Review of "the eternal face" - dialogue - Brief Article

African Arts, Summer, 2001 by Ulrike Weinhold

In its Winter 2000 issue African Arts published Professor Allen F. Roberts's extensive review of the exhibition "The Eternal Face: African Masks and Western Society" at the Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal, Netherlands. As guest-curator of this exhibition, I would like to make a few comments.

It is apparently because of the innovative nature of the exhibition, which needs some clarification, that Professor Roberts quotes at length my own elucidations concerning the relationship between the form and content of the exhibition design. I am very grateful for that. Nonetheless, the exhibition would seem to cause some surprise, and it reminds the reviewer of "modernist installation art." This in turn has surprised me. While conceiving the exhibition, and designing it with Roel Schneemann, a modernist goal was the last thing I had in mind.

My ideas are based on a thorough study of the ethnological literature with regard to African masks. It is true that, in accordance with the deliberately intercultural tenor of the exhibition, I extend this literature by making links with many topics that are of concern (equally) to Western culture. I have certainly made room for the African masks themselves, intending to have them "speak," albeit in a different, specifically intercultural narrative or dialogue.

I wonder whether this narrative has made the African context of the masks disappear or whether it has revealed, as was precisely my intention, unnoted dimensions and the unnoted actuality and expressiveness of these masks, making them come alive again--in what is indeed a somewhat unusual way--in an intercultural dialogue. By far the majority of reactions to the exhibition (mostly by people who are not trained as ethnologists) show that visitors indeed engage with the way the masks are presented; they really feel they are brought into contact with these masks.

This brings us to the crucial question: Which narrative or, (post)structurally speaking, "discourse" does one apply to ethnographic objects? This question is preeminently a matter of discussion with regard to modernism. I try to deal with this question as carefully as possible, precisely because I am quite skeptical of (post)modernist discourse-theory. In my opinion this theory, which evidently has been fruitful in many respects, results from a radicalization of the modern subject, who is often reduced to a mere narrativizing subject. As a result, all kinds of objects, including ethnographic ones, are considered to be no more than the product of the subject's narrative--a way of thinking which has gone too far. What is of utmost concern to me, precisely in relation to African masks, is the question What have African masks to say to us? rather than Just what have we to say about African masks? In my view, the (post)modernist perspective has made us preoccupied with our role as interpreters, which has perhaps resulted in our neglect of the impact which the ethnographic "object" has on us and on our interpretation. What are the (acceptable) conditions for perceiving ethnographic objects? Is it (scholarly) unacceptable to become inspired by these objects--as happened to me while preparing the exhibition--in view of questions concerning Western culture? The more you think about these questions, the more difficult it is to find answers. Still, I think it is necessary to ask them, in order for the rich and perhaps infinite meaning of ethnographic objects to be tapped or reformulated again and again, and be given a chance in an intercultural context.

While rediscussing in this manner the "essence" of African masks, in this exhibition I have tried to break open familiar discourses (including ethnographical ones) about these masks. Maybe this goal has resulted, unintentionally, in a thoroughly modernist narrative, as the review suggests--but then again, maybe not.

Anyway, I am very pleased that my exhibition has raised many questions, and that the review in African Arts will contribute to raising still others.

Ulrike Weinhold
University of Nijmegen
Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal
The Netherlands