Osogbo and the Art of Heritage: Monuments, Deities, and Money

Coda: A Final Note on Heritage as Presence

Coda: A Final Note on Heritage as Presence In the introduction I recalled Henry Drewal’s definition of art history as the “study of the appearance of things” and asked what this appearance means under conditions of contemporary heritage politics, here defined as a field of cultural productions shaped and driven by collective identity, memory, and public representation. Let me begin with James Clifford’s (1997: 218) remark on the current prominence of museums: “In a global context where collective identity is increasingly represented by having a culture museums make sense.” No wonder, then, that the institution of the museum has become one of the most dominant signatures of our times. No longer limited to the West where it was first established as one of the pillars of the modern nation state, the museum has made its way to all corners of the globe—including, as we have seen, the sacred grove of a Yoruba goddess in southwest Nigeria, whose homestead is now “managed” by the curator of the Osogbo Museum which functions as a branch of Nigeria’s National Commission of Museums and Monuments. If the global expansion of museums represents the institutional evidence of the dynamics of contemporary identity politics, then heritage constitutes the conceptual apparatus by which museums not only justify their importance but also manage to produce their effect. In fact, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998: 149) has argued, heritage is a “new mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past.” Contrary to its conventional rhetoric, heritage neither preserves nor conserves. Rather it creates “something new”; it “adds value” (ibid.). Given today’s image economy, it is clear that the “added value” heritage produces rests first and foremost in the way it endows its bearers with presence in the national and global arena. Seen from this angle, what is necessary to grasp are the various and conflicting ways in which this production of presence has proceeded over time. As I have shown, what led to the Osogbo art movement and thus propelled the images of Osogbo artists into the Western public sphere was a Western and modernist conviction of the imminence of 160 OSOGBO AND THE ART OF HERITAGE loss and decay. Responding to their own fear that African art was on the verge of collapse, the initiators of the movement tried to prove that it was possible to revitalize and resurrect African creativity by the production of “new images.” Presence in this configuration was thus first and foremost a matter of replenishment. But presence was also about attention. As we have seen, performing the Osun festival was meant to invoke the divine energy àse that opened up windows into an otherworldly reality. The respective images aimed to make the participants aware of Osun’s power. At the same time though, the festival generated another kind of attention. The kind of appearance it aimed for was not geared to the other but to this world, or rather it used the former to achieve its effects in the latter. It was about making oneself visible in the global arena, creating spectatorship within a mass-mediated “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck 2001). The two conflicting modes of attention reflect that as much as heritage is about production it is also about contestation. In the book the conflicts appeared as a dispute over memory and media. At stake were questions of ownership and control of and over Osun. The issue of property brings us back to James Clifford’s observation of the global triumph of the museum. As noted, Clifford formulated his reflections on contemporary cultural politics in the late 1990s. Today, more than a decade later, it seems appropriate to radicalize his insights and contend that not only do we “live in a world of museums ” (Clifford 1997: 218), but rather the world itself has become a museum. In fact, this seems to be exactly the vision of UNESCO’s World Heritage program. Given both the expansion of categories of heritage and the speed at which the “properties” proliferate worldwide , one is led to suspect that the World Heritage Center conceives the world as a meta-museum in which the individual nation states act as curators and caretakers of UNESCO’s “properties.” The interest of the nation state in this kind of arrangement goes well beyond the aims of preservation and safeguarding cultural diversity . In the light of what we have said about the newness of heritage, the interest of states lies also...