which demonstrated “‘accultur-
ated’ or ‘hybrid’ aesthetic forms” (Phillips,
1994; Phillips, 2006; Thomas, 1999). While
the 1970s and 1980s witnessed the develop-
ment of an international indigenous peoples’
movement (Daes, 1977; Sanders, 1977) and
the adoption by many countries of a politics of
multiculturalism (Hewitt, 2005; Turner, 1993),
Jean Fisher has argued that (despite curatorial
good intentions) exhibition contexts have been“persistently colonial in nature”, failing “to
acknowledge not only the circumstances under
which . . . collections are formed but also the
modern existence of Native peoples” (1992,
p. 44). Commenting on similar biases, Ruth
Phillips recalled, for instance, that during her
doctoral fieldwork in Sierra Leone in the early
1970s she was “still complicit in the search for
the mythic ‘authenticity’ and ‘purity’ of African
art” (1994, p. 43). She describes how her obser-vations of Mende artists’ practices profoundly
challenged her first assumptions:
During the colonial period, Mende art, like
many other traditions around the world,
began to display an increased naturalism that
was antithetical to the formal qualities most
Western art lovers appreciated in African art.
The carvings preferred by Mende audiences in
1972 had been influenced by Western modes
of representation which were journalistic and
commercial rather than artistic. I also met
Mende carvers in proud possession of recent
paperbacks on African art, which they used
as sourcebooks for replications of sculptural
genres from other parts of Africa. The hybrid,
in other words, was everywhere to be seen,
although—in that prepostmodern phase of
scholarship—it had not yet been ‘named’ or
celebrated as a valid form of postcolonial
expression. (1994, p. 40)
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While scholars like Phillips increasingly ques-
tioned their own assumptions about cultural
authenticity and traditions in the 1970s, non-
Western anthropologists voiced their concerns
about a persistent interest in anthropology instudying “vanishing” cultures before their dis-
appearance. As Simeon Chilungu wrote:
Lévi-Strauss goes on to say that ‘research must
be speeded up and we must take advantage
of the few years that remain to gather all the
information we can on these vanishing islands
of humanity. Such information is vital for,
unlike the natural sciences, the sciences of
man cannot originate their own experimenta-tion’. Here I totally disagree. Africans, Asians,
Polynesians, American Indians, Melanesians,
and Australians are critical of anthropologists
because of this very guinea-pig approach.
(1976, pp. 464–465)
By the 1990s museum practitioners were well
aware of criticism voiced by anthropologists
engaged in the “writing culture” debates and by
representatives of indigenous communities andethnic minorities who increasingly participated
in national and international arenas. Important
political and academic developments, including
the emergence of an international indigenous
peoples’ movement and the growing contri-
bution of informants to the development of
collaborative methodologies in anthropology
(Lassiter, 2005), influenced museum practice
in North America, the Pacific and Europe.
After more than a decade of self-reflection,
they were now in a better position to critically
analyse their collecting and display strategies.
The renewed interest in ethnographic collec-
tions as “primitive art” in the 1980s, while
criticized (Clifford, 1988; Danto, 2006 [1984];
Faris, 1988; Gell, 1999; Miller, 1993; Price,
1989; Rubin, 2003; Vogel, 2006 [1988]), drew
attention towards ethnographic and cultural
history museums that had been so far per-
ceived by many as “warehouses of material
culture from peoples living in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries” (Haas, 1996, p. S8).
By the 1990s, therefore, the growing interest
by mainstream art galleries and museums in
non-Western contemporary artworks raised the
question of whether and how ethnographic andcultural history museums should also collect
and display such artworks to demonstrate their
social relevance (Weibel & Buddensieg, 2007).
Faced with shrinking budgets, limited storage
facilities and the multiplication of indigenous
peoples’ institutions—built to display their own
cultural heritage, museum professionals in eth-
nography institutions wondered whether, why
and how they should still continue to collect
(Sayers, 1991). In Britain, for example, mostethnographic museums could not afford to
participate in the expensive tribal art market. In
contrast to the prices of antiquities, pre-Colum-
bian, African, Indonesian and Oceanic arts,
which are seen as inherently traditional rather
than contemporary, Aboriginal Australian art,
usually marketed as “contemporary fine art”
(Geismar, 2001, p. 44), at least initially, seemed
more affordable. As their productions become
entangled in the art market “some of those whowere or might have been native craftsmen are
transformed into artists in the Western sense”
(Stocking, 1985, p. 6), being accorded “interna-
tional appreciation as producers of ‘high art’”
(Myers, 1991, p. 27). However, the authenticity
of their art is still under scrutiny. For example,
a television documentary Art from the Heart?,
screened in 1999, argued that “Aboriginal
paintings produced for the market could not
be authentic” (Burns Coleman, 2001, p. 385).
