Lost in translation: ‘Unprovenanced objects’ and the opacity/transparency agenda of museums’ policies
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-1874
Attraverso l’esempio delle antiche terrecotte del Mali, questo articolo propone una riflessione epistemologica sul rapporto tra pratiche occulte che sottendono la circolazione di opere senza tracciabilità e retoriche e politiche ufficiali veicolate dai musei, sviluppando un’analisi dell’associazione kantiana tra Verità, Bellezza e Bontà presente nelle politiche del patrimonio culturale e nella circolazione delle opere d’arte. In questa prospettiva si fa riferimento alle teorie di Luhmann su fiducia e potere e di Handler sull’autenticità per mostrare come l’esclusione della vita sociale di queste terrecotte (traiettorie individuali dei mercanti d’arte, strategie d’investimento, politiche di collezione, sovrapposizione legale/illegale) incrini il rapporto di fiducia che i musei vorrebbero istituire con il proprio pubblico, (ri)producendo forme di diseguaglianza sociale. A partire da questa riflessione è possibile stabilire un nesso tra il valore estetico degli oggetti e il grado di opacità delle loro molteplici tappe di produzione: più il contesto locale del mercato informale e clandestino rimane vago, più il processo di omogenizzazione globale dei criteri deontologici ed estetici ufficiali risulta effettivo e solido.
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Lost in translation: ‘Unprovenanced objects’ and the opacity/transparency agenda of museums’ policies
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Cristiana Panella
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Lost in translation: ‘Unprovenanced objects’ and the opacity/transparency agenda of museums’ policies
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                                               2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 1, GIUGNO 2015: 66-87




Lost in translation. ‘Unprovenanced objects’ and the
opacity/transparency agenda of museums’ policies
Cristiana PANELLA
Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren




ABSTRACT: Starting from the case of ancient Malian terracotta in this article I propose an
epistemological reflection on the relationship between hidden practices of circulation of un-
provenanced objects and official discourses and policies driven by museums. In particular I
develop a critique of the Kantian association of Truth, Beauty and Goodness involved in
cultural heritage policies and art circulation. Through this perspective I refer to Luhmann’s
theory on trust and power as well as to Handler’s theory on authenticity in order to show
how the erasing of the social life of the Malian terracotta (overlapping legal/illegal, indivi-
dual trajectories of the art traders, investment strategies, acquisition policies) by museums
finally produces social inequality because of the lack of information through the production
of trust toward their public. In this sense I endorse a consequentiality principle linking
beauty and properness through which the value of a given final art product is directly pro-
portional to the degree of opacity of its multiple production stages: the more the local con-
text of the grey market remains vague, the more the world-wide homogenization of deonto-
logical and aesthetical official criteria is effective and firm.

KEYWORDS: ARTWORK, AUTHENTICITY, MALIAN ANTIQUITIES, DEONTOLOGY, TRUST.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Cristiana Panella
Lost in translation: ‘Unprovenanced objects’ and the opacity/transparency agenda of museums’ policies
2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 1, GIUGNO 2015: 66-87.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/ANUAC2239-625X-1874
CRISTIANA PANELLA                                                                    67




Introduction
    The circulation of material culture in contexts of exchange, and the impact of the
market economy on value systems have constituted special fields of social anthropo-
logy (see Simmel, 1978; Appadurai, 1988; Godelier, 1996; Berking, 1999). Marcel
Mauss’s The Gift (1925) opened the way for crucial reflection not only on the func-
tion of objects in social organization and the production of difference but also, in the
Durkheimian wake, on the role of the symbolic and imaginary in the production of
value. One aspect of the gift theory seems to be pertinent to the conceptual approa-
ch proposed in this article, namely the ethical implications of exchange in the con-
frontation between heterogeneous value systems.
    In Art and Agency, Alfred Gell theorized, from a Maussian perspective, the equi-
valence between art objects and persons as ‘social agents’ (Gell, 1998). This princi-
ple of interaction between things and humans stresses the ‘shaping of objects and
performance – indeed in seeing object as ‘performative’ (Myers, 2004; 2008) follo-
wing a principle of selective integration and exclusion, within which objects are con-
ceived to exert influence on individuals (Gell, 1998; Miller, Parrott, 2009).
    The production of performance seems to me particularly cogent with regard to
the main topic of this article: the display of objects issued by clandestine networks
and the confrontation between heterogeneous regimes of value underlying the inter-
dependence between shadow practices and transparent rhetorics. In the last fifteen
years social sciences developed a growing interest in ‘art crime’ (see O’Keefe, 1997;
Brodie, Doole, Renfrew, 2001; Brodie, Renfew, 2005; Mackenzie, 2005; Tijhuis,
2006; Mackenzie, Green, 2009; Charney, 2009; Ulph, Smith, 2012; Campbell,
2013). Nevertheless, the displaying of the clandestine social life of ‘unprovenanced’
objects still represents a Gordian knot of museums’ policies. Market interest in ‘tra-
ditional’ art with fixed and classifiable ethnic and cultural borders diverted attention
away from ongoing changes in non-Western contexts determining a progressive se-
paration of form from effect (d’Azevedo, 1958). The commercial biography of Afri-
can objects, which was already developing through international exhibitions in the
1930s (see Corbey, 1993; 2000; Gaugue, 1997; Hodeir, 2002; Flam, Deutch, 2003;
Geary, Xatart, 2007; de l’Estoile, 2007), had thus been obscured by the art market
itself to the advantage of an aesthetic formal identity that fueled higher market bid-
ding. Moreover, the strong link between stylistic studies and market overvaluation in
the making of African art and the ‘laundering’ of stolen objects implied that art hi-
story and the study of African material culture had long been connected to commer-


