So here you are again in a museum—an ethnographic museum, as they used to call it—just as you find yourself in a museum time and again, even though you should have known long ago that a museum is the place where everything that might once have had a sense of urgency is transformed into atmosphere, into text, into promotion, into a program booklet, in short: into something that stands on pedestals, in display cases, and no longer disturbs. And right there, in this space—which is at once a castle ruin, a museum relic, and an institution of curatorial self-reflection—these women dance as if they’d heard nothing of all this, as if they’d wanted to know nothing, as if they cared not a whit about this whole highly subsidized business of meaning—which is presumably also the only sensible way to approach a museum.
These women dance themselves into a state of ecstasy, and immediately, of course, the entire apparatus is on the scene—not literally, but mentally—the entire art-historical household, the entire conceptual furniture of the last few decades, the entire labored-breathing cellar of theory, and everything asks at once: Is this a ritual? Is this a voodoo dance performed by women who dance until they lose consciousness? Is this appropriation? Is this reference? Is this decolonization? Is this body politics? Is this a critically subverted engagement with otherness? And while these questions, all prim and proper, stumble through the arts pages, these women have long since continued dancing—and in such a way that each of these questions looks like what it usually is: a form of belated helplessness expressed in very well-paid language.
For nothing is more pitiful than ethology, art history, and the museum apparatus the moment it stands before something alive. As soon as something won’t stand still, as soon as something eludes us, as soon as something isn’t immediately usable as discourse fodder, this embarrassing flurry of activity—classifying, contextualizing, historicizing, problematizing—begins, and in the end, one has turned ecstasy into an interpretive text. That, in fact, is the specialty of museums: transforming everything that seems dangerous or unpredictable into a state of well-tempered legibility. They provide it with wall text, a catalog essay, an opening speech, and a panel discussion, and just like that, the provocative nature of an image has been turned into an evening event.
Here, however, this endeavor fails in a peculiarly beautiful way. The women are not dancing for the system, not for theory, not for the institution; they are dancing through it, against it, and over it. Their bodies do not form a pretty choreography of understanding, but rather an imposition of the uncontainable. Hair flies, dresses blur, arms tense and open at the same time, and everything about this scene rebels against that fundamental museum lie, according to which things are only taken seriously once they have finally become still enough to be viewed.
That all of this takes place in a dilapidated museum or castle is, of course, an act of malice that one cannot appreciate enough. For this space is nothing other than the very image of European artistic consciousness itself: crumbling, exaggerated, self-absorbed, intoxicated by its own patina, and still convinced that it is the ideal place where the world is transformed into meaning, only to then export this omen from the West to Africa. “Where 500 museums are just waiting to get back what was stolen from them.” (Bénédicte Savoy). Walls riddled with decay, floors littered with rubble, a space that should have been abandoned long ago—but of course isn’t, because the art world is particularly fond of decay right now, as long as it remains aesthetically exploitable. Decay is, after all, the favorite “piece of furniture” of ethnologists and art historians in their castle-like museum buildings: they love what is crumbling, as long as it appears in an institutionally secure form and does not, for example, affect their own budget structure.
And then there’s this painting in that over-the-top Baroque frame on the wall—this picture within a picture, this incredibly self-assured, almost brazen symbol of everything that art history is constantly driven to do: frame, ennoble, exalt, appropriate, reshape, adorn with pathos, and then pretend afterward that the frame did the painting a favor. Within this frame, you see the black, bald woman embracing the figure—this archaic form, a so-called “Prampram figure,” this object, this bodily remnant, this artifact, if one insists on using such hideous terminology—and you realize instantly that something is happening here that should never actually happen in a museum: closeness. Not contemplation, not context, not distance, not the usual hygienic separation between the viewer and the viewed object, but closeness. An embrace. A bond. A relationship. In other words, precisely what the Western museum space has systematically transformed into display cases for centuries, so as not to be touched by it.
One must keep this in mind: Europe first stole African art, then marveled at it, then praised its form, then generalized it historically, then explained it poorly, then explained it better, then explained it guiltily—and still explains it today, only with a seemingly more humane voice and better footnotes. That is, after all, what is both funny and repulsive about this enterprise: it never merely errs; it professionalizes its error. First it was called “primitivism,” then “modernism,” then “context,” then “restitution,” and it always sounded as if the morally or aesthetically appropriate tone had finally been found, while in reality they were merely inventing ever-new ways to linguistically refine their own power over what they saw.
