Thank you to Prof. Lambropoulos and to Jim Cogswell for inviting me to participate in this panel, to be given the opportunity to reflect on Jim Cogswell’s epic mural Cosmogonic Tattoos, more than a year after its completion. My name is Laura De Becker, I am the Helmut and Candis Stern Associate Curator for African Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) and I have the great pleasure of encountering this mural on my daily walk into work. In this paper, I would like to briefly reflect on the very small role I played during the conceptualization of the project; what themes have emerged for me since its completion; and what I think we, as a museum, as an institution, can and should take away from this remarkable installation.
Jim Cogswell and I first met in July 2016, not long after I had first arrived in Ann Arbor and less than a year before Cosmogonic Tattoos was installed on the windows and facades of UMMA and at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. After being introduced by a colleague, we arranged for a studio visit to talk through issues of cultural transmission and appropriation, themes that are central to Jim Cogswell’s work, and mine. At the time, I was mulling over the idea of organizing an exhibition exploring the topic of copyright, addressing issues of ownership (who owns culture?), authenticity (what is a copy and what is an original?), and who gets to make those decisions. These questions originated from research in South Africa on artists who rapidly rose to fame after being included in exhibitions in Europe and the US, only to later plummet the values of their own works when copying their own pieces in an attempt to respond quickly to the demands of the international art market.
I remember Jim Cogswell being especially interested in exploring questions around the ethics of copying, layering, reconstituting - eager to tell epic stories in a respectful way. We spoke at length about the original function of the African objects he was interested in citing in the mural; the original context in which they would have been used and performed; their provenance and the complex debates surrounding their display in Western museums today. Not surprising to those familiar with his work, Jim showed a particular interest in ornament and pattern, eager to mine the museum’s African collection for details previously unnoticed or too easily passed by.
Little did I know (though I am quite certain Jim did), that one of the works that he decided to feature prominently in his mural, would itself be an outcome of the assemblage techniques so successfully deployed by Cogswell, as well as assuage any possible concerns with regards to cultural appropriation and influence. There are numerous references to African objects included in Cosmogonic Tattoos, but I would like to focus on one particular element: the Egungun headdress that is represented on the double doors outside the UMMA Commons.s an integral part of the performance, but because of long-established hierarchies of collecting in the West, the wooden headdress was privileged over the cloth costume. This notion of fragmentation, of remnants, of elements selected and neglected, strongly emerges in Cosmogonic Tattoos.
Additionally, there is another comparison to be made between the Egungun headdress, as it currently exists in UMMA’s collection, and Jim Cogswell’s mural. The headdress itself acts, in effect, as the representation of a microcosm, indicative of the cosmopolitan and global outlook of its patron and the communities in which it was performed. Several elements are tied to the Yoruba worldview and religion: the headdress’ facial features are in line with Yoruba stylistic depictions of ancestors. Birds, we know, are symbolic representations of female ancestors, possessing both destructive and creative powers. The beard, protective bird claws, and a representation of a double-headed drum suggest this was a hunter’s Egungun. However, upon close examination, other symbols emerge, connecting Nigeria to global conversations. A Christian cross is prominently featured at the front, amulets containing Qur’anic verses dangle and dance, lions referencing British heraldry leap and pounce. The artist carving the headdress pulled together pictorial elements from many different sources to tell a story – a technique certainly familiar to Jim Cogswell. I interpret this method of collaging - of bringing together disparate cultural fragments to tell certain stories, as a commentary on the institutional history of museums. In many ways, museums act similarly to the hybrid creatures of Cogswell’s mural: they collect objects (many of them fragments from foreign countries) and recombine them in set-ups that tell stories: e.g. exhibitions. Sometimes these stories are epic, at times they are jumbled, but, most importantly: they are created and curated, by someone who carefully selects and displays.
Jim Cogswell’s mural makes such hands visible. In fact, hands are a frequently repeated pattern in the mural, as many of the other panelists noted as well. Forming almost a rhythmic cadence, guiding viewers through his epic story of migration and displacement, hands are everywhere in Cosmogonic Tattoos. They are at the origin of the artworks it cites - lovingly creating, shapingand making the works that are now in UMMA’s and the Kelsey’s collection – but they are equally responsible for the mis-, dis- and relocation of these objects, explaining their presence in Ann Arbor today.
While the notion of provenance has been debated for decades in my field of African art history, this is a timely discussion, as museum audiences increasingly demand to know how things arrived to their current location. Due to the recent impact of the Black Panther movie, in combination with some high-profile cases (e.g. the Ethiopian treasures in the Victoria and Albert Museum) and recent remarks by the French president Emmanuel Macron, the thorny question about the repatriation of African objects seems to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind. At UMMA, we have tried to bring such issues to the fore by openly discussing provenance and collection histories, when and where possible. Two years ago, an exhibition titled Traces: Reconstructing the History of a Chokwe Mask sketched the object biography of one work from the UMMA collection and how it founds its way to Ann Arbor. The different sections in the exhibition focused on the hands that made, collected, traded, altered and donated this one mask to UMMA, highlighting the individuals involved with moving this one work from its point of origin in Central Africa to its final destination in Ann Arbor.
This brings me to reflect on my final point: what we, as museums, can and should learn from Cosmogonic Tattoos, even after the work has been de-installed. One of my main take-aways is a commitment to transparency. Jim Cogswell has, quite literally, taken works that are stored away in the storage spaces of the Kelsey and UMMA, and has represented them on the outside, has tattooed them on the skin, of both museums. Too often, museums remain spaces that are closed off, impenetrable, secretive. While some of that behavior is caused by legitimate concerns about security and safety of the collection, Jim Cogswell’s work has shown us that there are other and new ways of bringing out works in the collection, for everyone to see and enjoy. Lastly, in Cosmogonic Tattoos, I see an important argument against any notion of cultural purity. By transforming, layering, combining, reconstituting, Jim Cogswell, in my mind, makes the argument that hybridity is the rule, not the exception, when working with material culture. All cultures are defined by hybridity, exchange, and encounter – not by purity, authenticity or isolation, which is more often than not an imagined, rather than an actual, reality. At a time when countries in the West are increasingly falling back on a rhetoric of what is in- and excluded from the nation-state, Cosmogonic Tattoos serves as a timely reminder that such definitions were always murky to begin with.
