Introduced by Matthew Gale, the co-curator of the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition and former Head of Displays at Tate Modern, the screening featured two films: L’invention du monde (The Invention of the World) (1952) directed by Michel Zimbacca and Jean-Louis Bédouin, and Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die) (1953) directed by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet. The screening was followed by a panel discussion moderated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Professor of Visual Culture at Norwich University of the Arts, with speakers María Iñigo Clavo, Assistant Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and Michael Lowy, Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) in Paris.
In his introduction, Gale described the films as being inherently anti-colonial, despite containing images, attitudes and language of their time which could be found offensive today. Further, he explained that while the filmmakers’ views were sympathetic to their subjects, they still represented European perspectives rather than the ones of the cultures portrayed. Gale’s disclaimer represents the museum’s attempt to engage in decolonial perspectives, which is also apparent in the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition wall text:
While embracing anti-colonial politics, Surrealists in Europe mistakenly perceived an affinity with art made by Indigenous peoples of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. This fantasy of shared ideas is visible in early Surrealist collections, journals and exhibitions.1
The exhibition text further referenced a Paris exhibition of Surrealist objects in 1936 which included objects made by Indigenous peoples. These were shown for ‘their perceived aesthetic value’ under a European gaze, but ‘were stripped of place, maker and their original meaning’.2 The exhibition further describes Surrealist artists as being ‘entangled within a colonial attitude of cultural appropriation’.3 Krzysztof Fijalkowski acknowledged the corrective historical approach of Surrealism Beyond Borders and referenced previous surveys of Surrealism in which colonial attitudes had been largely ‘brushed under the carpet’.
Still from Les Statues meurent aussi, 1953. Courtesy of Revue Présence Africaine.
Michael Lowy introduced the first film, L’invention du monde, by offering an overview of its director Michel Zimbacca, who was born in Paris in 1924 of Syrian origin. He was a poet, artist and member of the Surrealist movement that formed around André Breton in Paris. Zimbacca worked closely on the film with Jean-Louis Bédouin, an expert on so-called ‘primitive art’, and the poet Benjamin Péret, a member of the Surrealist circle, who wrote the film’s script. The film depicts objects borrowed from the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and the British Museum, London, as well as from the private collections of Breton, Péret, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Man Ray. First presented in 1953 at the Musée de l’Homme, the film was well received and attended by Breton and the Surrealists, with several subsequent screenings that year. The film then largely disappeared from public view, only to be rediscovered in 2012 and re-released in a new DVD edition.
In his presentation, Lowy made a distinction between ‘primitive art’, a term rejected by the Surrealists in favour of their term ‘savage art’, which they preferred for its ‘antagonistic’ and ‘rebellious’ connotations. Lowy asserted that ‘the Surrealists believed that the savage cultures had some magic qualities – qualities of enchantment and authenticity – which disappeared in the modern industrial Western capitalist civilisation’. According to Lowy, Zimbacca saw in these objects ‘the expression of a universal human spirit’ that buttressed the Surrealists’ anti-nationalist stance. Lowy reiterated that the film should not be taken as an ethnographic documentary but as a mythological and poetic piece, constructed following two principles: analogy (against the specificity of these cultures) and psychoanalytic free association provided by Péret’s script for the film.
Lowy’s short response was followed by the screening of the second film, Les statues meurent aussi. Given its existing wide and critical reception, Maria Iñigo Clavo chose to use the film to discuss contemporary art practices that deal with two key themes featured in it, which she termed ‘the death of the showcase’ and ‘the authenticity of culture’.
Les statues meurent aussi postulates that African statues ‘die’ after being removed from their original context and turned into museum objects. Displaced, muted and deprived of agency, these objects are artefacts of colonial desire. Iñigo Clavo cited Ivory Coast art historian Adack Gilbert Kouassi, who claims that when such objects are turned into museum artefacts, they can no longer be considered African.[i] Further, the film points out how some works (of African origin) are found in the Musée de l’Homme, while others (Greek and Roman classical art) are exhibited at the Musée du Louvre. Each museum frames them within their respective anthropological and art-historical discourses, genealogies and histories of humanity (and otherness) and Western art.
