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Keeping the Dark Continent Dark Jean-Pierre Salgas ven Jean-Luc Godard in his memorable T V appearance on Bouillon de culture1 was off target, and missed a fine chance to deconstruct the image of the Barnes Foundation as presented by the Muste d'Orsay Whatever its popular success (1,500,000 visitors), the exhibition was one of the most astonishing intellectual lapses of the last ten years For this Parisian showing of Barnes' "elitism for all" collection provided the perfect opportunity to reconsider the debates surrounding the creation of the Musee d'Orsay (destined to present the field of early modernity ), as well as those provoked by two shows at the MoMA, the 1984 Primitivism (the constitution of a formal field of world art) and High and Low (the object and work of art) It would have been enough simply to recreate one of the foundation's ten rooms in philadelphia2 to see how "the strange Mr Barnes" juxtaposed what was then called "Black art" and Cezannes and hung his paintings in his factory But instead of that what we got was a whole package of cliches about "the sequestering of masterpieces" redeemed because they are Renoir MISSED OPPORTUNITIES Meanwhile, on the other side of the Seine, the so-called "biggest museum in the world," the Grand Louvre, has failed to metamorphose into a genuine "museum of imagination " For although it has dropped the veil of ethnocentrism to make room for Islamic art, it looks pretty likely that Africa, Oceania and America will continue to be excluded from the canons of grand museological legitimacy T o see an interesting exhibition of distant art recently, you would have had to go to Marseille (Batcham: works from Cameroon), Lyon (Africa Explores, coming from New York and curated by Susan Vogel), or try the private Dapper Museum (the Luba exhibition) or the Petit Palais (preColumbian sculptors of the Greater Antilles: L 2 r t des sculpteurs Tainos) It is late , Doctor Barnes, and the senescent century is a disgrace to its youth Remember Appollinaire's words in Le journal du Soir in 1909: "The Louvre should contain a number of those ['exotic'] masterpieces which are just as powerful as the finest Western statues " In 1920, in the Bulletin de la vie artistique, FtnCon asked "twenty ethnographers and explorers, artists and aestheticians, collectors and dealers" (including Paul Guillaume) the simple question: " Will exotic art be admitted to the Louvre?" Most of the answers (which need to be read in the ambiguous context of the period's ambient conservatism) were positive In fact, the range of responses seems to anticipate all our contemporary debates on the subject In 1994, the art of oral cultures (for that, in the end, is what it's all about), remains the blindspot of French museums, and indeed of contemporary art Though carefully swept under the carpet, these debates re-emerged twice in 1989 - once with regard to contemporary art, and once on the subject of traditional art It was surely no coincidence After all, contemporary art ( much of which is pre-modern, a-modern) and "primitive" art have a great deal in common, and the hatreds inspired by these objects could well be related After the 1989 Bicentenary celebrations , and taking into account the renovation work then going on at the Louvre (the forerunner of which, the Museum Central des Arts, was established by the convention in 1793), Jacques Kerchache, once a dealer, now a collector , expert and curator (he organized the Tainos exhibi- tion ), as well as coauthor of a hefty volume on L 2 r t africain (Editions Mazenod, 1988), published a manifesto in Libhation on March 12, 1990 under the heading; "All the world's art is created free and equal " H e warned that if the authorities failed to admit "the primary arts" into the Grand Louvre, "then, by an act of blindness similar to the one that justified the dark night of colonialism, the France of 1989 will have approved the exclusion for decades to .. come all the major works produced by three quarters of the human race " Kerchache gathered a hundred prestigious signatures for what, when you think about it, was an...

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