Читать книгу Museum Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 44

Of course, in reality, to see either a full god’s-eye view of the world or another partial perspective from a different viewpoint is impossible: we can neither fully escape our own modes of perception and cognition nor wholly take on those of others as if they were our own. In the colony, through mutual encounter, colonizer and colonized in a sense came into being each for the other, noticing particular characteristics, functions, habits, details previously unnoticed, and future possibilities. Nonetheless, the view on both sides remained partial, restricted, and imbalanced. One of the effects was for the more powerful side, the colonizer, to dominate the ways in which knowledge was articulated and understood, so that the subordinate’s ways of describing and understanding things were rendered weak and ineffective (e.g., Said 1978; Spivak 1988); indeed, in politics and in other areas of life, Guha (1983) claims, they operated according to a wholly different, “autonomous,” “grammar,” incomprehensible and untranslatable in the terms of the elite.

The ways in which things act on us are similarly incomprehensible or untranslatable. The colonial metaphor, however, provides a means of conceptualizing their effects and the processes by which those effects come about. In the colonies, it was those in power who named, defined, described, confined, controlled, and worked the people, places, and things of annexed regions, setting up a hegemonic us-and-them set of structures and discourses, in the process taking agency away from the colonized. Historically, collecting and museums were part of this process. On another, metaphorical level, in our very gaze at the things confined and categorized in display cases, we turn them into passive colonized objects in their museological realm today. Yet, in those moments when we are intrigued, surprised, stirred, or shaken by them, we feel their gaze looking back at us – though we might not wish to articulate it in such terms. In those transitory, discombobulating experiences, we are aware that, even in their captivity, they retain at least some power to affect us. Moreover, as it was in such fleeting engagements in the colony, it is in these fugitive instants that dominant ways of knowing and established relations between (our) center and (the object) periphery as (we) the colonizer/visitor perceive them, are destabilized. What Fanon ([1952] 2008) described as the long-term pathologizing effects of colonialism on both sides, and the relationships of dependency created as a result, are also momentarily knocked off course. That is, in these brief but powerful encounters, the artifact is no longer exclusively an inert, submissive representation of facts or stories, but becomes wayward and recalcitrant, refusing wholly to submit to the hegemony and conscious expectations of the museum and the visitor, and instead provoking surprising and potent reactions.

Such destabilization of the status quo can be exciting, liberating, comforting, or frightening; it offers creative but risky possibilities to visitor, object, and museum alike. Some of the most powerful of these effects of objects on those who encounter them can seem noncontentive and non-narrative, like Barthes’s now classic discussion of the photograph’s punctum appearing magically to resist description and explanation (1981, 75). Nonetheless, it often seems that the preoccupation of both museum and visitor with the explication of meaning largely forecloses the potential for creative disturbance of the viewers’ assumptions or equilibrium. Moreover, this fettering, cessation even, of the unpredictable possibilities of encounters with objects is more often than not completed with the common assumption – again, by museum and visitor alike – that objects themselves have no power or effect. Yet why should this be? There will be those who do not disagree that such moments happen, but who balk at its characterization as unruliness on the part of the object rather than as something determined by the mental state of the subject, perhaps, combined with other prevailing conditions. Inevitably, the visitor’s condition of mind and other factors will play a significant part; but to emphasize these alone and ignore the impact of the qualities of a particular object on a particular person, for example, is to pay attention to only part of the equation, and to ignore the reality that if this object were not on view and not what it was, the effects would not be what they were. It seems surprising that the possibility that the artifact could actively be having effects is so unacceptable. It is true that it is human beings who attribute to objects the meanings and values they are supposed to have. Furthermore, people similarly attribute meanings and values to animals and other persons. Yet we do not suppose that this human-created web of meaning renders those other living beings incapable of action or, in the case of other people, intention, leaving them without agency of their own and unable to impact significantly on us. Why, then, should and do we make such an assumption about all the other constituents of the material world (of which we too, of course, are parts)? There is no difference between my child, my dog, or my favorite chair, insofar as my awareness of them and their qualities and actions comes via my senses, and their impacts on me come in physical ways via the same routes. Of course they each differ in the meanings and values I attribute to them, and in the kinds of relationships I have with them, but as components of the material world within which we all exist, each one has particular material qualities that define a capacity to influence me in physically, sensorially impactful ways. The same is true of objects on display in museums, and here, as with any other constituent parts of the material world, their effects on me via my senses may occasionally be very significant indeed.