Four grounds were specified on which the claim
that these productions were not genuine art
was based: (i) the paintings in question are not
spiritually motivated but were produced for sale
and therefore are not traditionally Aboriginal;
(ii) Aboriginal paintings produced in acrylics,
on canvas, or in any other medium that is not
traditional, are not authentic; (iii) some paint-
ings were not produced by people of Aboriginal
descent and are not, therefore, Aboriginal art;
and (iv) as some paintings were not produced
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INDEXING (IN)AUTHENTICITY 251
by the persons who were believed to haveproduced them, the Aboriginal people whosigned them were engaged in the productionof fakes.
Burns Coleman, writing critically about theprogramme, noted:
These claims were supposed to lead us to the
conclusion that the paintings under question
are fakes: in the sense that they are not ‘tra-
ditional Aboriginal art’ and in the sense that
they are not ‘art’. (2001, p. 385)
Yet, she continues, Aboriginal groups have pre-
sented “counter-claims that challenge Westernphilosophical preconceptions about authentic-ity in painting. They have claimed that worksthat are ‘obviously’ inauthentic from a Westernperspective are in fact authentic” (p. 385).Debates in Australasia and North America,including growing criticisms of the preferencefor the traditional in indigenous art and thedifficulty for museums in acquiring contempo-rary objects, have also emerged in European
museums. However European ethnographicmuseums have developed distinctive ways ofengaging with such issues. On the one hand theyhave had to question their relationships withindigenous communities that are geographi-cally distant. On the other hand, particularlyin the Nordic countries, some have also dealtwith people indigenous to their territories. Inaddition, ethnographic museums have workedmore and more with representatives of indig-
enous groups who are living as members ofdiasporic communities in European urban cen-tres (Raymond & Salmond, 2008). They havethus developed specific questions regarding thecollecting of contemporary indigenous art. Incontrast to their colleagues in North Americaand the Pacific, curators in European institu-tions have found it more difficult to break withpopular stereotypes about indigenous peoplewho are more likely to be seen on television
than in the streets.A common assumption in anthropological
and museological literature is that while cura-tors and scholars have now acknowledged theimportance of showing culture change, thebroader audience visiting museums retain “an
appetite for a pure ‘primitive’ culture that canbe romanticized” (Thomas, 1999, p. 16). Asexamples drawn from my own fieldwork expe-rience will soon demonstrate, this assumptionseems even more justified in Europe, where thepublic is often described as “ignorant” of geo-graphically distant contemporary indigenouscultures and art production (Schindlbeck, 2002,p. 351). In the next section I therefore questionwhether museum professionals and their finan-
cial supporters are now clearly encouragingalternative perspectives on indigenous peoples’authenticity. Even in European museums thathave developed more enduring relationshipswith indigenous peoples, the presentation ofcontemporary artworks is sometimes jeopard-ized by a persistent preference for traditionalethnic art.
Collecting Sámi art
The Etnografiska Museet in Stockholm has beencollaborating with indigenous communitiesfor more than a decade. Important initiativeshave included the return of its Sámi collec-tion to Ájtte, the Swedish Mountains and SámiMuseum of Jokkmokk in northern Swedenin the late 1980s, and the repatriation of acarved totem pole to the Haisla community
in Canada (Cardinal, 2003; Rozental, 2007).The museum has thus developed knowledge onand relationships with both distant and nearbyindigenous communities. In 1999, it planneda new exhibition, Den Skapande Människan(Creative Man), designed to “convey the ideathat human beings create and shape world-view, beliefs, and material objects through theirunique understanding of the natural environ-ments in which they live” (Durrah Scheffy,
2004, p. 179). The exhibition is divided intothree sections, presenting the artistic traditions
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C.A. DURAND252
of indigenous peoples in Australia, the Amazon
and the Arctic. The Arctic section focuses on
four ethnic groups: the Sámi, Inuit, Chukchi
and Aleut. Karin Westberg, then museum edu-
cator and responsible for the Sámi part in thisexhibition, explained that the inclusion of Sámi
artistic creations in a museum dedicated to the
presentation of non-European cultures was
motivated by a lack of knowledge in Sweden
about contemporary Sámi culture. As she says:
“Many Swedes still look at Sámi as they were
living ‘before’” (K. Westberg, personal com-
munication, March 2008).
