museums and museum displays

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Handbook of Material Culture Museums and Museum Displays Contributors: Christopher Tilley & Webb Keane & Susanne Küchler & Michael Rowlands & Patricia Spyer Print Pub. Date: 2006 Online Pub. Date: June 22, 2009 Print ISBN: 9781412900393 Online ISBN: 9781848607972 DOI: 10.4135/9781848607972 Print pages: 480-500 This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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Page 1: Museums and Museum Displays

Handbook of Material Culture

Museums and Museum Displays

Contributors: Christopher Tilley & Webb Keane & Susanne Küchler & Michael Rowlands& Patricia SpyerPrint Pub. Date: 2006Online Pub. Date: June 22, 2009Print ISBN: 9781412900393Online ISBN: 9781848607972DOI: 10.4135/9781848607972Print pages: 480-500

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the paginationof the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

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10.4135/9781848607972

[p. 480 ↓ ]

Chapter 30: Museums and MuseumDisplays

Museums and displays, together with the associated panoply of galleries, internationalexhibitions, theme parks, panoramas, arcades and department stores, have beenclosely connected since the nineteenth century by related and sometimes mutuallyreinforcing disciplinary power relations (Lumley 1988: 2; Hamon 1992: 73; Georgel1994: 119; Bennett 1995: 59; Silverstone 1994: 161). Together, such institutions formwhat Bennett calls an exhibitionary complex, which, in its modernist manifestation,consist of:

linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines(history, biology, art history, anthropology) and their discursiveformations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, man) as well as forthe development of new technologies of vision … which mightbe productively analysed as particular articulations of power andknowledge …

(1995: 59)

Every exhibitionary complex involves ways of organizing and institutionalizing visualexperience; specific conjunctions of technologies of representation, conventionsand codes of understanding, associated ocular regimes, and their own particularexhibitionary narratives. Complexes are both dependent and supportive of markets,and through their unequal institutional engagements and relationships with audiences,classes, guilds or professions are complicit in the reproduction of social structures.Museums and their related institutions are not only technologies of representation butare proactive in the construction of social ‘realities’ (Kaplan 1994: 4; Macdonald 1996:13; Porto 1999: 3–4). They are ‘products and agents of social and political change’

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according to Kaplan which a nation can use ‘to represent and reconstitute itself anewin each generation’ (1994: 4–5). Exhibitionary complexes are not coterminous withpolitical ideologies, though that part of them sponsored by the state and consideredpart of a national or local patrimony may bear evidence of their imprint. In societieswith high illiteracy rates, state-sponsored visual organizations of knowledge frequentlyreinforce the educational system by providing the scenography and motivation behindthe mobilization of ‘celebrations, festivals, expositions, and visits to mythic places’.What Garcia Canclini describes as ‘an entire system of rituals in which the “naturalness”of the demarcation establishing the original and “legitimate” patrimony is periodicallyordered, remembered and secured’ (1995: 112). Even in literate cultures the role ofmuseums and galleries in sponsoring exhibitions that reiterate the symbolic constituentsunderlying national hegemonic mythologies is crucial for their periodic renewal andreassertion (cf. Duncan 1991: 90; Luke 1992: 38). Museums disseminate publicculture and through their architecture, decoration, arrangements, articulation with otherinstitutions and sponsored rituals frequently disclose, as Duncan (1995: 8), Handler andGable (1997: 221), Porto (1999: 133) and others have clearly demonstrated, as muchabout the societies of which they form part as the supposedly objectivist disciplines theyinstitutionalize.

Although the meanings museums attribute their collections are historically specific,variations and differences are always found within any one period. Museums,according to Lumley (1988: 2) ‘map out geographies of taste and values’ to articulate,as Bourdieu (1993: 121) or Garcia Canclini (1995: 136) would have [p. 481 ↓ ] it,particular hierarchical organizations and valorizations of symbolic goods. In latemodern period metropolises, to assist their ideological functions, museums are nearlyalways incorporated into wider institutional fields and relationships; in ceremonialprocessionways or malls connected with the display of governmental power, wherethey ‘become necessary ornaments of the modern state’ (McClellan 1996: 29), or what

Paul Valéry called the ‘geodesic signals of order’ (in Hamon 1992: 43);1 as systemsof nodal institutions within an international deployment of similar organizations for the

transference, reception and communication of global and local cultures;2 or increasinglyas co-ordinated, or jointly managed organizations with shared collecting, exhibition and

public service provision.3

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Acknowledging these mutual and changing disciplinary, organizational, functional andperformative linkages historically, the role of former colonial museums has been linkedwith map making, census inventories and archives as technologies of classificationand serialization, which were intended to visibly materialize the totality of a domainover which governmental power strove to assert mastery (Anderson 1991: 184–5;Richards 1993: 6). This fascination with totalization and transparency, the productionof a seamless narrative of local, national or universal history, whether through thedisplay of history and antiquities themselves, or ethnography, art or nature, continuesto remain at the heart of most national and large regional museums. The diverse visualand political regimes of which museums form part require them not only to be studiedas singular integral institutions, as has been the tendency in the past, but also as partof specific historically determined ‘exhibitionary complexes’; what Garcia Canclini(1995: 137) calls ‘patrimonies'or, more narrowly, what Bouquet (2001: 79) refers to as‘museumscapes’.

As a field, critical museology still remains an extraordinarily underdeveloped subjectof study. Baring the pioneering work of Marcus (1990), Macdonald (1997, 2001),Macdonald and Silverstone (1992) and Handler and Gable (1997) it is deficient in bothemic and etic ethnographic case studies. It requires enormous foci on such issuesas the interrelation between ‘front stage’ and ‘backstage’ activities and modes ofcommunication – descriptive and interpretative understanding of what happens insidemuseums; proper analysis of the different foundation narratives underlying the diversityof disciplinary and national institutions; greater focus on the politics and not only thepoetics of representations – the relations between business, politics and museuminterpretation and the ensuing ‘culture wars’ being fought in institutions not only in theUnited States, but in Europe and elsewhere too; reassessment of the epistemologicaladequacy of semiotic interpretations of museum meanings; more attention to the role ofmemory, its integration with other structures of events, and the mechanisms responsiblefor its ideological inflections. Differences in the institutionalization of material culturefrom one country to another need to be acknowledged, described and interpreted,and systems of material classification, and changes in the wider contemporary andhistorical fields of which museums form part, need to be better appreciated. There isgreat urgency for a theory of genres, so museum exhibitions can be subject to bettercritical scrutiny. Closer study of the different administrative and organizational models

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of museums, the distribution of power and authority they imply and actualize, and theirrelationship to the control and deployment of knowledges, with few exceptions (Kruget al. 1999), also require close study. Critical museology remains an open disciplinewhich, although in the process of defining its central problematics, has hardly beganto theoreticize its object, and even less to begin to distinguish interconnected fields, ordevelop a comparative perspectives that this chapter would like to encourage.

