Something More Than a Succession of Notes

Exhibition view "Something More Than a Succession of Notes". Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2013. Image: Aurélien Mole

Ada Magazine, William Anastasi, Amar Foundation, Willem Boshoff, Ian Carr-Harris, Alice De Mont, Ruy Guerra, Johnny Kit Elswa, Shirley, Douglas and Tam Krenak, Violaine Lochu, Ignazio Macchiarella, Pénélope Patrix, Taller Leñateros, Andrew Norman Wilson

Curator: Mélanie Bouteloup

In 2003, UNESCO estab­lished a Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, offering unprece­dented insti­tu­tional recog­ni­tion of prac­tices in the order of know-how, oral tra­di­tions, ges­tures, or ritual. According to this con­ven­tion, the notion of “in­tan­gible cul­tural her­itage” des­ig­nates the “prac­tices, rep­re­sen­ta­tions, expres­sions, knowl­edge, skills - as well as the instru­ments, objects, arte­facts and cul­tural spaces asso­ci­ated there­with” - trans­mitted from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion by a com­mu­nity. These prac­tices exist in states of per­ma­nent recre­ation in mea­sure with the inter­ac­tion of the group with its milieu, its his­tory, and provide “a sense of iden­tity and con­ti­nuity, thus pro­moting respect for cul­tural diver­sity and human cre­ativity”. This con­ven­tion tes­ti­fies to the evo­lu­tion of the con­cept of “her­itage” towards a broader def­i­ni­tion, no longer strictly mon­u­mental and western. Beyond mon­u­ments, objects and texts, this con­cept now includes oral tra­di­tions and ges­tures, rec­og­nizing the diver­sity of forms of cul­tural expres­sion throughout the world. The ambi­tion to assure their preser­va­tion, how­ever, poses dif­fi­cul­ties. How to envisage the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of prac­tices that are intan­gible? How to under­take their “safe­guarding” without freezing them within an inven­tory, and reducing them to a tran­scrip­tion or a reac­ti­va­tion nec­es­sarily par­tial and sub­jec­tive? Should we finally “con­serve” these intan­gible prac­tices, or give free reign to their muta­tions?

On the occa­sion of the tenth anniver­sary of this con­ven­tion, the exhi­bi­tion Something More Than a Succession of Notes [1] pro­poses an inter­ro­ga­tion of the con­cerns raised by the pat­ri­mo­ni­al­iza­tion of cul­tural good that are by def­i­ni­tion living and in per­petual evo­lu­tion. Attempting to clas­sify and per­pet­uate intan­gible cul­tural prac­tices, is this not to go against the grain of the organic move­ment which under­lines them, proper to the con­sti­tu­tion, to the evo­lu­tion, and the dis­ap­pear­ance of expres­sive forms belonging to a human com­mu­nity? In as much as the prod­ucts, knowl­edge and rituals of a group are always born and trans­formed in accor­dance with a pre­cise socio-eco­nomic con­text, their con­cretiza­tion in a time­less form sup­posed to be rep­re­sen­ta­tive (by means of sound record­ings, pho­tographs and videos, as well as tes­ti­mo­nials and ele­ments col­lected in the field), cannot take full account of their vari­a­tions and their strong ability to change.

The ques­tion of the preser­va­tion of intan­gible cul­tural prac­tices is com­plex and pre­sents many obsta­cles. The desire for memory and rep­re­sen­ta­tion which it implies involves, first off, the risk of leading to their folk­loriza­tion and com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion. These prac­tices gen­er­ally rep­re­sent a touristic chal­lenge for the con­cerned area; becoming a plat­form for eco­nomic inter­ests, if not polit­ical and nation­alist ones, they are grad­u­ally dis­tanced from the com­mu­ni­ties by which they are prac­ticed, and reduced to deriva­tive prod­ucts which flourish on the market - in con­tra­dic­tion with the very notion of intan­gible cul­tural her­itage. Moreover, the under­taking of their rep­re­sen­ta­tion by an insti­tu­tion - a pro­cess that involves sam­pling rep­re­sen­ta­tive ele­ments from a given reality in order to study and exhibit them - runs the risk of decon­tex­tu­al­iza­tion and reifi­ca­tion. In a reversal of the clas­sical model of the museum whose pur­pose is to con­serve, val­orize, and pre­sent to the public tan­gible her­itage, the aim today is thus to find ways of approaching the intan­gible dimen­sions of cul­tures, and con­ceiving of a muse­ology able to embody their plu­rality. A sig­nif­i­cant number of ethno­graphic and nat­ural science museums, such as The Royal Museum for Central Africa of Tervuren, in Belgium, the Humboldt Museum of Berlin, and the MUCEM in Marseille, are cur­rently engaged in a redef­i­ni­tion of the museum as site for the exhi­bi­tion of living prac­tices [2]. With the aim of avoiding the decon­tex­tu­al­izing effect of the museum space, they are working to make way for the his­tor­ical, eco­nomic and social ele­ments that con­tribute to explain the emer­gence of a prac­tice, its nature and func­tion.

