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I had visited the ethnographic museum in Frankfurt ten years earlier in the autumn of 1999 as the newly appointed guest professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. On one occasion, the dean of the art school, Kasper König, took me to meet the director of Frankfurt’s department of culture. They both knew of my background in cultural anthropology and wanted me to take on the vacant directorship of the ethnographic museum. At this first meeting, I declined. It felt anathema to the excitement of teaching art students. A couple of months later, the director invited me back to his office. Again, I refused. The main reason for not accepting the offer was informed by my studies of anthropology in the mid-eighties. At that time, the subject of analysis was not the foreign culture and its artifacts so much as the figure of the ethnographer. Anthropology, the “maculate,”¹⁴ soiled science, could be deconstructed by decoding the tropes employed to “write culture.”¹⁵ Neighboring literary criticism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis, this radical strain of semantic anthropology was barely engaged in defusing the charged condition of its founding institution, the colonial museum and with it, the hundreds of thousands of confiscated artifacts. Studying anthropology and art practice in Vienna in the early eighties, I read everything I could that was brought out by German publishers such as Syndikat, Suhrkamp, or the Qumran Verlag. I discovered texts by ethno-psychoanalysts Paul Parin, Fritz Morgenthaler, and Mario Erdheim, essays by transgressive thinkers like Hubert Fichte, the work of Michael Oppitz and Fritz Kramer, alongside the more mystically oriented research of Hans Peter Duerr. This theoretical material played a role in the German-speaking art world of the time. As art students we read anthropology because there was little else. There were no formalized courses in curatorial studies and no transcultural academies; nothing but a relatively conservative art history, which bore little relation to the heteroclite practices of Actionism, Concept Art, and performance.

Key to this interdisciplinary crossover was a text written in the seventies by American artist Joseph Kosuth titled “The Artist as Anthropologist.”¹⁶ In a sequence of numbered paragraphs, Kosuth cites economist Michael Polanyi, philosopher Martin Jay, sociologist Max Weber, and anthropologists Stanley Diamond, Bob Scholte, and Edward Sapir, and draws a map of contextual adjacency with which he aims to destabilize the narratives of Western modernism and scientism as the defining references in contemporary art. He argues for an “anthropologized art,” “an art manifested in praxis,” an “engaged” activity founded on “cultural fluency” whose criticality succeeds because it “depicts while it alters society.”¹⁷ Kosuth’s article—with its typically male figureheads—was more than merely a reading list for emerging artists. His intellectual stance corresponded with the aftermath of the first Independence period in sixties Africa, emancipatory movements in the US, the global student demonstrations of 1968, and the fallout of the Vietnam War. The relationship between contemporary art and cultural anthropology was built upon the articulation of linguistic and contextual propositions that might activate a recursive adjustment to ways of understanding and representing art itself.¹⁸

As a doctoral student in anthropology I was required to do fieldwork, so in 1986 I moved to Paris to investigate the storage rooms, archives, and ephemera of the Musée de l’Homme. I wanted to establish a link between those concentrates of Concept Art and Actionism that I had witnessed in Vienna as a young art student and the edginess and subversion that I detected within certain strains of twentieth-century anthropology. I named this connection eroticism, less with reference to gender studies or sexuality, but as a philosophical drive that motored both the ideational extremes of artistic research and various experiments in ethnographic inquiry. One afternoon at the Musée de l’Homme, I came across the incomplete collection of the dissident Surrealist periodical Documents (1929–31) edited by Georges Bataille and Carl Einstein. Here I recognized the prelusive moment, the uncertain and unresolved phase in creative practice, and its ability to activate entry points beyond explanatory or contextual forms of information. I decided to juxtapose the written and visual assemblages in Documents with the collecting activities of the team of French anthropologists who crossed Africa between 1931 and 1933 on the notorious Mission Dakar–Djibouti, amassing more than 3,500 objects for the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris.

