Blockchain Papers

J. Eric Gross

Reviewed by: Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration and Theater in Twenty-First-Century Paris by Emine Fişek Janice Gross AESTHETIC CITIZENSHIP: IMMIGRATION AND THEATER IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY PARIS. By Emine Fişek. Performance Works series. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017; pp. 240. As part of its commitment to l’exception française, France has long supported the ideals of republican universalism through policies that use the arts to integrate its citizens and foster cultural competency. Given the postcolonial nation’s relentless struggle “to integrate a multicultural polity” (5) with its robust animation culturelle outreach, Aesthetic Citizenship rightly identifies France as an “exemplary site” to study the social and aesthetic practice of immigrant theatre. Emine Fişek’s meticulously documented overview of the conflicted politics of French immigration offers an essential backdrop to the book’s ethnographic accounts of localized performance projects that developed in social centers, aid organizations, and neighborhood associations in 2008. Each project enacts performance as both a staged event and “a structuring logic of social life” (29), demonstrating Fişek’s argument “that national participation, belonging, and citizenship are spheres of experience that require rehearsal, and that theater is a particularly apt space through which to understand the complicated relationship between ideal and enactment” (5). Focused largely on the Sarkozy era (2002–12), the book situates the immigration crises of this period within France’s larger historical struggle toward national self-definition (including examinations of the 2004 law and the headscarf controversy, and 2005 urban violence in the banlieue neighborhoods). The book’s emphasis on embodied social practices interweaves performance studies research with discourses of alterity and communal belonging from French cultural theorists (Étienne Balibar, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière). Fişek’s expertise in cultural and linguistic translation serves the book’s extensive consideration of France’s distinctive relationship to processes of social integration and its articulation in the French language. Most importantly, the book’s argument rests on the tension between universality and particularity contained in two fraught terms: intégration as the abstract notion of French republican universality and autonomous personhood, and the danger of communautarisme as particular identification (local, ethnic, or religious) with the resultant categorization of the immigrant as Other. Fişek distinguishes Anglo-American notions of “community-based performance,” “intercultural theater,” and “multi-culturalism” from French critical terms often lacking handy English equivalents (communautarisme, laïcité, banlieue, animation culturelle, citoyen, and immigré). These concepts unique to the French lexicon are well-presented and prove critical to assessing theatre’s capacity for civic and artistic engagement consistent with France’s “ideal” of “social enmeshment and moral autonomy” (180) performed as an “enactment” of individual national belonging and self-affirmation. Interweaving archival, theoretical, and socio-political sources, Fişek’s ethnographic, dialogic, and self-reflective approach calls to mind Dwight Conquergood’s ideal ethnography of the “ears and heart” as a co-performative witnessing. Extensive interviews and exchanges with theatre practitioners, social and humanitarian aid workers, and civic actors and activists offer “fieldwork vignettes” that bring localized immigrant experience to bear on the development of an “emergent immigrant theater” and the staging of the “immigrant body.” Noteworthy is Fişek’s nuanced discussion of immigrant women’s relationship to embodiment and the complexities of ethno-cultural particularity. Her account of the contradictory stances regarding the headscarf controversy is particularly incisive and theoretically enmeshed in feminist scholarship (by scholars including Judith Butler, Jane Freedman, Joan Scott, and Saba Mahmood). [End Page 121] Focused on empowerment through immigrant corporeality, the book tracks “two dueling ideologies” of emancipatory work: “public recognition for those who lacked visibility,” and “arts practices as habit-generating phenomena that participat[e] in the creation of cultured citizens” (17). Each chapter narrates site-specific case studies where “ethical and aesthetic sensibilities” intersect and evolve. Chapter 1, “On the Paris Stage,” outlines the early effects of 1970s decentralization policies in their outreach to the “non-public” in underserved areas (la banlieue) through state-sponsored animation culturelle. The French-Arab troupes Al Assifa and La Kahina, as precursors to immigrant theatre activism, illustrate theatrical engagement as “both a force for cultivation and a space for aesthetic militantism” (23). The...

