• 1 Young, James E. "Memory/Monument", Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago: University of Chicago P (...)

1Over the summer of 2020, as statues were tagged and fell across North America and Europe, the question of how to deal with colonial legacy saturated media coverage, it became clear that we are as yet analytically ill-equipped to deal with the issues being brought up by different forms of public activism: the representations of and reparations requested in relation to the history of slavery, extractive colonial economics and the ideological constructions of racism. It is not the role of this review to examine why the summer of 2020 has emerged as milestone for a more widespread recognition of the need to address these questions with greater rigueur and public engagement, but what appeared for many as a surprisingly sudden rise in sentiment and concern cannot be tied to the circumstances of 2020, no matter how tragic and shocking these may have been. What the three books in review here have in common is to present us with different and important aspects of how counter- representations (and with them also revendications of a social and political nature) emerged, creating a visual, curatorial, artistic language that react to colonial forms of thought as embodied by practices of appropriation and representation. It is not a story of the summer of 2020 but one that goes back to anti-colonial strategies of the early 20th century, to the crisis of representation that has been ongoing in ethnographic museums since at least the 1980s and to forms of artistic practice which have been according to David Joselit’s central thesis, Heritage and Debt a driving force in constituting “Global contemporary art” since at least the 1960s. As these issues, long at the heart of cultural theory in North America and Canada becomes more central to the policies of European cultural institutions, in particular ethnographic museums, the volumes under review here provide us with some key elements to understanding a phenomenon that is in fine questioning and reformulating the notion of heritage itself and its modes of accounting for the past – requesting forms of ambiguity and plurality of memory, qualities that are uniquely lacking in 19th century monuments to great men of the past1. Fittingly all three books are in a sense also collections, assemblages, juxtapositions, whether it be of different dioramas (Noémie Étienne), artworks (David Joselit) and points of view (Margareta von Oswald and Jonas Tinius) that are carried by a strong central argument – each formulating from a different angle, how specific artistic practices deal with the impact of colonial pasts on our current experience of the world.

• 2 Troelenberg, Eva-Maria. Savino, Melania. Images of the Art Museum: Connecting Gaze and Discourse in (...)
• 3 Poulot, Dominique. Musée, nation, patrimoine: 1789-1815, vol. 1, Paris: Gallimard, 1997 (Bibliothèq (...)

2Heritage studies and contemporary art have over the last decades engaged in an ever more-lively relationship with one another. Whilst on the surface, they appear to constitute and deal with separate spheres of production, these have in fact merged quite significantly. Indeed, heritage studies, as a field of enquiry that fully emerged in the 1980s, did initially focus on conservation practices and discourses related to historical monuments, recent examinations of heritage processes, be they in the past or in the present, are increasingly looking to production of images2, and the analysis of representative strategies in order to gain a better understanding of how the past is/was reactivated (including through artistic practice) to stabilize dominant forms of identity formation but also and increasingly as a means of questioning these formations. Whilst the issue of nation building has been identified as a key force in the historical constitution of the heritage complex, in particular in the 19th century3, increasingly contemporary heritage construction are examined through what has been termed as “critical heritage studies”, mainly driven by academics working in former settler colonies (Canada, Australia, North America) focusing on heritage constructions principally as mechanisms of domination in particular in relation to the representational demands of minorities.

• 4 Etienne, Noémie. Natale, Mauro. Poulot, Dominique. "La restauration des peintures à Paris, 1750-181 (...)
• 5 The role of diorama’s in contemporary practice was also largely developed in the exhibition and the (...)
• 6 For a longer review of Noémie Etienne’s book by Dominique Poulot, see Cultures et Musées, no. 36, t (...)

4Both Noémie Etienne’s and David Joselit’s work are grounded in a North America approach to visual studies and analyze “images” produced to represent but also to contest what heritage might be. The elegant and solidly documented essay by art historian and specialist of collection and restoration history, Noémie Etienne is anchored in the author’s expertise on heritage making processes in Early Modern Europe4, and in the detailed reading of the museum archive, as she focuses here on a very different terrain: the diorama installations created by the German anthropologist Franz Boas and his successor Clark Wissler in Natural History Museum of New York and those produced under the supervision of the anthropologist of Iroquois-Seneca origins, Arthur Caswell Parker. Largely condemned as inauthentic, outdated and essentializing mechanisms of cultural representation, in Etienne’s work, Les Autres et les ancêtres : les dioramas de Franz Boas et d’Arthur C. Parker à New York, 1900, the image of the diorama is literally taken apart and examined through the variety of material processes (casts, modeling, painting, taxidermy) that its production implicates, to gain a better understanding of the complexity of the display of First Nations in the early 20th century. It is a cultural history with a very unclear dividing line between the representation of the self and the other; by carefully examining the dioramas as a medium in their own right with a complex genealogy, she sidesteps the many negative associations of historical diorama and also considers their efficiency as a form of communication and their emancipatory and identity building use in the case of Albany as mediators between two worlds. In particular she examines how Parker’s approach uses the notion of “authenticity through contact” to question the Western notion of heritage as related to the essentialized production of traditional cultures, untouched by modernity, and to allow for the representation of the future of First Nations through their contemporary productions. A point of interest is how her work takes into account the particular role that different producers, in particularly artists have continuously played, in the elaboration of museum diorama installations in North America since the beginning of the 20th century5. She shows how artists, far from being merely indispensable intermediaries, have largely co-invented scholarly representations and concludes with the analysis of the contemporary productions (i.e. p. 284, The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum) that clearly offer examples of how the diorama has been appropriated in order to provide effective counter narratives to dominant notions of identity6.