Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco

Abstract

IMAGINED MUSEUMS: ART AND MODERNITY IN POSTCOLONIAL MOROCCO Katarzyna Pieprzak Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 (x xix + 177 pages, bibliography, index, i llustrations) $75.00 (cloth), $25.00 (paper)"I am not interested in national museums of the Third World. Memory that is useless is useless to preserve," Ali Amahan, the former museum director of Morocco, declares in the opening pages of Katarzyna Pieprzak's study of Moroccan museums (xiii). In his definitive assertion, Amahan expresses a sentiment that echoes throughout the following pages, and beautifully sum- marizes some of the fundamental issues at the crux of this book. Imagined Museums explores the relationship between museums and the nation, and the place and "usefulness" of memory within these formulations, as well as the processes through which the designation of art, and subsequently value, is bestowed upon objects. Pieprzak demonstrates the ways in which museums, in their evolving forms, play a central role in a number of overlap- ping discourses of modernity in Morocco. Imagined Museums is therefore not only an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship on modern and contemporary artistic practices and institutions in the region, but it is also a particularly timely one as museums (and their contents) in the contemporary Arab world continue to be sites of controversy and con- flict, from the looting of the National Museum of Iraq during the US-led invasion in 2003, to the ransacking of the Egyptian Museum and its use as a site for torture during the 2011 uprisings, to the ongoing campaign by Gulf Labor, a coalition of artists and activists, for workers' rights and the boycott of academic and cultural institutions building on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, including the Louvre and the Guggenheim.While based primarily on research conducted between 2000 and 2004 and focusing on Arabic and French postcolonial press, letters, and memoirs, Pieprzak's work also draws on sources from outside the traditional archive such as travel narratives, visitors' comments, and blogs. She reads this vast array of material through a number of disciplinary lenses including com- parative literature, museum studies, African studies, and anthropology. Demonstrating the exciting potential of interdisciplinary work, she weaves discussions of museums in Morocco into a larger conversation about the role of museums in the non-Western world, particularly in postcolonial contexts, and demonstrates how art is used "to access the right to participate equally on local and world stages" (xxi).Imagined Museums is divided into two somewhat separate but dia- logical sections. The first three chapters focus on a number of institutional manifestations of the museum in Morocco over the last century, beginning with its earliest incarnation, the Batha Museum, established in 1915 in a nineteenth-century palace in Fez by Prosper Ricard, the director of the Protectorate Fine Arts Administration. Under the protectorate, museums were primarily concerned with collecting examples of local crafts such as weaving, ceramics, and woodwork while working toward the "restora- tion of [these] artisanal techniques" (6). Museums in Morocco differed significantly from their European counterparts, established during the Enlightenment. "They were never founded to instill a sense of community or nation in the Moroccan public at large" but instead "functioned more as a closed laboratory of conservation for the education of a specific group of people: primarily administrators, academics, and 're-educated' artisans" (15). Concerned with "purity" and "authenticity," the administration created a "canon of prototypes" that ultimately served new and expanding sections of the economy and the craft and tourism industries. This focus on "authentic" models meant, however, that any kind of contemporary experimentation was excluded. After liberation, the Moroccan state inherited these institu- tions and there were high hopes among artists for the establishment of a modern art museum. …