It is in such powerful encounters, however momentary they may be, that the object seems, in Elkins’s (1996) terms, to stare back. In literal terms, the phrase is obviously a rhetorical shorthand: we cannot say that objects gaze or have points of view in the way that we do. However, beyond the philosophical counter that, equally, we cannot say that in some sense incomprehensible to us they do not, the concept has utility. The colony’s subalterns and their historiographers found that they had to put their views and ways of knowing and acting into the vocabulary of the dominant other, the colonizers, if there were to be any hope of it being understood beyond the boundaries of their own group. Objects’ effects and influences, if their workings are to be comprehended from their position, similarly have to be rendered into an idiom we can understand (for which we could do worse than metaphor). Furthermore, the motif of the returned gaze, the two-way stare of curiosity and wonderment or disbelief, is one which readily conjures up a sense of being discomposed, bewildered, or perturbed. Even at a metaphorical level, however, some will balk at the idea of the object’s gaze or point of view as anthropomorphic and thus, ultimately, anthropocentric. To use such person-oriented language in an attempt to decenter the human subject and see how the nexus of relationships in the material world works from where the object is positioned, objectors may argue, seems, contradictorily, to bring people right back to the center because of its apparent emphasis on human processes. Yet why should it be any more anthropocentric to think of objects as having points of view than not having them, given that, for an object and, say, a museum visitor, just as for colonized and colonizer, precisely how “point of view” is characterized will differ? The colonizer who considered the colonized to have no point of view, even where the latter was not easily rendered or understood in the colonizer’s idiom, was guilty of cultural superiority and ignorance; are we perhaps also guilty, if we fail to consider person–object encounters from multiple perspectives? Prosopopoeia is the ascription of an essentially human voice to an inanimate object, animal, or dead body, and here I have effectively adopted it as a methodological tool.

There will be other objections to the application of prosopopoeia in this museum context, of course. Critique made of the personalization or humanization of objects elsewhere (e.g., Loumpet-Galitzine 2011) might also be leveled here. In her assessment (which focuses particularly on the Musée du Quai Branly), Loumpet-Galitzine identifies several objections to this process in the Musée du Quai Branly project. The first is her tracing of a trajectory within it that originates in the nonmuseological discourse of collectors and dealers and transforms anthropological insights into a different kind of narrative, which she argues “offers no new serious consideration of the peoples whose cultures are represented in the Museum. Thus constructed, the discourse is closed by its own dialectics” (Loumpet-Galitzine 2011, 153). Second, she argues that the museum’s exhibitions’ use of “humanized” objects does not aestheticize the artifacts’ producers or the other more generally, but rather transfers “human qualities to the object,” in so doing making it embody “the humanity of the Other” and depersonalize “the real human being in its favour” (Loumpet-Galitzine 2011, 154). I do not disagree that this particular museum appears to offer or indeed enable few new considerations, but it is unfortunate that the implication here is that such innovations, even in the case of ethnographic objects, might only be both provided and derived from anthropologists and curators. What of any new assessments that might form in the mind of museum visitors, including those from the immigrant communities to whom Loumpet-Galitzine understandably turns in other ways in her discussion? Of course, any of these sorts of new considerations of displayed objects and the peoples associated with them would be shaped dynamically and unpredictably in the course of the moments of object–person interaction on which I have focused in this chapter; moreover, they would most likely be ephemeral and may well be ambivalent and problematic in various factual, sensual, and possibly ethical ways (see below). They would not have the interpretive authority and weight, or documentation and publication, of the expert, research-based insights of anthropologists or museum representations. But does that mean that the moments in which object and visitor seem to connect, and the powerful affective responses that can result, are unimportant? Certainly museums need to avoid giving inappropriate impressions, such as the evolutionist sense that the objects being viewed are “primitive” even if the societies whence they originate are no longer thus (Loumpet-Galitzine 2011, 154), or the idea that there is only one meaning applicable to an artifact (and the Musée du Quai Branly, for example, has been criticized for doing both; e.g., Clifford 2007; Price 2007; Loumpet-Galitzine 2011). Rather, opening up immediate, and multiple, interactions with objects as far as possible empowers both visitor and object alike. In conceptualizing such engagements, prosopopoeia has its applicability as the attribution to objects of a point of view: metaphorical, but nonetheless a technique for trying to see things from the inside, a potent reversal of perspective (Holmes [1985] 2005) to take forward our understandings of the effects and potentials of objects.