In an effort to counter popular stereotypes
of Sámi as merely reindeer-herders living inthe far north, Westberg commissioned Sámi
handicraft artist Helge Sunna to make a con-
temporary drum that would help to present
current Sámi concerns. Ceremonial drums from
the 17th and 18th centuries are among the
most exhibited Sámi objects in ethnographic
museums. Called sorcery drums (troll trummor
in Swedish), they were confiscated or burnt
during the expansion of Christian missions in
Fenno-Scandinavia and Kola Peninsula (Russia)(Mulk & Westman, 1999). As a result, less
than 80 historic drums remain—now stored in
museums across Europe, mainly in Sweden but
also in Denmark, Norway, England, Germany,
France, Spain and Italy (Edbom, 2005).
When Sunna began making drums in the
mid-1960s, he created what he now calls “cop-
ies” of ceremonial drums, without modifying
the selection and disposition of the so-called
bildvärld (world-picture)—the figures painted
on the skin of historic drums. The drum maker,
he argues, creates a copy when he tries to repro-
duce as precisely as possible the bildvärld of old
drums (personal communication, June 2007).
He adds that makers need a long time to prac-
tise copying old drums before being able to
make one of their own. Sunna created his first
“own” drum in 1997. The skin of this drum
was decorated with a Sámi flag in the centre
and was purchased by a private collector from
Uppsala (Sweden). In making his drums, Sunna
aims to integrate symbols and figures found on
old drums into the present (Sunna, 2006). He
argues that, through their drums, contemporary
handicraft artists also tell stories about their
own living environment.In contrast with replicas of traditional
drums made by other contemporary artists,
Sunna’s drums show current issues and aspects
of present-day Sámi life. As he commented in
the exhibition text he wrote to accompany his
work, the drum expresses both continuity with
the old drums held in museum stores and his
own contemporary perspective on Sámi life
(Sunna, 1999), thus demonstrating that Sámi
culture was simultaneously traditional andcontemporary. However, this approach was not
fully supported by the museum. As Westberg
recalled, the Etnografiska Museet refused to
purchase the drum at first on the grounds that its
budget was too limited. She thus contacted the
Museum Friends Association hoping for finan-
cial support: “[A]t first [they] were interested in
sponsoring the drum but when they heard it was
‘a modern drum’ they refused” (K. Westberg,
personal communication, March 2009).Following these refusals, Sunna suggested
lending the drum to the museum until the
closing of the exhibition. Eventually, in 2001,
2 years after the drum was first exhibited, the
Etnografiska Museet secured funding to pur-
chase the piece, which is still on display. The
inclusion of Sunna’s drum in a display about
the traditions of indigenous cultures generated
a debate within the museum about what is
authentic Sámi art. For Westberg and Sunna,
the authenticity of the drum lay, on the one
hand, in Sunna’s knowledge of the environ-
ment and of the materials he used, and on the
other, in his ability to express his own vision of
contemporary Sámi culture through the things
he made. However, as Westberg wrote in her
introductory text to the Sámi display case, other
commentators, such as the Museum’s Friends
Association, recognized authenticity only in the
reproduction of the traditional art forms of the
past centuries:
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INDEXING (IN)AUTHENTICITY 253
[W]e can hear critical voices saying that
Helge’s drum cannot be authentic. It does not
look like the old ones, those that were made in
the 17th and 18th centuries! . . . If [contempo-
rary indigenous peoples’] craft and art are notvisibly traditional they are not considered as
‘authentic’ . . . If a Sámi does not wear a kolt
[traditional garment], does not perform joik
[traditional singing], does not live in a kåta
[traditional dwelling] while reindeer-herding,
it is said that he is or she is not an ‘authen-
tic’ Sámi! (Westberg, 1999, my translation)
As seen earlier with the controversy surround-
ing the screening of the Australian televisiondocumentary, Art from the Heart?, scholars
and indigenous artists in the Pacific have been
involved in similar debates as those surrounding
Sunna’s drum (Burns Coleman, 2001). By com-
missioning Sunna to make a new drum, Westberg
wanted to give voice to Sámi “counter-claims”
about authenticity. Indigenous peoples have
increasingly sought to distance themselves from
essentialist ideologies regarding the continuity
of their traditions. International institutionssuch as the Working Group on Indigenous
Populations (WGIP) and museums have been
used as forums in which such communities
together with other cultural minorities have
explicitly argued that their cultural continu-
ity, while based on past traditions, implies the
constant creation of new knowledge. Informed
by these international debates, Westberg thus
convened public encounters in which Sunna
expressed his definition of authenticity in his
own terms, stressing the authority he had gained
over the years through family connections and
continuous engagement with materials, such as
reindeer antlers, roots and skins, that helped
him to talk about his experience and knowl-
edge through his art and craft (Sunna, 1999).
