Bringing things to life
In Chapter 1, Ernst suggests that museums need to focus on their own specificity, particularly the strengths that result from the presence of the material object. In my own chapter, I recount how museums have a history of being hospitable to reproductions and facsimiles, and argue that the value attached to direct experiences of authentic, original artifacts is associated with the notion that they are under threat from mediation (Henning, Chapter 25). The physical, material qualities of museum artworks became all the more vivid when they could be used to set the art object apart from the media object or photographic facsimile. While mediation in the form of information, context, and framing is necessary to make objects meaningful, it also appears to put a distance between visitors and the artifact, to diminish the potential for wonder, to “kill” the object.
The rhetoric of “bringing objects to life” is commonly used, even though most Western museums subscribe to the Western scientific view that the objects in their collections do not have life in any real sense. In her chapter, Fiona Candlin addresses this notion, asking “why museum exhibits are commonly perceived to be in need of resuscitation” (Chapter 13). She sees the use of the terms “live” and “dead” to describe museum objects as metaphoric (except where talking about living animals or animal and human remains). The dead object is one where “the practices and responses associated with its former functions have been sidelined and ... scholarly and aesthetic responses dominate.” A live object, by contrast, continues to elicit responses related to its previous role. Candlin is using a distinction derived from the early nineteenth century argument of Quatremère de Quincy, who saw museums as destroying artworks by removing them from their previous contexts and uses. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, in her writing on anthropological displays, suggests that the question of how much context is brought with an object into the display is really a question of where to make the “cut” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; see also Henning, Chapter 25). This cut not only produces the object as object by severing it from the world of which it was a part, but also destroys its use value.
The metaphoric sense of animate, lively things predominates in the anthropological concept of the “social life of things,” and in actor network theory where “nonhumans” (often, but not exclusively, technical objects) are understood as “actants” able to take on “delegated” human actions and capacities as if alive (Appadurai 1986; Latour 1992). However, Ivan Gaskell argues in his chapter that “to use a thing as though it were alive is not the same ontologically as for it to be alive” (Chapter 8). Some societies and cultures do hold certain objects to be sacred, numinous, or alive: and many such objects reside in museum collections. As Gaskell explains, both “life” and “things” are unstable concepts that are not settled even within a Western philosophical or scientific framework. Yet, many Western museums assume that the things in their collection are not alive in any meaningful sense. Gaskell argues that museums that hold objects in their collections that are sacred objects of veneration, or considered as living by their originating communities, need to begin from the premise that the Western biological sense of life is not the only valid one. He concludes that we need to consider “variable worlds” in which the quality that is “life” itself varies, and to understand museums as the mediators between these worlds (Chapter 8). Museums that facilitate acts of veneration such as smudging with smoke and touching, enable sacred objects to be returned to communities for rituals, or participate in reciprocal exchange carry out this mediating role more equitably than those “encyclopedic museums” that claim to be cosmopolitan yet refuse to countenance such exchanges.
While Gaskell is interested in the treatment by museums of sacred or numinous objects, Candlin is interested in the ways in which small, informal museums avoid the sense of deadened or impotent objects by not separating objects from the originating community, by being situated in an environment “broadly consonant with its interests” and by mediating its objects in such a way that they seem more immediate and “alive” (Chapter 13). The notion of liveness as something that is produced through display practices also resonates in anthropologist Petra Tjitske Kalshoven’s chapter. She writes about living history and re-enactment practices that animate museum objects, bringing them to life through replication and performance in ways that “both defy and celebrate the sanctity of the museum space” (Chapter 24). She sees this in terms of play, which, following Johan Huizinga’s famous study Homo Ludens ([1950] 1967), she describes in terms of the construction of temporary “worlds apart.” In Kalshoven’s account, museum objects are given back their usefulness, but as replicas, miniatures, and in the context of the intense experience of historical re-enactment. For her, the liveliness of objects comes in their integration into play, or via the careful staging of objects in exhibition giving them the opportunity to “perform.”
Fiona Candlin’s account gives the sense that it can be a certain carelessness of staging that enlivens objects, producing a powerful sense of the “having been there” of past occupants, through used objects that metonymically suggest their presence: shoes “molded to the shape” of the owner’s feet, “half-used” soap, doors “stained with the grease of repeated touch” (Chapter 13). A more chaotic, unregulated appearance might actually add to a sense of unmediated presence. Yet legibility depends on staging: as Caroline Morris has said about Charles Darwin’s study at Down House, the visitor’s ability to read the room as narrating the presence of Darwin and his activities within the study is enhanced by the careful placing of objects: “the cluttered table and carefully positioned stool narrate the chair’s use” (Morris 2013).
Ivan Gaskell argues that museums mediate not only through exhibitions, but also in their other practices, in laboratories and storage rooms. He shows how mediation occurs through conservation practices, and through prohibitions and rules: such as those preventing the touching of objects and the application of other substances such as incense or smoke, which are part of acts of veneration. Rules against handling of collections not only prevent “ritual interactions” but sometimes “appear to protect the power privileges of museum staff rather than serve demonstrable utilitarian purposes.” Even the most practical regulations can also operate symbolically, as “a way of establishing, enforcing, or contesting power hierarchies” (Chapter 8).
Touch prohibitions arrived both with the development of the museum as a disciplinary institution and as an imperial institution. According to Erkki Huhtamo, prohibitions on touching in art museums arrived with the nineteenth-century public museum. Visitors to early museums expected to be able to touch artworks. However, the new déclassé audiences of the public museum were not trusted to behave appropriately (Chapter 12). Today, Huhtamo suggests, museums can no longer rely on shared ideas about acceptable behavior in a museum context, and it is increasingly difficult to enforce touch prohibitions. He attributes this