 | NATURALLY IN PARIS Ateliers Jean Nouvel’s new Musée du Quai Branly includes a significant commission of Aboriginal art integrated into the building fabric, a component developed and implemented by Australian architects Cracknell and Lonergan.
REVIEW Peter Naumann
PHOTOGRAPHY Philippe Ruault
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The facade of the
Branly building, created
in consultation with
botanist Patrick Blanc,
is a living wall of plants.
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The objects on
display at the museum
float at eye level within
cleverly hidden glass
display cases.
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External views of the
museum set among the wild
gardens designed by Gilles
Clément.
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Overview of the
main display area, with its two
leather curving walls.
The processes of transforming
the artworks into part of the
built fabric of the Rue de
l’Universite building.
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Discussions with Lena
Nyadbi about Jimbala and
Gemerre (spearheads and
scars) included a full-scale
mock-up, which was rejected
as the image lacked contrast.
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Jimbala and Gemerre
carved into the plaster of the
Rue de l’Universite facade.
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The final printed glass
panels for Cloud being set into
stainless steel panels in
Leichhardt. The fresco of ten
photographs by Michael Riley
is installed on the ramp
leading to the bookshop.
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Preliminary samples and
methodology for Untitled
(Wirrulnga), by Ningura
Napurrula, developed at
Eumundi.
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John
Mawurndjul’s Mardayin at
Milmilngkan being painted
onto the bookshop ceiling.
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Installing Tommy Watson’s
Wipu Rockhole on the third
floor ceiling.
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Gulumbu
Yunupingu describes the
sequence of mark-making to be
used.
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Museum Piece, 2006,
by Judy Watson, on the glass
facade of the bookshop.
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Discussion and
preliminary sketch for an early
version of Paddy Bedford’s
facade piece based on
Thoowoonggoonarrin.
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Interior of the
bookshop, with
Mardayin at
Milmilngkan, 2006,
by John Mawurndjul
on the ceiling.
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The
Universe, 2006, by
Gulumbu Yunupingu, as
seen on the second floor
corridor ceiling.
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The
vibrant colours and
patterns on the ceilings
of each floor are visible
from the exterior facade.
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Museums carry a heavy symbolic load. They are
weighed down by their collections, assembled by
generations past, and often burdened by significant
but dated buildings. Yet museums are expected to
reflect current social and political trends as well as
offer a range of opportunities from socializing over
coffee and shopping to academic research. Less than
a century ago European museums proudly displayed
the cultural objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania and
the Americas as evidence of powerful colonial
empires. Now, new global relationships require
different thinking and displays.
The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, which
opened on 20 June 2006 and cost 232 million euro,
is intended by the French Government and
President Jacques Chirac to be an enduring symbol
of France’s new relationship with the non-European
indigenous world. At the museum’s opening Chirac
proclaimed, “We are putting an end here to a long
history of disregard, and giving just consideration to
art forms and civilizations too long ignored or
misunderstood.”
About 280,000 pieces form the collection of the
Musée du Quai Branly, of which approximately
3,500 are on permanent display. In the main, these
are cultural objects from the indigenous peoples of
Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas dating from
the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
However, there is also a unique collection of
Australian Aboriginal art, which includes
contemporary works. Apart from photography, this
Aboriginal material is the museum’s only significant
collection of contemporary art.
The vision proclaimed by Chirac at the opening
is expressed in the dramatic architecture of Jean
Nouvel. Nouvel won the commission for the new
museum, placed prominently on the banks of the
Seine and close to the Eiffel Tower, through an
international competition. His Letter of Intent for
the competition was titled “Presence-absence or
selective dematerialisation”. In it, Nouvel advocated
making the building disappear “out of our sight and
mind, let [structures, such as fire escapes, railings
and false ceilings …] step aside from the sacred
artefacts on view and allow us room for
communion”. He envisaged the museum as
“a simple sanctuary without walls in a wood”, as
“a place marked by the symbols of forest and river,
and the obsessions of death and oblivion”.
