Abstracts of Papers
Kabria Baumgartner:
Cashing in on Native Otherness:
The Royal Academy of Arts Aztecs Exhibition in London
This presentation will argue that the exhibition of indigenous art becomes a way for political, national, and cultural debates about race and culture to be rehearsed in the space of the museum. Even though the Aztecs exhibition presented by the Royal Academy of Arts in 2003 was supposed to be a profound artistic and even anthropological portrayal of Aztec civilization, on display was contemporary British society reenacting its nineteenth century imperial ideology. The marketing and advertising of the Aztecs exhibition as bloody and barbarous merely betrays British cultural anxieties about the threat of foreignness and the perceived ongoing loss of traditional British values amidst the rise of British multiculturalism. Indeed, inside the museum, Aztecs are portrayed as an incomprehensible, foreign, and barbarous civilization overtaken by Spanish (European) conquistadores. Outside of the museum, a similar rubric is being rehearsed but in the place of Aztecs are asylum seekers, immigrants, and Muslims and an overtaking has not yet occurred whereby the British can regain their traditional values-their perceived Britishness. The Aztecs exhibition subsequently becomes a glaring model whereby the British nation, as represented in and by the museum, articulates its opposition to multicultural Britain by re-accessing its historical imperial past. Hence indigenous art is relegated to mere a re-enactment of colonization; artistic discussions are unfortunately abandoned in favor of engaging veiled debates about the threat of 'Otherness.'
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