The Brooklyn Rail

Kader Attia experienced his artistic epiphany at the Louvre. Alongside Elizabeth Peyton, he has been offered the status of “Hôte du Louvre” by the museum, acting as a fellow-traveller to the museum and holding a studio at the Pavillon de Flore. Amongst the many activities he has developed, including the Artist’s Lessons program, with a final sequence on September 25th, he conceived as seminar entitled What is Missing in the Object. This seminar was held at the museum’s research center, the Centre Dominique Vivant Denon, and brought together members of the curatorial team as well as leading figures from the contemporary world. The questions raised stemmed from both his work and the thinking inherent to the Louvre: how does the lack of an object, the lack in an object, the lack around an object, enable us to extend and clarify our perception of art, of the museum, and of our humanity?

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 Attia’s seminar took place in three parts. The second in this trilogy is presented here. The third will be published on September 24.

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With the participation of Benoît de l’Estoile, anthropologist, director of research at the Musée du quai-Branly-Jacques Chirac and Olivier Gabet, director of the department of Objets d’art at the Musée du Louvre.

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Kader Attia: We often imagine that museum curators, exhibition curators and collectors collect works of art and everyday objects. But if we move away from this somewhat phantasmagorical vision of accumulation, from a logic of bringing back the missing object, of metaphorically bringing back the phantom limb, we can open up another perspective. We are merely passing through, while the objects remain. It’s the objects that watch us go by.

Collecting, then, is an attempt to reverse the dynamic of life, which means that it’s the objects that watch us pass. This presence means that we are nothing other than the result of the traces these objects have left behind. They bear witness to a creator, to someone, to a system that has issued a grace. This is what enriches the process of collective individuation.

For to create, in a broad sense, is to bring out of nothingness something that is not yet there, destined for eternity but including the possibility of accident and its own disappearance.

Bringing this something out can be painful. A wood or marble sculptor removes it. A form is excavated from nothingness. It takes a great deal of maturity to take this on board, to accept that, in a creative process, we are not alone. There’s a ghost, a trace, which can manifest itself in mistakes. When we make a mistake while sculpting, we need to be able to see in it an expression of all these traces that intersect at a given moment. The result can be negative, but it can also be a masterpiece.

For me, the fundamental thing about the birth of a work of art is that the world afterwards is never the same.

Olivier Gabet: As a curator, I also like works in their material, practical, real aspect. This is always my starting point. So I’d like to dwell on this phrase, which is like a poetry line: objects watch us go by.

This is of particular interest to me as director of the Objets d’art department. Objects, in other words everything that isn’t painting, antiques, sculpture, drawings... for a long time there was a sort of hierarchy, with objects coming a little after the rest, which wasn’t the case during the Renaissance. By virtue of their status and materiality, objects are fascinating but stand somewhat apart. And yet, when we consider them, the objects are made singular by the context in which they were produced, their artistic quality, the sense of technical know-how that went into their making, the thinking that went into them, and also their destiny—for, often, these are objects that did not arrive so naturally within the walls of the Louvre.

Thinking of the title “Objects watch us go by,” one notices that we regularly speak of the spirit of places, but rarely of the spirit of objects. As a rational and fundamentally positivist being, however, the question suddenly takes me towards a more animist approach than usual.

We often think of Lamartine’s first line, “Objets inanimés avez-vous donc une âme” (“Inanimate Objects, do you have a soul,” and the rest of the line, “qui s’attache à notre âme et la force d’aimer” (“which attaches itself to our soul and the strength of loving”).

And that’s the subject. I often think that objects look at us and tell us things. That’s what drives us as curators: we preserve prestigious, well-known objects at the Louvre, and at the same time, if we don’t start from this sensitive, almost “animistic” principle, we can probably somehow miss the point.

As curators at the Musée du Louvre, we spend a lot of time in the rooms, in contact with the works and objects. If we’re on permanent duty, we’re responsible for them alone, or almost, for a few hours at a time. In short, we find ourselves alone, face to face with the works, in the midst of several tens of thousands of people, but at the Louvre.

Often, then, I find myself wondering what the objects are watching go by.