Genealogies and Foundation Narratives

Collecting, together with the requisite conservation, classification, interpretation anddisplay or storage of the assemblages it engenders, has until recently provided notonly the foundation, but the universalist justification behind museums. ‘While themuseum,’ according to Elsner ‘is a kind of entombment, a display of once lived activity… collecting is the process of the museum's creation, the living act that the museumembalms’ (1994: 155). This common perspective relies on a genealogical view ofhistory in which museums have been naturalized, through an essentializing legitimatorydiscourse based on a sometimes applauded or vilified common mental proclivity,traceable to our earliest human origins.

For Pierre Cabanne ‘The origins of collecting are as remote and mysterious asthose of art’ and coincide with the recognition of beauty [p. 482 ↓ ] (1963: vii), whileJospeh Alsop, basing his argument on cave deposits, traces this primordial drive tothe Palaeolithic (1982: 71). The genealogical viewpoint has been incorporated intomanuals and managerial and technical works published by museums and their relatedprofessional associations. In The Manual of Curatorship (1984), Lewis concurs thatacquisitiveness and the desire to record and transmit knowledge are basic humanproclivities traceable to the Palaeolithic. Museums, he speculates, are ‘a reflection of aninherent human propensity towards inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness combined with awish to communicate to others’ (1984: 7). For Pearce:

It is clear that institutionalised collecting in various modes … is anactivity with its communal and psychic roots deep in the prehistory ofEuropean society, and can be traced in detail through the centuries

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of later prehistory in the Iron and Bronze Ages back at least to theNeolithic communities of around 3000 bc …

(1992: 90–1)

This long established, and still current view of museums as the product of individualacquisitiveness (cf. Kaplan 1994: 2; Thomson 2002: 29) was celebrated andpopularized in The Museum Age (1967: 12), in which Bazin traced the collectingimpulse to the Hellenic world and the beginnings of the Chinese empire.

Although chronologies on the origins of collecting and its museum institutionalizationdiffer and necessarily are never more than speculative, genealogical approaches tomuseum history were until recently widespread. The etymological association whichrelates the classic Greek mouseion to the activities and attributes of the nine muses, thedaughters of Zeus, associated with the arts and sciences, is ubiquitous in most museumhistories (Bazin 1967: 16; Mordaunt Crook 1972: 19; Boulton n.d.: 2; Alexander 1979:6; Lewis 1984: 7). Mordaunt Crook succinctly exemplifies the genealogical view ofmuseum development in the classical world: ‘The Greek mouseion became first a shrineof the muses, then a repository for gifts, then a temple of the arts, and finally a collectionof tangible memorials to mankind's creative genius’ (1972: 19). Pearce completesthis unilinear evolutionary view by noting the successive periods – archaic, earlymodern, classic modern and postmodern – coincided with specific institutionalizations ofcollections in medieval treasuries, cabinets of curiosities in eighteenth to mid-twentieth-century museums, and contemporary museums (1992: 90).

Concerned with the indiscriminate use to which the term ‘museum’ had long beenapplied, Alsop proposed a more restricted attribution to refer to ‘a permanentlyestablished assemblage of works of art to which the public has a permanent right ofentry’. This he exemplified by what he regarded as its first manifestation, the 1471Museo Capitolino, founded to bring together the dispersed remnants of Rome's classicalsculpture (1982: 163–4). This chronology is also supported by Pearce (1992: 1) andCannon-Brookes, for whom, like Alsop, museum collections derived their uniquenessfrom the intellectual environment fostered by Renaissance humanism (1984: 115).

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Genealogical history, therefore, legitimates museums by locating their origins within acluster of activities and institutional exemplars, motivated by the presumed universalhuman disposition towards collecting, the enjoyment of beauty or rarity, and/or curiosityfor knowledge. These are all criteria which have been used to define the uniqueness ofhumanity and distinguish it from the remainder of the animal kingdom and consequentlythe transcendental importance with which such proclivities are endowed, through theirassociation with the Greek muses, attribute them divine origin and patronage. Whethercollections are exhibited as aesthetic transcendental or as encyclopaedic modelspatterned on the greatness of nature, the value and worth ascribed their deploymentsare located in the trans-social domains to which they ultimately refer.

Accepting these presuppositions, broad agreement over the museum's most singularcharacteristics has been long established. George Brown Goode, in his Principles ofMuseum Administration (1895), advised:

A museum is an institution for the preservation of those objects whichbest illustrate the phenomena of nature and the works of man and theutilisation of them for the increase of knowledge and for the culture andenlightenment of the people.

(Cited in Mather et al. 1986: 305)

The essential basis of this definition has been reproduced until recent times. Pearce, forexample, opines: ‘Museums are by nature institutions which hold the material evidence,

objects and specimens of the human and natural history of our planet’ (1992: 1).4 ForKaplan museums collect, conserve and display ‘the “things” of culture, belonging to thematerial world … and specimens or phenomena of the natural world’ (1994: 1). DavidWilson concurs with orthodox opinion in his unequivocal [p. 483 ↓ ] assertion that ‘Theprimary duty of museums … is not didactic’ but related to the conservation, collectionand display of material culture. Adding: ‘A museum which does not collect is a deadmuseum’ (1984: 57), a sentiment he shared with Goode, who, in a slightly differentform, had insisted: ‘A finished museum is a dead museum and a dead museum is auseless resource’ (cited in Mather et al. 1986). The three primary functions reiteratedby Wilson and Kaplan have been reproduced in almost every institutional definition

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of museums right up to the last decades of the twentieth century,5 when they weresupplemented, subordinated or replaced by some sort of public service provision.Though it may be argued that museums are essentially ideas rather than buildingsand collections (White 1987: 12), and although some of their more assiduous criticsmight argue collections need to be subordinated to clearer mission statements andmanagerial resource bases, for the most part the value of their material assets as theirmost unequivocal distinguishing characteristic is seldom challenged (cf. Thomson 2002:25).

Institutional recognition of a change in emphasis, from a scientific to a social role, inthe way museums are defined was first raised in the 1974 ICOM declaration which sawthem as a;

non-profitmaking, permanent institution in the service of societyand of its development, and open to the public, which acquires,conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits, for purposes ofstudy, education, and enjoyment, material evidence of man and hisenvironment.

(In Alexander 1983: 3)

This shift later influenced changes in definitions adopted by national professionalassociations. The Museums Association, for example, abandoned its earlier adagethat ‘A museum is an institution which collects, documents, preserves, exhibits, andinterprets material evidence and associated information for the public benefit’ (MuseumsAssociation 1991: 13) towards the end of the 1990s to replace its once considered‘disinterested’ purpose with its explicit use value:

Museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learningand enjoyment. They are institutions that collect, safeguard and makeaccessible artefacts and specimens, which they hold in trust for society.

(UK Museums Association 1999)

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This more pragmatic view has perhaps most eminently been argued by Keith Thomson,who emphasizes the importance of mutuality between museums and users over theirfunction rather than their subordination to the utopian pretensions of their collections(2002: 106). Museums for Thomson ‘act as brokers and suppliers in the world ofinformation’ (2002: 3). Their rationalization and narrative legitimation have thereforeshifted, in Lyotard's terms, from a Humboldtian or philosophical (rationalist) narrative toa narrative of emancipation (1984: 31).

