Clémentine Deliss - The Metabolic Museum

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 studies or sexuality, but as a philosophical drive that motored both the ideational extremes of artistic research and various experiments in ethnographic inquiry. One afternoon at the Musée de l’Homme, I came across the incomplete collection of the dissident Surrealist periodical Documents (1929–31) edited by Georges Bataille and Carl Einstein. Here I recognized the prelusive moment, the uncertain and unresolved phase in creative practice, and its ability to activate entry points beyond explanatory or contextual forms of information. I decided to juxtapose the written and visual assemblages in Documents with the collecting activities of the team of French anthropologists who crossed Africa between 1931 and 1933 on the notorious Mission Dakar–Djibouti, amassing more than 3,500 objects for the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris.

The thesis was a handmade affair produced on discs the size of a bathroom tile and interspersed with black-and-white photocopies of archival material. I asked an artist friend to take photographs of me while I worked in the museum’s library, standing on steps to reach books, or holding a Dogon mask on my face against the backdrop of metal filing cabinets.19 Alongside these self-portraits, we took photographs of Michel Leiris in his office or in conversation at the museum’s Le Totem bar. All this led to a doctorate that stuck out from the purely text-based, literary dissertations of the time. By then I had realized that academic anthropology was not my future. It was the summer of 1988, and I was keen to return to art and become a curator. The new discipline of cultural studies was flourishing in Birmingham under the leadership of Stuart Hall, and the Black Arts movement was active in London. Rasheed Araeen was preparing the seminal exhibition The Other Story and Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa were producing films on the Black experience in Britain. In contrast, the Museum of Mankind in London’s Burlington Gardens felt both disconnected from movements in contemporary art or cultural studies, and out of sync with curatorial practice.

The artists who made an impact on me as a student often worked in relation to a form of meta-ethnology. I focused on Lothar Baumgarten and his friend the anthropologist Michael Oppitz, who in turn was close to Marcel Broodthaers, Benjamin Buchloh, and Candida Höfer. Baumgarten and Oppitz created a shared wilderness out of their early expeditions to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. In 1976, Oppitz headed to Nepal to begin his long-term visual and textual recordings of Magar shamanism. Two years later, his friend abandoned the relative security of the Rhineland art scene for the Orinoco in Venezuela, armored with “a machete, a towel and a change of clothing, two Leica cameras, some film stock, a tape recorder, batteries, watercolor paints, pens, and paper.”20 Both messed with the sanctity of documentary material in different ways, testing out the poetics of chance encounters and alternative representations in language and visual media. Whereas Baumgarten’s adventures held fort within the discourse of art, Oppitz strode a high-wire suspended between the authority of academic publishing—that “paper persona” he always refused to become—and the experiments he performed in visual anthropology. His commitment to fieldwork was not one of rugged individualism in search of personal enlightenment, but a desire for human exchange.21 He questioned what it meant to be part of a context, be it in time or space—in Kathmandu, Cologne, or Kassel—in contemporary art or in anthropology. Is it one’s physical location, one’s political stance, or one’s interlocutors and the conversations they engender, he asked? Or might it be the desire to identify an emancipatory nerve, an organic alliance to those whose positions lie outside of the institution, thereby keeping the unforeseeable nature of the human condition, and the archival drive that defines it, both alive and contradictory? Oppitz recalls the period:

When you look at historical situations now and what was going on in Düsseldorf and Cologne between 1968 and 1975, there was something of a movement which we participants were not aware of at the time. All of us who were part of it thought, Jesus, we live in the wrong time. If only we had lived at the time of Minotaure! If only if we had lived during the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, we would be happy! There would be a bigger self. Now if we look back at this situation—and I talk to younger people about this—they say, damn it, why didn’t we live in 1968–1975 in Cologne and Düsseldorf! There were a number of people who you could see forming a group, although they weren’t. They didn’t understand themselves as such. The Surrealists did see themselves as a group for a short time, and they had a leader who kept them together, and there were people who created the ideology of the group. In Cologne and Düsseldorf, we did not have lead figure. There was maybe this or that artist who was a little more attractive than another one, and of course there were people whom we would not consider at the time, like Otto Piene or artists we found totally uninteresting. As time goes by, distances become larger and then it looks even more as if it was a group of self-made alliances.22

With its philosophical heritage, Frankfurt was a prominent player in the conversation between art and anthropology. Central to this junction of minds was the publishing company Qumran Verlag (1980–85), conceived and directed by writer and anthropologist Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs. With his connections to Parisian publishers and Swiss intellectuals, Heinrichs was the...