Clémentine Deliss

Ethnografische Museen in Europa stehen seit geraumer Zeit unter legitimatorischem Zugzwang. Der grundlegende Diskurs ihrer Ausstellungen steht hierbei ebenso zur Disposition wie ihre sich nur allzu oft kolonialer Selbstermächtigung verdankende Sammlungsgeschichte. Dass es so nicht weitergeht, ist klar. Dass es darüber hinaus auch ganz anders sein kann, zeigt Clémentine Deliss in ihrer aktuellen Publikation. Sie bietet einen spannenden Mix aus autobiografisch informiertem Roman und wissenschaftlich argumentierendem Thesenpapier zur Gegenwartskunst und Ethnologie. Reflexionen über die eigene Arbeit als Direktorin des Frankfurter Weltkulturen Museums treffen auf prägende Auseinandersetzungen mit einflussreichen FilmemacherInnen, KünstlerInnen und SchriftstellerInnen. Zustandsbeschreibungen treffen auf das Metabolic Museum, das als interventionistisches Labor potenzielle Sammlungen für die Zukunft öffnet.

CLÉMENTINE DELISS erlangte als Kulturhistorikerin, Kuratorin, und Verlegerin internationale Bekanntheit. Als Direktorin des Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt sowie als Forscherin und Dozentin namhafter Kunstakademien und Institute steht der transdisziplinäre Austausch in der Gegenwartskunst im Zentrum ihrer Arbeit. Sie ist Associate Curator in den KW, Berlin und Gastprofessorin an der Akademie der Künste, Hamburg.

Vorwort
A manifesto for a radical new way of thinking the museum Postcolonial methods of curating on the basis of collections Transcultural and transdisciplinary research methods

Klappentext

For quite some time now, ethnographic museums in Europe have been compelled to legitimate themselves. Their exhibition-making has become a topic of discussion, as has the contentious history of their collections, which have come about through colonial appropriation. Clearly, this cannot continue. That the situation can be different is something that Clémentine Deliss explores in her current publication. She offers an intriguing mix of autobiographically-informed novel and conceptual thesis on contemporary art and anthropology. Reflections on her own work while she was Director of Frankfurt's Weltkulturen Museum (Museum of World Cultures) are interwoven with the explorations of influential filmmakers, artists and writers. She introduces the Metabolic Museum as an interventionist laboratory for remediating ethnographic collections for future generations.

CLÉMENTINE DELISS has achieved international renown as a curator, cultural historian and publisher of artist's books. In her role as Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, as a curator, and as a professor and researcher at eminent institutes and academies, she focuses on transdisciplinary and transcultural exchanges. She is Associate Curator of KW Berlin and Guest Professor at the Academy of Arts, Hamburg.

Leseprobe
Artists and Anthropologists

I had visited the ethnographic museum in Frankfurt ten years earlier in the autumn of 1999 as the newly appointed guest professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. On one occasion, the dean of the art school, Kasper König, took me to meet the director of Frankfurt's department of culture. They both knew of my background in cultural anthropology and wanted me to take on the vacant directorship of the ethnographic museum. At this first meeting, I declined. It felt anathema to the excitement of teaching art students. A couple of months later, the director invited me back to his office. Again, I refused. The main reason for not accepting the offer was informed by my studies of anthropology in the mid-eighties. At that time, the subject of analysis was not the foreign culture and its artifacts so much as the figure of the ethnographer. Anthropology, the "maculate,"14 soiled science, could be deconstructed by decoding the tropes employed to "write culture."15 Neighboring literary criticism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis, this radical strain of semantic anthropology was barely engaged in defusing the charged condition of its founding institution, the colonial museum and with it, the hundreds of thousands of confiscated artifacts. Studying anthropology and art practice in Vienna in the early eighties, I read everything I could that was brought out by German publishers such as Syndikat, Suhrkamp, or the Qumran Verlag. I discovered texts by ethno-psychoanalysts Paul Parin, Fritz Morgenthaler, and Mario Erdheim, essays by transgressive thinkers like Hubert Fichte, the work of Michael Oppitz and Fritz Kramer, alongside the more mystically oriented research of Hans Peter Duerr. This theoretical material played a role in the German-speaking art world of the time. As art students we read anthropology because there was little else. There were no formalized courses in curatorial studies and no transcultural academies; nothing but a relatively conservative art history, which bore little relation to the heteroclite practices of Actionism, Concept Art, and performance.

Key to this interdisciplinary crossover was a text written in the seventies by American artist Joseph Kosuth titled "The Artist as Anthropologist."16 In a sequence of numbered paragraphs, Kosuth cites economist Michael Polanyi, philosopher Martin Jay, sociologist Max Weber, and anthropologists Stanley Diamond, Bob Scholte, and Edward Sapir, and draws a map of contextual adjacency with which he aims to destabilize the narratives of Western modernism and scientism as the defining references in contemporary art. He argues for an "anthropologized art," "an art manifested in praxis," an "engaged" activity founded on "cultural fluency" whose criticality succeeds because it "depicts while it alters society."17 Kosuth's article-with its typically male figureheads-was more than merely a reading list for emerging artists. His intellectual stance corresponded with the aftermath of the first Independence period in sixties Africa, emancipatory movements in the US, the global student demonstrations of 1968, and the fallout of the Vietnam War. The relationship between contemporary art and cultural anthropology was built upon the articulation of linguistic and contextual propositions that might activate a recursive adjustment to ways of understanding and representing art itself.18

As a doctoral student in anthropology I was required to do fieldwork, so in 1986 I moved to Paris to investigate the storage rooms, archives, and ephemera of the Musée de l'Homme. I wanted to establish a link between those concentrates of Concept Art and Actionism that I had witnessed in Vienna as a young art student and the edginess and subversion that I detected within certain strains of twentieth-century anthropology. I named this connection eroticism, less with reference to gender stud