"On the Chronology of Benin's Art: Between Museum, Market, and Myth" by Dr. Stefan Eisenhofer.
This is the title of a lecture announced by the “Association of Friends of African Culture” (Verein der Freunde für Afrikanische Kultur e.V.), to be held on June 6 at the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich.
A few months ago, I had an email exchange with Dr. Eisenhofer, the director of the Africa Department at Munich’s Museum Fünf Kontinente, in which I suggested organizing an exhibition on Benin that would present both originals and so-called “copies” of these famous bronzes. The idea was to introduce the topic of “Benin” and its provenance research to the public from a different perspective.
Dr. Eisenhofer replied kindly that he would be retiring in the autumn and, for scheduling reasons alone, would not be able to realize such an exhibition.
As I will not be able to attend the meeting in Munich due to my upcoming trip to Africa, I would like to preface Dr. Eisenhofer’s lecture with a few remarks. I assume he will speak about the “market” in a conventional historical context, but not about the kind of history that connects directly to the present.
It is unfortunate that Dr. Bodenstein (Digital Benin) and Dr. Plankensteiner (Museum of Ethnology Hamburg, MARKK Museum) will not be giving lectures at this meeting.
Dr. Bodenstein likely knows “the market” surrounding the Benin Bronzes better than Dr. Eisenhofer, as she visited us several times in Lomé and Berlin as part of the TU Berlin “Translocation Project,” and I introduced her to local Benin traders in Togo.
However, it is well known that the “grey eminence” in the background, Dr. Plankensteiner, fundamentally rejects any contact with the trade. Inquiries from us or from other dealers generally go unanswered.
How different my relationship with African national museums was in past years. I recall Samuel Sidibé, then director of the National Museum in Bamako, Mali, asking me how much I would want for an artifact so that it could be acquired for the National Museum in Mali. It was on the list of objects for export for which he had to grant authorization. Of course, it was an honor for me to donate the object to the National Museum in Bamako. With his successor, things were initially somewhat different. Comments were made such as: “If I let this pass with my signature, I’ll get a call tomorrow from the Tervuren Museum asking why we are not protecting our Cultural Property in Mali.”
The German ambassador in Mali at the time, Dr. Dr. Pohl, handed me a copy of a letter addressed to the then German Minister of State for Culture, Dr. Grütters. For understandable reasons, I cannot quote it in full here, even though it certainly does not contain any state secrets.
Nevertheless, one passage can be summarized as follows: the diplomat, who had previously been stationed in Burkina Faso, described how a future National Museum in Ouagadougou was envisioned. "A fetish object, to be displayed centrally, would impose certain conditions on visitors: they would have to remove their shoes before entering the room where the sacred object stood, and out of respect, they would only be allowed to approach it backwards before even catching sight of the altar. Today, such a presentation might be staged in a Western museum as an “exotic attraction,” were it not likely to provoke criticism for “cultural appropriation.”
At the time, plans for a National Museum in Burkina Faso did not come to fruition. The Museum was not opened to the public, and today Burkina Faso faces other concerns than shaping a national museum in a Western style.
But let us speak about the market for the Benin Bronzes—not about the marginal market of our great-grandfathers, figures like Felix von Luschan and the events of the British punitive expedition of 1897, when people thought very differently from today—but about a provenance that extends into the present. That is what provenance is, not something confined to a specific period or time frame that becomes a projection surface for our present-day value judgments. Such an approach may serve a questionable cultural policy, but it has little to do with scholarship, because every account of history is determined by the present—without revisiting here the “historians’ dispute” I have mentioned elsewhere.
An African woman whom I took to a lecture on Benin at the Audimax of the Technical University of Berlin was barely prevented from storming the stage to seize the microphone. She felt offended, even repelled, by this temporal narrowing of provenance research. “Why are you talking about the past? Why not about the present? There are around three hundred people in this hall, and judging by their skin color, maybe six or ten are from Africa. What kind of event is this? Come on, let’s go!”
Another kind of art—“airport art” in the truest sense of the word—seen after customs control at a West African airport, shortly after Dr. Bodenstein (Digital Benin) visited us in Lomé and we introduced her to local traders dealing in this kind of art.
A visual search image : Is this sculpture on the book cover of a German collection in the chaotic image at a West African airport?Than we should call it „Airport Art“?
Among other places, it appears on the cover of a Western collection that contains a gap in its provenance history. Those who look closely will recognize the depicted statue in the photograph taken after customs control at the West African airport. This, too, is history that must be documented—just as Bénédicte Savoy photographed the export documents of the National Museum in Bamako from me, yet never included them in her extensive publications (including the Savoy/Sarr report), which present a highly distorted image of Africa.
How do we protect ourselves from purchasing “looted” or “stolen” art? Answer: through the greatest possible degree of transparency. If we have doubts about provenance, we photograph the seller together with the object he is offering us. If he refuses to be photographed with the object, we decline the purchase. This is how we conduct the trade in Benin Bronzes and other artifacts in West Africa.