A peer of mine in London sent over this review of Carsten Holler’s ‘The Double Club,’ originally written for the art journal OBJECT, which is published by the History of Art department at the University College London. She writes about the work’s contentious and divisive depiction of cultures and the more general staging of non-Western cultural stereotypes that many Euro-American cultural institutions have adopted and reaffirmed within exhibition practices. From my own experience, I remember a chilly winter night in London last year, when I tried to get a glimpse of Holler’s ‘installation’ and was denied entry at the door, perhaps for lack of being 5’11, waify and blonde. It’s an interesting when one tries to experience supposed art installation/project, yet in the process, is faced with the oftentimes humiliating door politics of a nightclub. Perhaps this was Holler’s intention. –Persis
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The Double Club’, A Carsten Höller Project by Fondazione Prada
London, November 2008 – July 2009
By Juliette Desorgues
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The growing urge in our post-modern age to embrace the multicultural takes on a complex dimension within the context of cultural productions. Contemporary Belgian artist Carsten Höller’s latest London-based project The Double Club, realised in collaboration with the Fondazione Prada, can be seen as an example of this. Similarly to the Quai Branly Museum, inaugurated in Paris in 2006, attempts at an unbiased post-colonial aesthetics of display were here problematically debased and old colonial stereotypes of the primitive Other seemed to be deployed.
Höller’s project was intended as a place where both ‘the Congo meets the West’ and ‘the West meets the Congo’, and to celebrate a new and harmonious relationship between the two. [1] It consisted of a restaurant, bar and nightclub situated in an old Victorian warehouse behind Angel tube station, divided both functionally and decoratively between so-called ‘Western’ and Congolese cultures. The music played in the nightclub alternated between both cultures, and the menus in the bar and restaurant offered a range of both European and Congolese specialities. The general décor of the space also functioned according to this pattern: works of art by Western and Congolese artists adorned the walls and sophisticated Western furnishings were juxtaposed to (stereotypical) Congolese plastic chairs, tables and a shack-like bar.
It was this supposedly equal distribution of distinct marks of cultural identity that set up the intended dialogue. Such an endeavour to render Congolese culture visible, by attempting to create a space of equal exchange within the largely white middle-class area of Angel, could be considered commendable. Similarly to Höller’s earlier works such as Test Site (2006), which involved large slides for public use in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, the project took on an experimental quality, unsurprising for an artist with a background in science. This gave a real-life character to the dialogue, one in which the artist’s control remained open-ended.
However, the fact that the project was developed by two Europeans – Höller and Italian fashion designer Miuccia Prada, co-founder of the Fondazione Prada – and not, for instance, in collaboration with Congolese scholars, sets up a primary imbalance and risks the actual effectiveness of the dialogue. Could the latter be considered successful as a whole, in its display of non-European, previously colonised cultures, if its very conception is dominated and sponsored by European entities – including an exclusive fashion brand? Perhaps it could, if a degree of precaution was adopted. Yet it is in the problematic staging of the DRC that the conceptual difficulties lie. Other forms of structural imbalances seemed to follow. As previously mentioned, the venue was located in a highly fashionable white middle-class area. There was no Congolese head chef present and most of the management team was European. Furthermore, if the Western sections of the venue were designed exclusively by Europeans (Clemens Weisshaar, Reed Kram and Höller), the creation of the Congolese décor also involved the artist.
In the face of such imbalances, the Congolese décor strikes one as problematically backward looking. It seems here that old, primitivist-oriented stereotypes of Africanness, which have plagued European and North American cultural fields, remain operative. The project can thus be read as consisting of two largely tokenist homogenous binaries. These derive in turn from the problematic conflation of race and geography inherent to colonial discourse. As theorised by post-colonial thinker Edward Said, such a West/East binary corresponds to an imaginary opposition between the modern, sophisticated centre and the primitive, exotic Other. [2] By presenting such stereotypes within the sphere of entertainment, Congolese culture is turned into an object of mere spectacle, participating in a commodified form of multiculturalism, which finds resonances in other non-artistic venues – like the nearby Favela Chic club – or in fashion world settings to construct a consumable exoticism or ‘primitive chic’. The essential acknowledgement of the current political upheavals that the DRC is undergoing is, in contrast, omitted. Whilst Höller’s commitment to Congolese culture may be at a certain level unquestionable (half of the profits go to UNICEF to help women in the DRC), this does not translate to the level of representational politics: the project’s set-up remains a largely idealised and stereotyped cultural construction by two Europeans.
This somewhat thwarted effort towards a more open dialogue between cultures is not however unique to The Double Club. With the motto ‘là où dialoguent les cultures’ [where cultures come to interact], The Quai Branly Museum attempts to map out a new curatorial direction for the collections of the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens, rejecting centuries of ethnocentric French museology. Similarly to The Double Club, the museum seems to fall back into the very colonial discourse it sought to avoid. Designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the general setting of the museum, which dissolves into the landscape under the growing vines, activates a sense of the primitive which become associated with the objects on display and their respective cultures. A meandering path leads visitors through a garden of bamboo and other indigenous plants towards the earth-coloured museum. Inside, visitors embark on a ‘voyage of discovery’ following a dimly-lit trail, shrouded in mystique, towards various (grossly generalised) geographical areas where the objects are displayed.
The reasons for the problematic staging of these objects could perhaps be found, just as in the case of The Double Club, in the very development of the museum which was largely dominated by the then President Jacques Chirac, a keen amateur collector of ethnographic objects. Seen as another ‘grand project’, a seemingly presidential tradition in French politics, the museum, which sits in a fashionable, desirable tourist area of the city, was created without the inclusion of contemporary artists or scholars in the field.
If a growing concern with promoting unbiased dialogues with non-European and non-North American cultures is evident in both projects, they both also reveal a continuing tendency to collapse into the very discourse they sought to overcome. Both seem to fall into the traps of sponsorship and Eurocentric advocacy, becoming prey to the complex politics of display. Yet, in contrast to the Quai Branly Museum, and despite its problematic set-up, it must be said that the real-life quality of The Double Club allowed for some unpredictable and enriching cultural encounters to develop.
[1] See accompanying booklet to The Double Club.
[2] Edward Said, Orientalism, London, 2003.
–Juliette Desorgues
(Photo: Attilio Maranzano, Courtesy of Fondazione Prada, Milan, from DOMUS)
For more information: www.thedoubleclub.co.uk/
