Guide to New Museum Studies

The Museum of Jurassic Technology can simultaneously exist as an art installation, curiosity cabinet, museum of museums, fact and fiction—a cabinet, moreover, that uses its collection of museum exhibits as witnesses to museums past, artifacts of the evolving narrative of the history of museums.⁴²

Whether and how such a narrative can be pieced together again, piously or not, is a major question facing present and future students of museums and their history.
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In the conventional wisdom "the object" is primary material that museums convert into a lasting cultural good through collection, classification, conservation, and exhibition. A move that the new museum studies share with recent historians of material culture is to de-materialize objects as mere semiotic indicators or to re-materialize them in social, political, and economic contexts, or to do both. One way or another, objects are not supposed "to speak for themselves" but are spoken for. They are "reticent," awaiting their ventriloquists; or, in a deliberate oxymoron, they are "discursive objects" or "rhetorical objects," which is to say subjects of shifting semantic fields.⁴³ The theory-wielding newer studies have taken a lion's share of credit or blame for the displacement or even dissolution of objects into discourse. There is a triumphalist tone to visual studies theorist and critic Mieke Bal's pronouncement that museum professionals have learned to accept "the idea that a museum is a discourse, and an exhibition an utterance within that discourse."⁴⁴ Here again, however, the case is not closed, and since old echoes resound in the new lexicon, new confrontations can also be understood at least in part as the confirmation of what had been routine museum practice all along.

Historian Steven Conn provides a benchmark account of the museum as the institutional setting of an "object-based epistemology."⁴⁵ Its heyday came in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, from natural history and anthropology museums to museums of history and art; as early as the 1920s it had lost pride of place to the theoretical, experimental, and text-oriented production of knowledge centered in universities. Conn's most telling insight is that what looks at first like naïve object-based materialism was not strictly object-bound. Smithsonian Secretary Brown Goode suggested just the opposite in a much-quoted maxim: "An efficient educational museum may be described as a collection of instructive labels, each illustrated by a well-selected specimen." Tony Bennett quotes contemporary British museum administrators to the same effect: specimens were to be appended to texts rather than the other way around.⁴⁶ The reigning assumption was that "objects could tell stories to 'the untrained observer'": they were "visual sentences" backed up by a metanarrative of "evolutionary progress…from simple to complex, from savage to civilized, from ancient to modern." ⁴⁷ Narrative trajectories of this sort were meant to be informative and performative, guides to discovery and scripts for progressive understanding. Material things could not produce these results on their own.

Though limited to museums in the U.S. from 1876-1926, from the centennial to the sesquicentennial of American independence, Conn’s study points to the problematic status of objects in the old museology and the new. This is not surprising. Objects are remarkably unobjective subjects, if we mean by objective, stable, self-sufficient, or self-explanatory; they can be thought of as things, as modes of being, or, as in medieval philosophy, the "objects" of God's creation that we would call subjects. The most intense and arguably most profound debates about museum objects date from the period of French Revolution. Between 1789 and Napoleon’s campaigns of plunder and confiscation—“liberation” in revolutionary parlance—it was by no means a foregone conclusion that museums would prevail over vandalism, auctioneering, or indifference. The bibliography on the eventual triumph of the public museum in France is the fullest dossier we have on the new or vastly enlarged public museums of Europe during their formative years in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁴⁸

The French art world polymath Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy and no less a philosopher than Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel elaborated opposing philosophies of "museification." Already in the 1790s Quatremère had come to the unsettling realization that the amassing of cultural treasures by conquering French armies amounted to an assault on culture and history, a dislocation and not a deliverance. It was a political hoax to proclaim that looting served the cause of civilization and enlightenment. Even if museums opened to a citizen-public the preserves of a privileged few, the museum “kills art to make history” by wrenching works of art out of their original context. Quatremère had developed a full-scale critique along these lines by 1806 but published it after the Restoration in 1815 when it was relatively safe. His position has dominated a modern lament over the complicity of the museum in the divorce between art and experience. Didier Maleuvre summarizes:

Loss of context, loss of cultural meaning, destruction of a direct connection with life, promotion of an esthetically alienated mode of observation, instigation of a passive attitude toward the past and of a debilitating mood of nostalgia--the museum seemed to embody these ills of the modern age, an age that, by its own account, had forsaken the immanent ties with tradition that had blessed every previous era.⁴⁹