Around and under the Musée du Quai Branly are
extensive garden areas designed by Gilles Clément –
two hectares of “wilderness”, albeit a manufactured
“wild” place of unruly trees and bushes, trickling
streams and meandering paths. Visitors “become
explorers” and journey, through the gardens, to a
central entrance beneath the museum, where they
make their way along a 180-metre ramp to the
display area. The main gallery appears to float ten
metres above the gardens on twenty-six randomly
placed metal posts. The Branly building, limited
to a height of twenty-one metres, is partly hidden
by a forest of trees, which at maturity are expected
to reach the museum’s roofline. In a tour de force of
nature, a vertical wall of growing plants, designed
by Patrick Blanc and formed from 15,000 plants,
covers an 800-square-metre curved wall of the
administrative section of the museum, punctuated
by square windows. “There is,” claimed Nouvel,
“a mystery here.”
The focus on nature in many aspects of the
museum’s architecture recalls, perhaps
unintentionally, outmoded European associations
of indigenous peoples with the exotic unknown
and natural world. The ghost of “the noble savage” portrayed by French philosopher Jean-Jacques
Rousseau seems to haunt aspects of the
architectural symbolism.
The interior of the museum echoes these
allusions to the natural. The pathway through the
collection is described as a river. The ramp leading
up to the collection undulates in uneven humps and
waves around a large glass storage core for musical
instruments. The sounds of drums and other
instruments are heard as visitors move through a
tunnel until they finally emerge into the dark heart
of the main display. Lighting levels are low to
protect the light-sensitive objects. Daylight is filtered
through a photomontage of jungle leaves over the
massive front windows (200 metres long and nine
metres high). Running parallel to each other
lengthwise through the centre of the display area
are two curving walls of about 100 metres in length
and from 1.5 to 2.5 metres in height. These walls
incorporate seats and spaces for multimedia screens.
They also establish a directional flow around the
space as well as separate sections of the displays.
In the dim light, the walls appear to be eroded
sandstone cliffs and the seats become little caves
of shelter. On closer inspection these furniture
walls are completely covered in a patchwork
of light brown leather. Wonderfully extravagant,
they indicate the quality of fittings throughout
the building.
Stéphane Martin, Director of the Musée du
Quai Branly, describes making a museum as
“making theatre, not writing theory”. This was the
guiding principle for the interior design. The objects
are displayed “naked … just the objects”. Each piece
is dramatically spotlit and most are displayed in
glass vitrines in the round, while some larger
wooden items such as slit gongs from Vanuatu and
other stone pieces are in freestanding groups. The
overall effect is stunning and sets a standard for
display design that few museums worldwide could
even imagine.
In general, the works on display are arranged
according to aesthetic rather than cultural
considerations. However, this emphasis on the
objects as art can be a pretext for avoiding contextual
consideration. It could be argued that in postcolonial
times, art is a much safer category in which to place
collections, allowing aesthetic considerations to
overshadow darker social and political histories and
any ownership difficulties. Throughout its planning
and development, the Musée du Quai Branly was the
subject of intense arguments and even
demonstrations and strikes by some anthropological
staff. They were not convinced that the cultural
objects of other societies, often produced for very
different purposes, should be treated simply as “art”.
Branly attempts to respond to these issues
through extensive multimedia installations as well
as a teaching and research focus. Events, theatre,
dance and musical performances will be an integral
part of the museum’s programme, using the
numerous auditoriums and performance spaces
incorporated into the museum, including an outside
amphitheatre. One of the building’s four wings
houses educational facilities, including a library
with over 180,000 volumes and a multimedia centre.
The Interdisciplinary Research Centre occupies
another wing and houses specialist research
facilities, including collection study areas and
conservation laboratories.
This research centre for the museum, sited on
Rue de l’Université, emerges from the existing
streetscape of neo-baroque nineteenth-century
buildings. Its walls, floors and ceilings feature work
by eight Australian Aboriginal artists. On the outside
wall is an architectural rendering of a painting by
Lena Nyadbi, a Gija artist from the Kimberley region
in north-western Australia. On each level of this
building are various Aboriginal ceiling murals.