Following from the exhi­bi­tion "One Caption Hides Another" which in 2012 addressed the eth­ical, polit­ical and legal ques­tions raised by the resti­tu­tion of ethno­graphic objects, Something More Than a Succession of Notes extends the reflec­tion on our rela­tion to the cul­ture of the Other, by inves­ti­gating the modes and limits of its doc­u­men­ta­tion. Each occur­rence of a tra­di­tion, a ritual, or of a ges­ture is unique, and will never be repeated iden­ti­cally. Therefore, any tan­gible record that the researcher may pro­duce from it can be but a rep­re­sen­ta­tion that is nec­es­sarily par­tial, in both sense of the word: the sound or written record­ings of a song will indeed never provide a trans­la­tion of accom­pa­nying ges­tures, nor of the inter­per­sonal rela­tion­ships of its inter­preters, and will remain but a single example among an infinite number of pos­sible inter­pre­ta­tions. The anthro­pol­o­gist Jack Goody, who focused his work over many years on the tran­scrip­tion of Bagre song in Ghana, thus under­lines in a volume of the journal Museum International ded­i­cated to intan­gible her­itage: “Tran­scrip­tion is not a neu­tral event. […] The shift of a spoken recita­tion into a written text is not merely a matter of recording what has been said. The actual pro­cess changes the nature of the work by giving a per­ma­nent shape to some­thing that is other­wise under­going con­tin­uous change, by pro­viding visual line end­ings and sen­tence end­ings to what were pos­sibly slight pauses in the per­for­mance, by elim­i­nating the musical, ges­tural and vocal accom­pa­ni­ments [3].”

Facing the impos­si­bility of objec­tively rep­re­senting and inter­preting that which has a life of its own, the exhi­bi­tion Something More Than a Succession of Notes takes on the role - like cer­tain cur­rents in con­tem­po­rary anthro­pology - of assuming the com­plete sub­jec­tivity of the tran­scrip­tions at play in the pre­sented works. It makes a note of the inco­her­ence that we fall upon in dividing human cul­tures into one “tan­gible” side and another “in­tan­gible” one - while in prac­tice cer­tain ele­ments said to be “ma­te­rial”, such as cos­tumes, are insep­a­rable from the “in­tan­gible” prac­tices to which they are asso­ci­ated. At the inter­sec­tion of Anthropology, History, Art and Museology, the exhi­bi­tion brings together con­tri­bu­tions from researchers, activists and artists whose works and researches affirm the irre­ducible sin­gu­larity of the intan­gible cul­tural prac­tices. Far from any type of clas­si­fi­ca­tion that risks pro­ducing a sim­pli­fi­ca­tion and nor­mal­iza­tion of these prac­tices, the exhi­bi­tion Something More Than a Succession of Notes on the con­trary shapes itself as plu­ralist and poly­phonic. Sketching a muse­ology of many voices coming both from com­mu­ni­ties, researchers and cre­ators, the exhi­bi­tion glides from the field of anthro­pology to that of art - united here by the obser­va­tion, the recording of the real, the sub­jec­tivity of their view­point, and the deep vari­ability of their sub­ject matter.

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Exhibition view "Something More Than a Succession of Notes" with Alice De Mont, "Study, test block, test shelf, test room", 2011. Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2013. Image: Aurélien Mole