As examined below in a second example from
Cambridge, museum practitioners in Europe
have increasingly expressed an interest in what
contemporary indigenous artists can offer
museums regarding the concept of authenticity.
Unsettling the (in)authentic: Pasifika
Styles
Together with other ethnographic museums
in Europe, North America and the Pacific,MAA has developed strategies over the last
decade to add contemporary art and craft to
their ethnographic collections. Drawing on a
broad network of students and scholars from
the university, who conduct anthropological
and archaeological fieldwork in many coun-
tries, MAA allocates each year small grants
issued from its Crowther Beynon Fund, one
of which enabled the curators of the Pasifika
Styles exhibition to collect newly made itemswhich were later incorporated to co-curator
Rosanna Raymond’s art installation Eye Land
Pt2: Welkome 2da K’Lub (Durand, 2008).
Participating in the Pasifika Styles exhibi-
tion, I became involved in the interactions
and discussions surrounding the selection and
display of a wide variety of objects including
artefacts drawn from the museum’s Oceanic
collections, items purchased in New Zealand
by the co-curators, as well as artworks commis-sioned for the exhibition and brought from the
Pacific or created by the artists in the museum.
It became soon obvious that, by displaying all
these objects in the same space, the Pasifika
Styles exhibition called into question the oppo-
sition between traditional and contemporary,
as explained in the exhibition website:
A fusion of contemporary style and technologi-
cal innovation with ancient traditions, Pasifika
Styles unites the new wave of contemporary
Pacific art and culture with extraordinary
historical collections. (MAA, 2008)
Described by one commentator as “a poly-
phonic collage” (Moutu, 2007), and enriched
by recorded interviews of the artists and audio-
visual material exhibited alongside artworks
and artefacts, Pasifika Styles explored issues
of authenticity and inauthenticity, in part by
showing a wide diversity of art forms (painting,
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C.A. DURAND254
sculpture, photography, etc.) and materials
(acrylic Perspex, glitter on canvas, synthetic
flowers, newspapers and so on). Deidre Brown,
a contemporary art curator and historian of
Mäori Art at the University of Auckland,describes this artistic approach, common in
New Zealand, which does not eradicate the
traditional but embraces it as a crucial com-
ponent of the contemporary. She argues that
“while European influence has changed Pasifika
art aesthetically, it has not changed it concep-
tually” (Brown, 2008, p. 28). Western media,
art practices and technologies, she continues,
“have often been employed to perpetuate Pacific
concepts” (Brown, 2008, p. 28). The fusionof “contemporary style” and “ancient tradi-
tions” evoked by the museum’s website, and
the perpetuation of Pacific concepts described
by Brown, were also made evident in the work
of Mäori artist Bethany Edmunds (Figure 1).
Her installation pART mAOri (2006) showed
traditional Mäori carving patterns made out of
denim. Edmunds, as the artist herself explains
in an interview with Rosanna Raymond, usesall the abilities she has gained from her double
heritage—part Mäori, part Päkehä (people of
European descent)—to translate her traditional
knowledge into contemporary materials.
A lot of my work is focused on young people
. . . I’ve had the privilege and the ability to
sit with my old . . . nannies . . . and learn
skills from them and I think that it’s really
important because I’ve been given all of . . .
this knowledge. I then become a vessel for
that knowledge and it’s my responsibility to
hand it on to future generations. . . . Being
part Mäori is a huge thing for me and having
returned back to the big city [Auckland] where
I grew up as a teenager it’s really interesting
to translate all of that old knowledge that I’ve
got from the far north and then bring it back
to the city and put it into a context that peo-
ple in an urban environment can understand.
(interview by Rosanna Raymond, 2005)
In the same way as Sunna explained to visi-
tors to the Etnografiska Museet in Stockholm,
Edmunds relates the authenticity of her work to
the knowledge she has acquired over the years.
Learning the history and stories related to themotifs she uses has given her, she argues, the
“licence and the ability” to interpret them in
an urban environment (interview by Rosanna
Raymond, 2005). Using simultaneously the tra-
ditional and the contemporary, Edmunds states
that “it’s about not having to put myself in a
little tiny box. I can actually be comfortable to
weave all of the strands of my bloodlines into
the person that I am” (ibid.).