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LOST IN TRANSLATION                                                                                  68


cial interests that envisioned stylistic fixity as an integral part of market value (Har-
din, 1993).
    In the early Nineties the display of antiquities has been accompanied by the
deontological turn driven by the so-called ‘looting question’ (Tubb, 1995; Vitelli,
2000; Brodie, Doole, Watson, 2000). In this trend, African studies found its flagship
issue in the debate over Malian ancient terracotta (McIntosh, Keech-McIntosh,
1986; Togola, Raimbault, 1989; Polet, Bessaguet, 1993; McIntosh, Keech-McInto-
sh, Togola, 1995; Schmidt, McIntosh, 1996; Bedaux, 1998; Bedaux, Rowlands,
2001). Paradoxically, such an overexposure of the global fight against clandestine
digs has been directly proportional, with a few exceptions such as the itinerant exhi-
bition Vallées du Niger (1993), to the silence surrounding the display of ‘looted’ ob-
jects in temporary exhibitions or, as shown below, to the creation of moral fictions
in order to justify circulation of ‘looted’ objects while asserting the good faith of ac-
quisition and display museums’ policies.
    Considering such a state of the art, in this article 1 I propose an epistemological
reflection on the processes of deontological legitimization driven by museums as
well as on the relationship between opacity and transparency in circulation and di-
splay of unprovenanced archaeological objects. Starting from the case of the so-cal-
led ‘Djenne terracotta’, my reflection orients on the epistemological break due to the
erasure of the traceability of the unprovenanced objects (objets trouvés) (rural and
urban networks of the transnational trade chain) in the production of knowledge and
confidence-building policies towards their public by museums, in order to create an
‘aesthetic truth’.
    I will thus attempt to show that ‘aesthetic truth’ entails an automatic association
between beauty and properness/goodness based on the erasure of the temporalities
of social practices imbricated into circulation and display of unprovenanced objects.
Such an overlapping finally determines a contradictory good faith pact between mu-
seums and their public due to lack of full information on the biography of the objec-
ts.

1. This article is a revised version of a previous publication in French language (Panella, 2011). I
truly thank the two anonymous referees for their suggestions and comments. My aim is not to come
back to the literature on the musealization of the objects and ontology of African art (e.g. Weber,
Vogel, 1987; De L’Estoile, 2007; MacGaffey, 1998), nor to refer specifically to repatriation issues
(see Tythacott, Arvanitis, 2014). I rather describe the debate over the clandestine trade in antiquities
developed in the early Nineties in the wake of the global deontology driven by the World Heritage
Centre and by ICOM. In this framework I have extensively analyzed the social organization of Ma-
lian farmers-diggers (temporalities of digging, hierarchical clusters, supply dynamics) (Panella, 2010;
2014a), ethical and aesthetical concerns over circulation of terracotta, and the interdependence bet-
ween the production of ‘masterpieces’ by the art market and national integration policies (Panella,
2012).


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CRISTIANA PANELLA                                                                                    69


Moral fictions, authenticity, and ‘aesthetic truth’: the good faith pact of mu-
seums
    The presence of ancient Malian terracotta in private European collections was al-
ready regretted in the Fifties (Szumowsky, 1955). Official denunciation of clandesti-
ne digs however emerged in the Seventies (Parigi, 1973; Bedaux in Evrard, 1977:
63-64) in parallel with the growing outflow and circulation of Djenne terracotta in
art galleries, temporary exhibitions and museums’ collections. The international de-
bate on ‘looting’ strongly developed in the Eighties (UNESCO, 1981, McIntosh,
McIntosh, 1986; McIntosh, 1986; Togola, Raimbault, 1989) before reaching its
peak in the following decade (Berns in McIntosh, 1990: 15; Polet, Bessaguet, 1993;
Brent, 1994; 2001). In the mid-Seventies undergraduate student Jacqueline Evrard
made the first typological research on a corpus of Djenne terracotta, only reprodu-
ced by drawings, owning to three major collectors at this time: Baudouin de Grunne,
Emile Deletaille and Marie Kiriloff. Among the forty-three statuettes taken into
consideration in this study, three (31, 32, 33) have been acquired respectively ‘in an
art gallery in Paris in 1970’; in Bamako before 1972; ‘en 1972’. A fourth one (60)
has been ‘seen in Segu in July 1975 at the antiquarian Dembélé’ (Panella, 2014b:
110). With a few exceptions, these statuettes are the only ones for which the ‘collec-
tion site’ is mentioned. For two of them (31-33) the collecting site is respectively
‘unknown’ or ‘undetermined’. For thirty-six of forty-three objects it is mentioned as
‘Bani/Niger’2. In four cases (27-28-29-38) there is a questioning point 3. Definitely in
most cases, the collection sites of these objects remained silent.
    The Gordian knot within museums’ communicational strategies with regard to
the clandestine trade of the terracotta has produced over time three competing, pa-
rallel exhibition policies which are as follows: mimicries of morality, denunciation

