Instead of exhibiting the work as a representation of the artists’ cultural backgrounds, the curators’ choice not to mention their nationalities helps highlight what the piece really represents. While denouncing slavery, the inhuman behavior and violence, there is a particular focus in the piece on celebrating the syncretism and transculturation that was born out of this cultural exchange. This labeling choice can be understood as a way to preclude the reading of the object through the identities of the artists, which English argues seals the object in the identities’ representational space.[11] In other words, including the national information on the label would allow the perception of the work to be replaced by the visitor’s conception of these identities.[12] This would result in the projection of meaning, instead of allowing meaning to be generated through the analysis of the piece in conjunction with the text.[13] If the work were to be read only through the artists’ nationalities, the reading would overlook the artists’ global argument alluding to different syncretized cultures.
By choosing this labeling practice, the museum returns agency to the artists. Nationality is not the immediate approach through which the work is read, even though it might have played a role in the creation of the piece; following English, this becomes a way for “restituting the subject to ‘relationship to self’ and ‘performances of self’ in which race informs but does not determine aesthetics and politics.”[14] As the museum is not approaching the art pieces through that perspective, it becomes the viewer’s choice to reflect on whether they might want to know where the artists are from, and independently research this information.
The Sociological Reading of an Artist
During the Black Artists in America Symposium, hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, a debate sparked between artists William Williams, Sam Gillian, Jacob Lawrence, and Tom Lloyd. They debated whether using Black art as a genre, making an identity a label through which an artwork can be read, gives it a political and thus sociological value and approach.[15] Making this type of information available, according to English, results in a displacement of race as a “central location for our interpretation of the work,” which further results in a dismissal of what he calls the “multiple categories [artists] occupy.”[16] He further explains that placing race as a central reading of a work brings a speculative historical analysis of the category’s attainment of an authority with which it would articulate the Black artist’s project before she, and it, have the chance to speak for themselves.[17]
A label’s social categorization of an artwork takes away the artist’s agency to speak for their work. This further results in an isolation of art created by artists who do not belong to the white Western Euro-American canon.[18] As English characterizes it, integrationism justifies itself by acknowledging that there now exists a history of aesthetic practice which is all the harder to reckon with the more one allows notions of “African American art as a distinct form of expression” to determine it.[19]
The author affirms that “we simply cannot see Black artist’s work until we throw it into relief against the transformations it undergoes in our inevitably social involvement with it.”[20] This argument alludes to the need to state a sociological difference to understand how these practices are distinct and how they are related to the canon to which it is compared.[21] Therefore, if national identity were to appear on a label, it could be reduced to a visual representation, which in turn is reduced to the artist’s identity and their societal status by inhabiting this.
Overruling Stereotypes
National labels can create a one-dimensional reading, resulting in ethnicity being the only element considered when interpreting an artwork. This argument is supported by English’s statement that “Black aesthetics and the Black arts movement extended sharp views on the Black artist’s responsibility to Black culture, encouraging artists to make ‘their own history.’”[22] One of the main arguments is how a reading based on an artist’s ethnicity is stereotyped by the assumptions and expectations visitors have of this identity—mainly because single narratives overpower the possibility of an identity inhabiting what English calls “multiple meanings” of a cultural identity, a claim alluded to earlier.[23] These multiple meanings point to the diverse categories that a person can inhabit and can be representative of, which shows the reductionist capacity single labels can have. This argument shows how labels can be limiting for an artist and their practice by reducing them to a stereotypical depiction of their cultural background.
A result of this stereotyping is that meaning is projected instead of understood. Stereotypes based on the maker’s ethnicity inform the reading of the work even when this was not the artist’s intention. This argument is also explored in Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art, by art historian Jennifer A. González, as she defends that objects can also “be epidermalized.”[24] The scholar elaborates: These stereotypes come to stand in for subjects not merely in the form of commodity fetish, but as part of a larger system of material and image culture that circulates as a prothesis of race discourse through practices of collection, exchange and exhibition.[25]
Art historian Anneka Lenssen sustains this argument when she explains that the “mind perceives only mental images (representations) of material objects, not the objects themselves.”[26] According to these scholars, race and ethnicity become the only way through which an object is read when this information is available. By choosing not to label artists’ identities in the exhibition space, museums and institutions aim to avoid stereotypes that overpower the reading and value of an artist and their work.