FIGURE 1 Detail of pART mAOri by Bethany
Edmunds at the Cambridge Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology,
May 2006.
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INDEXING (IN)AUTHENTICITY 255
Other ways of assembling traditional and
contemporary resources in the museum were
demonstrated by artist George Nuku. At the
entrance to the Pasifika Styles exhibition, visi-
tors were welcomed by his Outer Space Marae,carved from acrylic Perspex (Figure 2). In May
2006, in preparation for the exhibition opening,
Nuku used museum workshop facilities to cre-
ate additional elements for this piece. Assisting
him in his work, which took place partly in the
museum’s galleries, I could see how the public
engaged with his installation. Many of the visi-
tors at first could not tell whether the Marae was
made of plastic or ice. Nuku encouraged them to
touch it and then discussed why he had chosen towork with Perspex rather than wood. He argued
that Mäori have always worked with the materi-
als available around them. In the 21st century, he
said, “we live in a plastic world, there is plastic all
around us” (G. Nuku, personal communication,
May 2006). His carved Perspex demonstrated
his ability to call on the experience and knowl-
edge of previous generations while engaging
with contemporary materials. Commenting on
the issue of authenticity debated over the past
decades in anthropology and in museums, Nukucalled into question the judgment of scholars and
art critics:
How can somebody who lives on the other
side of the world come and tell you on your
side of the world how you’re supposed to be?
I mean that doesn’t make any sense—it would
be like me going over to England and trying
to instruct the people of England on English
culture and saying that their culture is notauthentic and it’s become corrupted and they
should be doing it this way. (interview by
Rosanna Raymond, 2005)
Edmunds’ and Nuku’s artworks illustrate “the
extent to which an indigenous population can
FIGURE 2 George Nuku completing his installation Outer Space Marae at the Cambridge Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology, May 2006.
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C.A. DURAND256
remain grounded in tradition and in ances-
tral practices while being fully engaged with
modernity at the same time” (Thomas, 1999,
p. 223). Yet such intentions do not always get
through to museum audiences. Museums maynot always succeed in conveying the simulta-
neity of traditional and contemporary, despite
curatorial good intentions and a collaborative
approach to exhibition planning. According to
Edmunds herself, indeed, “to view someone’s
work on the wall is one thing but to converse
with the artist about where they’re coming from
is a whole other thing” (interview by Rosanna
Raymond, 2005). Well aware of this issue,
the Pasifika Styles exhibition offered museumvisitors the opportunity to understand how
the artists challenged common assumptions
about authenticity by simultaneously using
traditional and contemporary elements in their
artworks. This was achieved by a variety of
methods, including a documentary featuring
artist interviews, directed by Lisa Taouma, a
New Zealand-Samoan writer and broadcaster
(Salmond, 2008); interviews (available on sound
stations in the gallery and on the Pasifika Styles
exhibition website [MAA, 2008]); and work-shops, as well as gallery demonstrations led by
visiting artists (Figure 3). In late June and early
July 2006, for example, Bethany Edmunds led
weaving workshops in Cambridge with Mäori
weaver Kahutoi Te Kanawa. Participants were
able to acquire knowledge about the traditional
and contemporary practice and uses of Mäori
weaving. During 3 days, they were taught “the
harvesting of New Zealand flax (Phormium
tenax), extracting its fibre, traditional dye tech-niques using heated stones from a small fire pit,
and the techniques of Mäori decorative täniko
finger weaving” (Harknett, 2008, p. 101).
A year after the exhibition opened, in
April 2007, an interim evaluation report ana-
lysed some of the visitors’ comments about
FIGURE 3 MAA’s anthropology gallery during the closing of the Pasifika Styles Exhibition, February
2008.
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INDEXING (IN)AUTHENTICITY 257
the “fusion” Pasifika Styles aimed to produce
between Mäori and Pacific Islanders’ contempo-
rary art and the museum’s Oceanic collections.
