The prominent French social anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, is quoted approvingly in a 1962 book for his general rule: "One cannot modify societies based on so rigid a social system without destroying them." The French painter Karel Kupka was the man going all the way with Levi-Strauss. In Dawn of Art, Kupka's flawed but remarkably early appreciation of Australian Aboriginal art, he theorised that 1962 was its absolute apogee, "a golden age for the Aboriginal plastic arts, conserved in a miraculous state of purity, even though their disappearance is inexorably growing near".
How could he have known that just ten years later, the contemporary indigenous art movement in Australia would rise like a pheonix from the social chaos that Levi-Strauss had correctly identified to become "vibrant and dynamic, ageless and contemporary", in the words of Stephane Martin, Chairman and Managing Director of France's new Musée du Quai Branly?
The new museum is a shotgun marriage of two great anthropological museums in Paris, the Musee des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie (MAAO), and the Musée de l'Homme. The vast project, which will open as the Musée du Quai Branly in 2006, occupies the last great Seine-side site.
And, in a million-Euro project recently announced in Sydney, it will be decorated with the works of eight Australian Aboriginal artists, thus incorporating their work into its fabric and putting their work on permanent show 24 hours a day.
The museum's expected 5m visitors a year will be able to compare present and past, too, viewing Karel Kupka's collection of 230 Aboriginal bark paintings, inherited from the Musée des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie. Given this huge acclamation of the form, could the great anthropologist have been wrong about an inevitable Aboriginal decline?
In a sense the Quai Branly project is itself designed to underline the threats to their survival. There is rearguard action, however, from the Musée de l'Homme, where staff have gone on strike in protest, for the new emphasis at Quai Branly is on ethnographic objects as art. Context in text and video will appear only on the side of showcases.
And the way Aboriginal art has developed from anonymously created maps of country or illustrations of myth to pure aesthetic excitement created by increasingly well-known artists is a perfect match for Martin's new paradigm.
"You could say we're re-colonising the French," declared an ebulliant Brenda Croft, one of the two Australian indigenous curators behind the project at this end. One of the artists, Judy Watson, hailed the process as "swallowing their building".
But another of the artists, Arnhemland's John Mawurndjal, illustrates the continuing anthropology/art dilemma. While most of the artists' works for inclusion have now been agreed between architect Jean Nouvel, the curators and the artists, Mawurndjal can't decide. He's currently the star of a survey show of Kuninjku art in Sydney, curated by Croft's partner, Hetti Perkins. In it, his development from painting spirit figures and Rainbow Serpents to an exquisite abstraction is wonderful to behold. But which style to choose to represent himself (and Aboriginal art) for as long as the Quai Branly stands?
Mawurndjal's appreciation of the subtleties of the issue is reflected in a catalogue quote: "It's OK for Europeans to look at these paintings because that's what Europeans like to do." His people, of course, do much more than just look.
But there'll be plenty of Europeans looking at Marwurndjal's work and that of the four other indigenous artists which will dominate the ground floor beside the Quai Branly's main entrance. Deep blasted into four storeys of the concrete facade of the administrative building in the Rue de l'Université will be Lena Nyadbi's "Jimbala and Kumerra" or "Spearheads and Cicatrices" (the body scars denoting rank that were traditionally cut by spears). It's a stark black-on-white/white-on-black post-colonial response to the noble savages sculpted around the doorway of the old MAAO.
Below Nyadbi will be her fellow Kimberley artist, Paddy Bedford, whose dark abstraction is ceramically fired into a window. Will Europeans only look, or will they read the story of a 20th-century massacre that lies inside this painting? And, walking along the Rue de l'Université, will they pick up urban artist Judy Watson's references to French nuclear testing in the Pacific?
Indoors, the museum's ground floor will offer a juxtaposition that will be even less obvious to European eyes. The Sydney-based Michael Riley, who died soon after his selection, made enigmatic photographic images against an Aussie blue sky, condemning the Christianity that was imposed to replace traditional Aboriginal beliefs. Beside him is tribal woman Gulumbu Yunupingu's traditional Hollow Log column. She's spent much of her life translating the Bible into the Gumatj language.
Architect Jean Nouvel developed his ideas for the Aboriginal contribution to Quai Branly from the familiar Parisian experience of looking up through long 19th-century windows to see a house's decorative ceiling. But he's taken it further in the museum by adding mirrors that will project the art out through the windows. So Western Desert woman Ningura Napurrula will watch her secret women's story repainted on to the first floor ceiling, becoming kinetic as it's reflected into the world. And on the two floors above Irrunytju man Tommy Watson's work will actually become part of the ceilings on enamelled steel panels that will fit smoke detectors into his irridescent dots.
Some legal details remain to be worked out. An unfortunate precedent involving the International Olympic Committee's abuse of copyright during the 2000 Games has forearmed the artists and their advisers. But with a combination of the goodwill of Branly's patron, President Chirac, €950,000 coming from the museum and A$300,000 contributed by the Australian government, as well as Stephane Martin's stated object to "acknowledge the genius of (non-European and non-classical) civilisations in a spirit of revelation, tolerance and exchange", any difficulties should be happily resolved.
As Gulumbu Yunupingu memorably put it at the recent launch in Sydney, "These are my stories in Paris for ever, when I am gone; from the Yolgnu people of this planet for all the people no matter what colour or tongue they are speaking."
