Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium

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Just as good collecting requires understanding context, so does the good use of collections. Using collections requires knowing what was collected, as well as what wasn’t. What’s missing, and why? It requires understanding of the context of collecting, and of the history of the collections. Collections’ history shapes the way we use them and the stories we tell with them. We need to understand collections’ connections — those that were broken, those that survive, those that might be reknit. Curators need to reconnect collections with communities. But in the longer term, clearly not. He did not lay a foundation on which others could build. He created a museum that was unable to change with the times. He failed to teach his colleagues or his audiences about the value of the collection. Jenks was a good at curating, but not a good curator. He collected, but never connected. Andrea Witcomb, Australian museum curator and author, asks: “is curatorship a smiling profession?” She takes the term from media studies scholar John Hartley, who defines it as those trades where “performance is measured by consumer satisfaction…where knowledge is niceness and education is entertainment.” He contrasts the smiling professions to those which “continue their disciplinary, classical, clubby and institutionalized maleness, as bastions of older notions of power, enemies of smiling.” We might say: is curatorship people work, not just object work? I believe that curatorship is people work; that it should be a smiling profession. This book examines one of the most important and intriguing themes in art today: the often obsessive relationship between artist and museum.

Exhibitions connect audiences with artifacts. The best writers on exhibition and interpretation remind us that exhibition is not a one-way street; it’s about meeting visitors where they are, about making connections. Freeman Tilden, in his classic book on interpretation, got this right: museums need to figure out how to connect their collections to their audiences. Nina Simon wisely titled her new book, The Art of Relevance. From Marcel Duchamp’s “Portable Museum” ( Boîte en valise) of the early 1940s to Damien Hirst’s distinctive use of vitrine displays in the 1990s, the artists of the past seventy years have often turned their attention—both creatively and critically—to a reappraisal of the ideas and systems of classification traditionally associated with curatorship and display. There is something special, and essential, about the curatorial way of knowing. But it can be problematic, too narrowly defined and sharply focused. Remember the Jenks Museum! Curators also need to learn, from audiences and communities, new ways of knowing objects. We need to add to shared authority, the mantra of museum reform over the past decade or two, shared ways of knowing, and new ways of sharing. We need to connect as well as collect.Many objects come with a history, and community connections; and all too often, those connections have been lost, or ignored. So many museum objects carry with them the legacies of colonialism, violence and domination, and are defined by a process of curation that excluded some peoples and turned others into objects. The new material culture studies are based on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. Latour wants us to consider the ways that “things” are actors, or, more precisely, what he calls “actants” — they have agency, they put human ideas into motion. He urges us to look at the heterogeneous associations of human and nonhuman actors, the relationship between people and things. Museums need both collections and connections. Curators need to collect, and connect. It’s the combination that give museums their power. Collections Curators of scientific collections, too, exercise their own form of connoisseurship, of object knowledge: Philip S. Doughty, keeper of geology at the Ulster Museum, defined this as “Hunches, intuition…the apparent mystique is in reality a synthesis of a large mass of detail, the product of generations of talented geological curators who have developed, tested and refined skills and practices.” Displaying art and artifacts — making exhibitions — is a skill that depends upon the curator’s intimate knowledge of the objects, their knowledge of context, and their connections to audience. A good exhibition is an argument from art and artifact, designed to communicate with its audience. Conversation

Join me for a visit to the museum storeroom, the place where curators engage with artifacts directly, thinking through the problems of exhibitions or research in a material, affective, way. A museum storeroom might be thought of as a kind of memory palace, an extension of the curator’s brain. Things are organized, available, visible on shelves or ready to be discovered behind neatly labeled cabinet doors. Museum curators have the privilege of access to the storeroom, of seeing the categories made physical, gaining a visceral understanding of how those categories came to be, what they reveal and what they hide. Storerooms highlight the materiality of objects, their heft and presence, a perfect counterbalance to the way that the registrar’s files capture their history and exhibitions their meanings. Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, offers a model for how to do this. The audience for her exhibitions, she insists, are not art historians, but the public. One of the secrets to the success of her exhibitions, she claims, is that she is not an art historian, but rather, a curator, someone who engaged with artists and their work. “I learned to curate from curators.” Her technique for designing exhibitions was simple. She moved the artworks around in the space until it all made sense. “I am someone who is totally experiential,” she told the Washington Post . For Thelma Golden, what’s important is the direct experience of the art, not “works, but works in space.” We might add, works in social space, that is, space with people and things. This publication provided a brief overview of the history museums and how they have progressed in terms of exhibiting collections and art and how this gradually evolved from ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ into the installation of avant garde art work. The book covered the various methods of how collections have been displayed in the past to signify importance and significance of the objects, such as, vitrines, plinths, drawer cabinets and specimen jars. Anthropology museums have a new understanding of source communities as essential to their work. The National Museum of Natural History’s Recovering Voices program, for example, works with communities from which collections were gathered not just to understand the collections, but also to document and revitalize language and knowledge traditions. This makes collections useful to the museum and also to the communities.

One important aspect of this knowledge comes from the curator’s physical connections with the objects. They have the objects, and privileged access to them. Whatever there is to an object that can’t be can’t be described or photographed or digitized — that’s a place to look for particular curatorial knowledge. Geoghegan and Hess offer this list of some of these qualities: “three-dimensionality, weight, texture, surface temperature, smell, taste and spatiotemporal presences.” Bercaw contrasts the National Museum of the American Indian, which worried that many of the objects in its collection were tainted by colonialism and the legacy of violence and domination, and not useful to indigenous ways of knowing, and the NMAAHC, which embraced objects — but not the objects already in the collection, but new objects. She writes “We have the power of the Smithsonian, which values the authority of the object, but we have no collections to de-colonize.” NMAAHC’s collecting initiatives offer a revealing insight into the way that connecting serves collecting and community. That museum built its collections by connecting with communities that hadn’t been ready to trust the Smithsonian with their stories until the new museum came along. Reconnecting with Artifacts