With diversification of the museum's purpose, the increasing difficulty of capturing,never mind rationalizing, its proliferating functions is saliently attested in the adoptionof functional criteria in the literary structure of recent monographs describing them (cf.Alexander 1979; Weill 1983; MacDonald and Alsford 1989). Most works, however, whileacknowledging contradictions endemic to museums’ burgeoning agendas, seldom

discuss their resolution.6 Contradictions between contending museum functions areprofligate; in their designation as repositories of heritage and their incorporation withinmodernising discourses (Garcia Canclini 1995: 107); in their aspiration to be botheducational and entertaining (MacDonald and Alsford 1989: 58); in their split identitiesas lofty temples for disinterested contemplation and their general educational provisions(Hooper-Greenhill 1989: 63, 1994: 133; Thomson 2002: 64); between their focus on acommon public addressee, and their role in differentiating populations (Bourdieu andDarbel 1991: 107; Bennett 1995: 104); in the division between restrictive practicesintended to conserve objects and the requirements of public display and use (Clavir2002: 35); between their professed universality and the interdictions of local knowledgesystems (Holm and Pokotylo 1997: 34; Ames 2003: 175; Clavir 2002: 139; Clifford1997: 144–5), and the dependence of collecting on the free market, which it inevitablyrestricts and progressively exhausts (Thomson 2002: 41). Paradox, therefore, appearsto be an essential characteristic of much contemporary museum organization and work.

Current doubts over the purposes and natures of museums are made more complicatedstill because of their sometime involution of form over content. In recent decades, withmuseums themselves re-entering the arena of prestigious architectural competitions,new buildings like Piano and Rogers's Centre Pompidou, Meier's High Museum,Geary's Gulbenkian or Eisenman's Wexner Centre have become avante-garde objectsin themselves, showcases for the virtuosity of new design and [p. 484 ↓ ] materials,

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which invite artists to interact with them. Content easily becomes secondary to their foil,with architecture regarded as a ‘catalyst’ for the event-centred ‘activities’ that museumsincreasingly sponsor (Ritchie 1994: 12), or alternatively ‘a membrane through whichaesthetic and commercial values osmotically exchange’ (Luke 1992: 230), a situationreminiscent of the buildings that housed nineteenth-century international exhibitions(Hamon 1992: 92). If the ambiguities existent within formal definitions, and changingsimulacra, were not confusing enough, a comparison of the mission statements of saythe British Museum with the more interventionist Museum of the American Indian, NewYork, or the Tyne and Wear Museums Service quickly dispels presumptions of similarityand reveals the poverty of generalist approaches which have long troubled museumstudies. Museums, as Wilson (1984: 54) cautioned, with their diverse ‘forms, functions,philosophy and policies’, preclude useful comparison and consistently evade definitionand classification.

Museums as Sites of Memory

Museums again call on classic mythology through the figure of Mnemosyne, thegoddess of memory, the mother of the nine muses, the ‘Remembrances’. Oncegenealogical narratives ignore specific chronological history and memory and collectedobjects are explained by attributing the activity of collecting to a common, archetypal,psychological complex, museums appear to de- and retemporalize objects andexhibitions in accordance with modern-period meta-narratives. Moreover, becausematerial culture is usually embodied with meaning retrospectively, and reanimatedthrough its role within particular exhibitions, displays are often infused with the ‘air’ ofan ‘other’, expired, time. It is surprising how little attention has been focused on the waymuseums manage and construct different relations between history, or for that matterany rationalized disciplinary formation, personal memory, and different constitutivegradations between articulated and unconscious cognitive structures. Halbwachs(1980) noted long ago how in pre-modern societies, historical events are structuredby familial and community memory, while Nora (1995: 635) has argued that it is onlyafter the relation between personal memory and the past is broken, as in modernWestern societies, that history emerges to fix the past in a uniform manner to producestereotypical fictions that it sometimes tries to conflate with remembrance.

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Exhibitions, the clearest expression to the public of a museum's identity (Hughes 1997:157), structure objects spatially to reactivate or create memory anew. ParaphrasingStewart (1993) and Donato (1979), Silverstone is mindful that ‘An object is nothingunless it is part of a collection. A collection is nothing unless it can successfully lay claimto a logic of classification which removes it from the arbitrary or the occasional’ (1994:165). Exhibitions, as temporary classifications, incorporate both spatial and temporalstructures, which clearly disclose the museum's role in the construction andreconstruction of temporal orders (Durrans 1988: 145–6), or what Bakhtin calls‘chronotopes’ (cf. Levell 2001a: 154). All exhibition involves the ‘disorganisation of anorder and the organisation of a disorder’ (Borinsky 1977: 89). They ‘pull together anunstable combination of fragmentary mythologies, polyvocal meanings, and diversevalues’ whose understanding is arbitrated by interaction between curators and diverseaudiences (Luke 1992: 228–9). Once decontextualized and allowed to return to theirruinous state these fragmentary material ciphers of diverse histories and geographiesreadily induce melancholia (Boone 1991: 256; Shelton 2003: 187). Burgin describes artmuseums as ‘machines for the suppression of history’ (1986: 159); Adorno as ‘familysepulchres of works of art’ (1967: 175) and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, more humorously, as‘tombs with a view’ (1998: 57). Clifford notes museums save objects ‘out of time’ (1988:231), while for Crane museums ‘freeze time’ to precipitate a state that lies beyondit (2000: 93). More melancholic still, Shelton has described them as ‘vaults hewn ofinterstitial melancholia’ (1995b: 13), while Harbison locates them between graveyardsand department stores, concerned either with the entombment or the commodificationof objects (1977).

Nor is this melancholic attitude confined to academics. Merriman's 1987 survey ofvisiting patterns found that the most common comparison of museums made by lessfrequent or non-visitor groups, were with monuments to the dead, although this changedamong frequent and regular visitors, who more commonly made a connection withlibraries. Surprisingly, only 8–14 per cent of his samples made a connection withthe temple or church, and hardly any to department stores, despite the oft quotedsimilarities between them and their shared genealogical origins, evident in some [p. 485

↓ ] museological literature (e.g. Harbison 1977; Harris 1990; Hamon 1992 (Merriman

1987: 156).7 Deathly associations, far from literary or prejudiced, are frequentlyembodied in the design and decoration of older buildings (Harbison 1977: 144; Shelton

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1995b: 13–14; Duncan 1995: 83).8 In some cases, the museum and the tomb of itsfounder are combined, as at the Dulwich Picture Gallery; others, like Berlin's NationalGallery, were built as personal monuments and became transformed into museumsto commemorate their former patrons. Funereal associations sometimes accrue toprivately sponsored galleries, museums or house museums after their benefactors havedeceased; the Barnes Foundation, Merion; the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; the MuséeFragonard d'Alfort and Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris, or the Kahlo House in Mexico.Here, by fusing historical narratives with personal recollections, representation andcommemoration are combined, and sometimes catalysed by architecture, to establishpotent emotional sites like the Hall of Testimony of the Museum of Tolerance in LosAngeles; or the Washington and Berlin Holocaust museums and the Terezín Museumin Prague. Neither should the spectral association of natural history, anatomical andmedical museums be forgotten, most of which inculcate their objective lessons frompiles of carefully classified, preserved and mounted dead animals, skeletons and humanorgans. Small wonder that Harbison opines that a museum's life is ‘naturally ghost life,meant for those more comfortable with ghosts, frightened by waking life but not by thepast’ (1977: 140).