They watch us go by, quickly, more or less. We look at them and move on to the next, from one showcase to another, from one room to another, in a random or, on the contrary, systematic movement. On average, a visitor to the Louvre spends two and a half hours with us, which is a colossal amount of time in this day and age. And even if we go fast, we still look at them, if only to photograph them. What objects see today are usually the backs of telephones, the shells of laptops, the hidden face of iPhones.

I’m lucky enough to deal with works of art that people have been able to touch and handle, because some have had a use, prestigious or otherwise, because some have been objects of delight and desire. Yet visitors don’t touch objects very much, except inadvertently. Don’t objects and works of art, which for me have a soul, sometimes want to be touched? We’re talking about phantom limbs. Could we touch the absence? Intellectually and collectively, this sends us all back to very intimate things.

Objects watch us go by. What’s also fascinating when you look at the works is to think that they have watched many people pass by, including the creators of these works. An elephant horn, from Africa to Europe, worked by a craftsman in 1650, must have seen a lot. A bit of earth became a Palissy marvel. A bit of gold became a precious object, and a hard stone the object of a sovereign’s contemplation.

Finally, there’s the history of objects. How did they come to us? In Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons, objects utter the noise sh!... sh! to attract the attention of Cousin Pons, the embodiment of the connoisseur and collector. Visitors should be told to take the time to listen to the sh ! sh ! that the objets d’art address to them. In fact, some of the pieces here come from the collection of Charles Sauvageot, who was undoubtedly one of Pons’ role models for Balzac.

Today, of course, we’re all very concerned by the question of provenance. We often wonder about the most problematic elements. In the history and reality of the museum, there are those elements that are problematic or bloody and politically violent; some of our works come from revolutionary seizures carried out in a period of particular gravity. But some of these objects also express love stories, objects that have watched collectors pass by, who one day loved them, cherished them, caressed them. These works, which have seen the kings of France—and even an emperor—pass by during their coronation, queens with a passion for art like Anne of Austria or Marie-Antoinette, distinguished collectors like all the Rothschilds or Isaac de Camondo, and so many others, have captured their gaze, and sometimes their gestures.

These objects have watched us pass through the centuries, and perhaps even realized that we didn’t look at them in the same way or with the same intensity, depending on the period.

In today’s museums, works of art watch us pass by, who knows? with concern. Worried that we might throw a bit of paint or an old cream cake at them. Are they ever surprised that we don’t? Worried that we might look at them with indifference, or even ignore them. During one of these recent visits, when we had to go through all the museographic spaces of the Louvre, I lingered in the rooms of the Department of Near-Eastern Antiquities. In the room where all these sublime and moving portraits from Palmyra stare back at us. Not only do the objects watch us pass by, I think they judge us. And today, it’s also our mission to make sure they judge us well.

Kader Attia: In a book called Cinema or the Imaginary Man, Edgar Morin talks about the life of objects as a subjective life.

In cinema, you frame a jug of water and it immediately becomes something else. Olivier Gabet contemporizes this question.

The way we think objects look at us is the result of the thousands of glances that have been cast at them, and which, through an attentional process, return to our gaze. It’s the life of the gazes that have been placed on them over time, transforming our view of the object.

That’s why I wanted to do a speaking session in the Rothschild room of the department of Objes d’Art. This room hasn’t been “ennobled” by museography as a work of art in its own right, in the sense that it’s an accumulation of objects. We come here to search through these thousands, these millions of gazes. The gaze of Marie Antoinette, the gaze of the Rothschilds, the gaze of a person who for a moment gave love to these objects.

Olivier Gabet mentioned Palmyra, we could be talking about Baalbek today. What can we do about the fact that it’s impossible to think of reparation in isolation from injury: there is reparation because there is injury. It’s an interdependent relationship. Derrida would have called it a pharmakon, i.e. a pharmacological position in which we enjoy the remedy that is also poison.

Benoit de l’Estoile: The phrase “objects watch us go by” suggests the immobility of objects. Of course, what makes the museum experience so special, in contrast to the spectacle, is that it is the visitor who moves through a static space. At the same time, the movement of objects is, with few exceptions, the founding act of the museum. In this sense, Quatremère de Quincy’s Letters to Miranda: on the displacement of Italy’s art monuments (1796) condemns the very project of the emerging museum, when he protests against the revolutionary policy of taking ancient and modern masterpieces to France in the name of freedom. In the third letter, he writes:

What is Antiquity in Rome but a great book whose pages time has destroyed or scattered, and whose gaps modern research daily fills or repairs? What would the power choose to export and appropriate some of these most curious monuments? Precisely what would an ignorant person do who tore out of a book the leaves where he found vignettes?