Space as Label
The label is ubiquitous in exhibition spaces: It is everywhere, not limited to a small text next to the artwork. A label can also influence the reading of a space. On a macrolevel, the museum first and foremost holds an external label, which informs the visitor of the type of institution they will be entering—whether it be an ethnographic museum, a Western contemporary museum, an archaeology museum, an Italian Renaissance art museum, a historic site, or an independent art space. These external labels predetermine the content visitors will study or “consume” upon entering the space, and the approach the reading of these objects will take. Implicitly, the label manifests itself in the expectations visitors might have when entering the museum. The external label will anticipate the type of approach visitors should engage with when approaching the exhibited objects—for example, an ethnographic approach to an artwork shown in an ethnographic museum, instead of an aesthetic or art historical one if the work is exhibited in an art institution.
Both the Stedelijk Museum and the Wereldmuseum have works by Dutch Surinamese artist Jungerman. These examples show how external labels influence the creation of internal labels in museums, exhibitions, and their distinct galleries, each presenting an overarching argument informed by the type of label the building holds. The discursive space created among these different museums changes, and so does the treatment of the objects internally.
The outcome of clear external labels is that visitors need less contextualizing information in the exhibition spaces, as the museum already encourages a specific approach. In art museums, one could assume that the identity and cultural background of the makers becomes a secondary focus. In contrast, an ethnographic museum would lean more toward culture and ethnos being of primary importance.
Labeling a space can also be done internally through the different exhibition rooms. A perfect example of this would be where Jungerman’s work is exhibited in the permanent collection display of the Stedelijk Museum. The wall text in this room has the title “Breaking the White Frame of the Museum” and further explains that this space focuses on the display of Afro-diasporic heritage in Dutch art, including works by Remy Jungerman, Michael Tedja, and Gillion Grantsaan (founders of Wakaman); Marcel Pinas; Iris Kensmil; Patricia Kaersenhout; and Charl Landvreugd. The title and the approach stated in this text informs the visitor that what they will see in this space is an artistic expression by nonwhite diasporic artists. There are two issues visible with this room. First, the title indicates a need to exhibit artists from different cultural backgrounds other than white. The result is only showing one among the many different diasporic communities in the Netherlands, suggesting that the white frame is only broken by Surinamese artists. Those from other former Dutch colonies, or those representing the wave of international artists based in the Netherlands today, shown in the exhibition When Objects Are Beings, are thus not considered as breaking the white frame of museums. Second, although artists’ nationalities are not mentioned in the artworks’ labels, this detail still informs the reading of the exhibited works because of the external text, in which the artists and the gallery are presented.
Having this information on the art pieces’ labels could be considered redundant since the gallery presentation already accomplishes that role. The space is an excellent example of how “racial gazing,” done through a nationality or ethnic label, can seal an artwork in a “representational space.”[27] It additionally shows how, even if a label might not display the artist’s cultural or national identity, the space where the work is displayed can fulfill that role as much as the label does, defeating the purpose of omitting national information on the object label.
United Through Difference by the Label
If labels do not figure in the exhibition space, the artwork and the artist can be universal; the art and the artist can fit better into a globalized context because the object’s particularity and singularity, in relation to the cultural background of the maker, is taken away. However, some museums continue to have labels that inform visitors about artists’ nationalities. Other curatorial practices choose to have this information on factual labels and, in some cases, further explore this information in longer interpretative texts. Here I will explore the different ways visitors, institutions, and artists benefit from having a national or cultural identity affiliated with works of art.
By refusing to include national information on artists’ exhibition labels, one could argue that this adheres to a claim for universality, which English has thoroughly explored. However, one of the ways this view can be countered is that difference can create unity. Political theorist Iris Marion Young discusses this in her book Justice and Politics of Difference.[28] Young’s reasoning opposes the universal treatment of artists, as “the politics of difference sometimes implies overriding a principle of equal treatment with the principle that group differences should be acknowledged in public policy.”[29] Instead of an approach demanding the equal treatment and reading of artists and their practice, as developed by English, Young argues for an approach focused on highlighting differences so that they can coexist equitably. For Young, these differences are a way to recognize groups’ rights to “promote their full participation” or, in other words, give them agency.[30]
Culture and diaspora scholar Rinaldo Walcott develops a similar reasoning in his book Genres of Human, in which he explains that “the struggle to think about cultural differences outside of conceptions of multiculturalism is a significant denial of our present order of knowledge and modes of being human.”[31] He further suggests that this multiculturalism can “produce genres of the human for which our only hope of an engagement beyond those categories is to ethically recognize them as meaningful to all.”[32] Through difference, through these different “genres” of humanity, unity can be created, and thus they can both coexist and prosper. Walcott explains that this sharing of cultures and identities is “not necessarily utopic or egalitarian; in fact much of it recalls the brutality of previous encounters”[33] —pointing to how cosmopolitanism and differences derive from the caste system created during colonization.