To refer to museums as detemporalizing, ahistorical or static organizations, whilegreatly oversimplifying their temporal dimensions, also points to their often forgottentemporal complexity. Lumley's (1988: 6) designation of museums as ‘time machines’is both apt and precise, though Nora's focus on their double self-referentiality in whichsimulation is achieved through them acting as a ‘site of excess closed upon itself,concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of its possiblesignifications’ (Nora 1995: 641) opens richer and still hardly acknowledged researchopportunities.

Museums stage temporalization of buildings and galleries through spatializingknowledge. Different architectural styles both functionally and symbolically frameand determine the dispensation of objects and collections. Spatial relations betweengalleries, corridors, floors and staircases structure the circulation and sequence of visits,provide breaks and continuities between one area and another, and regulate fields ofperception by establishing beginnings and closures of knowledge (cf. Harbison 1977:142; Bal 1992: 561; Boyer 1994: 133; Bouquet 1996: 10–13). ‘The museum converts

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rooms into paths, into spaces leading from and to somewhere’ (Bennett 1995: 44); sitemuseums assign different epistemic knowledges to different areas (Handler and Gable1997: 15). If the Renaissance memory palace organized memory by creating mnemonicassociations between classes of objects separated and associated with specific mentalor real topoi, in the nineteenth century memory received material expression in modernmuseums (Dias 1994: 166; Boyer 1994: 133). Anderson already recognized theclassificatory totalizing grid which provided the warp and weft, constituted by the effectof serial replication in which the singular stood for the series in a surveyed ‘landscapeof perfect visibility’, with limitless ability to absorb anything that enters the state'sjurisdiction, and its pernicious determination of official, subaltern or even alternativeidentities (1991: 184–5; cf. Shelton 1994: 190). In a similar vein, Ernst acknowledgesthe changing functions of museums in arranging texts and objects to inscribe privateor publicly valued memories seeing them, like Ernst, as ‘“occupying a position in thediscursive field somewhere between biblio-theca, thesaurus, studio, galleria, andtheatrum” possessed of their own museology more concerned with “the disposition ofthings, the structural relationship that governs their placement, than to the positivity ofcollections as such”’ (2000: 18).

Silverstone makes a distinction between the dominant temporal orientation a museummay avow and the way it consciously uses time through the exhibits and servicesit provides. Temporal orientation is a kind of museal patina formed over time thatframes representations and organization of activities while what Silverstone refers toas ‘clocking’ concerns a shorter and more limited time perspective based on the visitorexperience of sequence, frequency, duration and pace, that has been deliberatelyincorporated into an exhibition's staging (1994: 170). Thus different temporal orderand apparent contradictions between the old and new can often be found uneasily orcomple-mentarily juxtaposed together, and may even provide criteria for a classificationof museums. Museums like the Fragonard, Moreau, the national military museums inLisbon and Brussels, the old evolutionary galleries of the Musée d'Histoire Naturellein Paris, or its sister institution in Toulouse, are characterized by [p. 486 ↓ ] pasttemporal orientation and slow clocking and exert strong feelings of nostalgia for thepast; museums, including the new gallery of the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle and theMusée d'Orsey, Paris, possess a past temporal orientations, but disclose inside anaccelerated clocking which exerts a contemporary orientation. Other museums with

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present temporal orientation and accelerated clocking, like Le Veillet, the CentreGeorges Pompidou or the thirteen museums opened in Frankfurt at the end of thetwentieth century, appear to disclose a future temporal orientation. These latter sites,like the Tate Modern, achieve far higher visitor figures than sites belonging to other

temporal categories.9

However, these are rather tidy, rationalized classificatory approaches to museumswhich hide their complex epistemologies, the different formations between narrativesstructured historically or by nationally consecrated memories, and the multiplicity ofpotential meanings they are capable of generating, discussed by authors like Handlerand Gable in their study of Colonial Williamsburg (1997: 62); Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's(1998: 194–5) work on Plimoth Plantation, and Holo's description of the contemporarySpanish museumscape (2000: 15). Museums, like all sites of memory:

are mixed, hybrid, mutant, bound intimately with life and death, withtime and eternity; enveloped in a Möbius strip of the collective andthe individual, the sacred and the profane, the immutable and themobile whose purpose is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting,to establish a state of things, to immortalise death, to materialise theimmaterial.

(Nora 1995: 639)

Lowenthal (1996: 161) rightly insist commemoration is ‘profoundly anti-historic’,and along with Nora (1995: 635–6) and Handler and Gable (1997: 35), viewsmuseums, monuments, cemeteries, archives, libraries and dictionaries as les lieuxde mémoire, dislocated fragmentary sites of memory, which history continues torework and transform in its attempts to subject experience of the intimately lived pastto contemporary rationalizing narratives harnessed to the interests of an emergentdemocratic, mass future. Societies that assured the transmission and preservationof collectively held values, that valued the preservation of specific objects thatenshrined collective memory, and those ideologies that ensured a smooth transitionfrom the past to the future, have all declined, necessitating ‘lieux de mémoire, sitesof memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments ofmemory’ (Nora 1995: 632). Such sites not only unavoidably restructure memory into

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narrative configurations, but narratives themselves can be politically manipulated to re-imagine the nation. In her study of post-democratic Spanish museums Holo describesthe political motives behind the construction of the Museo Nacional Centro de ArteReina Sofia and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid towards encouraging amore international public vision of art denied during the dictatorship to affirm the vitalityof contemporary Spanish culture, and to demonstrate the viability and adoption tothe corporate model of museum institutions. Older institutions, long identified with afossilized and closed image repertoire of the nation, like the Prado, were long ignored,as older memorialized orders of values were constructed to encourage new, modernand democratic genealogies (2000: 197). At the same time, while Madrid's museumssought to re-establish the vitality and moral reformation of the nation state, newprovincial museums, established by regional governments to rescue local historieson which their distinct identities have been rationalized for narrative expression,proliferated, creating a structure which acknowledged and sometimes attempted toincorporate national and local structures of memorialization (2000: 116–17).