2. In 1993 in Paris a French painter asked me if I could give an expertise on a Djenne terracotta
head which he just acquired at Drouot. He told me that the object had a certificate of ‘authenticity’
(thermoluminescence dating) but its former owner, Marie Kiriloff, has not been able to determine
the very provenance of the head. She was leaning towards an attribution to the Djenne style but some
‘strange’ details made her doubtful. The only certain information concerned its origin from ‘Bani/Ni-
ger’. I replied him that as academic milieu already knew at this time the TL certification was not a
guarantee of authenticity. The painter was dismayed and told me that in any case he was not intere -
sted in authenticity of the head but in its form, which he considered as a source of inspiration for him
even if the head were a ‘fake’. This case is not rare indeed. The catalogue of the Blanchard-Dignac
collection stated: ‘Thermoluminescence dating gives variable and not really precise results; it indica-
tes however that objects are ancient, which is enough for collectors who are not archaeologists’ (Pa -
ris/Drouot, December 8-10 1990). The translation from French is by the author.
3. Bernard De Grunne massively exploited his father’s collection for his contested (McIntosh, 1992)
stylistic analyses (see De Grunne 1980, 1987, 1988). The former De Grunne collection of Djenne
terracotta as well as that of his son-in-law, Philippe Guimiot, are dispersed among private owners.


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LOST IN TRANSLATION                                                                                   70


of clandestine digs and minimization. One can recall the debate over whether or not
to study and exhibit the Djenne terracotta that accompained the De Grunne collec-
tion exhibit at Rome in 1990, Terra d’Africa, Terra d’Archeologia. La grande scultu-
ra in terracotta del Mali, Djenné, VIII-XVI sec. 4 (Bernardi, De Grunne, 1990) as well
as a similar debate that took place during the exhibition The Art of a Continent in
London in 1995 (Coombes, 1999; Brodie, 2005). In actual fact, these opposing stan-
ces followed a decade during which museum policy generally trivialized or suppres-
sed the clandestine entity of Malian terracotta. The disconnection between the pre-
sentation of these objects and their social context through Western markets reached
its peak during the 1980s, when Djenne terracotta appeared to a large extent in both
museums and private collections. Between 1980 and 1995, the rapid expansion of il-
legal digs thus paralleled a rise in market value for the Niger Inland Delta’s terracot-
ta as well as their circulation through temporary exhibitions. Nevertheless assertions
of the market pedigree were directly proportional to the malaise recurring around
presentations. Farmers-diggers are called ‘record takers’ (Anati, 1991)5, or, more re-
cently, ‘workers’ (De Grunne, 2014: 21). Expressions such as ‘found’ or ‘discovered’
are preferred to terms like ‘looted’ or ‘excavated’ 6 revealing ambiguity, discomfort
and surrealistic fictions of avoidance that have accompanied the display of Djenne
terracotta from the Eighties to the mid-Nineties.
    I will limit myself to citing one case, the exhibition Perspectives, Angles on Afri-
can Art, organized by Susan Vogel at the Center for African Art in New York in
1987. This exhibition intended to reconstruct ten key cultural personalities against a
series of photos of African objects. The writer James Baldwin (1927-1987) respon-
ded to one of the exhibited Djenne terracotta comprised of a hippopotamus and two
people. Dolo, one of my best informants, along with Satimbé, during my PhD field-
work on the clandestine trade in Djenne terracotta (1996-2001)7, unearthed this an-
thro-zoomorphological group at Debena, near the village of Pondori, in the Niger
Inland Delta8. The Pondori zone is known for its hippopotami in the river Bani, as
seen in a large amount of ancient terracotta representing hippopotami.


4. ‘Some thirty ancient Djenne terracotta coming from a private collection (kept anonymous!). An
exhibition jointly organized by the City Council of Rome and by the Centre Culturel Français of
Rome, hosted by the Centre Culturel Français. Did the Centre Culturel Français (under the French
government) consider juridical and ethical issues of displaying objects issued by illicit digs and plun -
der of archaeological sites?’ (WAMP Bulletin, 1991).
5. In 1991 Emmanuel Anati and Ivan Bargna presented a collection of Djenne terracotta coming
from private collections exhibited at Pinacoteca Civica at Como (Italy).
6. See Art ancien du Mali, 1983.
7. I undertook a few very last interviews in February 2001.
8. I acquired this information in 1997 through the oral description of the piece. Dolo confirmed it in
2001 on the basis of some photos.


