Enlightenment As Intervention
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Maria Muhle Enlightenment as Intervention Universalmuseum On 28 May 2008 a press conference was held at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin under the title Dubai – erweiterte Horizonte: Museen schaffen eine neue internationale Öffentlichkeit (Dubai – Expanded Horizons: Museums Create a New International Public Sphere). It brought together the directors of the three largest German museums: Peter-Klaus Schuster of the National Museums of Berlin, Martin Roth of the Dresden State Art Collections and Reinhold Baumstark of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich. The directors, who referred to themselves during the press conference as the ‘three generals’, were ‘flanked’ by Martin Kobler, Head of the Directorate-General for Culture and Communication of the Federal Foreign Office, and by Michael Schindhelm, Cultural Director of the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (DCAA), representing the Dubai government. The aim of the event was to make public the plans for a large-scale collaboration project between the three German institutions – joined under the label ‘United German Museums’– the German cultural diplomacy and the Emirate of Dubai. The wholly unironic project consisted of the development of a ‘Universalmuseum’ to be located in Dubai. It was considered the continuation of another – as they put it – ‘very successful’ international cooperation between the three institutions and, this time, the National Museum of China in Beijing (“situated at the eastern side of Tiananmen Square”1 as Schuster explains omitting any reference to the violent abatement of the student's protests on that very square in 1989). Since the completion of the extension work by the Hamburg architect firm von Gerkan, Marg und Partner in the summer of 2011, this museum is considered “one of the largest museum buildings in the world”2. The collaboration between the ‘United German Museums’ and the National Museum in China has eventually resulted in the exhibition The Art of the Enlightenment, taking place between April 2011 and March 2012 and which, through a selection of works and artefacts from the museum collections from Berlin, Dresden and Munich, will present the Enlightenment as a key chapter in the history of European thought and civilisation: “At its heart, the exhibition features artworks which best exemplify the great ideas of the Enlightenment, its influence on the fine arts and its effective history, from the artistic revolutions of the 18th century right up to the present day.”3 After this first experiment, the ‘United German Museums’ plan to expand their horizon further by exporting European culture and its enlightened key notions such as cosmopolitanism, civilisation, public sphere and universalism to Dubai and other countries of the former Second and Third World. 1 http://www.kunstderaufklaerung.de/index.php?knoten_id=2&lang=en (24 January 2012). 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. Muhle.indd 233 23.07.2012 18:30:15 234 MARIA MUHLE The press conference consisted of a presentation of the concept for the first show, The Art of Enlightenment, and a projection of further collaborations. It thereby re-enacted a traditional gesture of imperialism replacing the colonial and missionary exportation and enforcement of civilised western values to the so-called underdeveloped countries with the exhibition of cultural European goods from the Age of Enlightenment – “masterpieces by Friedrich, Füssli, Gainsborough, Watteau, Piranesi and Goya”4. But while the enlightened cultural export was made up to the colonial masters by the exploitation of slavery labour force, the contemporary export of the imagery of Western democracy turns into an exchange against economic benefits from the rising economical powers such as China or the gulf region. But these unsettling analogies remain unaddressed and the cultural export is thought to re-enact itself an ‘enlightening’ gesture. What is addressed instead is therefore the ideal situation of a ‘dialogue between cultures’: Accordingly, the recalling of Dubai's situation 50 years ago – by then exclusively known for pearl fishery – is directly subsumed under the ideal of an ‘universal art’ based on a historical dialogue between the East and the West, in this case ‘brilliantly’ exemplified through the important role of the pearl in the European baroque, as one of the museum's directors stresses. In times of post-colonization, post-histoire and post-modernism, the official arts and their institutions do not seem to take into account the wrongdoings, paradoxes or crimes committed under the banner of colonization, history and modernism, but rather they re-activate or re-enact their strategies under the shelter of an alleged meta-reflexive position. The missionaries and militaries of the past that brought alphabetization and western values to the colonized countries are replaced by the cultural ‘generals’ that bring the archive of enlightenment to the newly built universal institutions in China and Dubai, in order to establish an ideal situation of communication in which the flows of cultural goods, commodities and the financial system are undisturbed. Horizontal Expansion The interventionist and explicitly political re-enactments of the visual artists Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann in collaboration with the composer Christian von Borries, unfold against the background of this cultural-political situation. Their re-enactment Horizontalerweiterung (Horizontal Expansion, 2009) addresses the colonial character of the institutional export of art and cultural goods taking place in the Chinese and Dubai museum projects by re-staging the ‘United German Museums’ press conference. At the same time and through its form, it addresses the relation between representation and historiography – a question of increasing interest in the contemporary art context today.5 Re-enactment is a traditional form of historiographical practice that has become 4 Ibid. 5 Several recent publications have addressed these issues, such as the December 2009 issue of Texte zur Kunst, which was titled Geschichte/History, or the Jahresring, also from 2009, Wessen Geschichte. Vergangenheit in der Kunst der Gegenwart, edited by Yilmaz Dziewior. There have also been several exhibitions dedicated to re-enactment, including History Will Repeat Itself at HMKV Dortmund and Kunst-Werke Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin in 2007-08 and Life, Once More. Forms of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art, Muhle.indd 234 23.07.2012 18:30:15.