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18th of May 2005 Museums day
The theme of this year’s museum day is: "Museums bridging cultures" but can dreams of another life on earth be a bridge in and to reality for poor people, for those living in the shadow of the new wall in Palestine or in villages of Africa ravaged by AIDS? Or are museums so different from cities and real life altogether that by entering them, a different time mode captures the visitor and lets him or her wonder? While it is possible to reconstruct entire villages and put them into museums, that is not the same as reality in which crowded houses and tiny alleys give some shade like the hollow eyes of the starving people make everything appear black and hopeless? A Kaethe Kollwitz museum would bridge the two forms of existence but with a note of difference between preservation of something left behind by those whose life was already squandered before the paint could dry. The Potato eaters in Van Gogh’s museum certainly belong to that category just as the ‘night café’ with the waiter transformed into a butcher of time for those without work speaks out human anguish, if such interpretations would resonate in discussions becoming attentive to the needs of people around the world.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
It seems that museums are not about the hopeless but about those people who made it by surviving through their culture. Certainly the Armeniens did so by discovering the alphabet and then copying everything they found and translating it. Because they failed to find a state that could secure the continuity of their existence, they put everything into books, books often torn apart when they fled so that one part would end up in Lemberg, Poland while another part perhaps in Latin America. The culture of the Armeniens wherever on display will mark that difference between survival as a state and what fate happens if not successful in that endeavour.
So again a museum may ‘unconsciously’ more than unconsciously turn its attention not to those who made it, but who did not and this because of many but even today still unknown reasons. There are after all many empires in history whose remnants are but little puzzles for what mankind is looking for when trying to survive in this modern world. If anything, museums could take a clue from Peter Weiss’s ‘Aesthetics of Resistance’ by letting those who do not know a way out feel something else? It may be called belonging to humanity. It is like a little horse made by an unknown artist and on display in the museum of Delphi that inspired the Israeli sculpturer David Fine to do a series of horses all dedicated to that unknown artist and the kind of horse he made back then in Ancient Greece. Communication over the centuries is like that: a part of the sublimation process as described by Freud and developed into an aesthetical theory by Adorno. It means for beauty to be known you don’t need to go into museums but to appreciate beauty over time, museums play a vital role in bridging not merely different cultures, but very different times.
The plundering of the National Museum in Baghdad sets the stage for a new beginning, the need to bridge a difference between an ancient Civilization being now occupied by American forces bringing with them another culture. As turning point in the history of Iraq this will certainly have to be documented by future museums, but what to collect and to display if the curator wants to avoid a simplistic reformulation of Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’? Jean Tardif of the world forum ‘planet agora’ would certainly say dialogues between different cultures are the real bridges, but can museums be the centres of dialogues when some would prefer the cafes and the piers where the boats arrive and depart?
Indeed, one project in the EU program CONNECT focused on ports as the most diverse places, culturally speaking, with international meeting places like the Scandinavian church in Cardiff Bay perhaps one of the most sustainable cultural entities over time. The coal industry could flourish and disappear, but the church remained to greet the new comers: investors guided by Cardiff Bay Development Incorporation to make use of this opportunity – a huge port with hardly any buildings, just waiting to be developed. Until then people hardly had come down to the Bay area. They feared the darkness, the crime, the unknown. Run down, neglected, barren land. It was not everyone’s favourite area but that tiny church stayed and kept its doors open. Like many sailors who have lost nearly all contact with their native country, they dream that one day there will come a ship with some message from home. They remain at that place because this is where they landed last with memories still fresh.
The same goes for a young girl who survived Auschwitz to which she had been taken as a twelve year old from Hungary and who no one ever claimed afterwards as their daughter, niece or child of a friend. She grew up, studied dentistry and decided to open up her praxis near the former camp, now the Auschwitz museum. By remaining in the vicinity she was living with that slim hope someone would come.
I suppose the bridging of cultures is more about time. Museums become thereby measures of the distances between things. However, if that is to be a theme of this year’s museum day, then it would be important to remember that museums were fore mostly in the past imperial collections. They housed things taken away from the natives or like Lord Elgin the marbles from the Parthenon and now to be seen in the British Museum. Italy has just returned a monument to Ethiopia after Mussolini had taken it to underline his ceremonial understanding of power. Another way to describe that would be using culture of others to mask the nakedness of one’s own. Barrenness is still something related to emptiness and lack of meaning in life, hence the kind of creativity brought about would mean frankly nothing to those who would live on earth much later and who would not make out any sense of what people produced and collected back then.
Faced by rapid changes, museums have difficulties in deciding what to keep and to collect, for things will have a very different value in even ten years from now. On the other hand, the difference between even ten years ago and now is that museums have become more active and productive in terms of exhibitions, discussions and almost in everything they can and will display. Rita Klages from the European Museum in Berlin says, they are ‘social memories’ accompanying the living process of the present while trying to remember what happened back then. Always bridges between the past and the present have to be found. On special occasions like the 8th of May this will be even more important, namely to continue collecting the various interpretations made now not then.
As a result museums have become open to tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Certainly the Canadian Heritage one in Ottawa, Canada is dedicated among other aspects of Canadian life to the culture of the Indians. If anything that is a good example of bridging cultures, in particular between the one culture which so far has blended out, forgotten, neglected and even destroyed the other and the other existing there with nature a much bigger element than houses, fences and streets to mark a community or city like a lay out of man’s plan on how he wishes to inhabit earth. By bringing into the museum that ‘otherness’ of cultures not valued until recently as being equal to none, that changes perception and appreciation: two important elements for cultural bridges of understanding.
Still, cultures cannot be compared so easily. In their nuances they retain their special meaning. Even the word ‘love’ although existing in other cultures cannot be translated into any other culture, so Al Gahiz, the philosopher of Arabic descent. So museums must allow also for distinct niches of understanding while letting the imagination wander over newly founded bridges to make the in-between connections. They are not sensational, but subtle nuances and yet can illuminate upon larger aspects of life. Katerina Tsaligapoulous, curating and coordinating the build-up of a football museum in the newly build football stadium of the Greek team Olympiakos says one thing is to bring in fans also of other clubs to understand the common history of the football games. This important aspect of bridging different fan clubs and their cultures of identification and loyalty can be seen as a contribution towards less hooliganism and violence by football crowds. One detail she wishes to show is how the players of different teams could be identified on hand of the moustaches they wore like Olympiakos players of the twenties how they were influenced by the Rebetica culture while the up town players showed up already in suits with ties and clean shaven faces.
All museums will make a contribution to understanding the richness of life in all nuances. It will be like Raphael’s painting of ‘mother and child’ a bridge to understand the smile only a mother can give to her new born child, a smile full of hope and warmth. In such a light museums should put the things which have been smothered until now but which we need to see so as to deepen our understanding of things to come.
After all, a bridge is connecting two sides and once built as Stari Most, then two different communities will have to find a way to communicate with one another. As such museums can become a place of learning on how to communicate by not forgetting what was the history and development of these other communities. As bridges of culture, they can let the streams of humanity flow past while the visitors become a part of the imagination of the future. That then touches upon something this heritageradio in linkage to the HERMES project has retained as one of its key mottos: cultural heritage as memory of the future – a way to see things on how they will turn out to be and become if given the right attention and understanding rather than let them crumble under the imperial eye seeking conquest and not understanding.
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Last updated: 31. December 2005