Wonu Veys (then a curatorial assistant at MAA)
recalled that from the beginning of and duringthe project there were serious reservations and
concerns about having a contemporary art
show in an anthropology museum (personal
communication, April 2009). Indeed, some
commentators from the fine arts community in
New Zealand feared that contemporary Mäori
and Pacific Islanders’ artworks exhibited in
a museum of anthropology would inevitably
be associated “in many people’s minds with
primitivist and ethnically orientated under-standings” (Raymond & Salmond, 2008,
p. 13). However, responses to the 2007 visi-
tor survey demonstrated a strong interest in
this innovative approach. In answering the
question, what did you learn that was new?,
a visitor wrote, “how culture is developing
with new influences yet still keeping traditional
styles and methods” (Harknett, 2007). Others
acknowledged the “eagerness of artists to link
traditional craft with contemporary art” and“the juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘new’ taonga/art,
the effect–impact was one of cultural/artistic
continuity and change” (Harknett, 2007). To
the questions: “What did you like least? If you
could change one thing, what would it be?”,
only 1 of 46 respondents answered “that it is
too modern art like” [sic]. The vast majority
of visitors who responded to the survey were
in line with the following statement: “I think
the key idea is progress, by incorporating tra-
ditional elements it is possible to innovate but
stay true to your cultural heritage” (Harknett,
2007). If they are representative of the wider
community, these generally positive comments
tend to challenge Thomas’ and Schindlbeck’s
claims, that the broader audience visiting muse-
ums retain “an appetite for a pure ‘primitive’
culture that can be romanticized” (Thomas,
1999, p. 16). A wider survey would have been
necessary for a truly representative sample,
but the findings freely provided by 46 visitors
to the exhibition suggest that museums willing
to remain socially relevant might gain insights
from this initiative. While many of the audience
visiting the Pasifika Styles exhibition were unfa-
miliar with contemporary art from the Pacific,they seem to have been eager to understand
the kinds of connections artists drew between
ancestral collections and contemporary art-
works. The kaupapa or guiding strategy of
the exhibition certainly influenced the public’s
positive responses. As mentioned, at various
times during the exhibition museum visitors
were able to directly engage with the artists
participating in public lectures and workshops.
Visitors were thus able to discuss with the artiststo understand “where they are coming from” as
suggested by Edmunds (interview by Rosanna
Raymond, 2005).
The example of the Pasifika Styles exhibition
suggests that the collecting of contemporary
artworks in ethnographic museums might not
be sufficient to make these institutions socially
and politically relevant. As some of the Mäori
and Pacific Island artists involved have indi-
cated, direct engagement between artists andmuseum staff and with the public was fun-
damental to convey that the revitalization of
past traditions cannot be reduced to formal or
functional affinities between the old and the
new. While assembling their artworks, the art-
ists demonstrated that none of their works fell
neatly into the category of inauthentic produc-
tions created for an international art market,
in which non-Western works of art have often
been classified since the 1970s. Rather, they are
self-conscious works that aim to reveal, rather
than conceal, the contradictions embedded in
the lives of indigenous peoples and other cul-
tural minorities today.
Conclusion
In response to discussions in museums and in
the academy about cultural and artistic authen-
ticity, the Sámi and Mäori artists participating
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C.A. DURAND258
in the exhibitions discussed offered alternative
definitions of authenticity as the ability to be
simultaneously traditional and contemporary.
In doing so, they offered a challenge to the view
that indigenous peoples either “present them-selves and their causes in terms of essentialisms”
(Conklin, 1997, p. 728) or, if they do not con-
form to exotic images, are seen as not indigenous
enough. Criticism of Sunna’s contemporary
drum in the late 1990s at the Etnografiska
Museet in Stockholm seems to point towards
similar assumptions about authenticity: the
new is considered more authentic if it is easily
comparable with the old. While anthropologi-
cal discussions about indigenous peoples havelargely focused on essentialist discourses in
the past three decades, (Paine, 1985; Kuper,
2003; Barnard, 2006), many indigenous artists
have rejected the “role of exotic appearances as
markers of indigenous authenticity” (Conklin,
1997, p. 728). Nicholas Thomas has observed
for instance how some Pacific Island artists in
New Zealand “have embraced the fascination
with things Pacific, but insisted on defining
the object of that interest in their own terms”
(Thomas, 1996, p. 323). In the Pasifika Styles
exhibition, the organization of workshops,public lectures and, most importantly, the trans-
formation of the exhibition gallery into a space
in which the artists created their installations,
offered unique opportunities for museum staff
and visitors to better understand the difficul-
ties in recognizing contemporary works of art
as authentic.
Glossarybildvärld world-picture (Sámi)
joik traditional singing (Sámi)
kåta traditional dwelling (Sámi)
kaupapa guiding strategy (Mäori)
kolt traditional garment (Sámi)
taonga treasure (Mäori)
troll trummor sorcery drums (Sámi)
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INDEXING (IN)AUTHENTICITY 259
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