Nora's view of memory and its intertwinement with historical narratives and lessarticulated and unconscious knowledge formations complicates, and even undermines,existent theories on the reception of curatorial interpretation in museums. Whilethe relationship between museum narratives and ideology is a subject of frequentdisquisition, little attention has been paid to how such narratives are structured to triggermemory, or how group memories mediate the process of interpretation, which has beenfrequently reduced to formal semiotic terms. The most coherent theoretical presentationof their view is given by Taborsky (1990) in her discussion of Peircean semiotics to theunderstanding of museums, though again while acknowledging the interplay of differentdenominations of signs in shaping perception, and the relativity of object meaning,depending on the community interpreting it, she nevertheless equates the interpretantwith the community from which s/he is a member, and reduces memory, unconsciousassociation, or ‘anti-structure’, to knowledge formations. For Taborsky ‘the observeris always “grounded” in a specific society, which provides him with a conceptual basewhich he uses for developing [p. 487 ↓ ] meaning. There is no such thing as a free orcognitively unattached observer’ (1990: 70). This position has been pervasive and isrepresented in the works of Pearce, Hooper-Greenhill and Jordanova among others.These authors not withstanding memory cannot simply be treated as homogeneous

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or reducible to articulate structures for incorporation into semiotic analysis (cf. Burgin1986: 183; Zolberg 1996: 80).

Semiotic approaches also frequently ignore the political dimension of exhibitions,which as Macdonald (1997, 2001), Macdonald and Silverstone (1991) and Luke (1992)have convincingly shown, play a determinative role in structuring, organizing andthe interpretation and timing of exhibitions. On the other hand, Stafford (1994: 263),Handler and Gable (1997: 7) and Shelton (2000: 162–3) have focused attention on thesimultaneous coexistence of different interpretative projects within the same institution;curiosities and classified and standardized specimens in the mid-eighteenth-centuryroyal Cabinet d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, commercial and antiquarian interests inthe nineteenth-century India Museum, London, or celebratory and New Social Historydisplays in Colonial Williamsburg. The continual applicability of semiotic models needsto be comprehensively evaluated in relation to complications added to interpretive

readings as a result of the factors discussed above.10

Semiotic reductionism holds further serious implications for better understanding someof the root causes of conflicts of interpretation within museum environments. It is thedifferences between group memories or a group's spatial-temporal articulations thatcombine memory with other forms of temporal ordering, and the narrative approachesof museums, that have provoked many of the more dramatic confrontations betweenthem and their publics over interpretation (cf. Zolberg 1996: 70). Documented examplesof such conflicts can readilly be drawn from both the Canadian and US museologicalliterature.

In the United States, the controversy surrounding the Smithsonian's proposed 1995Enola Gay exhibition in which military and veteran lobbyists forced the focus awayfrom the historical circumstances that resulted in the use of the atomic bomb and itseffects on Hiroshima to a focus on the personal reminiscences of the plane's designers,makers, restorers and crew, although clearly part of a depoliticizing strategy, wasalso very personally motivated by the protagonists’ own memories (Harwitt 1996:427; Zolberg 1996: 70; Lubar 1997: 17). ‘The West as America’ (National Museumof American Art, 1991), an account of America's westward expansion, challenged adecade of dominant self-images underlying the nation's foundation narratives, origins,

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values and political destiny which had been repeatedly reiterated during the Reagan-Bush years in exhibitions like ‘Frederic Remmington: the Masterworks’ (St Louis ArtMuseum, 1988), ‘George Caleb Bingham’ (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC,1990), ‘The West Explored: the Gerald Peters Collection of Western Art’ (RoanokeMuseum of Fine Art, 1990) and others, which ignited the so-called culture wars betweenconservative and critical supporters. The proposed Enola Gay exhibition, through itshistoricist interpretation, and ‘The West as America’, by acknowledging the relativistmeaning of art works, both confronted and threatened the normative representation ofthe nation's imaginary narratives of continuity (Truettner 1997: 44). By threatening theneat border around a domain of accepted history, by disrupting established narratives,historiography ran contrary to nationally reproduced and accepted narratives (Nora1995: 641; Handler and Gable 1997: 24). At another level, however, the controversythat both these exhibitions fell into, as well as some of the few other documentedpostmodernist shows in the late twentieth century, were also disputes betweenolder institutionalized narratives concerning the foundation and nature of the nation,deconstructvist rereadings of such narratives, and the collision between this latterhistoriography with dominant or subaltern memories, which may have been influencedby the older historiography. These have been documented in Harwitt's (1996) andZolberg's (1996: 79) reading of the Enola Gay affair, or, in the case of another muchdisputed exhibition, ‘Out of Africa’ (Royal Ontario Museum, 1989–90), Butler's (1999)equally revealing description and interpretation of the role played by Canada in Britishcolonial history. It seems probable that to a large extent, the difficulties experiencedby modern museum exhibitions primarily stem from the uneasy coexistence of originalintention and its rearticulation and representation within memory; ‘all lieux de mémoireare objects mises en abîme’ (Nora 1995: 640).

Memorialization in museums is always selective and necessarily accompanied byamnesia. By ignoring colonial history Mexican museums not only focused moreprecisely on their pre-Hispanic past but were excused from explaining the relationshipbetween it and the contemporary living Indian populations. After the Second WorldWar, West German museums adopted aesthetic approaches to elude the [p. 488 ↓ ]militarism and totalitarianism, even though in the east, the ideological pretensionsof such aestheticization were dismissed by the occupying regime in favour ofconfronting the lessons of historical materialism. Spanish museums, according to

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Holo (2000: 199–200), in the latter quarter of the twentieth century were successivelyemployed to reformulate and represent an open, tolerant and modern nation statewhile ackowledging the plurality of previously repressed regional historical realitiesthat constituted it. Bennett's study of Beamish open-air industrial museum finds allmention or effects of class, the trade union or co-operative movements, or women'ssuffrage or feminism, eluded in a narrative without ruptures and conflicts that favourscontinuity and the naturalization of people's relation to land and to each other(1988: 67–9). Even Colonial Williamsburg, which for thirty years has attempted toembrace constructivist history and give much greater visibility to the ‘other half,still according to Handler and Gable falls back into objectivism and reaffirmation ofAmerica's national mythologies. Luke's discussion of exhibitions during the Reagan-Bush presidencies, treating the theme of America's conceptualization of its westernexpansion, draws attention to parallel imaginaries dominating political, military andbusiness discourses. These reaffirm and renew themselves historically throughrerunning exhibitions on iconic heroic views of the nation's history represented byBingham and Remmington; alternatively they may be used to materially brand a regionwith lifestyle values independent of its real condition (the use of O'Keeffe); or substitutesymbolic acknowledgement of minority cultures for programmes for the amelioration oftheir marginalized condition (‘Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty ContemporaryPainters and Sculptors’ (Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, CA, 1988). Examination ofother contested exhibitions (MacDonald 1997, 2001; MacDonald and Silverstone 1992;Bouquet 1997; Clifford 1997; Levell 2001a; Butler 1999; Riegel 1996; Zolberg 1996;Harwitt 1996; Luke 1992) illustrates the usual elusion of some part of history necessaryto affirm the preferred institutional interpretation.