The thesis was a handmade affair produced on discs the size of a bathroom tile and interspersed with black-and-white photocopies of archival material. I asked an artist friend to take photographs of me while I worked in the museum’s library, standing on steps to reach books, or holding a Dogon mask on my face against the backdrop of metal filing cabinets.¹⁹ Alongside these self-portraits, we took photographs of Michel Leiris in his office or in conversation at the museum’s Le Totem bar. All this led to a doctorate that stuck out from the purely text-based, literary dissertations of the time. By then I had realized that academic anthropology was not my future. It was the summer of 1988, and I was keen to return to art and become a curator. The new discipline of cultural studies was flourishing in Birmingham under the leadership of Stuart Hall, and the Black Arts movement was active in London. Rasheed Araeen was preparing the seminal exhibition The Other Story and Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa were producing films on the Black experience in Britain. In contrast, the Museum of Mankind in London’s Burlington Gardens felt both disconnected from movements in contemporary art or cultural studies, and out of sync with curatorial practice.

The artists who made an impact on me as a student often worked in relation to a form of meta-ethnology. I focused on Lothar Baumgarten and his friend the anthropologist Michael Oppitz, who in turn was close to Marcel Broodthaers, Benjamin Buchloh, and Candida Höfer. Baumgarten and Oppitz created a shared wilderness out of their early expeditions to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. In 1976, Oppitz headed to Nepal to begin his long-term visual and textual recordings of Magar shamanism. Two years later, his friend abandoned the relative security of the Rhineland art scene for the Orinoco in Venezuela, armored with “a machete, a towel and a change of clothing, two Leica cameras, some film stock, a tape recorder, batteries, watercolor paints, pens, and paper.”²⁰ Both messed with the sanctity of documentary material in different ways, testing out the poetics of chance encounters and alternative representations in language and visual media. Whereas Baumgarten’s adventures held fort within the discourse of art, Oppitz strode a high-wire suspended between the authority of academic publishing—that “paper persona” he always refused to become—and the experiments he performed in visual anthropology. His commitment to fieldwork was not one of rugged individualism in search of personal enlightenment, but a desire for human exchange.²¹ He questioned what it meant to be part of a context, be it in time or space—in Kathmandu, Cologne, or Kassel—in contemporary art or in anthropology. Is it one’s physical location, one’s political stance, or one’s interlocutors and the conversations they engender, he asked? Or might it be the desire to identify an emancipatory nerve, an organic alliance to those whose positions lie outside of the institution, thereby keeping the unforeseeable nature of the human condition, and the archival drive that defines it, both alive and contradictory? Oppitz recalls the period:

When you look at historical situations now and what was going on in Düsseldorf and Cologne between 1968 and 1975, there was something of a movement which we participants were not aware of at the time. All of us who were part of it thought, Jesus, we live in the wrong time. If only we had lived at the time of Minotaure! If only if we had lived during the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, we would be happy! There would be a bigger self. Now if we look back at this situation—and I talk to younger people about this—they say, damn it, why didn’t we live in 1968–1975 in Cologne and Düsseldorf! There were a number of people who you could see forming a group, although they weren’t. They didn’t understand themselves as such. The Surrealists did see themselves as a group for a short time, and they had a leader who kept them together, and there were people who created the ideology of the group. In Cologne and Düsseldorf, we did not have lead figure. There was maybe this or that artist who was a little more attractive than another one, and of course there were people whom we would not consider at the time, like Otto Piene or artists we found totally uninteresting. As time goes by, distances become larger and then it looks even more as if it was a group of self-made alliances.²²

With its philosophical heritage, Frankfurt was a prominent player in the conversation between art and anthropology. Central to this junction of minds was the publishing company Qumran Verlag (1980–85), conceived and directed by writer and anthropologist Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs. With his connections to Parisian publishers and Swiss intellectuals, Heinrichs was the first to offer translations into German of French ethno-poets Victor Segalen and Michel Leiris, and to dissolve the barriers between genres by bringing out new texts by writer and traveler Hubert Fichte. Eroticism, possession, mythologies, the oneiric and the irrational all merged with an alternative history of ideas that found an avid readership among anthropologists and young artists alike. Limited edition box sets with photographs of ephemeral artworks drawn in the sand by Joseph Beuys in Kenya, or depicting murals by Papisto Boy, a graffiti artist from Senegal, were sold at leading art bookshops and information galleries. Like its contemporaries, the Merve Verlag in Leipzig, Jean-Michel Place in Paris, or Semiotext(e) in New York, Frankfurt’s Qumran Verlag reflected a collective interest in transgressing linguistic, aesthetic, and political borders by highlighting the subjective sensibilities of transdisciplinary knowledge production. Although Qumran lasted a mere five years, as an organ for writers and artists it laid the foundation for a far-reaching debate between advanced anthropology, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary art.