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CRISTIANA PANELLA                                                                    71


    Dolo was satisfied of this discovery as the piece was almost whole and complete
while usually most of the terracotta discovered nearby Debena were shattered. In
1984 an identical piece illustrated the advertising of the Craft Caravan Gallery
(New York) in the review African Arts (1984: 18), announcing an exhibition sale of
‘Bronzes and terracotta from Mali’. Between 1978 and 1984, Satimbé discovered
the most famous terracotta which were acquired into the major collections during
the Eighties. He identified twelve of the thirty-two terracotta published in the exhi-
bition’s catalogue Terra d’Africa, Terra d’Archeologia (Rome, 1990) (Bernardi, De
Grunne, 1990), entirely composed by pieces of the Baudouin De Grunne’s former
collection, for which he established the provenance site as well as discovery details.
Just a few examples; the horseman represented on the cover was found by Satimbé
at Sebera, nearby Pondori. The famous trunk of a woman keeping her hands on her
cheeks and sticking out her tongue has been excavated by his team at Soum (San re-
gion) (Panella, 2002).
    The construction of the archaic past is linked to the trope of authenticity and it
has been deeply imbricated into the post-excavation biography of Djenne terracotta.
The art dealer Chantal Dandrieu, curator of the exhibition Terra d’Africa, Terra
d’Archeologia with Christian Depuyper, explained to me that their goal was to stress
the evocative ancientness (arcaicità in Italian) of the objects. They wanted the objec-
ts to speak for themselves. They didn’t want to show only their aesthetic side but
also a set of ‘ancestral values’ emerging from the emotions that would arise in the
public when seeing the objects.
    Richard Handler brilliantly analyzed the construction of authenticity in the West.
In the wake of Lionel Trilling (1972), Handler considers authenticity as that which
concerns individual existence outside the social rule that each individual plays in his
own society. A main step of such individualization processes is the link between au-
thenticity and sincerity (Handler, 1986). Handler thus conceives the museum as a
place where visitors […] can appropriate the authenticity of the object ‘incorpora-
ting that magical proof of existence into what we call our ‘personal experience […]’
(Handler, 1986: 4). Nevertheless, objects convey in their own an ‘aesthetic truth’
which, as being ‘truth’ also does incorporate an ethical dimension carried out by the
evocative force of their material nature. I stress the fact that the erasing of the out-
flowing steps of unprovenanced objects doesn’t concern specifically ethical issues of
acquisition by museums but rather it stems from an epistemological question concer-
ning the display of the objects and the nature of their reception. After raising co-
smopolitan approaches in the debate on repatriation of cultural heritage (Appiah
2005; 2009), occultation of the clandestine side of the objects has been replaced by
the reestablishing of the aesthetic experience of art with a variant: considering sensi-
ble experience as an universal tool of deontological agreement. This approach re-


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LOST IN TRANSLATION                                                                            72


flects a connotation of cultural heritage based on a perspective of transmissibility
and perennization (Bindé, 2001) in the wake of the creation of the ‘immaterial heri-
tages’ (Smith, Akagawa, 2009) and of ‘living human treasures’ by Unesco .
    In Trust and Power, Niklas Luhmann cogently analyzes collective and individual
implications of confidence building and perceived authority, in this specific case, of
perceived authority of beauty. This authority always undergirds a representation of
complexity which is nevertheless not represented in detail where the factual expe-
rience is linked to other, unrealized, possibilities: ‘the world gains unity solely from
the boundaries of this ‘et cetera’’ (Luhmann, 1973: 52), rendered ‘real’ by emotions.
In the case of the sensory experience of the object, hiding the clandestine origin of
that objects thus constitutes the ‘et cetera’of this sensory experience. Such an ‘et ce-
tera’ finally overlaps the ‘aesthetics of indeterminacy’ of the objects, a condition of
‘unfinishedness’ intentionally constructed by the artist whose sense is given by per-
ceptions of the beholder. These perceptions give sense to the object (work of art or
daily life things) and constitute its meanings (Kemp, 1998). Similarly the ‘blanks’ of
a text can be seen as ‘an elementary matrix for the interaction between text and rea-
der’ (Iser, 1978 in Kemp, 1998: 188). Due to their ‘fixed’, ‘inelastic’, and ‘non-trans-
ferrable’ nature, human emotions attempt, according to Luhmann, to immunize
themselves from refutation, and thus become tools that simplify reality. As a result,
any disturbance of the individual emotional relationship with the exhibited object
restores the crushing complexity of the world (Luhmann, 1973: 81). Erasing of de-
tails of the real underlying the archaization of the past thus entails the temporal gap
between the acts of production of objects and their musealization. The production
of the aesthetic value of the objects thus implies a process of objectification underly-
ing a lack of concern about practices of use value which Kant calls ‘aesthetical in-
difference’ (Simmel, 1990: 74).

Aesthetic truth as confidence
   James Cuno’s book Whose Culture? The promise of museums and the debate over
antiquities (Cuno, 2009)9 seems to me to represent a striking example of the value
gap imbricated in circulation of art works while showing the crucial role of the ob-
jects within the opacity/transparency arenas of the museums’ display policies. In this
book, Cuno, at that time President and Director of the Institute of Arts of Chica-
go10, proposes a series of essays about antiquities acquisition by advocating a univer-
salist vision of beauty in which the emotion created by aesthetic interaction with an

9. I truly thank Charlotte Joy for having drawn my attention on this book.
10. In 2011 James Cuno was appointed as President and Executive Director of the J. Paul Getty Tru-
st.