These include a depiction of Garak – The Universe
by Arnhem Land artist Gulumbu Yunupingu, a
painting by Pintupi artist Ningura Napurrula
depicting her central desert homelands, Pitjantjatjara
artist Tommy Watson’s central desert design in
enamelled metal, and a painting by senior Kuninjku
Arnhem Land artist John Mawurndjul. Near the
ground-floor museum staff entrance is a painting
designed by Paddy Bedford, and outside along
Rue de l’Université, the window glass has been
etched in designs by Judy Watson, through which
can be seen a photo series by Michael Riley.
The incorporation of Aboriginal art was the idea
of Jean Nouvel, with the cost of the commission met
jointly by the museum and the Australian
Government. Aboriginal art curators Brenda L. Croft
and Hetti Perkins advised on the selection of works.
Australian architects Cracknell and Lonergan, a
practice with considerable experience working with
Aboriginal communities, implemented the project.
This included technical adaptations of the art, and
they were in the midst of negotiations between
artists and curators in Australia and the museum
and Nouvel’s team in Paris. Cracknell and Lonergan
Architects used a warehouse in Sydney as a
workshop for testing how to translate the painted
designs into architectural forms. For example,
laser-cutting templates for enlarging the
brushstrokes of Lena Nyadbi’s painting into a
rendering technique suitable for transforming the
outside wall of the research wing into a textured
surface were conducted at this base. And exercises
in the textures of paint. After various experiments
the architects would then show examples and
discuss aspects of the scale of the designs to the
artists, often in their remote communities. Each of
the artistic projects required different yet demanding
techniques to achieve the appropriate result.
Mawurndjul’s bookshop ceiling and Watson’s
and Riley’s works in the window are the most
visible to the general public. There is limited access
to the other Aboriginal works. However, clever
mirroring makes snippets of the ceiling paintings
visible in the street below, and lighting at night
makes the ceilings even more visible.
The French have made a bold political gesture
with this new museum. It is easy to find questions
that are not well answered, such as the absence of
contemporary art in the museum from the
indigenous peoples of France’s former colonial
regions. Or to scoff at some of the overblown
rhetoric associated with the museum. Yet to dwell
on these aspects is to ignore the phenomenal
achievement of building such an impressive display
space for the artistic accomplishments of
non-European cultures. No such museum exists
elsewhere in the world and Ateliers Jean Nouvel’s
rambling, unconventional building is a similarly
bold statement.
PETER NAUMANN IS RESEARCHING ABORIGINAL ART IN
EUROPEAN MUSEUMS THROUGH THE CENTRE FOR CROSS
CULTURAL RESEARCH AT AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY.
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MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLEY, PARIS
Architect Ateliers Jean
Nouvel.
AUSTRALIAN
INDIGENOUS ART
COMMISSION
Architect Cracknell and
Lonergan Architects—
project team Peter
Lonergan, Julie
Cracknell, Matt Fearns,
Chris McBride, Aryan
Mansor, Romy Farmer,
Jan Cracknell. Curators
Brenda L. Croft, Hetti
Perkins. Artists Paddy
Bedford, Michael Riley,
John Mawurndjul, Judy
Watson, Tommy
Watson, Ningura
Napurrula, Gulumbu
Yunupingu, Lena
Nyadbi. Artisans Brett
Gibson, Rosie Gordon,
Michael Place, Jeremy
Cohen, Jenny Hayman,
Peter Harris, Martin Say,
William Undery, George
Hammond, Peter
Flemming, Peter Lucas,
Richard Lucas, Nelson
Lucas, John Shipton,
John Creighton, Lance
Nichols, Frank Villy,
Samantha Hawken.
Other collaborators
Australia Council for
the Arts; Embassy of
Australia, France;
Embassy of France,
Australia.
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