A year before Qumran folded, Josef Franz Thiel, the director of Frankfurt’s Museum für Völkerkunde, commissioned the thirty-one-year-old Senegalese artist and activist El Hadji Sy to curate a new collection of Senegalese paintings and works on paper for the museum. I had visited this German ethnographic museum in 1992 when I was preparing the exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa for the Whitechapel Gallery in London.²³ At the time, it was the only institution in Europe that held a considerable number of drawings and paintings by named twentieth-century artists from East, West, and Southern Africa. Sy’s work was seminal in Dakar. He was a founding member of numerous artists’ collectives including the Laboratoire Agit-Art and had pioneered a notorious studio complex in the center of Dakar that was violently disbanded by the Senegalese military in 1983. Sy was renowned for having dedicated ten years of his life to painting with the soles of his feet in reaction to the Senghorian paradigm of visual art and state representation.²⁴ Nineteen eighty-four was not only the year when Sy was commissioned to assemble a collection of contemporary Senegalese painting for the museum, but also the opening of the much-disputed exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art, curated by Kirk Varnedoe for The Museum of Modern Art in New York.²⁵

At the time, this synchronous double take on art and ethnography located both in New York and Frankfurt would have been barely perceived. Whereas the MoMA show pretty much dug its own grave by epitomizing a myopic relationship between African and Western art, the Weltkulturen Museum gave free rein to a Senegalese artist, effectively the first curator from Africa to have worked with a European museum. Aware of the need for serious art-critical reporting on contemporary art practice in Africa, El Hadji Sy also coedited a trilingual anthology on art production in Senegal with a foreword written by Léopold Sédar Senghor, former Senegalese poet-president and close friend of Pablo Picasso and Pierre Soulages. The book also included a text on art criticism in Senegal by Issa Samb, aka Joe Ouakam.²⁶ With Sy’s anthology in hand, I was able to locate him in Dakar and subsequently invite him to become one of the five African cocurators of Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, which opened in 1995. Described by Nigerian novelist and dramaturg Wole Soyinka as “unique in a number of ways,” and the “harvest of a creative journey that began on the African continent,” the exhibition was a complex conflation of modernist painting and post-independence movements, supported by a team approach to curatorial work.²⁷ It was the precursor of subsequent exhibitions and acted as a launch pad for some of its cocurators.²⁸ Today, Sy’s contribution to the history of Senegalese painting and the development of independent artists’ movements in Dakar warrants greater attention, both in terms of academic analysis and regarding his considerable work as a painter. Wilful omission is a procedure no one likes to talk about. It can take on different scales, morphing according to whether it is generated by a politician, an historian, a scientist, a lawyer, a curator, or a journalist. All too often, ethnology and art history work through the medium of omission, provoking consensus through the presupposition of a common reasoning that either extracts something or withholds key dimensions from a narrative.

In 2010, I invited Sy back to Frankfurt to reflect on the collection that he had curated in the eighties, and provide additional and complimentary information to the inventory cards. Because several artists of his generation had died in the interim, this return was fraught with emotional memories. At the time, the person responsible for the museum’s African collections did not adequately record or take notes on Sy’s oral history. This experience would prove an alarming precursor to the widespread resistance to recognize alternative and legitimate meanings generated by artists in relation to a museum’s collection. Several decades following Sy’s pioneering work for the Frankfurt museum, I was able to engage the Afro-German art historian Yvette Mutumba to become the new curator of the museum’s African collection. Her detailed knowledge of contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora outweighed the standard expertise of most ethnographers or area studies specialists. By 2014, Mutumba had identified more than 1,400 works in the museum’s collection, significantly helping to restore the value of individual authorship to a collection that, in its generic taxonomy, had been founded on the disenfranchising discourse of ethnicity. Once more, we invited Sy back to the museum, and with the legacy of Fritz Axt’s art collection that he had inherited and generously lent to the museum, Mutumba and I were able to mount a retrospective of his practice as painter, performance artist, and activist.²⁹ For five years, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt would become an experiment in venue construction, intended to articulate not only the dissident approach of these earlier countercultural artists and anthropologists, but to consider how new relationships between collections and methods of inquiry might be nurtured by artists within this post-ethnographic institution.