Restitution/Decolonisation*
With the Covid-19 pandemic, the capitalist machine was forced to slow down and the seemingly unstoppable flow that supply chains had built was curbed, but the profits of e-commerce skyrocketed and billionaires became richer. The suspended time, for those who could afford it, allowed for dreaming of another future; one of less consumption and greater care for the planet and people. These dreams were made possible because black and brown people continued to work throughout the pandemic. The protection of a few rested on the lack of protection for many. The Covid-19 pandemic magnified capitalism’s underlying health epidemic of exhaustion and psychological debility – anxiety, depression, PTSD – that arises from it. The less that one was well-off, able-bodied, and preferably white and male, the more exhausted one was a risk of becoming. During quarantine, there were, on the one hand, people with relative privilege working from home, apparently managing their lives through Zoom, yet on the other, there was a spectral labour of thousands of people – many female, many people of colour – who kept the city sanitised, cared for the elderly and sick, delivered food and goods to those who could afford to stay inside. These are the bodies upon which the well-off are most dependent. This lopsided equation of those with privilege being dependent on those working and living in increasingly exhausting conditions is part of what I have described as the economy of exhaustion, which has a long history in the modern world: it started with colonial slavery, mining human energy to death; the Industrial Revolution then adopted this logic, exhausting the bodies of white workers and children until they finally obtained a reduction of work hours and hard physical labour thanks to the exhaustion, instead, of racialised bodies in the colonies. The conditions of a good life in liberal and neoliberal countries still rests on mining to exhaustion the bodies of migrants and people of colour. Capitalism is a structurally unequal economic system founded on extractivism, which results in a constant exhaustion of all forms of life – humans and animals, soil and subsoil, oceans and rivers, air and water – for the well-being of a few.
What unsurprisingly emerged from months of lockdowns and death were greater inequalities and injustices, racial murders, anti-migrant policies, and extreme poverty. The consequences of the pandemic have been aggravated by global warming and the continuous extraction of resources, with megafires, floods and more severe hurricanes adding to the devastation.
Art biennales and exhibitions were cancelled, and museums, closed. Indeed, among the 104,000 museums in the world (an estimation given by UNESCO), 90% of them closed their doors during the Covid-19 pandemic and, according to the International Council of Museums (ICOM), more than 10% may never reopen [1]. The closure had an impact not only on the public but also for all who work in the museum sector, for instance the cleaning staff and guards, but there were also the ‘reduction in salary and the loss of jobs for a large number of professionals who were involved, to a greater or lesser extent, in the museum economy as a whole: many institutions rely on a large number of self-employed workers, particularly for reception and mediation tasks. Many craftsmen who work for museums (production, scenography, repairs, etc.) have also seen their income collapse’ [2]. It was as if we had forgotten that the museum is a social institution with its own racial, gendered and class hierarchy. Studying how this hierarchy echoes its politics of collecting and exhibiting opens up new areas of thought. In other words, if the decolonisation of the museum is a goal, then it must be analysed as a structure, as an institution among other social and cultural institutions in a racial capitalist world. Further, rather than going back to business as usual, back to an economy of productivity and consumption, artists, curators and workers have asked to take the time to reflect on new ways of working that includes everyone. It means that the decolonisation of the museum is a political question that goes beyond adding contexts and trigger warnings to objects, beyond the politics of diversity and inclusion, with the latter being mere window dressing; it is about transforming art schools and the formation of curators, questioning the race for private funding and the organised precarity of artists of colour.
The Western museum was mostly built upon extractivism and looting. Visiting the Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, provides a lesson on the role of imperialism and looting in institutional collecting. When the French revolutionaries founded the museum as a public institution, they wanted to restitute to the people the art that in fact belonged to them, since the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Church had been able to collect masterpieces thanks to the wealth they had accumulated through exploitation and dispossession. However, according to Vivien Richard, the head of the Louvre’s department specialising in the museum’s history, it was Napoleon who ‘unquestionably founded the Louvre Museum as we know it today, with all the richness and variety of its collections’ [3]. For instance, Napoleon ordered the Italian states he conquered to hand over their most valuable artworks. He brought back around 600 paintings and sculptures from his military campaigns, which were added to the art he looted from Spain, Portugal, Central Europe and the Netherlands. Aside from the laws of war that justified plundering the defeated country, the French claimed that their country had the right to seize art in the name of the Enlightenment, public education and encyclopedism. Bishop Henri Grégoire declared before the 1794 French National Convention that it was legitimate to seize works that had remained ‘soiled too long by slavery’, and bringing them to France meant that ‘these immortal works are no longer on foreign soil. They are brought to the homeland of arts and genius, to the homeland of liberty and sacred equality: the French Republic’ [4]. As Paul Wescher has argued, ‘The great museum of Napoleon did not end with the dispersion of its materials and masterpieces. Its example outlived him, contributing decisively to the formation of all the European museums. The Louvre, the national museum of France, had shown for the first time that the artworks of the past, even if collected by princes, belonged in relation to their people. And this principle (with the exception of the British royal collection) inspired the great public museums of the 1800s’ [5]. And Benedicte Savoy, who, along with Felwine Sarr, published a report on the restitution of arts by European museums, declared that Napoleon’s formation of the Louvre’s first collections – and their subsequent restitution – inspired the opening of many other public museums in Europe, including new extensions to the Vatican Museums in Rome and the Museo del Prado in Madrid [6]. In the name of liberty and equality, looted works of art enriched French museums and the Louvre acquired its reputation as the repository of universal beauty. If around half of the looted works were returned after Napoleon’s defeat in the Battle of Waterloo, the other half has remained in France, among them the masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, The Wedding Feast at Cana (1563) [7]. The fact that it was Napoleon, author of the Civil Code that legalised women’s submission to their husbands, who reestablished slavery in the French colonies in 1802 and sent troops to crush the Haitian Revolution and Guadeloupean resistance, trying to bring about the return of slavery; the fact that it was him who set up the model of all subsequent European museums, matters. There is something deeply wrong in centring the European museum as the site to admire art, which then becomes the ’universal’ canon. The great inequality in the distribution of museums throughout the world is a consequence of that history and speaks for itself: 61% are located in Western Europe and North America (!), 18% in the Asia-Pacific region, 11% in Eastern Europe, 8% in Latin America and Caribbean, and only 0.8% in Africa and 0.7% in the Arab States [8]. This is neither surprising nor the consequence of a greater interest in art in Europe. One could see the opening of the great European public museums of art as progress, as offering art that would otherwise be in private hands to a diverse public. Their imperialist origin could be analysed as something from the past that can be redeemed. Yet, the establishment of these museums remains tied to the construction of the Western nation-state, its national narrative and the ideology of a civilising mission.
