L'Invention du Sauvage at the Musée du Quai Branly

Image: Musée du Quai Branly

 

Text: Rooksana Hossenally

 

Just this morning as I got on the metro at Stalingrad I regretted it as soon as stepped inside the closing doors. A tall black man dressed in a long leather coat wearing freshly-shined brown loafers was yelling at no one in particular that black people are not dirty and that they’re not animals, and that white people are not above black people. Whether this man was drunk or on a come down from the night before, or simply having a random yell at lay metro passengers, is beside the point. What it does however underline is a deep-rooted problem in our society that has existed ever since Columbus brought the ‘Other’ back to the Western world from his various travels all over the globe.

 

How did we come to such hatred and discrimination of the Other? That is the question that the latest exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly, 'L’Invention du Sauvage', seeks to take apart and analyse. The curator of the exhibition, Lilian Thuram has received great acclaim for seeking to go beyond the 21st century surface of the problem.

 

 

The carefully curated exhibition, spread over several darkened rooms, comprises a collection of over 250 pre-nineteenth century drawings, texts, paintings, sculptures, posters, postcards, films, photographs, casts, slide shows, models, costumes and objects ranging across the nineteenth century up until when cinema made its debut. 'L’Invention du Sauvage' traces the development of the perception of the Other in chronological order from the 1800's to the end of the 1950's, where the Other is from Asia, Oceania and America, and where the Other had the ‘misfortune’ of being born outside a white man’s world.

 

A well crafted anthropological exhibition that reconstructs the west world's discovery of the rest of the world over a period of 150 years. However, the exhibition isn’t just about investigating the sources of racism but it is also an enquiry into the perversity of the human mind and the twisted and limitless pleasures it takes in feeding its curiosity. The entertainment industry is key in illustrating the latter. What is even more significant is how the phenomenon of what was coined ‘exotic entertainment’ - or shows using foreigners as a source of entertainment - was synonymous of propaganda, scientific exploration, as well as providing entertainment for the masses. This type of entertainment has formed the West’s perception of the Other for almost five centuries. Voyeuristic and sadistic, 'L’Invention du Sauvage' taps into our 21st century education and takes us right back to the the source of a problem that remains very much still in place today: that of discrimination against people who look different to us.

 

The exhibition is divided up into four main parts or ‘acts’. The first tells of the arrival of the ‘foreigner’ to the western world between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries by a number of explorers and colonisers. People's curiosity was instantly aroused. How similar to them were these exotic beings? Did they have a mind? A soul? Were they closer to humans or to animals?

 

The second act presents these foreigners as objects of entertainment. The success amassed by putting the Other on show in circuses, theatres, bars and cabarets was quickly confirmed by unrivalled interest from western society attending these shows - over a billion in total. The third act shows how these ‘ethnic shows’ became formalised and took place at high-profile venues like Crystal Palace in London and Les Folies Bergères in Paris.

 

The last act seeks to mix ethnology and science, an obvious pairing, that saw an unexpected rise in popularity for reconstitutions of ethnic ‘habitats’ in human zoos and a number of universal exhibitions all over the world. These types of exhibitions proved to be popular beyond imagination, bringing in millions of people curious to see the exotic 'bêtes de foires'. The Other suddenly found itself on display side-by-side with people who suffered abnormalities and deformations in what was commonly-known as 'freak shows'.

 

On a scientific level, the features of these exotic beings were likened to those of an ape's by scientists who claimed the exotic beings were the missing link in Darwin's Theory of Evolution between ape and Man. Persecuted for years, sold, exchanged and put on show like objects, treated like animals, this people never once showed rebellion. We learn that people’s perceptions of the Other in the West evolved as communication became more fluid between the different ethnicities. The end of the exhibition fizzles out in such a way as to reflect people’s wavering interest for this sort of entertainment during the rise of the film industry.

 

The exhibition is well put-together and although presents a violent and painful subject for the 35,000 victims of their time, it has been thought-out in such a way as to be accessible to a wide-ranging audience so as to soften the sharp edges of what could easily have fallen into the sadistic and morbid.

 

While our perceptions have highly evolved since the 1500's, the exhibition highlights the fact that the next question we should be asking ourselves is 'Why does the sauvage still exist today?' For those of you who are keen on delving deeper into the issues surrounding the origins of racism and its present-day form, the museum will be hosting debates and conferences ‘L’Autre de la Science à la Fiction’ (The Other, from Science to Fiction) until 28 February.

 

'L’Invention du Sauvage' runs until 3 June 2012 at the Musée du quai Branly, 37 quai Branly, Paris 75007. Open 11h00 to 19h00 Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Sundays and until 21h00 on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. (closed Mondays, 25 December and 1 May ). Tickets start at 10.50 Euros. Metro: Pont de l'Alma - line 9.

 

Comments

[Sue Donaldson]

I saw this show in early December and I have just realized what has bothered me about it in the intervening weeks: the exhibition itself replicates the voyeuristic fascination with the 'other' it purports to critique. Maybe the exhibition catalogue is a better vehicle for critical examination of the subject, although I haven't read the catalogue yet, but the exhibition material, its text panels and even its storyline layout, present an overwhelming amount of unmediated material, encouraging the same kind of objectification from viewers. I found the show's naïveté very alarming.

[Sarah Radcliff]

I agree with the previous comment - the exhibition could have gone into a lot more depth and shown viewers the source of the problem through different channels like philosophy, psychology...so many areas left unexplored...the show should have been more 'engagé' as opposed to taking a back seat to the problem that is still, like the writer of this post says, very much present today.