Hegel seems at first (and, writing in 1807, independently) to concur with Quatremère in his lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Maleuvre quotes the passage in which the philosopher refers to ancient artifacts newly imprisoned in "an intricate scaffolding of the dead elements of their outward existence--the language, the historical circumstances, etc. in place of the inner elements of the ethical life which environed, created, and inspired them."⁵⁰ But then, reversing himself (and Quatremère), Hegel goes on to argue that the relationship between an art work and its original milieu is superficial; instead of being alienated by passing through time and space, art is perfected as an object of conscious understanding by virtue of being removed from its original setting and put in a place for contemplation and study. Thus, as Maleuvre puts it, "antiquity is more genuinely itself in the British Museum than in the temple at Paestum."⁵¹ The immediacy and immanence whose loss Quatremère mourned must be transcended. On this account museums not only preserve objects, they endow them with cultural coherence and value.

Over the long term, the argument between Quatremère and Hegel has refused to go away. The idea that the museum objects take on another, higher life as discursive subjects represents a Hegelian tilt in the newer museum studies; hostility toward the museum as a collection of lifeless objects is the Quatremèrian riposte. But on an altogether mundane level we have grown accustomed to seeing older collections transformed, new museums opening, traveling museum shows coming and going, museum objects taking on different meanings as they are rearranged, restored, or removed from some familiar place. The “permanent collection” sounds increasingly like wishful thinking or a joke. The newer museum studies underscore an object lesson that all but the most casual museum visitors have already learned—and are likely to resent when some favorite piece is involved. "Anyone who has attended closely to the movement of artefacts in a museum," observed Charles Saumarez Smith when he was Assistant Keeper at that great treasure trove, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, "will understand that the assumption that, in a museum, artefacts are somehow static, safe and out of the territory in which their meaning and use can be transformed is demonstrably false."⁵² Change the label and the surroundings and an object may take on new significance. Museum donors and benefactors may specify conditions into perpetuity, but the binding clauses of bequests to public institutions that survive time, trustees, lawyers, and changes in taste are the exception not the rule. In the irreverent quip of a former director of the Musée D'Orsay in Paris "Trying out paintings on walls" is the painting curator's best "museum science".⁵³

Saumarez Smith raises the key point: "What is the most important consistent property in determining the form of an object?" He goes on to recast his question in terms of a choice between "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" properties:

Is it the intrinsic physical properties of the object, the material from which it is made, the way the body is manipulated and structured according to the inherent skills of craftsmanship or technique? Or is it rather the extrinsic circumstances of the surrounding culture, the demands of the client and the ruling aesthetic of a particular period?⁵⁴

Depending on the context, we can answer either way. Yet the newer museum studies show, sometimes in spite of themselves, that we usually have it both ways. While museum theory and practice have periodically tipped to more "intrinsic" or more "extrinsic" extremes, one view may entail the other, as we have seen, for example, in Steven Conn's analysis of "object-based epistemology" and the periodic flare-up of the argument between Quatremère and Hegel. Conn's nostalgia over the loss of the museum object's authority is probably premature: "while objects may no longer function epistemologically, they can still function--for me at any rate--magically."⁵⁵ Consigning material things to immaterial networks of interpretation may render their inarticulate presence all the more mysterious or "magical." Paradoxically, the displacement of objects into discourse may also re-enchant them.

There are signs of a return or, it has been said, a "revenge" of the object. The material expertise of the connoisseur, curator, restorer, or museum scientist remains a bottom line in museum work. While critics may deride the technicians for tunnel vision or simply ignore them, the demand for their specialized knowledge has increased as a result of technological innovations, market forces escalating the value of cultural property, and public controversies over accountability and authenticity. "Materials memory" is one of the newer formulations of a form of recollection that resides in the workmanship, alterations, or patterns of wear in the materials that people make and use over time. A corollary of the recent fascination with collective memory, this notion contrasts embodied, nonlinear deposits of memory with the more or less abstract unfolding of historiographical narrative; in one form or another, the contrast has given impetus to the recovery or outright construction of alternative histories for marginalized or excluded groups. Over and against the idea that objects are the passive registers of symbolic meanings or exchange values, some revisionist thinking in anthropology stresses their material specificity as things with inalienable pasts.⁵⁶