Western European and North American museums have historically benefited, on the one hand, from the general wealth their countries accumulated from the colonial exploitation of peoples, their lands and resources, and, on the other hand, from the looting of art during colonial wars and occupation. Discussion about museums, reparation and restitution must start with this fact: a great deal of the museums’ collections come from stealing, looting or dishonest acquisition. Ignoring the link between war, colonialism and imperialism and what it leaves behind – rape, trauma, suffering, mutilation, wasted lands, ruins – and what it encourages – looting, stealing – forecloses any real conversation on restitution. We need to trace how the wartime practice of looting became, in the nineteenth century, linked with the colonial civilising mission.
The discussion around the decolonisation of the museum and the restitution of stolen objects is inseparable from a discussion about the economy of extraction, the formation of the Western nation-state and the hegemonic model of the museum. But what is specific to the Global North is that, as we have written, the idea of the museum as a pillar of nationhood is connected to war and imperialism, and thus, inevitably, to systemic and structural violence and racism. In this context, the restitution of stolen art from the Global South is, simply, moral justice, ethical justice. It is about righting a wrong and paying the indemnities that are required. But it is not decolonisation. The decolonisation of the museum is connected to the larger decolonial struggle in which cultural and art institutions are used as ‘platforms and amplifiers’ for ‘social movements demands’, as Decolonize this Place (DtP, NYC) has argued. The transformation of these institutions is not ‘an end in and of itself’ [9] say DtP, whose members have launched actions in New York City museums in support of Indigenous rights, of Palestine, and for the abolition of prisons. In Strike Moma, DtP not only showed that Board Members were ‘death-dealing oligarchs using art as an instrument of accumulation and shield for their violence’ but also that ‘At the ground level, MoMA is also a messed up workplace. Elitism, hierarchy, inequality, precarity, disposability, anti-Blackness, misogyny’ [10].
Restitution must not obscure the inequalities that the racial capitalocene produces; it must not serve to flatter the white saviour complex. Restitution must be thought of in connection with social justice, the abolition of a system that, for centuries, has exploited, killed, maimed, massacred, wounded and wasted lives and lands. The anti-racist protests around the Black Lives Matter movement that brought to the centre debates around the repair, restitution and repatriation of museum pieces, were also about the structural and systemic violence of racism and misogyny. These movements asked for the removal of statues and monuments, which are always the result of political and aesthetic choices. Must they be replaced by other statues and monuments, or should the conversation about the decolonisation of the public space (of which the museum is an element) go further and ask if the memorialisation of collective struggle can only be expressed through that form? It is a problematic form historically tied to emperors, monarchs, and tyrants. Public memories of struggle and resistance have already been imagined in the shape of gardens, sacred forests, murals, altars, places to exchange, ecologies of care, refuges and sanctuaries, where the right to rest is guaranteed. Decolonial practices of restitution are politics of reparation that go beyond contextualising the ‘object’, transforming it into a piece of art that erases affective and spiritual dimensions. It is about reimagining how transmission is done, new epistemologies of art, new pedagogies, new relations to the object, to the environment. It is about rethinking the architecture of the museum, so that the latter offers a site where one can practise freedom and abolitionism. In other, words, it is about decolonising the museum.
*This text has been written in conversation with other texts on the decolonisation of the museum. I am indebted to their authors.
Notes:
[1] Museums around the world in the face of Covid-19, UNESCO, April 2021, p. 5.
[2] Ibid, p.32.
[3] Farah Nayeri, ‘The masterpieces that Napoleon stole, and how some went back’ The New York Times, 10 June 2021, consulted https://bdnews24.com/arts/2021/06/10/the-masterpieces-that-napoleon-stole-and-how-some-went-back
[4] Henri Grégoire, quoted by Paul Wescher, Paul I furti d’arte Napoleone e la nascita del Louvre (in Italian). Translated by Cuniberto, Flavio. Turin: Einaudi, 1988, Wikipedia.
[5] Wescher, Paul, Kunstraub unter Napoleon (in German). Berlin: Mann, 1978, translated in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_looting_of_art.
[6] Farah Nayeri, op.cit.
[7] See: Cynthia Saltzman, Napoleon’s Plunder and the Theft of Veronese Feast, New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
[8] Launch of UNESCO Report on Museums around the world in the face of Covid-19, 27/05/2020, https://en.unesco.org/news/launch-unesco-report-museums-around-world-face-covid-19
[9] See https://decolonizethisplace.org/faxxx-1
[10] See https://www.strikemoma.org