And, of course, this image, too, will immediately be drawn back into this apparatus. People will say “Walker Evans” because a wall is crumbling. They will say “Man Ray” because something looks ghostly. They will say “Hannah Höch” because they want to say “montage,” even though nothing here needs to be mounted for the curators to be able to call it a montage. People will speak of a critique of representation, of alterity, of regimes of the gaze, of decolonization, of opacity, of materiality, of body archives, of spaces of affect, and of transcultural processes of negotiation—and the more they speak, the clearer it becomes that it is not the image that requires explanation, but rather the urge to explain it in this way.
For the real disease of the business of dealing with other cultures is not its ignorance, but its verbosity. Its terrible, incurable, highly educated verbosity. Everything is immediately translated into language—and not just any language, but that monstrous art-hall language that is at once morally agitated, theoretically sound, and utterly inconsequential. A language in which every object is “negotiated,” every body “inscribed,” every gesture “made legible,” every contradiction “productively turned,” and every historical catastrophe “critically questioned.” After all, in the museum world, people prefer to question things critically anyway, because the word “question” has the advantage that no one has to answer.
This image, however, does in fact respond—just not in the language of the institution. It responds with dance, with excess, with restlessness, with pathos, with intimacy, with a remnant of impenetrability. Above all, it responds with the audacity to make visible the entire apparatus that immediately builds itself up around it like mold on a damp wall. The museum, which once chronicled peoples—that refined instrument of aesthetic taming—becomes here an exhibit in its own right, the ruined shell of a culture that seeks to frame everything because it must maintain a distance from everything. And the Baroque frame on the back wall is perhaps the most beautiful insult of all: a monument to Europe’s vice—its inability to resist first artfully framing everything and then declaring it understood.
In the end, it is not the dancing women who are actually on display, but the institution that sought to exhibit them. It is not so-called African art that is being displayed here, but the European mania for constantly having to display it. It is not the ritual that is being turned into a museum piece; rather, the act of turning it into a museum piece itself becomes a farce. And while the institution continues to lecture on regimes of visibility, epistemic violence, and decolonial shifts in perspective, these women have long since moved on, danced on—further than anything one could say about them.
What remains is an ethnographic museum—that is, what always remains: a text, a framework, a poorly ventilated room, a few overhyped concepts, and the old misconception that one has understood something simply because one has stood in front of it long enough.
In the second image, we see yet another of those spaces where one isn’t sure whether to admire them or shut them down—spaces that, in all their ruinous grandeur, already possess everything the art world so desperately needs to feel significant: height, decay, pathos, history, grime, light, architecture—in short, the complete arsenal of the cathedral of auratic misery. It is a dilapidated hall, a castle, a museum, a monumental cathedral of Western self-aggrandizement—in any case, a place where the plaster is falling from the columns, as if even the architecture itself no longer wants anything to do with the art world; and yet, of course, this very decay possesses that irresistible allure that ruins exert on people who like to educate themselves through decline.
In the middle of this vast, hollowed-out space, a woman sits atop a mountain of African masks, sculptures, and figures, and one realizes instantly that this image does not simply depict something, but rather tells an entire history of display—a history of amassing, collecting, exhibiting, appropriating, admiring, explaining, and glorifying—that is, of that European activity in which desire and the gesture of possession have never been far apart. The woman sits up there, almost enthroned, almost bored, almost untouchable, in a pose that oscillates between sovereignty and weariness, between superiority and quiet contempt. She rests her head on her hand, as if she were long since beyond anything this space, this history, this gaze could still want from her.
And beneath her, around her, before her, lies this entire arsenal of African masks and figures—this jumble of faces, gazes, forms, surfaces, and carvings—a vast collection of what Europe once called “exotic,” then found “formally interesting,” then exploited in a modernist vein, then labeled “ethnological,” and finally rehabilitated with a guilty conscience. One does not see the masks as individual cult objects, not as individual works, but as a mass, an overabundance, a deposit, the inventory of a collecting mania that has always remained the same at its core: one wants to possess what one does not understand, and because one does not understand it, one calls this possession “appreciation” and “preservation.”
It is precisely here that the bitterness and the intelligence of the image lie. For the woman is not sitting in front of the objects, nor beside them, nor gazing at them reverently like a model museum visitor, but rather on them, above them, with them—almost emerging from them. This is not the typical scene of Western exhibition practice, in which the object maintains a discreet distance from the subject and both are separated from one another by the pristine order of the museum arrangement. Here, there is no such pristine order. Here there is accumulation, layering, overload, ruin, dust, and a woman who occupies all of this with a matter-of-factness that must immediately become unpalatable to the institutional gaze. For this gaze requires order, provenance, a display case, a label, an insurance value, context, and a catalog number. This image, however, offers it a heap. A heap of history. A heap of desire. A heap of guilt, if you will, but above all a heap of things whose presence defies the museum’s sense of calm.
