Today’s festivities included visiting the British Museum, walking among the high rises of the city, and taking a boat trip to Greenwich; all culminating into a magical day. In contemplation of my experiences, I can’t help but feel impressed upon by my first visit to the British museum. It was an incredible repertoire of knowledge and record. Representing an epitome of a museum experience and a prime example of British exhibitionism, the British Museum struck me with a powerful conviction: the idea of exhibition itself. I am deeply concerned with the interesting conversation about the ethics of the British ownership of the Greek Parthenon. The world becomes a material to be collected, gathered and sorted. Worshipped, conserved and researched. Exploited, colonized, stolen. Ethics becomes relative. How do we gauge cultural and ethical responsibility?
This reminds me of the controversial work of performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco. Their “The Couple in the Cage” challenged these ideas as an ironic reenactment of the imperialist practice of displaying indigenous peoples in exhibition to be empirically exploited by white intellectuals. By performing “The Couple in the Cage” in various museums, Fusco and Gómez-Peña were exposing the racism, colonialism, and voyeurism of developed countries. Appearing five hundred years after Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, they performed live in museums displayed as an exhibition of Amerindians from an island in the Gulf of Mexico that had somehow been overlooked for five centuries. They called their homeland Guatinau and themselves Guatinauis. Most important to the work includes the reaction of the audience. Filmed, their behavior reveals the racist ideology that exists among a postcolonial society that understands non-western people as primitive and objects of exhibition. Fusco relates “In such encounters with the unexpected, people’s defense mechanisms are less likely to operate with their normal efficiency; caught off-guard, their beliefs are more likely to rise to the surface.”
London lies at the heart of this debate.