Seeing no perspective other than the meaning-filled, human-centered one whence we see the world perpetuates the distancing of the other – cultural, temporal, material – embodied in and represented by the objects on which we gaze. This distancing is also achieved through the “cultural bias towards vision” (Fabian 1983, 106). Sight clearly dominates both the technology of the museum display and the metaphor of the two-way colonial gaze; nonetheless, “gaze” here operates as a complex, and in practice multisensorial, set of processes. In a material world in which people, themselves physical three-dimensional entities, interact with things, the importance of our bodily performances and memories of the handling and performativity of objects in situations where handling has been possible, are still important in museum engagements where it is not. We combine such remembered and imagined sensations with what we can see of the material qualities of the thing before us. Gazing at a picture hanging on a gallery wall or at a carved wooden bowl in a glass display case, attention momentarily held by the material form, colors, composition, scale, and impact of what I see, my eyes also taking in information that allows me to intuit texture, density, weight, and thickness, I simultaneously objectify the thing before me and am vulnerable to it and its effects on me. Its impacts on my sensibilities are real – if it were not there or if it were something else, my responses would be different. No matter what the influence of my own preconceptions and background, it too has both individuality and effect. These effects will indeed be strongly filtered by my own characteristics – the lens through which I see – but I alone do not determine what happens in that encounter; the object’s characteristics too are fundamental to the outcome. The object’s materiality and my sensibility, then, together can create powerful, albeit culturally, historically, and personally constituted, effects.

These effects can work against the distancing between the visitor and the other represented by and embodied in museum objects, through powerful moments of connection, empathy, and recognition. However, they can also, especially when powerful responses are negative ones, work to enhance the sense of distance. This potentiality of the object and the museum encounter thus raises ethical dimensions too. Is it, for example, appropriate to facilitate the possibility of unencumbered, powerful, moving encounters with objects if the visitor’s interior reflections, which may later become externalized into voiced opinions or even actions, are factually wrong, politically unacceptable, or morally reprehensible? Indeed, more often the museum may be seeking not to bring about these sorts of encounters at all but instead to inform people, only to find that visitors’ responses to the objects and apparent misreadings of the exhibition undo all the effort put into the interpretation. Bouttiaux, for example, writing of her curation of Persona, an exhibition of Côte d’Ivoire Guro region masks at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium) in 2009, described her concern and techniques to convey both that objects used in the past are still functioning in daily and ritual life today and that the cultures whence those objects come are not unchanging. However, she concluded that despite working hard to demonstrate both and in the process to deconstruct a number of “clichés … the visitor’s gaze manages to nullify such efforts” (Bouttiaux 2012, 36). Her experience rested partly on visitors’ tendency to watch the in-exhibition contemporary films of the masks in action – prior to their collection – in dance performances in Guro, and their failure to pay much if any attention to the actual masks on display. Bouttiaux had provided such films as an attempt at contextualization, yet ultimately felt that their inability to provide the full sensory experience of being present at the dance, combined with the fact that most visitors did not connect each displayed mask with the film that depicted it in action, rendered the films as other, as distant, and as out of time as the masks themselves, from the museum-goers’ perspectives. She refers to the sensory remove between the museum and the originating context, and describes the masks as “so decontextualized or “deadened” from being behind glass that they are not even recognizable” (Bouttiaux 2012, 37, 39).

