Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac's Museum on the Quai Branly (review)

A symbiotic network connecting "museums and governmental agencies" (23) operates in France, and as Sally Price has shown, "Museums in France are solidly under the thumb of the State [. . .]. The principal governing body for French museums, the Direction des Musées de France (French Museums Board) or DMF, part of the Ministry of Culture, has traditionally played a determining role in the creation and function of major museums" (23). Indeed, since the office of Minister for Cultural Affairs was inaugurated in 1960, a mechanism has been set in motion whose antecedents can be found in such colonial mechanisms as the civilizing mission that rendered culture and politics indissociable. These close relations have expressed themselves in multiple ways, most powerfully in the Presidential "Grands travaux" legacy projects; former President François Mitterrand was the most active in this regard, literally transforming the Parisian landscape through the addition of such sites as Pyramide du Louvre, the Arche de la Défense, the Opéra Bastille and the new Bibliothèque Nationale. Thus, as Price shows,

The vision of museums as State institutions means that projects initiated by presidential decree operate through a special dynamic within the general structure, enjoying a degree of autonomy that simultaneously facilitates their efficient realization and foments strong divisions between supporters and opponents.

(27)

Broadly speaking, it is to these divisions that Price turns her attention in Paris Primitive.

The Musée Quai Branly (MQB) was Jacques Chirac's grand projet, inaugurated in June 2006, some eleven months prior to leaving office. The museum has essentially centralized the collections of the former Musée National des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie (MNAAO) and the Musée de l'Homme. Price's book provides a comprehensive background to the political intrigue (separate chapters are devoted to both Jacques Chirac and art collector Jacques Kerchache who masterminded the project) that informed the conceptualization, planning, resistance to, and ultimately the actualization of the MQB. The justificatory rationale of the project was to accord a place to those arts previously "unknown, neglected, or disdained" (36), overshadowed by established museums such as the Louvre in which Western art occupied a place of privilege.

However, the MQB is, much in the same way as other French museums, inseparable from layers of ambiguity. The Musée de l'Homme, for example, itself the outcome of several revised collections, was a space in which "to celebrate the exploits of French explorers and, more generally, the French nation" (81). Thus, the MQB's objective of transplanting "nearly three hundred thousands of objects in the collection of the ethnology department and elevate them to what was seen by proponents of the new museum to be conceptually higher ground as masterpieces of world art" (87) is naturally riddled with problems, and all the more as Price illustrates, given that

against this background, the current recontextualization of these same objects from scientific specimens to works of art might be read as continued proof of the power of political and cultural climates to determine the significance of objects that have been stripped of their original (native) meanings.

(97)

Anthropologist Maurice Godelier had recommended a "resolutely postcolonial museum" (50) that incorporated information on the history of acquisition as part of the display information, but he was eventually sidelined and that proposed angle was "drastically downsized and largely leeched of power to influence the museological program" (53). But for MQB architect, Jean Nouvel: "It's a space marked by the symbols of the forest, the river, and obsessions with death and oblivion [. . .] a snake or lizard into which you walk and discover not so much a building as a territory—a zoo really" (113, emphasis mine). Nouvel speaks with apparently no concern for the striking allusions to human zoos and essentializing exhibition practices at such sites as the Colonial Exposition of 1931. Many critics had observed very early on what Benoît de L'Estoile remarked upon in 2003: "In this day...