These arguments tie closely to that of mutual respect. By respecting differences without racist biases, different cultures and practices can thrive. These thinkers’ arguments point to a hopeful mentality in which, instead of hiding differences to avoid judgment, these differences should instead be highlighted to promote education, resulting in respect for others.
The Universal Remains Global
Studying Walcott and curator Okwui Enwezor in this context presents a school of thought that argues that an explicit display of singularity, the culture behind the objects presented, is valued, and thus this singularity can be accepted globally. By this, it is understood that the unity created through difference can also be considered global. Walcott begins to present the concept of cosmopolitanism by quoting philosopher Seyla Benhabib, who defines this concept as:
For some [ . . . ] an attitude of enlightened morality that does not place “love of country” ahead of “love of mankind” [ . . . ] for others, cosmopolitanism signifies hybridity, fluidity, and recognizing the fractured and internally driven character of human selves and citizens, whose complex aspirations cannot be circumscribed by national fantasies and primordial communities.[34]
Nevertheless, this concept has its intricacies, given its rootedness in the distinction between the West and the rest. As Enwezor explains, cosmopolitanism is entangled with internationalism, which is “a rubric that places the West in the position of achieving internationalism at the expense of the rest, who are not ushered into a higher order of Man.”[35] By describing how other scholars define cosmopolitanism, Walcott unravels the complexity of this concept’s implications as, while highlighting cultural diversity, it does so through an entanglement in Western colonialist perspectives. He explains that the complications behind cosmopolitanism are “the terms under which European modernity continues to shape all of humanity.”[36] This translates into it stemming from an “assumed un-complicatedness of belonging, identity, and nation becomes the grounds of regulation, containment, and refusal.”[37] This means that when cosmopolitanism is not practiced well, questions and judgments of identity overpower a reading through a Western European perspective, paralleling English’s argument. Walcott therefore pleads that the conceptual use of cosmopolitanism must acknowledge that these differences were created by “an already deeply racialized modernity.”[38] The use of cosmopolitanism does not come as a solution to racist practices; the argument of unity through difference is rooted in colonial and racist origins. Even so, Walcott’s use of this concept shows a way to live with these differences through acceptance.
In a similar vein, Enwezor develops an argument around the global aspect of identity-based curatorial practices. He explains that the creation of “the new in the context of decolonized representation” comes from the acceptance and development of the new “relations of cultures and histories, practices and processes rationalization and transformation, transculturation and assimilation, exchanges and moments of multiple dwelling,”[39] and the persistence of artists to remain associated to their identities, cultural and national. Here, the curator speaks of the relationality created between the new and the old, and how these two contradictory approaches inform artistic creation for some artists. This means that even when an artist speaks of topics deeply contemporary and explores modern forms, most remain loyal to a discourse deeply rooted in their cultural and national background. Later, he argues that:
the development of new multilateral networks of knowledge production—activities that place themselves strategically at the intersection of disciplines and transnational audiences—has obviated the traditional circuits of institutionalized production and reception.[40]
Through this argument, Enwezor highlights transnationalism’s effects on the development of culture. This effect, he later explains, is something that a museum or any exhibition space cannot deny or disassociate itself from, as these institutions are informed by this cultural entanglement.[41]
Both scholars—although warning of the complexities of the global as an idea, given its colonial and racist origins—emphasize that the display of identity-based practices, when done correctly, can support the argument that unity can be created through difference.
The Contextual Label Proposal
Thus far, I have explored the different sides of whether to label contemporary artists with their nationality in museums’ exhibition spaces. The complexity of this issue, I suggest, demands a new approach, for which I propose a contextual label that can help counter the miscommunication that can be created between the museum and its visitors. I here propose a series of questions formatted in a flowchart (fig. 6) to determine whether an artist needs to be labeled with their nationality and, if so, how to render justice to this textual ethnical representation correctly. These questions all aim to answer whether the information needs to be placed in the factual label. The flowchart can be used for any artist or maker, not solely responding diasporic artists.