This revisionist enterprise has real-world consequences in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) in the U.S. and comparable initiatives in the interests of native people elsewhere, particularly Canada and Australia. Statutes of this sort have written into law the view that objects are bearers and witnesses of values past and present, not just their signifiers or specimens. Where it is possible to establish legitimate claims, the legislation mandates the restitution to native groups of human remains and material goods “collected” by institutions such as ethnographic or local history museums. Predictably enough, enforcement has met institutional resistance in the name of public interest, scholarship, and science. Between extremes, however, many creative accommodations have emerged: exchanges and loans of objects between museums and tribal groups; exhibitions and workshops bringing together museum professionals and “community curators”; the revival or adaptive reuse of techniques and traditions. Critics argue that the results are forced, inauthentic, and evasive, but this line of criticism tends to attribute a purity to cultural objects that the chipped glaze, the torn thread, or the worn surface insistently belie. ⁵⁷ It is quite possible to imagine some future version of this Brief Guide suggesting that museum studies had turned—or returned—from the primacy of discourse to the priority of object.

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Since the exhibit is a professional unit of reckoning, museum workers are at home with this genre.⁶⁰ The Smithsonian curators' dilemmas turn out to be mostly on-the-job issues, however much intensified by rising and often conflicting expectations from administrators, patrons, and publics. Their dilemmas are grounded in specific cases rather like minefields are grounded. So, for example, an exhibit at the National Museum of American History featuring the Woolworth's lunch counter of the historic 1960 sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina; to secure the centerpiece of the exhibit, the curators had to negotiate with corporate executives, city government and community groups, an ad hoc African-American association promoting its own museum in the Woolworth's building, a carpenters' union, and not least their Smithsonian colleagues, because exhibition space was limited in the museum's crowded Political History Hall.⁶¹ Another collection of curators’ papers, Making Histories in Museums, revolves around British and Commonwealth history museums, from medical and agricultural to minority and childhood museums. The title is a gentle teaser. The authors do not want to argue that history is merely made up. Their aim, according to editor Gaynor Kavanaugh, was "to open museums to braver and better researched histories presented with great imagination and real regard for visitors…." These were fighting words in the wake of a national row over the so-called “heritage industry”—whether the fixation on historic preservation in Mrs. Thatcher’s Britain was pandering to nostalgia for empire and the privileges of class.⁶²

Academics outside the museum tend to reduce the issues of representing difference to power struggles. In the introduction to Displays of Power media scholar Steven Dubin declares that "symbolic politics is replacing realpolitik" before announcing that the stories he will be telling about U. S. museum controversies "are stories about power: losing it and gaining it, exercising it and resisting it."⁶³ Shades of Foucault notwithstanding, when it comes to further explanations, Dubin is a robust, certainly an un-Foucauldian social functionalist; conflict over the representation of social identities in museums and elsewhere has broken out, he suggests, because the relative status of different groups is in flux. With explicit bows to Foucault, "power" in American museums is also political scientist Timothy W. Luke's keyword in his Museum Politics, from his subtitle--Power Plays at the Exhibition--to his conclusion. The "single, theoretically unified critique" with which the book ends is actually a composite of critiques of Late Capitalism and Neo-Liberalism attached to the proposition that "museums can pull together publics and their knowledge of culture, history, nature, or technology in ways that artfully mediate the power of those governing the people and their things." ⁶⁴ That museums may do many other things besides, among them inspiring this brand of criticism, is evidently not on Luke’s agenda.

Once they get past formulas, Dubin and Luke effectively chronicle between them some twenty contested museum sites or exhibitions in the U. S. Dubin goes back to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Harlem on my Mind" (1969) as a forerunner of later conflicts. The scenario is depressingly familiar: breaches along ethnic, generational, and ideological lines; a "revolt of the exhibited" against a well-intentioned but uncomprehending museum staff; minorities mobilized, Us vs. Them, against the "establishment"; an opportunistic press spoiling for a fight and a story.⁶⁵ While overarching patterns recur, and are even overdetermined, the calculus changes from one case to another. Dubin's interviews with some fifty veteran museum warriors are illuminating in this respect, and so are Luke's chapters comparing museums or exhibitions with similar contents but quite different public receptions.⁶⁶ Dubin concludes that "social and corporate elites, 'knowledge workers,' and community-based groups struggle in various combinations," and that temperament and training matter as much to the outcome as institutional structures. ⁶⁷ Since charges of misrepresentation fly fast and loose in these confrontations, it is all the more important that they not be represented as if the dynamics of “power” were essentially the same.