Of course, people will immediately say that this is an allegory of appropriation, an allegory of the postcolonial, an allegory of reappropriation, an allegory of the reconquest of the archive—and of course none of that is entirely wrong, because, as is well known in the art world, everything becomes an allegory as soon as there is enough ceiling height and enough black-and-white. But it is precisely this speed with which people seek to turn every bold statement into a theoretical text that becomes suspect here. For the image is wiser than its future commentaries. It does not simply show that African art has been appropriated by the West. Rather, it shows that the Western gaze cannot help but either accumulate or interpret this art, and that even its remorse still contains a reflex of ownership. Criticism, too, collects; decolonization, too, catalogs; even a guilty conscience loves to take inventory.
The woman in the center thus becomes the pivotal figure. She sits atop this mountain of objects as if on the collapsed pedestal of the European museum itself. Not as a victim, nor as a mere victor, but as the embodiment of a sovereignty that neither asks for permission nor needs to explain itself. She is not supported by the space; rather, she carries the space along in all its absurdity. Her clothing, ornamental and richly patterned, echoes the logic of the objects while simultaneously contradicting it. She is not neutral, not toned down, not detached from the scene, but in her formal language is herself part of that aesthetic field that the West is so fond of categorizing first as “ethno,” then as “fashion,” then as “decolonial aesthetics,” depending on which department happens to be in charge.
And this ruinous palace hall all around—this vertical exaggeration of Western architecture—is, of course, once again more than just a backdrop. It is the true counterpoint to the pile of masks and statues. Here is the architecture of sublimity, of order, of hierarchy, of a historically grounded desire for representation; there, the profusion of objects, their materiality, their faces, their persistence, their refusal to be reduced to a single art-historical statement. The space says: I am culture. The pile says: You are storage. And the woman above it may not say anything at all, because she has long since realized that the silent pose is often the most precise form of criticism.
Of course, one could once again cite Walker Evans, because the space crumbles so beautifully. One could once again cite Man Ray, because the scene has something dreamlike, hyper-stylized, almost hallucinatory about it. One could once again cite Hannah Höch, because various visual orders collide here: the ethnographic, the fashion-oriented, the museum-like, the architectural expressions of power, and the performative. But as with the first image, the same applies here: these art-historical names say something, but above all they say something about the art world’s urgent need to immediately invoke a lineage of predecessors, as if one could soothe the uncomfortable through reference. In truth, this image does something far more insidious. It uses the monumentality of the museum to expose the art gallery. It uses the beauty of the staging to make the violence of collecting visible. It uses the dignity of the pose to shed light on the indignity of the history that made this pose necessary in the first place.
For the image is not sentimental. It asks neither for pity nor for pedagogical insight. It carries no wall label and offers no solution. It merely shows, with an almost unbearable calm, that between African art and its European reception lies an entire mountain—an actual mountain, a mountain of objects, of meanings, of projections, of theft, of admiration, of misreadings, of curatorial seriousness, and of newly discovered morality. The woman sits atop this mountain as if upon the rubble of an entire history of knowledge, and therein lies the harshness of the image: it is not the masks that appear lost here, but the space that once sought to house them.
Both images are, at their core, images of the impossibility of viewing African art or African-connoted physicality innocently within European institutions. Both images place Black female presence within ruinous, magnificent, fragile spaces—that is, within those spaces of Western culture that were once meant to guarantee dominion, collection, order, and meaning, and now appear only as the exhausted shells of their former selves. In both images, a Black female figure—or Black female bodies—stands in contrast to European architecture that has fallen into disrepair, while their own presence remains unbroken.
Both images revolve around the relationship between body and object, between liveliness and museumification, between ecstasy or sovereignty on the one hand and institutional framing on the other. In the first image, this is expressed through ecstatic dance—that is, through movement, blurriness, trance, and the refusal to stand still. In the second image, this is achieved through the monumental calm of a figure seated on a throne—that is, through pose, superiority, and the accumulation of objects, which, precisely through their sheer number, reduce the museum’s claim to order to absurdity. The first image shatters the institution through movement; the second undermines it through composure.
What both also have in common is that they do not simply illustrate the history of European reception of African art, but rather demonstrate it. They do not merely show African objects or motifs, but always simultaneously reveal the Western framework within which these objects have been viewed, collected, exhibited, aestheticized, and misunderstood. In the first image, it is the Baroque frame on the wall that makes the violence of enclosure visible; in the second, it is the mountain of masks in the ruined palace room that materializes the history of accumulation and appropriation.
And finally, what connects both images is that they reject postcolonial critique by drawing attention to its danger of once again reducing everything to a discourse of administration. Both images insist that Black presence is more than mere case material for a theory. In the first image, it is an ecstatic counterforce; in the second, it is a resting sovereignty. One image dances against the museum; the other sits atop its ruins.