Page 41 - Made For Trade Chinese Export Paintings In Dutch Collections

64 pag:Opmaak 1
18-10-2016 21:07 Pagina 40
roos boek 001-064 f

heirlooms that guarantee someone’s historical human agency comes to the fore when the
identity and thus confirm their claims to status trajectory of production to consumption closes.
and authority as icons of the China trade. In this It is always human valuation towards inanimate
way, they are appropriated and hoarded as a things – in casu Chinese export paintings, which
unique object, singularised by collectors, in their turn contain agency too – that could
museum curators or people who design their close the open-ended market of commo-
home with things that they imagine breathe the dification. But is this really closed? When closed,
life of China, articulating their identity as a after all, there is always a chance that this
‘been-to’, as Van Binsbergen calls this commodification process will open up again in
phenomenon. 15 In this respect, the owner is other contextual circumstances. This basic
40 actually trying to ensure these items do not ambiguity concerning the commodity soul of
circulate. Chinese export paintings will be covered later
Approaching these paintings from a in this chapter when discussing the concept of
commodity perspective requires us to follow the material complex.
paintings’ pathways from production to The painting View of the waterfront of
consumption. The path that leads to ‘freezing’ or Canton (Figure 2.0.) on loan to Museum
de-commodification is a dynamic that often Volkenkunde from the Leembruggen family, for
emerges when, in the positive sense of the word, example, functioned as an artistic commodity at
an object is set apart as unique cultural heritage, the time and place of its production, until its
for instance in museums. In a negative sense, the inheritance by the Leembruggen family, when it
painting is neglected, in a bad conservational became a real identity-marker for the people
state, and has become of no value for the current involved. For a while, they withdrew the
owner, whether this is a public insitution or a painting from further circulation. This also
private person. Additionally, if an object’s happened when the artwork entered the museum
identity is permanently attached to that of an in 1905, where it remains in the storeroom until
original owner, or when things are inalienable, today. This de-commodification has nothing to
circulation, Graeber states, cannot actually do with identity marking or with unique, artistic
enhance an object’s value. 16 Its value, then, is and historic value; rather, it has everything to do
measured in the fear of loss and not in it being a with priorities and strategies in collection
product of exchange. Moreover, the process of management, whether or not motivated by
claiming identity of an object is a fluid, valuation of Chinese export painting in general
overlapping and inconsistent process. The and/or by financial considerations. In their turn,
relation between commodities (or, more we can assume that these considerations are fed
generally, things) and the marking of human by existing ignorance about the high use value of
identities is generally accepted. 17 However, this this art work. The future, fortunately, holds the
nexus shows some ambivalence. On the one promise of change for this particular painting
hand, things may be used to confirm identities. with its representative function.
On the other hand, things are involved in By labelling the Dutch museum collections of
processes of commodification, related to a Chinese export paintings as cultural heritage, the
market that is, in principle, open-ended, and safeguarding of which for future generations is
this, I agree with Van Binsbergen, “necessarily essential, the joint collections acquire value as a
undermines such efforts at closure.” 18 Often, class of cultural property that should not be

---
15 Van Binsbergen 2005, 44.
16 Graeber 2001, 34.
17 Van Binsbergen 2005, 23, 30. The terminological exploration of the word ‘thing’ in the introduction of
Commodification: Things, Agency, and Identities (2005) gives us a definition of a thing as “an extensive (in principle
unbounded) set of distinct, countable individual objects, marked as non-human (even as inanimate), and together
constituting the ensemble of the concrete world that surrounds humans, without including or implying them.” In
English, the expression ‘things’ clearly has the above connotation, but the expression tends to refer to concrete
objects, not to the empirical world as a whole. This definition is appropriate for this present research. In Chinese,
the expression ‘wan wu,’ 萬物, literally ‘the ten thousand things’ (all things, everything that is happening), connotes
the ‘general world’, although ‘wu’, 物, is also used for ‘object(s)’ and ‘commodity/ies’.
18 Van Binsbergen 2005, 23. The authors of The Social Life of Things rather use the term ‘commoditization.’
Together with Van Binsbergen (2005, 15, footnote 2), I prefer ‘commodification’, since –ification relates to ‘making’
while –ization might refer, in some sort of teleological sense, to a more or less automatic and unilineal process.