“A refugee in New York during the second World war, the anthropologist [Claude Levi-Strauss] is bewildered and delighted by a landscape of unexpected juxtapositions. His recollections of those years, during which he invented structural anthropology, are bathed in a magical light…As Levi-Strauss tells it, the New York of 1941 is an anthropologists’s dream, a vast selection of human culture and history…In New York one can obtain almost any treasure….Everything somehow finds its way here. For Levi- Strauss New York in the 1940s is a wonderland of sudden openings to other times and places, of cultural matters out of place” (237-238).
Sixty years later, New York is still the place to obtain any treasure, still a dense, intense, overlapping and interacting space where countless cultural circuits are at work. At the same time, New York is also a nucleus of late capitalism; it is here where we may also view the gradual homogenization of global cities. The chief difference between Levi-Strauss’s New York and ours is perhaps that we think about those juxtapositions and sudden openings; today we worry less about vanishing words.
Once while walking up Broadway in Soho, I passed a familiar face. Celebrity sighting number 587687667, big deal. A tall interesting-looking dude with a distinctive nose passed, sporting a hot purple jacket, baggy dark jeans, and a pair of bright Nike Air Max sneakers. He was carrying a skateboard and talking sweetly to an equally stylish girl by his side. I walked passed and heard an excited group of teenagers squeal, “That was Mos Def!”
This celeb moment has stuck with me, because I love Mos Def, but also because it was a visual example of why today, “cultural matters” in fact do not seem out of place in New York. We live in the age of hybrids and mash-ups and we are accustomed to it. What did I imagine a rapper to look like? Mos Def was carrying a skateboard, not a sports jersey. His jacket was skate but his jeans were hip-hop. Self-consciously I thought about the enormous fake gold doorknocker earrings I was rocking at the time, the ones that made me feel a little sheepish in the subway—did people think I was trying to be Puerto Rican? First I was a gentrifier; now I was appropriating the very culture of the folks I was displacing! But here was Mos Def, culture-crossing along with me.
In “On Collecting Art and Culture,” J. Clifford posits that traditionally “culture” has been viewed as whole, unified, and enduring. “Culture is a process of ordering, not of disruption. It changes and develops like a living organism. It does not normally ‘survive’ abrupt alternations” (235). Clifford brings forth the example of Margaret Mead and the Mountain Arapesh. “Mead found Arapesh receptivity to outside influences ‘annoying.’ Their culture collecting complicated hers” (232). The Arapesh, like our modern day New Yorkers, interact within several cultures at once, and quite naturally so. Mead wants the Arapesh to have an isolated culture, enduring from times past, that does not demonstrate the influence of “the outside world” (230-231).
This model, viewing cultural authenticity as related to historicity or preservation in “another time,” is the same technology that Donna Haraway analyzes as functioning at the American Museum of Natural History in Teddy Bear Patriarchy. “To see ethnography as a form of culture collecting…highlights the ways that diverse experiences and facts are selected, gathered, detached, from their original temporal occasions, and given enduring value in a new arrangement” (231). In the context of the Museum, this means that certain ways of presentation may lead to essentialist notions of cultures, rather than nuanced and materially complicated ones. For example, a sign reads “Masks and Magic,” above an assortment of African masks. All the masks are grouped together, inferring similar uses and meanings, when in actuality they could have been collected from all parts of the continent and function in very distinct ways.
But the xenophobic logic of preservation that forms the underlying ideology of the AMNH has not persisted. As Clifford shows in his diagram of the “Art-Culture System,” today’s material culture can travel all over, a landscape stretching from MoMA to the souvenir shops of Times Square. And this is reflected in the real life materials choices of New Yorkers. When I wear my gold earrings, I’m participating in my own culture collecting, and this is a multi-layered process that shows how “appropriation” of culture cannot be defined as merely good or bad thing, appropriate or inappropriate. Now more than ever our definitions of culture are rapidly changing, with all rhetoric and concrete material processes of globalization. Gone are the days when we can be annoyed by the Mountain Arapesh reading the index of the Golden Bough.
On the subject of primitive art and its eventual inclusion in the modern fine art canon, Clifford writes, “What had begun with the vogue for l’art nègre in the twenties would become institutionalized by the fifties and sixties; but in wartime New York the battle to gain widespread recognition for tribal objects was not yet one” (239). Again in 2007, we find ourselves in war time New York. What objects are traveling through the art-culture machine today? How has the New York chronotype changed, and what therefore do we constitute as the material corpus of our hybridized, globalized culture? If we remade the AMNH today, with a focus on NYC, what would it look like?
No comments:
Post a Comment