First Sunday of the month museums are for free so we try out Quai Branly. We have many a prejudice about the concept of “art premier”, like with the concept of “art brut” or outsider art. Actually they have abandoned the name, as it was a quite problematic way of calling everything that comes from “traditional societies”. It is art, but then it isn’t… So the concept of the museum staid but now it is called some no name like Musée des arts et civilisations d’Afrique, d’Asie, d’Océanie et des Amériques”.
Now that the place is not as full as the past year, when it grandly opened as Chirac’s last gift to the Republique and the queues went all the way out of the building, so that we had to give up on our last try (not really a problem).
The location is charming, so near to the tour Eiffel, it seems to have been taken into account for the window-openings. Inside you are lead around quite sternly and in an hour to do a quite dark and leathery, banal and superficial tour of the continents: from Oceania, 4 things from Asia, the Americas, and of course, Africa. This distribution is exclusively geographical, as the museum totally black out any historical changes in these “primitive societies”. Like if all the souvenirs from some coloniser had been put together, you can see an Indian feather mane besides some totems, a few Japanese kimono cloths along side some Chinese stuff.
This was the only object we found from Ethiopia. A wooden pillow. We had seen some already in Addis on our small museum tour, as well as in the markets, but it did not make more sense then either. As you see the object dates back two centuries, as most of the stuff displayed. Some aborigines designs where even from 1989. We where born back then, but the museum still sells it as “Art premiers”. So “arts premiers”, somehow, is arts primitifs but without sounding colonial. It is stuff that, if regarded as art, should sit in the Art museum, but is still considered quaint and etnographic, somehow relating to a past history of humanity.
A mix of ethnography, colonialism and postcolonialism we have also found in Porte Dorée, in the newly opened Museum of Immigration.