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CRISTIANA PANELLA                                                                                73


object suffices in and of itself to render that object’s prior history largely irrelevant.
Furthermore, this theory provides an example of museums’ good faith, as they are
required to select beautiful and (thus) good objects, a requirement which goes back
to the idea of sensory experience as a tool of deontological agreement. According to
this logic, the public’s reception of objects responds to their implicit faith in the mu-
seums’ acquisition methods: “[…] The responsible acquisition of antiquities is some-
thing the public has entrusted our museum to do. It’s part of the public’s trust in our
museum […]” (Cuno, 2009: 12).
    The erasing of the clandestine-origin objects’ path in museums does not only rai-
se the deontological problem of the best means of object acquisition but it also hi-
ghlights, in my sense, an epistemological problem concerning the exhibited object
and the nature of its reception. In one of the contributions of the Cuno’s book To
shape the citizens of ‘That Great City, the World’, Neil MacGregor, director of the
British Museum, affirms that the museum context allows its public to think about
and imagine different stories than that which they initially imagined (MacGregor,
2009). In order to demonstrate his statement, MacGregor presents the case of the
‘throne of weapons’, which the British Museum bought in 2002 11. This work was
commissioned by the Bishop Dinis Sengulane of the Christian Council of Mozambi-
que with the support of Christian Aid in the context of the TAE project - Transfor-
maçaõ de Armas em Enxadas (Transforming Arms into Tools). The throne was
made by the Mozambican artist Cristovao Canhavato from decommissioned AK47
automatic weapons collected since the end of the civil war in 1992. According to
MacGregor, through this social rehabilitation project (weapons for farming imple-
ments), Sengulane not only wanted to take these weapons out of commission but
also to make this disarmament process visible.
    With regard to the red line of the book, the legitimacy of circulation of objets
trouvés in the name of universalism of beauty, MacGregor’s choice lends itself to
some considerations. The international traffic in arms which underlines the materia-
lity of the throne and its social life doesn’t concern directly the deontology of the
British Museum’s collection policy. The British Museum did not buy the arms that
make up the throne as weapons but as objects of reification of the war. In other
words, there is no direct link between these weapons’ presence in the British Mu-
seum and the clandestine or illegal nature of their previous social life. Even though
it is the result of a clear context of illicitness, this example demonstrates an inverted
sense of the public confidence-building which the article promotes inasmuch as one
notes an ontological gap: trafficking, but not art trafficking. As one considers the pu-
blic reception of the work, one realizes that this inverted sense is made richer due to

11. The ‘throne of weapons’ was part of the British Museum’s multimedia initiative ‘A History of the
World in 100 Objects’ (MacGregor, 2010).


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LOST IN TRANSLATION                                                                              74


a contrary, mirrored factor. The power of the throne as an ‘art’ work emerges from
the difference between its components’ original function as weapons that belong to a
sphere of ethical and economic values. Nevertheless, these values are only percepti-
ble to the general public due to the over-mediatization of war imagery that gives
these weapons a new identity as Signs, carriers of an ethical sensibility linked to
their function as anti-war signifiers12.
   The elements that I have illustrated call into question confidence-building mecha-
nisms within a contradictory epistemological context. Contrary to trust, which is
constrained by interpersonal relations or contracts, the experience of ‘aesthetic truth’
entails a free choice. Such a choice in turn implies relative certitude about the legiti-
macy of confidence-building based on the information and the value assessment
which are the habitus of cultural production. However, applying these value judg-
ment criteria, it can be assumed that the aesthetic habitus does not consider the acts
of production that accompany the object’s staging (mise en scène). As Diego Gam-
betta states, the trust act acquires ‘a special significance in instances of ignorance or
incertitude concerning unknown or unknowable actions’ (Gambetta, 1988: 218). As
a result, unlike interpersonal trust, which implies a certain, albeit sometimes very in-
complete, familiarity between actors, the musealization of the objets trouvés implies
that the principle of aesthetic truth is sufficient in order to bestow on the public an
adequate knowledge of the goodness/properness of the displaying process even
though that process may exclude several stages of the staging (donner à voir) of the-
se objects. This assessment demonstrates Luhmann’s affirmation according to which
‘confidence is possible as long as truth is possible’. The proof of truth thus proves to
be the product of a relational dynamic based on a collectively unconscious epistemo-
logical dimension, a cultural substrate that underpins aesthetic or moral value judg-
ment (Engelke, 2009). Thus, when individualizing the aesthetic experience, the ob-
ject is considered a proof” of truth, and thus of trust, due to an intrinsic relational
power. Similarly, perception of truthiness during the sensory museum experience
stems from an intimate, exclusive and self-referential approach to knowledge deri-
ving from the synergy between staging policies acted by museums and assessment
values of the public. Consequently the individual processes of aesthetic experience
considers the objects as a proof of evidence, and thus of trust, because of a taken-
for-granted intrinsic relational power. The aesthetic truth as rhetoric of the past and
authentication techniques considers culture as an objective discovery and not as a
construction of social acting (Handler, 2003). On the contrary it is interesting to
note that following a specular and opposite approach, proof of evidence of plunder
does not originate from a sensorial individual experience but from a collective habi-

12. With regard to the display of the ‘throne of weapons’ in a prison and emotions of touch, see Sa-
muels, 2008.


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CRISTIANA PANELLA                                                                         75


tus to ‘visualize’ official iconographies of illegality driven by the press and rhetoric
of cultural heritage policies alike.

