CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
Wes Anderson’s exhibition in Vienna is whimsical and endearing, but ignorant of current debates about African cultural heritage
Agrinning leopard from Cameroon stares at a thick-tailed crocodile from Papua New Guinea. For all its potential, the drama of this ferocious stand-off is wholly contrived — both animals are wood statuettes posed for effect by filmmaker Wes Anderson in a grand Viennese museum.
Two years ago Anderson was invited to curate an exhibition at the Kunsthistoriches Museum, a sandstone wonder opened in 1891. The outcome is a series of glass cabinets filled with curious objects, including the leopard with a broken ear. Best known for offbeat ensemble films The Royal
Tenenbaums (2001) and Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), the exhibition bears the hallmarks of Anderson’s creative method: delicate plunder and cute irony.
Anderson, whose artsy films quote Francois Truffaut, Yasujiro Ozu and Satyajit Ray, produced the exhibition with his partner, writer and illustrator Juman Malouf. A collector of traditional Bavarian sweaters, she also contributed a series of pencil drawings. They depict some of the 409 objects discovered after spending months rummaging through the museum’s 14 historical collections, some housed in a warehouse near the airport.
The couple’s dig yielded some unorthodox finds, not the least a small painted coffin for a mummified shrew. The tapered funerary box is from Egypt and dates to the 4th century BC. It was acquired by the museum in 1997. The exhibition, Anderson’s first time curating, honours this tiny oddity in its title. “Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and other Treasures” (on until April 28 2019) offers a terse and whimsical summary of the Kunsthistoriches Museum’s nearly 4-million objects. Occupying a single room, the displays are organised into eight unconventionally themed sections.
An all-green presentation of objects in one glass cabinet proved a real crowd pleaser on my two visits. The selection includes Mexican ceramics, malachite rock samples, gilded bowls by 17th-century Italian stonecutter Ottavio Miseroni, five brilliantly green male red-necked tanager birds from Brazil and a silk dress worn in a 1978 production of Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler.
In the accompanying catalogue Anderson admits that the “unconventional groupings and arrangements” are not scientific, but rather “trivial” and characterised by “error”.
“True: one of the Kunsthistoriches Museum’s most senior curators (educated, of course, at the University of Heidelberg) at first failed to detect some of the, we thought, more blatant connections; and, even after we pointed most of them out, still questions their curatorial validity in, arguably, all instances,” writes Anderson.
Jasper Sharp, a British curator and art historian working at the museum, initiated the idea for this exhibition after reading about Andy Warhol’s 1969 exhibition Raid the Icebox 1
(1969).
That long-ago exercise, writes Sharp, established “a lasting template for re-imagining of museum collections through the introduction of an artist as curator”. Anderson is the third artist after American painter Ed Ruscha and British ceramicist and writer Edmund de Waal to create an artist-curated exhibition in Vienna.
Anderson’s exhibition, which travels to the Prada Foundation in Milan next year, is a masterstroke of caprice. It lends cool to a fusty historical museum, while at the same time being remarkably tone deaf. In November, during a talk hosted by Verein K, an arts and cultural organisation in Vienna, responding to a question about exhibitions of interest, I mentioned Anderson’s show. I reservedly loved it, I said, reservedly because the display format used by the filmmaker has a troubling imperial history. My audience stared blankly back at me.
A few days later, on November 23, a report commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron offered a blunt assessment of Europe’s museums. Written by Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese economist, and Bénédicte Savoy, a French art historian, the report noted that “certain European museums” have become the “public archives” of colonialism. The report elaborates on a pledge Macron made a year ago at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso.
“Starting today, and within the next five years, I want to see the conditions put in place so as to allow for the temporary or definitive restitution of African cultural heritage to Africa,” stated France’s embattled president. Depending on how you look at Anderson’s exhibition, which includes stately oil portraits of long-dead royals alongside a menagerie of immaterial animals including a brass chameleon from Cameroon, it is far from cute. It nudges the conscience. “The confiscation, or the transfer of art objects, objects of worship, or those merely used on a daily basis have accompanied the projects of empire since antiquity,” states the much-discussed Macron report. Cultural plunder, the authors remind, is not time specific, and its consequences have always been deeply felt.
Ancient Greeks were just as aggrieved by Roman plunder as sub-Saharan Africans today, who face the fact that 90% of their material cultural legacy is located outside of the African continent.
While not involved in the scramble for Africa, Austria is not exempt from a history of plunder. The feathered crown of Montezuma, the Aztec emperor of pre-colonial Mexico when Spanish colonialists arrived, forms part of the collection of Vienna’s Museum of Ethnology. This iridescent green headdress, which could seamlessly have slotted into Anderson’s impulsive scenography, was catalogued as belonging to Ferdinand II in 1575.
Ferdinand’s successor, Rudolf II, a crackpot Habsburg emperor smitten with the arts and entranced by collectable oddities, created one of Europe’s most extensive cabinets of curiosities. Also known as cabinets of wonder, these Austrian displays exerted great influence on French, British, German and Belgian monarchs.
The newly revamped Royal Museum for Central Africa near Brussels, which displays King Leopold II’s royal plunder from Congo, has an estimated 180,000 ethnographic items, more than double estimated in the whole of France.
Politics is not part of Anderson’s vocabulary; rather, whimsy and humour are his stock in trade. The absence of politics may be why his exhibition with carved stone baboon from Egypt, green tree frog preserved in alcohol and lustrous suit of child’s armour appeals.
It is an endearing diversion, one that also has nothing to offer in relation to the big debates washing up with increasing force against the doors of
Europe’s treasures chambers.