The End of Grand Foundation Narratives

If the still largely unexamined literature discussed in the introduction to this chapter,along with its associated publications (histories, descriptions and inventories of museumcollections, catalogues, exhibition reviews, marketing literature, professional guidelines,reports, etc.), once provided the successive bases for the practical organization andoperation of museums, by the last quarter of the twentieth century it had began tolose much of its former legitimatory conviction. In 1970 the annual general meeting

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of the American Association of Museums was repeatedly disrupted by protestersdemanding that museums should abandon their traditional prerogatives by breakingtheir ties with the ‘establishment’ and redirecting their resources to eliminate socialinjustice, war and repression. Although no coherent critique or reform programme inthe early 1970s had been formulated, at least four diverse dissenting currents havesince then radically changed assumptions regarding the purposes and functionsof museums, the demarcation of their institutional boundaries, and the suitability ofsubjects that form the focus of exhibitionary presentation (cf. Macdonald 1996: 1).André Malraux, a precursor to the sustained criticism which was to follow, challengedthe presuppositions underlying Bazin's The Museum Age (1967) by contrasting thefreedom and inclusivity of the personal recollections of works we carry in our mind, his‘museums without walls’, with the overdetermined, selective and partial works displayedin galleries (Malraux, 1976: 133). More important, when seen in relation to his earlierwork, The Voices of Silence first published in 1953, there is a clear implication that thepersonal museum without walls could be materialized through print. The rise of ‘printcapitalism’, which made possible the reproduction, serialization and dissemination ofgeographical domains, from the mid-nineteenth century changed the form and functionof the museum's construction of the imaginary (Anderson 1991: 163–4), leading notonly to its literary imitators (Georgel 1994: 114), but complementary technologiesto perfect its hegemony (cf. Müller 2002). Malraux presented not a confirmation ofthe art museum's authority but a deeply subjective and individually more meaningfulalternative whose implications museums continue to experience with the developmentand adoption of digital and other technologies (Levell and Shelton 1998; Müller 2002).

A more explicit front of criticism, crystallizing around Riviere in the 1980s, and clearlyforming the first of the national critiques to be discussed here, became variouslyknown as ‘active museology’, ‘experimental museology’, ‘popular museology’ and‘anthropological’ or [p. 489 ↓ ] ‘ethnographic museology’. The ‘French new museology’called for the rethinking of the museum's social purpose and provided the impetus andjustification for rural and urban eco-museums, community, special-interest, industrialand national park museums. It radically questioned the institutional boundaries betweenmuseum and non-museum spaces; the nature and relevance of the connection betweenmuseums and collections; and even the location of expertise (Mayrand 1985: 200;Poulot 1994: 67). Hoyau's observation in particular that ‘once the notion of “heritage”

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has been cut free from its attachment to beauty, anything can be part of it … solong as it is historical evidence’ (1988: 29–30) anticipated the application of newcultural technologies to substantially extend the museum's competence to includelandscapes and cityscapes, industrial and community complexes, archaeologicalsites and theme parks. Furthermore, the adoption of new technologies has radicallychanged the media, what Haraway (1984–85: 30) calls ‘technologies of enforcedmeaning’, by which collections are interpreted. No longer are collections only deployedto stage a metonymic representation of an aspect of the external world. Increasingly,they are undergoing a secondary capture and recontextualization through electronicmedia, which in science museums may supersede the physical integrity of objects(Silverstone 1994: 172). The adoption of new media is partly subsuming establishedoppositions between material culture and interpretation with virtual simulation, whichwhile substituting the ‘aura’ of the authentic and unique work with extended levels ofinformation opens a new epistemological field of representative practices (Boyer 1994:66; Stafford 1997: 23; Müller 2002), hitherto ignored by most museologists. Simulationsare increasingly exploited by museums – Bologna's Nuovo Museo Elettronico hasno physical integrity but exists only as a simulated three-dimensional environment,which enables the city's history to become accessible, while the Dutch Identity FactorySouth-east (Identiteitsfabriek zuidoost), includes multiple narratives, collated fromdifferent cultural sites (museums, landscapes, monuments, etc.), to provide a heterodoxinventory pertaining to Kempenland's cultural identity. Projects like these are notonly establishing new ontological bases from which to understand reality, but aredetermining some of the most significant transformation of Western ocular regimessince the nineteenth century. According to one of the bleakest evaluations of suchtendencies, ‘We live among the interminable reproduction of ideals, phantasies, imagesand dreams which are now behind us, yet which we must continue to reproduce in asort of inescapable indifference’ (Baudrillard 1993: 4).

In North America a second series of critiques developed among others by Weill(1983, 1990), Sturtevant (1969), MacDonald (1992), Ames (1992) and Haas (1996)challenged the museum's continual social and, in some cases, academic relevance,its functional crises, and called for new directions in museology. Vine Deloria Jr andClavir noted the limited relevance Western museums have for First Nation peoplesand the clashes over the interpretation, relevance and use to which such collections

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should be put. Studies highlighted how different ethnic groups memorialize events andthe different significance and interpretations they bestow on objects: Abrams (1994),Saunders (1995), Merrill and Ahlborn (1997), Wilson (2000) and Clavir (2002), on FirstNation Americans, and Hall (1995) and Coombes (1994) on Africa. Similar concerns,in countries like Nigeria, where colonial museums had not been rearticulated in the

service of new nation states,11 have preoccupied curators there (Eyo 1988; Nkantaand Arinze n.d.; Munjeri 1991), though Yaro Gella's new cultural policies in whichculture became an integral part in the nation's political and economic developmentto ‘give meaning and order to life’ once promised notable changes in the continent's‘largest and most extensive museum system’ (Kaplan 1994: 45). In South Africa, thevoice of interpretation is being reclaimed by artists working with indigenous populationsto replace older racist displays and dioramas by more open, interogative and criticalexhibitions (Scotnes 2002). Similar changes are occurring elsewhere. In the Pacific(Anderson and Reeves 1994; Kaeppler 1994; Moser 1995; Clavir 2002) and Asia(Prösler 1996; Appadurai and Breckenridge 1992; Ghose 1992; Taylor 1995).

While Malraux focused on limitations museums placed on personal experience ofworks of art, Sturtevant, Ames, MacDonald and Haas concerned themselves with thetechnological, academic and institutional realignments which were beginning to erodetheir established justification and legitimacy, others have challenged whether the movefrom a rationalist to an emancipatory meta-narrative has been sufficient to preserve theintellectual basis underlying them. Sola (1992: 102) accused museums of adhering tonineteenth-century models and ignoring crises concerning their institutional identitiesand sense of purpose. A third series [p. 490 ↓ ] of critiques originated in Britain, whereVergo (1989) questioned the aims and effectivity of exhibitions, which soon widened todiscussion of the history and limitations of an essentially methodological and practicalnon-reflexive museology and its insularity and lack of theoretical concern with museum'srelationships to the wider society. At nearly the same time, Shelton published a seriesof articles (1990, 1992a, b, 1997, 2000, 2001c and d) intended to provide an extensivecritique of operational museology, and advocated its replacement by what he termed‘critical museology’. British critical tendencies were accompanied also by a anti-intellectual movement, promoted by Hooper-Greenhill, that blamed the insularity ofmuseums from their publics largely on historical curatorial attitudes and practices (cf.Hooper-Greenhill 1988). Despite Hooper-Greenhill and many of her students’ support

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for a client-focused museology, the public reception of exhibitions is often more complexthan most educationalists and lobbyists would admit. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett arguesthat the museum's scopic regime is used by visitors to also view urban landscapes,and forms a split representational category through which the self can reflexively re-examine itself (1998: 48). This museological conditioning has also been commented onby the artist Sonia Boyce after being confronted by a museum collection of ethnologicalobjects from her native Guyana (1995: 4), and is also evidenced in the demand forfaux colonial-style real estate development encouraged by the restoration of ColonialWilliamsburg (Handler and Gable 1997: 42–3). Riegel suggests that, under certaincircumstances the public can actually value their distance from exhibitions, and thatwhile supporting educational programmes, they do not want displays so realistic thatthey revoke painful past memories (1996: 87). Scattered references like these suggestthe complexity of the linkages between different level simulacra in the perception of anincreasingly problematicized social ‘reality’ that require much more attention than has sofar been given them.