The gaze of materiality for global properness
    The link between authenticity, truth, and confidence firmly fixed by the sensory
experience of objects can constitute a means by which one can understand why the
public would question the origin of weapons or blood diamonds and would not, by
contrast, question the origins and acquisitions of works of art. Djenne terracotta and
the ‘throne of weapons’ show that knowledge of the objects underlies a process of
authentication created by the function of museums as agreement tools of aesthetical
qualities of the objects grafted onto the art market pedigree processes. The public’s
habitus to give an ethical aura to displayed objects thus constitutes a taken-for-gran-
ted element for establishing the pact of trust between museums and their public, wi-
thout considering the official or clandestine nature of acts of production which un-
derlie the display of the objects. The repeated question that the public asked throu-
ghout the throne’s touring exhibit – ‘how did these weapons get here?’ (MacGregor,
2009) seems to me to prove the discriminatory habitus between objects and art ob-
jects due in part to the fact that a contemporary work does not transmit the same di-
screpancy between acts of production, function, and aesthetic experience which is
interwoven in the antiquation process of ancient objects. In this case, Richard Hand-
ler is right to affirm that aesthetic truth, the rhetoric of the past, and authentication
techniques all respond to the idea of culture as an objective discovery and not as a
construction of acts of social interpretation (Handler, 2003). In other words, follo-
wing Simmel’s perspective, the strength of the object’s pedigree, particularly that of
archaeological objects, is directly proportional to the gap between its biography
(sculpture or production workshops, trade circuits) and the time of its pedigree (see
also Dilley, 2005). Objects of cultural heritage thus shift from a material dimension
to an immaterial one before being re-materialized through classification through on-
going dynamics of ethical and aesthetical agreement.
    The case of the Houston-based Menil Foundation’s digitalization of the Djenne
terracotta is very representative of such a shift. John and Dominique de Menil’s col-
lection, begun in the 1930s, includes 16,000 objects, of which about one thousand
come from Africa. Among these objects are several works of Djenne terracotta ac-
quired between the Sixties and the Eighties. Like most of the Djenne terracotta
items held by North American and European museums, the Djenne of the de Menil
collection came from clandestine networks. According to Kristina van Dyke, former
curator of the de Menil Foundation’s African collections 13, the digitalization pro-

13. Kristina van Dyke is the current President of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.


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ject’s goal was to establish regional iconographic styles (van Dyke, 2007, 2008) whi-
ch have been missing until now due to the anonymity of local actors and the obscu-
rity of the original sites of the objects. The project included three-dimensional scan-
ner analysis of the earthenware, presented alongside Kristina van Dicke and the ra-
diologist Marc Ghysels as part of large-scale international media coverage at the
Mande Studies Association conference in Lisbon in June 2008 14. Most of this cove-
rage focused on the benefits of three-dimensional scanning and analysis, a tool with
which one could select ‘good’ objects (i.e., those which are authentic and beautiful)
and could exclude ‘bad’ objects (i.e., those which are ‘inauthentic’ and not
‘beautiful’). In this case, the polarization of the discourse on cultural heritage bet-
ween ethical values/legality, and non-ethical values/illegality, is reflected in the tech-
niques by which one can detect ‘authentic’ and ‘fake’ objects using a deontological
approach to the material management of terracotta based on normatization.
    Authentication is thus expressed via a contradictory approach that, despite its in-
tentions, promotes the individual, sensory experience of objects (aesthetic truth)
while promoting the rationalization of this experience by establishing standardized
authenticity criteria (age of the object, textural and mineralogical characteristics, re-
sidual traces of the object’s construction, patina). No need to say that the pumped
presentation of this new technique of analysis of ‘unprovenanced’ terracotta openly
constituted an additional source of the market value of the de Menil collection. And
yet, except for my own comments, this panel didn’t raise any reaction by the floor.
Remembering the academic outcry generated by the exhibition of the De Grunne
collection in Rome or by the screening of the Dutch documentary-film The African
King. An investigation (1990) at the Museum of Mankind in Paris, I would argue
that the restyling of the de Menil collection finally demonstrates that the survival of
heritage as a concept is achieved through the maintaining of its visibility and this in
spite of the market social life of the objects.
    The de Menil case thus shows that the binomial association deontology=legality
had shifted in intensity over time following market assessment of terracotta as well
as evolution of an ethical and aesthetical ‘global hierarchy of value’ (Schramm,
2000; Herzfeld, 2004) through the tool of normatization.
    It is worth reminding the fact that normatization underlies a reciprocal nourish-
ment between legal and illegal practices as well as opaque transactions (Panella,
Thomas, 2015). The diplomatic embarrassment due to the purchase of two Nok ter-
racotta by the Musée du Quai Branly in 1998 resulted in a bilateral agreement
(2000) establishing the property of the artwork to the Nigerian State which allowed
the MQB to keep them for 25 years in spite of its illegal circulation. In other words,

14. The aim of this communication was ambiguous. It was evident that its aim was to endorse the de
Menil pieces vis-à-vis statuettes coming from other collections.


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CRISTIANA PANELLA                                                                                77


a sort of condono (amnesty) apt to legalize illegal items or practices15.

