By Lara Pawson
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The nails that fixed the tables to the floor proved just how popular it was. The aim of the game was to make the flags of six African countries by sliding tiled segments around within the frame of the tabletop. These puzzles were tackled with such exuberance, however, that the tables themselves began sliding around on the gallery floor. Hence the decision to nail them down.
Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art (1996–2002) was one of Tate’s most successful exhibitions last year, with more than 220,000 visitors swarming through its 12 rooms between July and September. According to assistant curator Nada Raza, ‘It was extraordinary […] because we had to work out how to not barrier the works in a way that was too prohibitive and interfered with the piece itself. We really did test the limits of what our systems can do.’
Those barrier systems certainly tested my limits during my first visit to the show, on a Saturday in early August. It was packed. The sound of buzzers was incessant as many visitors, including myself, repeatedly breached the security lines around parts of the installation. A stressed, but polite, Tate staffer dashed about warning people not to cross the wires taped to the floor while fielding calls on her walkie-talkie.
In the Architecture Room, adults and children were frantically piling up blocks of wood, then knocking them over. On a piano in the Salon, two girls were playing two-finger ‘Chopsticks’, an irritating tune that people who can’t play the piano properly always seem to know. In the Game Room, a competitive parent was boasting to her teenage children about her superior ability to reconstruct the Algerian flag. My partner tried to console me with one of the many chocolate coins laid out on top of the piano, but what I really wanted was a beer from the Salon’s bar. In vain: it seemed that, here, Gaba’s assault on gallery norms had broken itself on the more inflexible laws of alcohol licensing. The bar was dry and empty.
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In the Wedding Room, I winced at a video of Gaba’s marriage ceremony in 2000, which was attended by figures such as Chris Dercon, then director of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, now director of Tate Modern. I wondered if this entire installation was really an exclusive conversation between the artist and an art elite; and I felt mildly cheated that, unlike the VIP guests, visitors to Tate were not permitted to donate gifts to Gaba and his wife.
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My frustration peaked when I reached the Museum Shop. Contrary to what I’d heard about this part of the work – that one could buy the art works of Gaba’s friends and contemporaries – there was little on offer that wasn’t also available in Tate’s own shop. Beside a mock African market, a Tate employee sat beside an electronic till selling Tate postcards, Tate T-shirts, Tate books, Tate pencils, giant chocolate coins and, for a tenner each, some non-Tate ‘African’ bottle-openers.
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Perhaps my disappointment would have been checked if the Tarot reader had been present in the Art and Religion Room, but, alas, I was there on one of the days she was not. Maybe I would have felt better if I could have gone for a ride on one of the Museum’s bicycles lined up beside the escalators outside, but due to an insurance glitch they were not available either.
Exiting the building, I came to the conclusion that by acquiring and then exhibiting Gaba’s Museum, Tate had destroyed it. Or, put another way, by choosing to sell his Museum to Tate, Gaba had destroyed it himself. For what was once a live, interactive, metamorphosing event without walls was now a museum within a museum – like a corpse in formaldehyde – with walls, buzzers and nails to boot.
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And yet, I couldn’t quite leave it there. A few weeks later, determined to find a more positive way in to the work, I returned. This time, I visited early on a weekday. Crossing the Millennium Bridge, I pondered Tate’s proximity to the City of London, that very British tax haven. I considered the wealth of the city and the fact that much of it is built on our brutal history of empire. Looking over the Thames, I noticed a KPMG tourist boat motoring by and, printed down one side of it, the words ‘cutting through complexity’. I thought of the reports I’ve read about KPMG’s dealings, not only with the British government, but other governments too, including several on the African continent. This chain of thoughts reminded me of the unsavoury relationship between some of the banks in the City of London and Nigeria’s former head of state, General Sani Abacha. As I approached Tate Modern, Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art came back to mind. I thought about the art industry and the way that money is laundered as it passes between wealthy elites around the globe; I thought about the place of Tate within that world; and I thought about Gaba’s Museum within Tate. What, I wondered, is its purpose?
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I know what the artist himself has said: that when he embarked on the work in the mid-1990s he wanted to create a place in which contemporary African art could exist. Tate’s blurb describes it as ‘a provocation to the Western art establishment not only to acknowledge contemporary African art but to ask why such cultural boundaries exist’. By all accounts, it certainly challenged Tate: assistant curator Raza, said its impact on staff had been ‘revolutionary’. While I would definitely not want to underrate the importance of that, on my second and third visits to the Museum, I still felt troubled by what always seems to have been the primary goal of the work – to enter the international market. Why? Because in the very process of gathering the work, the institution that acquired it now governs it too.
Funnily enough, a year ago, speaking to frieze editors, Dercon spoke of the need for big museums to change. ‘You have to be radically different and to rethink the notion of the museum,’ he said, ‘not just in its physical substance but as a social organization.’ Indeed. And you also need to re-examine not only the way big museums acquire art, but the way they exhibit it too. To borrow from a recent Tate lecture by the artist, writer and performer Tim Etchells, you want to avoid the ‘agony of fixing’ and of pushing art down that ‘slippery slope’ in which everything ends up ‘getting nailed down’.
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