The Brutish Museum
The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution
Dan Hicks
Having read it
★★★★☆
Just because there are quite a few words for this review doesn’t mean the book was that good a read, as being honest, I did skip a few bits and skim others!
Despite its brilliant title and points and pertinent, revealing and insightful views and opinions of the wrongful demeaning and acquisition through colonialism (essentially looting) of objects, particularly those from the sacking of Benin in 1897, that, in well formed and sensible arguments, actually just perpetuate the violence committed against others in other places essentially for power, resources and profit, then gain loot and misapply meaning, reason and actuality of it all to fulfil and justify outdated, but still contemporary really, excuses of the always shaky reality of universal museums, it still gets just a four out of five from me as a book.
However, many stars out of five for the work the author and many others in and around similar academic, anthropological and archaeological setups do, explain, learn, champion and strive to face and tackle and educate even a backward, near archaic and still trapped militarist-corporate-colonialist mindset that just seems to say, even today and often under the guise of liberty and progress when the Western world does the raping and pillaging it’s fine and allowable, ‘We actually need these pillaged artefacts to help continue to run a business model that does nothing for anyone really in a modern age where disaffection rules the roost because of our corporate-colonial attitudes but we in the Western world with our obsession for statueification, compartmentalising and convenience work to just fulfil competition, profit and our shareholders’ bank balances and fellow Western nation states’ feelings of being valued cultural guardians.’
Still, like a reasonably competent amateur academic, here’s a quote from the title to assist my point(s) in this review:
[...] as the lies of the Bush-Blair War on Terror and the Weapons of Mass Destruction are just as visible as the pretences of the punitive expeditions a century before, it is clear that the ‘values’ at stake in both the Declaration of War and the Declaration of Importance were about corporate finance and geopolitical power rather than about some western civilising mission. As the ideology of white projection re-emerged in its 21st-century form, it mapped itself straight back onto those items of loot that had been such effective ambassadors for destruction in the propaganda of [Queen] Victoria’s Jubilee Year of 1897, three years before the new century and all the horrors it would bring; it was just that now, three years after the century was over, it was tourist revenue and imperial nostalgia that concerned the museum directors, as the new front line in cultural warfare.
Just as everyone understood that both military attacks were for commerce and sovereignty not for civilisation conquering barbarism, so too we can see the idea of the universal museum as nothing but a weapon of its time, a 21st-century charter myth. The Declaration of Importance and Value of objects looted for rubber and palm oil was made hand-in-glove with the Declaration of War for oil. The great anthropologist of myth, Claude Lévi-Strauss, cautioned in 2005, ‘the Louvre Museum is not at all a universal museum’, because it simply ‘brings together all that has formed the traditions of France and the Western world’.35 The failure of the major 2007–08 Benin Kings and Rituals exhibition – which went to Vienna, Paris, Berlin and Chicago – to travel to Nigeria showed where the lines were drawn, and how firmly, as the regime of universal values became a time-geography of every place and era, as seen from London’s Bloomsbury, or Berlin’s Museumsinsel, or Chicago’s Grant Park. This was a harsh mythography in the making: behind the façade of Enlightenment values the violent legacies of European imperialism were reloaded.
When will Britain, certainly its seemingly entrenched traditions, hierarchies, institutions and attitudes, ever learn that real progress comes from involvement, empowerment and common sense of realising you’re not all that and can actually be not quite as bad if the dismantling of falsities and misguided understandings and recognitions were rebuilt through and with factual honesty and clarity of mind?
Anyway, enough of this reviewer’s attempts at academic waffle, sorry, prose.
What’s needed, as composed and implied in this book, is a legitimate acknowledgment of the violence and crimes committed, like is captured by the phrase (and title of a chapter), World War Zero; it is that of a period approximately around 1880 to 1910 that encompasses the Berlin Conference of 1884–5 and the displacement and destruction of many an African country by further European colonial ambitions and aggrandisements, and the reworking and honest explanations of the who, what and why of many a historical object and narrative that allows ownership of those things to be their makers’, not their subjugators’ who then invariably through the historical record continue and even establish new conceits and excuses to further justify dishonesty and apparent universalism of ‘looking after’ stolen property.
This is the brutish museum: a prolongation of violence in the name of sovereignty. These colonial museums became the infrastructure for a new kind of white supremacy. Violent military operations involving the theft and public display of art classified as ‘primitive’ or ‘degenerate’ were a key part of the ideology of white supremacy, foreshadowing the horrors of the 20th century. It is shameful for our national institutions to ‘contest’ this brutish complicity. The message of these chilling dispossessions was designed to live on through what visitors and curators alike today increasingly recognise as violent and racist museum displays.
A good passage
[...] In 1982, Philip Dark observed that ‘The extent of the loot brought back is hard to estimate; it is not a matter of several hundred objects, but of some four thousand or so, or perhaps more.’4 Today, as we consider the looting of Benin City, I want to suggest that any attempt to create a fixed list of what was stolen is a hopeless task, given the enormity of the loss and the nature of what was taken, and what is still hidden – something on which Kathryn Gunsch, following her ground-breaking attempt to identify the extant Benin plaques,5 and I are in agreement.6 We need another approach, that works with the uncertainty of numbers and forms that comes about with every re-discovery, as we begin to excavate, to sift and to document the long-neglected hoards of looted museum collections.