Satimbé and the others: the missing links of the museums’ trust agreement
    Richard Handler has brilliantly analyzed the relationship between materiality and
semiotics. Real semiotic processes - he states - need a spatial emplacement that ma-
nifests itself in language through physical metaphors. In the discourse on cultural
heritage such metaphors are represented by the objectifying approach of the preser-
vation principles aimed at material culture (description, circumscription, classifica-
tion). Nevertheless, while this approach is simple for physical entities, it becomes
problematic for ‘non-spatial’ and ‘semiotic’ cultural activities (Handler, 2003: 357)
such as survival strategies or power relationships; alias cultural agents driven by the
contradictory nature of human actions and hazards of contingency. The contradicto-
ry nature of the social lives of objects is the mirror image of the normatization pro-
cess. The binary character of normatization is apt to underplay the contradictions
that are embedded in the objects’ biography by erasing their traceability. In the case
of the Djenne terracotta, their representation required both the exclusion of the mar-
ket interactions, but also entailed the physical presence of farmers-diggers, stereoty-
ped as ‘looters’ in the press accounts (see Brent, 1994). The collaboration with Sa-
timbé enabled me to locate over 200 sites of the upper Niger Delta where he excava-
ted between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 2000s. Satimbé drew up
a mental geography of terracotta based upon the recollection of his personal expe-
riences and process of discovery of the various sites. For example, he remembered
his excavations near the village of Sahona due to the fact that while working there
he was quite destitute and thus had to eat old skins, letting them marinate and then
cook for hours. In fact, digger’s deaths due to hunger, thirst, and accidents are quite
frequent. The famous ‘Khun Ram’ sold by Sotheby’s for $275,000 in 1991, is known
above all for the quarrel concerning its authenticity (Brent, 2001). However, very
few people are aware of the fact that, while this zoomorphic terracotta was being
transported to Bamako, the vehicle carrying it flipped over, causing the death of the
driver (Panella, 2002).
    These trajectories of heroization (or lack thereof) reveal the inequality balance
embedded in national policies regarding the creation and preservation of cultural he-
ritage. These inequalities imply broader dynamics of reification and commodifica-
tion of objects and human beings (Vandenberghe, 2002) as they partake in a neo-
liberal and media-oriented vision of ‘Culture’ built upon visibility. In this sense,

15. Nok terracotta are included in the ICOM’s Red List Database of archaeological objects at risk of
looting: http://icom.museum/resources/red-lists-database/category/nok/



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LOST IN TRANSLATION                                                                  78


teams of diggers could be considered ‘shadow groups’. On the one hand this is the
consequence of their economic and symbolic non-visibility vis-à-vis the mechanisms
of cultural heritage production and circulation. On the other, this may be related to
their collective identification with resistance to the state through their mastery of
digging, outflowing and selling steps. Farmers who were required to abandon exca-
vation due to their age or due to repeated arrests or seizures of their objects, had a
prolonged perception of the actual time of the excavation because of the powerful
auto-representations interwoven in excavation’s acts of production. One can further-
more extend this identity power to the temporalities of nostalgia. In his well-known
book Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State, Michael Herzfeld applies
the concept of “structural nostalgia” to the rhetorics of intergenerational transmis-
sion of an alleged moral harmony that is inherited from the Past but, at the same
time, atemporal and engaged in national integration politics (Herzfeld, 2005). In the
case of the official discourse over looting, such a discourse entails the reification of
the human actions involved in the excavations in favor of the ‘material rhetoric’ (Joy-
ce, 2002) of images of the results of looting. On the other hand, in the case of far -
mer-diggers, the nostalgic dimension does not entail the transmissibility of a collec-
tive ethic. This nostalgia can more properly be summarized as an individual feeling
of loss of the moral harmony created by the acceptance of a shared dimension of
risk, and by the spirit of endurance, which one could, in the final analysis, interpret
as emic ethics of honor.

Museums, the anomaly of social sciences?
   Comparison between the Djenne terracotta and the ‘throne of weapons’ shows
that the epistemological contradiction of ‘unprovenanced objects’ display stems from
the erasing of the acts of production which underlie circulation of the objects and
production of knowledge. The unease of staging derives from the fact that the reco-
gnition of ancient objects as consumer goods implies the consciousness (and the vi-
sualization) of the acts of market production (excavation, outflow and exportation
dynamics) which fill the temporal gap between the time of creation and use and
their discovery by contemporary public. However such an approach is opposed to
the antiquation of the past performed by displaying Djenne terracotta in order to
produce aesthetic truth. The lack of reconstitution and of representation of practices
of production and circulation questions the selective criteria applied by museums in
deciding which objects and knowledge to display and, ultimately, the sense of mu-
seums in social sciences. This is not just an epistemological issue. The taken-for-
granted ethics of unprovenanced objects based on the deontological and aesthetical
labeling crafted by museums reveals an anomaly of museology in respect to the me-
thodological principles of the social sciences to which it belongs - namely the com-

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CRISTIANA PANELLA                                                                                   79


munication of the production and collection history of the social object 16. In nomo-
thetic sciences, the construction of the object is based on a deductive process which
finally constitutes the object in its own right. On the contrary social sciences do not
cease to question themselves about the modalities of data collecting and how this
impacts the production of knowledge. If an object is the result of a selection, appro-
priation and cultural mutation policy, the process of display also implies a produc-
tion process. The question arises as to how museums’ objects have been collected
when we see that progressive formalization of collecting policies have had a minor
impact on the volume of acquisitions, issued by remote choices and driven by sha-
dow assessment policies (Fleming, 2002). In the same time, as the other social
sciences, museology needs to take into account the temporal dimension of the ob-
jects and their contingent nature. Consequently museology’s credibility and trust-
worthiness will be commensurate to its ability to reveal, like a Russian matrioshka
puppet, the various levels of agency connected to the ‘real’ encounters occurred du-
ring the collecting steps. Such a transparency of collecting trajectories, which com-
plies with the “ethnographic pact” of the fieldwork (Olivier de Sardan, 2008), vali-
dates the restitution of the real as it has been selected by the fieldwork and authenti-
cates it.

