For the traditional culture, which is object-oriented to a high degree, we need the traditional museum, which displays the real object, and so far the difference works. But it becomes different now – the museum loses it and becomes itself changed from an institution, a place, or an agency to a format. When it comes to truly digital culture, then the museum is a format. It’s a way of ordering information, ordering images, offering a guided tour. Once the museum is a format, it’s not an institution anymore. I would make a difference between a format, which is a sort of technical term, and a real institution. The real place, which is based on material objects, exists on two different levels. Of course we can make it as complicated as we like. If we look at the history of the term “museum” or the history of the museum itself, we find it was not always the object-based rooms and places. In the early Renaissance, it could be the name for an empty room where you think: this was a museum as well – a cognitive space.
MH: You have that in contemporary holocaust museums sometimes – contemplative spaces.
WE: Yes, but this example shows that the very word “museum” was not bound strictly to the object base; it could mean arranging things in your head only, and for that you only needed a quiet and empty space – we call it the museum. So even that was genealogically more thinkable already but, as we know, the museum is an institution. It’s an object-bound institution and the strength is its object-basedness. It’s not like time-based media – that’s not the strength. Its resistance against time, that’s the incredible power of the museum – the resistance against time.
MH: You mentioned this earlier and you used a phrase that reminded me of Harold Innis, the transmitting through time, the museum as something that transmits through time but at the same time resists the passing of time (Innis [1951] 2008).
WE: Yes, the objects of the museum by their very presence resist the passing of time. We can see Roman inscriptions in the Vatican Museum, and it’s not that self-evident that for 2000 years we would still be able to decipher the letters inscribed in stone, so in a way it resists time. Actually one of the allegories of the paintings on the ceiling that connects the Vatican Museum to the Vatican Library, painted by Anton Raphael Mengs, who was a friend of Johann Joachim Winckelmann in the eighteenth century, shows how the Vatican Museum was actually founded on the idea that there are long-lasting values. The Catholic Church was very interested in claiming its authority as not changing with history [this painting is known in English as The Triumph of History over Time, or The Allegory of History, and is in the Camera dei Papiri]. There is an authority which traverses history and which resists time, which we can see by this allegorical painting which nicely shows the mechanism of tradition.
We now live in a media culture that is now very much real time-oriented, in which fast transmission is the most valuable quality. The almost immediate transfer of information which was already present in the transmission of live radio and live television is now referred to as real time processing. This traversing of space almost immediately started with the age of telegraphy and other information media communication. The virtue of the museum is completely different: to traverse long distances of time, to transfer objects in a time channel which lasts for several thousand years in the case of ancient Egypt and several other civilizations. This is a completely different channel of transmission, to use this media technical term. And it’s even a challenge to the idea of history, the museum, because it’s based on the invariance of the object. We can see an object of the eighteenth century, a painting for example, and still be touched by it. That’s a very strange thing, because we don’t dress like people of that age, we don’t think like them anymore ... Or take Greek objects: something happens – something interacts between our perception and this object. This undercuts the idea of history which emphasizes the difference, the change, the transformation.
MH: Yes, in your writing on “media tempor(e)alities” you quoted Heidegger’s Being and Time on the question of the extent to which the object is historical (Ernst 2008; 2012; Heidegger [1927] 1962). There is a tendency to assume that the traces of use make an object historical.
WE: That’s the way Heidegger tries to answer it, but the question he poses, I think, is still open to discussion because we know most of the objects in a museum are traditionally understood as historical objects but they are present and they have a present impression on us. So there is dissonance, a cognitive dissonance: cognitively we know they are past but we are affected by the object as present. Now this is a big paradox, and this is a productive paradox actually, which shows that the museum is not just part of cultural history or an agency of cultural history. And even the idea of history is challenged: for a long time the museum tour or narrative would start in early times and end in the present, although they could be arranged in a completely different way. The archaeological reading would be to take objects which traverse this seemingly historical sequence. For a long time the museum as a history machine produced history by the illusion that things progress, so that we begin by experiencing rough or crude objects and then end up with the most elaborate versions, as in technical museums which show technological progress. A lot of nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums were built on this model, or rather they were not only built on the historical model but they helped to build the historical model. Because, by physically wandering through these museums, we got this idea of history as progress which was based on the Hegelian idea of progress.
MH: Yes it’s interesting that in the art historical museum you have this Hegelian notion of the progress of art, and yet at the same time it was punctuated by these masterpieces that were supposed to transcend time and that you were supposed to almost sit in front of and commune with in some transhistorical way.
WE: Yes, this was the aesthetics of the art museum, of the art piece in the collection, until the age of Winckelmann and others when suddenly art itself became historicized. It’s fascinating to see how, for a long time, art from antiquity would have a metahistorical perfection. There was no historical distance to it; there was just a perfection which to later generations was the guideline. And one was confronted with it in private collections or in public museums or collections. Then there were figures like Winckelmann in 1764, writing History of the Art of Antiquity, where he said that art is dependent on its historical contexts (Winckelmann [1764] 2006). Suddenly art itself became historicized. Museums like the Berlin Altes Museum, built by Schinkel, reacted to it by arranging pieces of art in a historical sequence. It’s a spatial sequence, because all the museum rooms coexist spatially, but it was arranged in a way that we get the idea of a historical progress. And Hegel, who was living near the museum, built a lot of his ideas influenced by this arrangement of a gallery of pictures in a historical way. We can take it very literally, this phenomenology of mind – he in the end writes how the world and spirit progress through a gallery of pictures. We can take it very literally and visit the Altes Museum in Berlin: he was living just a few hundred yards away, and so was very much influenced by the new way of arranging museums.
MH: Something else you said that really resonated with me was in your chapter in the Susan Crane book – it was where you are writing about archives and you say the “true tragic archive is the soil” (Ernst 2000, 28). And, while I suppose I think of archives as things that have been authored, things that have been put together and ordered, collections that have been cataloged, at the same time it’s interesting to think of soil as an archive; it is an interesting way to think of power and the museum and what museums occlude or cover up. It reminded me of when I was researching whaling museums: there’s always some display of whaling equipment and a couple of whales, but then I read how the blood and oil from each sperm whale soaked into the earth – an extreme amount so that the whole port stank and the ground was full of the oil (Henning 2011). Similarly, what you said about the tragic archive being the soil made me think of the way in which history materially embeds itself. The effects of human activity on the earth and so on are constructing an inadvertent record, an archaeological record, and that sometimes conflicts with the version of events the authored museum wants to present.
WE: Yes, and this again depends first