Iñigo Clavo stressed the film’s pioneering anti-colonial vision – it was winner of the 1954 Prix Jean Vigo but banned in France until the 1960s for its fierce critique of colonialism – which resonates with current debates around repatriation, restitution and healing in museums by such theorists as Ariella Azoulay. In her film Un-Document: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), Azoulay contests Resnais and Marker’s argument, claiming that the looted statues in the imperial exhibitions do not, in fact, die. She highlights the paradox of the forced migration of (undocumented) people and of their (documented, looted museum) objects caused by the same imperial forces, and claims that the people’s rights are inscribed in their plundered objects4 For Iñigo Clavo, contemporary art serves to overcome art history’s theoretical shortcomings in finding the language and methodologies necessary to counter the colonial underpinnings of our Western epistemology. Nowhere is this more prescient than in the healing process which certain institutions are beginning to undertake. Ideas of restitution and the encounter of cultures, as proposed by such institutions as the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, are arguably entrenched in the imperial dialectical distinction between North and South which upholds colonial structures today. By contrast, decolonial contemporary art practices advocate for the encounter of knowledges and the interlocution of different epistemologies to redress the balance in order to prevent one epistemology (Western) subsuming another (non-Western).
Iñigo Clavo spoke of Western knowledge systems and the structural foundation of museums which are organised in predetermined categories to facilitate the study of objects separate from the people and cultures to which they belong. She also cited scholar Michel de Certeau’s proposal that ‘only what can be transported can be treated. What cannot be uprooted remains by definition outside the field of research’.5 Further, Iñigo Clavo stressed the museum vitrine as the epitome of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s notion of ‘separability’: the need to separate in order to study.6 She spoke about the looting of sacred objects in the huacas (archaeological sites) in Peru, among an elite upper class amassing private collections and the popular classes selling them to make a living, leading to the objects being trapped in mercantile exchange.
During the panel discussion, Lowy did not show any of the critical revisionist (even apologetic) perspectives held by the exhibition curators. On the contrary, he reiterated the radical, ‘universal’ and poetical value of ‘savage art’ without acknowledging the colonial and racist connotations of the term.
The speakers inevitably clashed in the panel discussion, which highlighted the stark contrast of their respective positions. Indeed, the event seemed to reflect wider generational and political differences. As art galleries and museums are increasingly being called into question for their colonial pasts, institutions are attempting to respond to a demand, both internal and external, to reflect on and embrace decolonial processes and strategies. While the films’ sympathies might have been anti-colonial, their blindness to their own entanglement within colonial paradigms feels dated at best, and offensive at worst.
The audience was surprisingly muted, perhaps reflecting the marketing of the event to a general audience visiting the Surrealist exhibition on a Saturday afternoon rather than to a more politicised audience. The question of ‘who do these films serve?’ from an audience member could have indeed been extended to the event as a whole. Is it enough to include a disclaimer in order to hold on to what is perceived as a great historical work of art? Or should works like these no longer be shown, taking structural actions rather than displaying them with disclaiming words?
Perhaps the issue lay in the choice of these two films as part of the accompanying public programme to the exhibition, inevitably re-inscribing the European perspective that the curation aimed to indict. Instead, Tate could have screened a work by a filmmaker expressing the kind of liberating aspirations of a Black artistic avant-garde of the Caribbean against French assimilation, as represented in the exhibition through the display of Légitime Défense, a journal published in Paris in 1932 by politically radical Martinican students. This would have aligned with the exhibition’s expanded and more complex vision of Surrealism, as it was understood and appropriated elsewhere, with a radical political stance towards Europe. Further, it would have let the voice of a filmmaker speak for themselves about their anti-colonial project – a conundrum decried by philosopher Michel Foucault in the 1970s and widely shared among the intellectual powers at the time.7 Such a programme would have further supported the curatorial attempts to stand for – rather than speak about – radical practices in order to redress the balance and generate the genuine conversations that are needed in museums today.