Hilden Debate

This commentary focuses on the Hilden piece titled Race for Sale: Narratives of Posession in Two “Ethnic” Museums as well as Carol Thompson’s titled Slaves to Sculpture: A Response to Patricia Penn Hilden, both articles published in the Drama Review.

The Hilden article discusses two museums: the George Gustav Heye Centre for the National Musuem of the American and the Museum for African Art. In the article, Hilden attempts to uncover the extent to which these two museums have “moved their centre” from the overculture’s national history of Europe to that of Africa and the African diaspora. Hilden argues that both spaces attempt to reconfigure a “new museum” by, for example, collaborating with the diasporic populations in their presentation of exhibitions and inverting negative stereotypes i.e. (turning artifact into ART). Hilden problematizes these initiatives and the vision of the “new museum” by asserting that good intentions aside, museums continue to be “post modern muddles dressed up in global disguises.” In other words, the two museums she takes as examples have not made much movement (if any) away from the Eurocentric centre. “Underneath the post colonial skin breathes the same old Euro-body, Euro-centre…,” she concludes.

Hilden brings up many thought provoking arguments to make her claim and this was really the strong point of the article. Among the most memorable are her dilemmas with multiculturalism, the commodity of art, connections to the market economy, and guest curators – she artfully and really thoughtfully summarizes the various arguments against museums as “new”, “different”, and culturally sensitive. Particularly, her mention of the importance of the role language in museums and how it maintains Europe as the centre was extremely central to her main claim. But what I think the article did best was walk us through both the museums and some of their problematic exhibitions to really give the reader a clear picture of what’s going on, why is it a problem, etc.

In Carol Thompson’s response article to Hilden it was a little bit difficult to discern her primary claims and objectives. At some points, she agreed with Hilden, at other moments she vehemently disagreed. She also made a lot of interesting arguments and connections in between. It seemed to be that Thomas’ primary articulation was that museum exhibitions are powerful engines of meaning and can have an “agency of display”. She argues that in order to get away from the Eurocentric centre, museums along with diasporic populations, need to look at the art themselves which has the potential to communicate African cultural ideals. She closely follows with last week’s readings on the power of museums and similarly argues that museums are a strong cultural resource.

For some reason, unlike last week’s readings, Thompson does a good job of thoroughly explaining how cultural resources and ideals can be acquired from museums by diasporic populations – by visiting museums, diasporic people can go there and see their history. She explains how this concept works and ultimately makes it clear how, for example, the African diaspora may look at African art and seek it as a cultural resource for understanding their culture. While not everyone may agree with this opinion, Thompson explains the process in a far less defensive manner than some of the readings from last week. Further, she also does a good job of explaining the process of how art pieces make it from all over Africa to all over Europe and the connections to slavery such a process invokes.

Questions:

1. What are the commonalities in issues and dilemmas faced by the Maharaja exhibition and the various exhibitions at the Museum for African Art?

2. What was Thompson’s main claim?