On one level, perhaps this is an inevitable result of the museum effect: the processes of collection, taxonomy, and display that museumize something, removing it from its original setting and isolating it as evidence and/or representation of that world, also separate it from its entanglement with quotidian life, from the ubiquitous, humdrum materiality of existence in which we tend not to think much about a separation between “subjects and objects” or to reflect too often on “the meanings of things.” Museumizing things has this separating effect whether we like it or not, and however the details of the process are done. This occurs in different ways in both Bouttiaux’s Persona exhibition and in the Musée du Quai Branly, for example. It does so, too, in each of the four approaches to ethnographic objects outlined by Sally Price: whether detaching objects from their pasts and displaying them as “masterpieces of world art,” privileging “the perspectives of members of the represented cultures and their descendants,” concentrating on colonial histories and disciplines and “the circumstances in which collections were formed,” or treating the represented cultures as untouched “vignettes of a pre-contact past” (2007, 170–171), there is no escaping the simple fact that the things are now in a museum and – even in Price’s second option – disengaged from the full machinations of everyday social life for which they were originally produced.

Yet, on another level, precisely because encounters between persons and things are – or can be – so different once something becomes a part of this new, metaphorically colonial world, objects and engagements with them can be unpredictable and potentive, disordered and enlivening, full of a wholly new and distinct set of potentials from those they have in everyday life beyond the hallowed walls of the institution. At their most dramatic, objects that might seem lost or even dead in their separation from prior contexts may, nonetheless, have new impacts and effects – sensory, emotional, imaginary, either layered on top of their old meanings or even as apparently new beginnings, such as when they are encountered unlabeled. Most interactions are perhaps less spectacular than this, but still heavy with an affective potential that centers on the peculiar kind of engagement with the material object that happens, or could happen, in the museal space. Indeed, there is an inherent paradox in this engagement: while it is common to identify the artificial distancing that the museum’s vitrines, ropes, and signage enforce between person and object, which seems to render the museum a very unmaterial world in comparison to the quotidian realm, at the same time there is an oft unexploited opportunity to focus in on the thing itself. Display, in other words, may simultaneously place things at one remove and bring them into closer focus. If the artifacts in question are utilized to illustrate a story essentially told by other means (such as text or film), their fundamentally material, multisensory reality – both now and in the pre-museum past – will likely remain distant. If, on the other hand, visitors and objects are, sometimes at least, able to encounter each other for themselves without prior or parallel explanation or context, and if instead such information (which should still be available) comes second, there is greater opportunity to be surprised and to form powerful responsive ideas and feelings – even if mistaken or problematic. Of course, in reality there is never a context- or interpretation-free display: even in the absence of directly adjacent text or images, a complex array of factors such as object choice, placement, juxtaposition, lighting, gallery design, and other display strategies all influence responses to artifacts and the messages behind an exhibit. Indeed, it is in these areas in particular that institutions can look to develop innovative techniques to bring focus back to things. Other interpretive materials can be moved to a physical distance that does not immediately impede the visitor–object encounter and placement; juxtaposition and design strategies can be utilized in ways that facilitate neither a simple aesthetic nor functional contemplation of the object, but encourage a more complex engagement on multiple levels.

How, for example, could an incised and colorfully enameled bowl be best displayed so that visitors might appreciate not only its beauty and good condition, the detail of its decoration, and its status as a vessel, but also the hue and dull sheen of the metal, its coolness to the touch, the contrast in texture (though both are smooth) between the copper alloy of the bowl and the enamel inlay, and the ring of the rim when sharply tapped with the fingernails? Excellent lighting, and positioning that allows maximal viewing of the entire bowl, are obviously good starting points. One additional, word-free (written or oral), possibility is an adjacent, low-key “sensory station” (see Wehner and Sear 2010): either low-tech, utilizing a similar reproduction or handling collection item that can be physically explored; or high-tech, utilizing digital technology to reproduce the tactile sensation of touching the bowl. Done subtly, and always subordinated to the object, such intervention can enhance, rather than diminish, a renewed thing centeredness in display.

Cultivating the analogy of the colonial encounter and the notion of the object’s point of view to facilitate such thing centeredness, can enable the development of both innovative material culture theory and fresh approaches to museum and gallery practice. It is a tack that need not dehumanize the producers and others associated with objects; detract from now established frameworks of museum interpretation, social inclusion, and audience evaluation; or take away from the notion of the museum as a place of learning. Rather, it permits the addition of something potentially very powerful and fundamental, in which the object itself, and its capacity to fascinate, awe, shock, irritate, or puzzle, is recognized and utilized fully too.