Contradicting the revolutionary discourse claiming the progress of reason, Quincy denounces as ignorance the process which, by tearing them from their space, produces fragments, contrasting them with the spirit of “modern research” which aims to repair the ravages of time by filling in the gaps, in order to restore the lost totality of Antiquity.

This passage invites us to reflect on the diversity of approaches to the question of lack.

The Wedding at Cana, now in the Louvre, was painted by Veronese for the refectory of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Does the monastery miss the Weddeing at Cana? In a sense, they are no longer missing, since a replica has been installed. Quincy’s question is: does this work lose its meaning by being moved to the Louvre? Certainly, the refectory of San Giorgio’s monastery is missing from the Louvre, which makes it impossible to see the work from a distance and grasp the way in which it was created, the way it inhabited its original space, but at the same time the work has acquired a new life here.

Displacement is also an integral part of the ethnographic museum. Indeed, an object becomes ethnographic when an element, material or otherwise, is chosen as representative of the universe from which it comes, and is taken away from its original territory. The ethnographic object thus functions on the model of synecdoche, as a witness to a given culture. To complete the ethnographic object, which is by nature fragmentary, museography strives to reconstitute a fiction of totality, the so-called context, through texts, labels, photographs, films, possibly narratives in the context of mediation, or even virtual reality. The pinnacle of this reconstitution is the diorama, an illusionist recreation of habitats.

The Musée du Quai Branly is in part the heir to the Musée de l'Homme, itself the offspring of the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro. One of the explicit aims of creating the musée du quai Branly was precisely to transform these “ethnographic objects” into works of art. In the Pavillon des Sessions at the Louvre, works from the musée du quai Branly have been presented since 2000 as “sculptures,” masterpieces of the arts of Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania: by giving them much more space than in ethnographic museums, thus highlighting their singularity, emphasizing them, keeping identification on the labels to a minimum, and concentrating information on the room cards. For Jacques Kerchache, a prophet of what he called the “primitive arts,” the aim was to achieve a metamorphosis, ridding the works of what he saw as “adventitious,” in order to rediscover the fullness of the work of art. This museography can be analyzed as a “technology of enchantment,” to use anthropologist Alfred Gell’s term, transforming ethnographic objects into works of art. If the ethnographic object is by definition a fragment, the staging of the masterpiece aims to lend credence to the fiction of completeness.

What are we missing? What has been erased is information on the history of the objects: how did this object get from its place of origin to the Louvre, or to the Musée du Quai Branly? And through this, what does the object’s journey tell us about the historical relationships between the object’s place of origin and Europe, France, as well as the specificities of the original object?

You could say that someone is missing an arm. A typical example is the “broken face,” on which Kader Attia’s installation places photographs of wounded soldiers from the 14-18 war and repaired African objects side by side (unfortunately, broken faces are not just a reality from over a century ago, but something that is very present in today’s world, in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan). It’s tempting to see in this case of the “phantom limb” a paradigm of lack, which “jumps out at you”; yet this is not always the case.

I propose to distinguish between lack and absence. Absence is the objective observation of something that is not present. Lack is an interpretation and a judgment that suffers from the problematic nature of this absence, it’s an abnormal or illegitimate situation: for example, we miss school. What seems interesting to me is to think of lack as an absence made significant. An absence that is marked and highlighted. We can explore this with a number of cases.

The Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at the Federal University of Salvador de Bahia wanted to show works by a Brazilian artist, but the museum that owned them had refused the loan. To signify the lack, we staged it with photographs of these images on large black fabrics on the wall.

It’s not just that the gaze is drawn to the lack, it’s the gaze that creates it.

