Robert-Goldwater-Library

A la défense du Musée quai Branly

The latest number of Museum Anthropology (Fall 2006) includes an interview by Peter Naumann of Stéphane Martin, Président-Directeur général of the Musée du quai Branly. In spite of the brouhaha surrounding the new installation, Naumann keeps the interview focussed primarily on the architecture of the Musée, the position and future of contemporary 'aboriginal' art, and the museum's research and outreach program.

For those who can't get enough, you can find other online interviews here (the image source) and here.

• Our past posts on the museum are here and here and here.

Middle Passage @ Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts

via NYTimes, Art in Review, 12/15/06 :

MIDDLE PASSAGE: WHITE SHIPS, BLACK CARGO
Drawings by Tom Feelings
Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts
80 Hanson Place, Brooklyn
Through Feb. 4

The Middle Passage is the name given to the dangerous sea leg of the slave trade, across the Atlantic Ocean from the west coast of Africa to North and South America and the Caribbean. It is also the subject of this astonishing suite of 52 black-and-white drawings by the African-American artist Tom Feelings, who died in 2003. The drawings took Mr. Feelings, a Brooklyn native, more than 20 years to complete. Composed through the unusual process of layering tissue paper over watercolor imagery, with pencil and tempera highlights, the drawings are smoky and ethereal. But the acrid content belies the softly beguiling presentation.

Mr. Feelings indulges in no lazy romanticism of Africa, depicting the origins of the slave trade in local tribal conflicts. Several drawings show African kings assembling and trading slaves with the Europeans for guns, molasses and rum.

The most affecting images illustrate the suffering and desperation of the captives on board the slave ships. There are countless images of them being force-fed, beaten and raped, of their bodies chained and pressed together, back to belly, in the putrid bowels of leaky hulks.

Thousands died of disease, starvation and torture; others took their own lives. But moments of humanity emerge, as when a European sailor tries to stop a slave from certain suicide by leaping overboard. Perhaps he is just trying to preserve his investment, though his fearful eyes suggest an uneasiness and conflict in the slave trader’s heart. BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO

Aboriginal film dominates awards

via BBC news:

8 December 2006

Australia's first Aboriginal language movie has dominated the country's top cinema awards.

Ten Canoes won six Australian Film Institute awards, including best film and best direction, at the star-studded ceremony in Melbourne.

Director Rolf de Heer said the film, set in the days before Europeans arrived, had touched its audiences.

Ten Canoes, which also won awards for best original screenplay, best cinematography, best editing and best sound, will be entered in the foreign language film category at next year's Oscars.

Filmed in the remote crocodile-infested swamps of northern Australia and starring a clutch of untrained actors, Ten Canoes revolves around the story of a young man who has taken a fancy to an older man's wife.

De Heer, who co-directed the movie with Peter Djigirr, was pleased the film had been so well received.

"Audiences everywhere find something in it," he said.

 

• Visit the official site of Ten Canoes

Be sure to click on "More Resources" which provides an impressive list of links related to Indigenous Australian history and culture

• Ten Canoes on IMDB

[image source]

Michael Rockefeller's pictures record New Guinea tribesmen beautifully

Documenting the dynamic moment: Michael Rockefeller's pictures record New Guinea tribesmen beautifully

Reviewed by Mark Feeney, Boston Globe staff | Dec. 10, 2006

... Rockefeller, who had been a history major as an undergraduate, had no background as a professional photographer. In fact, his primary responsibility wasn't visual: He was assigned the task of being the expedition's sound recordist .

Even so, his pictures are very good. It certainly helps that such a small percentage of the photographs he took are on display. But the exhibition includes a contact sheet, and the quality of its images indicates the rest of the show is no greatest-hits selection. Clearly, Rockefeller had an eye for composition and, what's far more unusual, a feel for the dynamic moment. He never posed his subjects. He didn't have to. There's one picture here, of a warrior caught from afar in exultant leap, that's so perfectly timed it looks almost comic.

The visual quality of the images makes it easy to forget that content mattered far more to Rockefeller than form did. Purely photographic considerations never obscured for him the defining documentary impulse of the larger enterprise. He was there to record not express. "Photography like other artistic mediums requires a very particular combination of talents," Rockefeller wrote in a journal he kept during the expedition, "and I now know that an eye sensitive to aesthetics by itself assures little."

What's most impressive about Rockefeller's pictures is how he managed to strike a balance between reserve (the photographer never tried to be anything other than an outsider) and immediacy (just as clearly, he presented his subjects with vividness and sympathy). One way he maintained his apartness is so obvious as to be easily overlooked: Almost none of the photographs was taken up close. The rare exception, like "Childhood friends," retains an innate gravity that carries its own sense of distance.

All of the expedition members had cameras. "There was a near din of clacking shutters every day," Gardner later wrote. "We each had other duties, but no one could escape the photographic mania."

Perhaps this accounts for the wondrous unself-consciousness the Dani show toward the camera. These strange rectangular objects around their necks were such a constant among the outsiders that they must have seemed like a talisman of their distant culture -- a bulkier form of necklace, say -- and thus unworthy of notice. Or maybe there was just something about Rockefeller's manner.

> See our earlier post ; locate the MMA copy of the catalog

Photo caption: Michael Rockefeller among the Dani, 1961, in a photograph which is part of Harvard's exhibition. (Jan Broekhuijse)

Mayans Excited, Unsure on 'Apocalypto'

via the New York Times:

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 5, 2006

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Scenes of enslaved Maya Indians building temples for a violent, decadent culture in Mel Gibson's new film ''Apocalypto'' may ring true for many of today's Mayas, who earn meager wages in construction camps, building huge tourist resorts on land they once owned.

Some Mayas are excited at the prospect of the first feature film made in their native tongue, Yucatec Maya. But others among the 800,000 surviving Mayans are worried that Gibson's hyper-violent, apocalyptic film could be just the latest misreading of their culture by outsiders.

''There has been a lot of concern among Mayan groups from Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, because we don't know what his treatment or take on this is going to be,'' said Amadeo Cool May of the Indian defense group ''Mayaon,'' or ''We are Maya.''

''This could be an attempt to merchandize or sell the image of a culture, or its people, that often differs from what that people needs, or wants,'' Cool May said.

Gibson employed Mayas, most of whom live on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, in the filming of the movie, and says he wants to make the Mayan language ''cool'' again, and encourage young people ''to speak it with pride.''

The film has been screened for some U.S. Indians, who praised the use of Indian actors. The Mayas haven't seen it yet, but like Indians north of the border, they have seen others co-opt their culture, as in high-class Caribbean resorts like the Maya Coast and the Maya Riviera. [full article]

Also from the Times:

Praise for Gibson Film, Quandary for Oscar Voters

Read our earlier post here

[image source]