Conclusion
   Following a guiding principle that connects subjectification, policy and material
culture (Bayart, Warnier 2004), I have tried to show, through the example of deon-
tological authentication policies, that the circulation histories of ‘Djenne’ terracotta
could be considered as ‘critical sites’ of negotiation of social, political and economic
values (Graburn, Glass, 2004). In particular I showed that authentication is the result
of a peculiar exhibitionary encounter between the opacity of objects’ circulation
practices and the transparency of museums’ exhibition discourse with regard to so-
cial memory, acts of production, and subsistence strategies. This approach emphasi-
zes an empirical perspective of culture that views the body as both possessing ’occu-
pational social relations’ capital (Jackson, Palmer-Jones, 1999) and as an individual,
ontologically independent entity. It also restores a synergy between the various ac-
tors and motivations found in clandestine archaeological sites, the public’s expecta-
tions, and the museum’s exhibition strategies by using a polyphonic approach to ob-

16. I refer here to the definition of ‘social sciences’ proposed by Jean-Claude Passeron. Passeron con-
siders social sciences as being deictic ones because they define an object within a temporal contin-
gency. In this frame, he considers all social sciences, among which human sciences, as historical
sciences (Passeron, 2005).




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LOST IN TRANSLATION                                                                  80


ject construction. The mise en scène of these contradictions justifies the museum’s
role as revealer of heterogeneous spheres of agency and of attribution of material
cultural value. It would perhaps be imaginable to abandon the old game of authenti-
city in favor of a concept of empathy, vectoring the hidden resonances of the con-
tradictory nature of these objects’ world and the anonymous acts of production that
govern it. Today, the display of contradictions – implied in exhibiting objects and
their social effects - constitutes an important challenge for a social turn of museums
as advocated by the Manifesto of Social Work (Silverman, 2010) and on new ‘fric-
tions’ and cultural contamination in museums studies (Karp et al., 2006). The que-
stion of social stigma and of its misrepresentation and the representation of social
groups which are discriminated through the exhibition of ‘hidden histories’ could
constitute a first step toward a revision of public representation of society in mu-
seums (Sandell, 2002) by the link of acts of production instead of by the gaze of re-
presentation. This new approach could constitute an alternative reading to the per-
spective following which the strength of the object’s pedigree, particularly that of ar-
chaeological objects, is directly proportional to the gap between its biography
(sculpture or production workshops, trade circuits) and the time of its pedigree. The
uneasiness of staging steps comes, ultimately, from the fact that ancient objects’
function as consumable objects entails the consideration of a series of bodily acts of
market production (dynamics of unearthing, of distribution and sale, of export). The
unmasking of the trade mechanism for plundered objects within a commodity chain
thus includes defetishization of the objects through the revealing of the chain’s acts
of production. Such a perspective contrasts both with museums’ objectification pro-
cesses which imply the archaization of the past and the production of aesthetic tru-
th, as well as with the principle of materiality which has been, since the end of
World War II, the raison d’être of cultural heritage. Finally the alternating of overex-
posure of official liturgies on looting and of silence on museum policies of purcha-
sing and displaying led to an inversion of the sense with regard to the diffusion of
knowledge aims imbricated into the trust pact declared by museums. Because they
are owners and arbitrators of the aesthetic value and juridical condition of the ob-
jects, museums exploit the ethical connotation linked to the sensorial experience of
the objects as a major element for constructing trust toward their visitors. If we
agree that museology is a part of social sciences, the absence of reconstitution and
finally of representativity of acts of production of the market life of objects without
traceability in museums poses the question about criteria of selection of messages
before questions on the objects themselves and finally on the scope of museology in
social sciences.




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CRISTIANA PANELLA                                                                          81




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 Cristiana PANELLA, is senior researcher at the Culture and Society Research Unit of the
 Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren. Since 1991, her research has focused upon
 the international market in African art: illegal trade of antiquities and international di-
 scourse on cultural heritage. In 2002 she was awarded a co-tutored PhD in Social Sciences
 from Leiden University. Her dissertation concerned local networks of the clandestine trade
 in antiquities in Mali. She has also been working on artisanal gold mining in Mali. Her
 current research focuses on informal/illegal transnational trades driven by African migran-
 ts in Italy in relation to value chains, materiality/corporality, Beauty and political produc-
 tion of illegality.




                                                                            Cristiana PANELLA
                                                   Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren
                                                          cristiana.panella@africamuseum.be




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Cristiana Panella
Lost in translation: ‘Unprovenanced objects’ and the opacity/transparency agenda of museums’ policies
2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 1, GIUGNO 2015: 66-87.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/ANUAC2239-625X-1874