The denunciation of lack can also be achieved through other strategies. At the heart of Mexico City’s National Anthropology Museum is the Hall of the Mexicas, weaving a link between this pre-Hispanic past and today’s nation. Here, a feathered headdress is presented as a replica of the headdress worn by Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor put to death by the Spaniards. The original is in Vienna’s Ethnographic Museum, now the Museum of World Cultures, and many Mexicans are calling for its return. Here, the lack is denounced by the presence of a double (the Vienna museum claims that it is not Moctezuma’s headdress, but another).

The question of lack in the place of origin also plays out on a national scale. Also in Mexico, the monumental Tlaloc stone, also known as the Coatlinchán monolith, was brought to Mexico City in 1964 for the opening of the new National Museum of Anthropology. The army protected the transfer because the inhabitants of the rural community of Coatlinchán refused to let the stone go. The absence of the Tlaloc stone was denounced by the local community to the central authorities, who demanded that a replica be sent to them by the museum. Unable to obtain a replica, a local sculptor created a fountain himself, replicating the monolith. The aim is to fill this gap so that the community can once again be complete.

Is it possible to feel a lack for objects that you don’t know, that you’ve never seen? I’d like to finish by mentioning an episode I recently experienced at the Quai Branly, when five Bororo representatives (who call themselves Boe) came from Brazil at the end of 2024. Claude Lévi-Strauss devoted several chapters to the Bororo in his famous book Tristes Tropiques, published in 1955. He had visited this Amerindian group with his wife Dina, during an expedition to Central Brazil in 1935-1936. Today, some of the objects collected are to be found in Brazil, in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of São Paulo, and others in the Musée du Quai Branly, and we have a research project on these “shared collections.” Here, the question of lack is posed differently. From the museums’ point of view, we’re wondering about possible gaps in the collections. Are the objects properly catalogued, or does the documentation of the collections need to be completed by adding to the annotations left by the Lévi-Strauss family? Which clan is the object associated with, and what material is it made of? What plant fiber was used?

We discussed these issues with the Boes. But what was also at stake was the encounter between the Boe and the objects of their ancestors. Some objects were not necessarily familiar: “I’d heard of them, but I’d never seen them,” said ritual specialist Ismael Atugoreu. And yet, they expressed less a sense of “lack,” than of recognition for the presence of this object in the museum, allowing them to see and touch them. Boe also noted that these objects were both well-made and bizarre: indeed, the symbol of a particular clan appears on an object that would seem to belong to this or that clan. Some of them feature feathers which, instead of coming from scarlet macaws as expected, were those of other birds, pinkish spatulas dyed red, and so on. The Boes therefore hypothesized that at least some of the objects were out-of-use items, restored by their ancestors, or manufactured so that they could be handed over to collectors. In this way, they do not consider these objects to be missing from their community (from a ritual point of view, for example), as is the case with other groups.

At the musée du quai Branly, we presented films shot by the Lévi-Strauss family in the Bororo village. After seeing black-and-white images of their ancestors fishing in the river, the Boe-Bororo expressed their nostalgia for a time when fish were abundant. The loss they wish to denounce is the loss of their riverside village, the loss of their ancestral territory, and the fact that they are besieged in the midst of the agribusiness plantations that produce the soya that feeds our livestock.

The idea was to recreate relationships in the present around objects that had been lost for generations.

Kader Attia: The title is very clear: objects watch us go by, and it seems to me that lack also watches us go by. In other words, if we position ourselves in a situation of lack, the subject can’t help but identify with it through a system of projection.

I’d say we’ve entered a society of identification, where we spend our time projecting our subject onto something and then, through the intermediary of the tool, keeping track of it.

Reparation also means irreparability.

There are traumas that are out of the ordinary. That’s what I talked about in my film on the phantom limb, making comparisons with the loss of the phantom limb, with the Holocaust, with a Lithuanian historian of Jewish history, with a psychoanalyst on colonialism, and so on. Talking to Native Americans and First Nations people in the United States about reparations is extremely difficult, especially at the moment.

I believe that the irreparable dimension of reparation comes from the fact that there is reparation because there is injury, and that it is unfortunately a process that leaves the trace of trauma forever. And the real work lies in trying to create a space where this conversation, the one we’re all having here together, is possible.

The problem is the monologue of the victor who writes history.

He writes from a position of power. Whereas, I believe, the more we develop works of art, texts, historians’ research, the more we create an academic space, a research space to elaborate this question together, the more we will envisage a future for this question.