A fourth, explicitly postcolonial critique emerged among artists and theoreticians likeRasheed Aarans, Sarat Maharaj, Paul Gilroy Hommi Bhaba and others associatedwith the journal Third Text. These opposed the objectification, essentialization andmarginalization of non-European cultural expressions and their exclusion from arthistory and the world's major museums and galleries (Deliss 1990: 5). The differentcritiques came together in settler nations where professional organizations and legalprovision sought to promote new relationships between museums and originatingcommunities from which their collections had been ceded. NAGPRA legislation inthe United States, introduced in 1991, required most museums to make availablecomprehensive inventories of Native American holdings as a necessary prerequisitefor future restitution claims; the Joint Task Force Report on Museums and FirstPeoples prepared by the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian MuseumsAssociation in 1992 recommended the involvement of native peoples in curating andinterpreting heritage, a position similarly adopted by the Australian Council of Museums

Associations the following year.12 With new ethical and juridical concerns affectingthe opinions of the professional associations in these countries, different concernsand newly emerging work practices began to divide European museums from thoseelsewhere in the world.

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Although, seven years after the publication of his initial critique, Vergo saw little changein the unreflexive way exhibitions continued to be curated (1994: 149), changes inmainstream professional attitudes became evident from at least 1989, when theMuseums Association conference ‘Museums 2000’ departed from its normally staid

insularity by acknowledging the pervasive crises in which museums were embroiled.13

The crises, already articulated by younger curators, often ignored by the profession,became palpable in presentation after presentation which treated issues like politicalengagement (San Roman 1992: 26), the need for museums to be proactive in thegeneration of new cultures rather than passively representing the old (Ghose 1992: 88),demands for reinstitutionalization and new configurations of subject specialisms (Horn1992: 66), the failure of traditional museology (Sola 1992: 101), crises in curatorship(Cossons 1992: 125; Sola 1992: 105), and problems of future funding (Moody 1992:44; Perrot 1992: 154; Verbaas 1992: 170). Even the direction and definition of whatmuseums were or were thought to be becoming was contested, with Sola for oneproposing an almost unlimited expansion of the concept to include ‘any creative effort ofcybernetic action upon the basis of [the] complex experience of heritage’ (1992: 108).Although then unorthodox, the proposition has nevertheless proved to be consistentwith later Information Age perspectives, like those of Ernst (2000) and Müller (2002),as well as certain political initiatives such as the plans underlying France's Commissionon the Ethnological Heritage, established in 1978 (Hoyau 1988: 28) and, more recently,the [p. 491 ↓ ] definition adopted by the 2001 European Meeting of Experts on culturalheritage in Antwerp (Capenberghs et al. 2003: 96).

Some of the issues raised by these different critical sources, from the 1970s, becameinstitutionally articulated by the International Committee of Museums (ICOM). Vergo'sand other critical works of the period coincided with ICOM's 1985 Declaration ofQuebec affirming a new social mission for museums. This focused on communitydevelopment, a commitment to embed museological actions in the wider culturaland physical environment, and an undertaking to promote a more interdisciplinary,active, communicative and man-agerially oriented museology in order to betterengage visitors (Mayrand 1985: 201). Though it may not have directly influenced theintellectual critiques emerging in 1980s Britain, the declaration was heavily influencedby French critical tendencies, and became instrumental in providing a foundation fora postcolonial museology both among immigrant populations in Europe and among

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internally colonized peoples in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico and the UnitedStates.

Independently developed French, British North American and postcolonial critiquesnot only coincided and sometimes merged with the reforms being supported by ICOM,but converged intellectually with the overlapping analyses and arguments of Bourdieu(1993), Burgin (1986), Becker (1982), Carrier (1987) and, more recently, Marcusand Myers (1995), Luke (1992) and Corbey (2000) on the market, politics and class

relationships endemic to museums.14 Theirs, together with critical work over themore general crisis of representation elaborated over approximately the same periodby Debord (1990, 1994), Baudrillard (1983, 1993) and Stafford (1994, 1996), beardeep-seated implications for museums, not least of which might suggest the incipientbeginning of a new exhibitionary complex in which visual experience is becomingreorganized to reassume the primacy it once had over textual exegesis. For Debordthis new complex is characterized by increasing autonomy and elaboration of form overcontent, while for Baudrillard it is the proliferation of signs and their autonomy oversignifications in what he calls a viral simulacra that is the cause for most alarm. ForStafford, on the contrary, such a revitalization of visual culture is welcome for its abilityto encode information and experience more richly.

New discursive tendencies reinforce the widespread and fundamental reconfigurationof museal and non-museal spaces imputed and effected by the French new museology.Together they imply a consequent reorganization of visual regimes, intellectualparadigms and even perhaps the beginning of a new exhibitionary complex basedon the reconstruction of history to create a live heritage, in which the past interfacesand shapes, while becoming itself shaped by, the present. Instead of the past beingremoved and isolated from the present in museums, new building, architecturaland planning technologies are aimed at transposing it and knitting it back together

with contemporaneous communities.15 This has not everywhere received positiveacclamation. As early as 1987 New Society included a special section on ‘the museummentality’ which mildly bemoaned the abandonment and transformation of industryinto touristic spectacle (White 1987: 10). Lumley notes the irony of Labour councilsturning depleted industrial landscapes, like those of the lower Don valley, the BlackCountry or Tyne and Wear into nostalgic evocations of working-class pasts, while cities

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become the host to architecturally innovative, new media museums sponsored bysuccessful entrepreneurs (1988: 17). Both processes are part of wider developmentsand need to be studied as aspects of a new museum simulacrum which is increasinglysubstituting the ‘traditional’ curator's play with metonymy and metaphor for the marketmanager's indulgences towards the staging of the hyperreal (Lumley 1988: 15, cf.Eco 1986: 1–58). Similar transformations have proliferated elsewhere; in the UnitedStates (Luke 1992: 57; Handler and Gable 1997; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 131–200; Chappell 2002); throughout Asia (Hendry 2000; Errington 1998; Treib 2002;Stanley 2002), Australasia (Bennett 1995: 128–62) and Africa (Hall 1995). This newexhibitionary complex which includes theme parks, as well as designated buildingsand whole cityscapes classified as world heritage sites, implies a radically differentrelationship between museums and their publics, as well as the publics from whichobjects have been collected and those where they are being exhibited. Together thesenew tendencies can be expected to redefine expert subject positions and the kindof knowledges from which exhibitions and spectacles, and multimedia events, willincreasingly be based. This still emerging exhibitionary paradigm has been called‘the society of the spectacle’ (Debord 1994), or the ‘paradigmatic postmodern visualcondition’ (Stafford 1996) and complements what Phillips has called ‘the secondMuseum Age’ (Phillips 2005).