Pascal Ughetto

For almost one century in museums, constant debates have dealt with accessibility of their contents to laymen. Part of these stakes are directly embodied in professional practices and meanings. This has resulted in the conceptualization of museums as organizations, composed of specialized professional groups. These are supposed to cooperate for collective targets and diverse ends but are also supporting rival and conflicting views. In the French institutional arrangements, this is all the more so that professional boundaries are institutionalized a a strict distinction between conservateurs and those, of diverse occupations, who claim to act as médiateurs, specialized on making collections more understandable for non experts. For their British or North American counterparts, institutional definitions conversely encompass various possible modes of acting as a curator, from a dominant scientific activity on collections to mainly devoting oneself to make collections more accessible-what the North American historical path has constructed as an 'interpretation' activity. Common, however, is the historical controversy about what a museum is about and what sort of practices are required. Are museums basically devoted to the conservation of collections and the scholar activity of studying them scientifically, or should museums staff be invited to think of themselves as members of organizations devoted to their publics? In this second case then is the expert activity partly deprived of its legitimacy by the obstacles it creates for profane perfect understanding of collections. Be they members of a same profession of curators or divided between conservateurs and various sorts of médiateurs, professional segments debate of what is fundamentally making museums useful for their publics, what is expected of the institution and of the individuals, what are legitimate activities and ways of practicing them. Fine arts museums are particularly exposed to such controversies, as they historically have been erected as symbols of temples forcing laymen to undisputable respect and celebration, admiration of the grandiose value of works and artists much more than beneficiating from experts' efforts to deliver accessible explanations of their knowledge. The paper will argue that this is less a matter of 'interpreting' versus behaving as a curator badly concerned with non-experts than of what are the intrinsic difficulties of communicating scientific results by and within the technical support of an exhibition. Exhibitions have developed since the 19th century not only as entertaining places for a large audience but also as a means of advancing knowledge on artists and their works. In other words, they are scenes of scientific debate on what scholars know on artists and works; they aim at explaining whom one particular painting has been attributed to and why it now should be attributed to another; they bring proofs about what is the exact value of this painter compared to that when replaced in the historical evolution of the artist or his/her movement, and so on. But at the same time and unlike most classical scientific scenes, a public is there, more or less consciously and competently interpreting the scene as an expert debate. When scientific activity is under sociological scrutiny, it generally is about scientists such as biologists, chemists, and so on. In the paper, the focus will be on curators as involved -entrapped?- in a specific scientific field and its constraints on how we produce knowledge and how we communicate results in such a field. In this perspective, exhibition is a fundamentally contradictory arrangement, compelled to convey conviction of experts and simultaneously to respond to expectations of various non-expert audiences. Scientific activity of fine arts curators is dealing with attributing value to works and artists, defining a scientific value, which contributes to determine commercial value. This is the professional stake of curators, forced to practice within organizational contexts. Analysis will be based on the exhibition 'Raphaël, les dernières années' (Louvre, Paris, 2012-2013), which has given rise to a public controversy about what it tried to show out and its object's relevance: it has been criticized for excessively trying to decide if details in the paintings should really be attributed to Raphael or to which of its students. Scenography, the choice of works and artists exhibited, texts (cards explaining works, catalogue, etc.) will be studied. They are not peripheral but central in the controversy in their various performance in making it clear what was the exhibition scientific major stake, namely dealing with a critique born in the 19th century about the value of Raphael end-life painting.

Robert Wangermée

Trends of Cultural Administration in Western Europe. In the last three decades, the ways and means of public intervention in cultural affairs have been multiplied and diversified following variable patterns in different countries. There has been an evolution in the levels of public intervention, which differ according to decentralization and federalism. There has also been an evolution of the means of intervention, because governments use new financing practices. Nowadays a new actor is emerging on the scene of cultural policy : the European Community.