Today we must acknowledge that the total figure of what was looted may quite possibly be 10,000 bronzes, ivories and other objects – but also that any hope for a definitive or final number is futile, since there is so much hidden in private and family collections. There is an inherent lack of fixity in number here, an intrinsic instability to quantify what was taken as our excavations proceed. As with any archaeological process, it would be a mistake to seek, to quantify in advance of a sustained enquiry these dispossessions. In the wake of the sheer destruction exacted by the British upon Benin culture – rather than counting up, however, we can begin to count back, so to speak: this is the method that I am calling ‘necrography’ here, unpicking each layer of these looting events, in reverse, as the digging proceeds, to match up circumstances with well-provenanced objects, and to begin to share and compare data so collections’ stratigraphies can be read across from one to another, like indexes to loss. This counting-back, like all archaeological excavation, is not some attempt to undo, nor simply to move on: but more precisely to re-trace and to make visible. Western curatorial attempts to pin down everything that was lost in advance, so to speak, to reconstruct in order to undo without needing to excavate, are not just misguided: they misdirect whatever work the western curator might do that is not entirely self-serving. They extend the work of destruction. Let us be clear on this point: the arrival of loot into the hands of western curators, its continued display in our museums and its hiding-away in private collections, is not some art-historical incident of ‘reception’, but an enduring brutality that is refreshed every day that an anthropology museum like the Pitt Rivers opens its doors.
A second good passage
[...] we can’t write colonial history on its own terms. We must not relativise our modern values in order to justify past acts, when those acts are unfinished. To pretend that the violence is over is the technique used, for example, by museums, galleries, salesrooms and private collections in North America that hold looted Benin objects when they claim that they were acquired legally at the most recent transaction, and so no question of restitution should arise. It is equally a mistake that descendants of Benin soldiers who inherit loot might reasonably make, but in both cases this is a category error: these are no longer artworks but trophies of ultraviolence, until restitution begins.
Anthropology and archaeology are of some possible help here, since these disciplines, through which world culture’ museums have been largely formed, are in some respects the very inverse of history. It is impossible for a researcher who thinks themselves back into some past epoch to tell the story adequately, since the whole point is that the things are still here; the museum is 600,000 events in material form. Archaeology is not the study of past fragments, but the science of human duration. And so, when it comes to one-sided mass violence, to the ‘cultural rape’ of Benin,15 we need to start with the maxim of the ethnologist: ‘The Tylorian method is to gather first and sift later.’16 The sifting must start with Ariella Azoulay’s awareness that the discipline of history will operate to disconnect the presence of looted objects in western museums on the one hand, and the ongoing situations of ‘millions of people, stripped bare of most of their material world, including tools, ornaments, and other objects, [who] continue to seek a place where they can be at home again and rebuild a habitable world’.17
We must not allow ‘world culture’ museums to pretend that this violence and loss is in the past – it is here in front of us in debts that need to be paid for things that were taken.
A third good passage
[...] this book is written in defence of the anthropological museum as a space – a defence of these institutions against the proto-fascism that co-opted them in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Displays of loot have no more rightful place in these places any more than exhibits of racial types, removed en masse after the fascists were beaten in 1945. Insofar as anthropology as a discipline is important for western societies – and I believe we have never needed anthropology more than we do today with the rise of populism, of racism, of intolerance – so too are its public spaces. But these institutions have an immense task to change themselves, dismantle, repurpose, re-imagine, disaggregate. The crucial first task, I suggest, is to understand and take action on every object that was violently taken within the collection. Anthropology museums will only be able properly to fulfil their central, crucial function – to bring a sense of other ways of seeing, knowing, living and making into the Euro-American consciousness, including an awareness of the universal importance of material culture in human lives – when nothing in their collections is present against the will of others. A major programme of returns, in which every departure is marked by a new creative act by an artist or designer, is the essential next step, hand-in-hand with transforming anthropology museums into sites of remembrance and conscience for the human lives, environments and cultures destroyed by European colonialism, past, present and future. This is how to dispel the illusion that the taking of photographs and the taking of objects was some past instant flash, like the split-second firing of the Maxim gun or the flash of a camera bulb – when in fact the museum was built to slow these moments of loss down to a near stand-still.
Museums are places where curators pretend that they can keep things the same. I prefer to see that stasis as a state of hesitation. The Pitt Rivers Museum has been hesitating for years, and maybe there is a new role for it to play. Facing up to inhumanity, just as in the urgent case of restitution to Africa, we can’t pretend that the violence of the past, or the present, can be undone in a space like this, ‘decolonised’ out of existence. But it can nevertheless be made to be seen by all, just as it is already felt by so many. Anthropology museums can be sites of conscience, for the present as well as the past, not frozen end-points but ongoing processes. But without acts of return this means nothing.