The Enola Gay affair is a case in point—the ominously cumbersome working title of the exhibition planned for the National Air and Space Museum was The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War. The literature is huge, much of it with a partisan edge; "denying history" was one the milder imputations of a multitude of sins.⁶⁸ "Left revisionism" supposedly played up the role of racism and the possible alternatives to the loss and suffering of the victims at Hiroshima; "rejectionists" supposedly traded historical understanding for commemoration and patriotic celebration. This is not the place to rehearse the details, except to note that the devil surely lay more in the stereotypes than in the details. Former Air Force historian Richard H. Kohn identifies at least five "separate stories" criss-crossing one another. They include long-standing disagreements over the Hiroshima bombing before and after the event; the unfolding of the "culture wars"; skirmishes over professional standards among museum staff and military and civilian interest groups; the coincidence of a newly-appointed Smithsonian Secretary and an aggressive new Republican majority in congress. Other fissures appeared within larger alignments; for example, some veterans' groups worked with the museum and deplored the cancellation of the show. ⁶⁹ These mini-histories are good remedies for bouts of Manichean dualism.

Museums of ethnography and natural history were another front in the “museum wars."⁷⁰ Until the 1980s they were comfortably authoritative, rather dusty islands in the museum archipelago. But tensions were built into their institutional profile: scientific authority and showmanship; objectivity and racial and cultural preferences; specimens and spoils; disciplined curiosity and habits of condescension and exclusion—the list could go on. A more demanding, more mobile, and increasingly heterogeneous public put these uneasy compromises under pressure; critics in the museum world and the academy exposed them with relish, often with a self-satisfaction that such vulnerable targets hardly warranted. The explosive mix of identity politics and academic scrutiny reached critical mass in hostile reactions to the Modern Museum of Art's 1984 exhibition Primitivism in 20^th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and Modern and the spate of events, including museum shows, commemorating Columbus's 1492 voyage—“discovery,” “invasion,” “genocide,” or “exchange,” according to the point of view.⁷¹

The ambiguous protagonist of these critiques was that intimate alien, the Other. One strand of criticism ran through variations on Edward Said's books on "orientalism" and the culture of imperialism. The museum connection was particularly apposite because Said had made a point of the Western construction of an alluring but dangerous exotic "East" that found legitimacy in scholarly collecting and classification—just as museums did.⁷² Another thread of criticism ran through social studies of science and technology (SSST), with their historical and ideological critique of objectivity in science. In 1985 Donna Haraway, a trained biologist working as a feminist theorist and ethnographer of contemporary culture, published a close-grained, paradigm-making essay on the African Mammals Hall in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The dioramas of stuffed animals staged to celebrate the virtues of patriarchy, empire, and make-believe nature would never look so “real” again.⁷³ A loose union of anthropology and art history opened the way to further analysis of the category of the “natural.” If “Primitive Art” was close to nature, it was, in what became the orthodox account, only because the West needed it to be so as an escape from enervation and a confirmation of superiority. In these analyses, as elsewhere in the newer museum studies, feminist critics gendered the family of man.⁷⁴

Museums have responded more or less effectively to assertions of difference, certainly more effectively than critics like to admit, let alone approve of. As crises over "sensitive" materials became practically routine, the Australian National Museum in Sydney and the Science Museum of Minnesota formed, in 1993, “rapid response” and “protest response” teams and task forces. Security is a bottom line, but “crisis management” also anticipates and incorporates objections by "product testing" with community outreach and focus groups.⁷⁵ Another response, the "collaborative exhibit," solicits the participation of a collection or exhibition’s “stakeholders," sometimes in conjunction with negotiations for the restitution of objects to groups with claims on them. Over and against implied omniscience and actual anonymity, the "perspectival exhibition" specifies the point of view and identifies the responsible curatorial staff. These initiatives jostle unevenly with liberal and professional ideals of "balance" enjoining both respect for cultural differences and consensual standards.⁷⁶