Such diverse critical tendencies are suggestive of a pervasive and global redirectionof [p. 492 ↓ ] museum functions away from pure scholarship towards fostering socialand political awareness (Mayrand 1985: 201), and correspondingly it might be added,increased disingenuous symbolic engineering. More than the simple ‘contact zones’proposed by Clifford (1997: 192), museums, have become essentially thresholdinstitutions constructed between major intellectual, historical and social fault zones,at the intersections and between the interstices of conflicting, contradictory andparadoxical, pluricultural cross-currents in an increasingly globalized cultural andpolitical economy, that still awaits serious theoreticization and concerted empiricalstudy.

Notes

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1 The Mall, Washington, DC (Longstreth 1991); the National Gallery and NationalPortrait Gallery on the route between St Paul's Cathedral and Buckingham Palace,London; the museums on Unter den Linden, Berlin, or the national museums alongConfederation Boulevard, Ontario/Hull (MacDonald and Alsford 1989: 10).

2 In Spain and Portugal, for example, where visual culture appears to be undergoingreorganization, new contemporary art and photography museums have emerged whichexpress global → regional integration, while history and folk life museums, rearticulatedas ethnographic, community or ecomuseums, reflect the reverse, regional → globalrelationship.

3 The examples that come most to mind are the thirteen Swedish museums that joinedtogether to research and document agriculture, fishing and forestry (Veillard 1985:192), and more recently the four Stockholm and Göteborg museums of antiquities andethnography that since 2000 make up the National Museum of World Cultures. In Spainmost national museums are administered at ministerial level, resulting in a high degreeof central control.

4 This is very similar to the French eighteenth-century idea of the museum discussed byGeorgel (1994: 115–16).

5 Cf. Vergo (1987: 40), MacDonald and Alsford (1989: 34), Hooper Greenhill (1994:135).

6 K. Thomson's Treasures on Earth (2002) and Stephen Weill's Rethinking the Museum(1990) are notable exceptions.

7 Bourdieu (1980) suggests that the freedom department stores give their customersto judge their merchandise makes them into ‘the poor man's art gallery’. Morton (1988)notes that increased competition between museums and theme parks and malls leadsto greater identification between them and the commoditization of visitor experience.The architects of Tate Modern planned the museum as a long street.

8 This arrested time orientation is captured in Richard Ross's Museology (1989), acollection of photographs of museum galleries and stores, and Pierre Berenger and

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Michel Butor's Les Naufragés de l'Arche (1994). It is also a reoccurring theme in PeterGreenaway's use of both filmic and museum medias.

9 In its first year Tate Modern exceeded all expectations by attracting 5 million(Thomson 2002: 9). The Centre Georges Pompidou predicted visitor figures in theearly 1970s of between 2.5 million and 4.5 million per annum, while in the first year ofopening it attracted 7.3 million (Heinich 1988: 201). The success of these museumswhen measured against a star American attraction like Colonial Williamsburg, whichattracts approximately 1 million visitors per annum (Handler and Gable 1997: 19), isnoteworthy.

10 Museum labels, which many institutions archive, constitutes a largely unexploitedarea for research and provides one arena in which past and coexistent interpretation ofobjects can be traced (Bouquet 1988; Lawrence 1990).

11 See for example the work of Taylor (1995) on Indonesian museums and Yoshida's(2001) description of Japanese museum movement. Also see Eyo (1988), Munjeri(1991), Hall (1995) and Scotnes (2002) for discussion of wider but related issues in theAfrican context.

12 Articles by Peirson Jones, Tivy Monroe, Bromilow and Terrell provide a goodintroduction to these issues (Museums Journal, March 1993, pp. 24–36). See alsoAbrams (1994) and Moser (1995).

13 Although museums continued to harbour very real resentment of theoreticalcritiques, Vergo's reaction may be exaggerated and from his article appears to be basedon just one critical review, written for a narrowly defined, even peripheral craft magazine(1994: 159).

14 The steep rise in critical attention given to museums over the 1980s and 1990s,by curators, art practitioners, academics and disaffected minorities, is also clearly[p. 493 ↓ ] reflected by the increased in conferences and related publications thathave emerged in each of its sectors. In the case of ethnographic museums alone,in just eighteen years, major conferences and colloquiums have included: ‘MakingExhibitions of Ourselves’ (British Museum, 1986), ‘Exhibiting Cultures’ (Smithsonian

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Institution, 1988), ‘Museums in Dialogue’ (Museum für Volkerkunde, Berlin, 1993),‘Ways of Seeing, Ways of Framing, Ways of Displaying’ (Museu Antropologico, Coimbra1993), ‘Du musée coloniale au musée des cultures du monde’ (Centre GeorgesPompidou 1998); ‘The World Mirrored’ (Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen, 2000), and‘Les arts premiers’ (Centro Cultural Calouste Gulbenkian 2002). These conferenceshave stimulated an impressive literature, including edited collections (Karp and Lavine1991; Karp et al. 1992) and special editions of journals (Zeltschrift für ‘Ethnologie,1976, and 118 (1), 1993; Anales del Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Madrid, 1994;Cultural Dynamics, 1995; Antropologia Portuguesa, 14, 1997; Focaal, 34, 1999; Cahiersd'Etudes Africaines, 155–6, 1999; Ethnos, 65 (2), 2000; Folk, 43, 2001; Arquivos doCentro Cultural Calouste Gulbenkian, 45, 2003).

15 Durrans called for the public to participate in curating their own exhibitions asearly as 1988 (1988: 166). Hooper-Greenhill gives the examples of Glasgow's OpenMuseum, which encourages the use of the city's reserve collections by the public tocurate their own exhibitions (1994: 134). In the decade since she wrote her article,community projects and renewed commitment to education can be seen throughoutthe sector in Britain, France and elsewhere. In Britain, Merseyside, Tyne and Wear,Croydon, Walsall and the Horniman Museum have all adopted innovative communityand educational compromises.

Anthony Alan Shelton

References

Abrams, G. (1994) #The case for Wampum: repatriation from the Museum of theAmerican Indian to the Six Nations Confederacy, Brentford, Ontario, Canada# , in F.Kaplan (ed.), Museums and the Making of #Ourselves#: the Role of Objects in NationalIdentity . London and New York: Leicester University Press, pp. pp. 351–84.

Adorno, T. (1967) Val#ry Proust Museum: Prisms . London: Spearman.

Alexander, E. (1979) Museums in Motion: an Introduction to the History and Functionsof Museums . Nashville, TN: American Association for State and Local History.

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