For Gardner (Chapter 24), the central problem posed by the need for museums to respond to pressures to commemorate and memorialize events such as September 11 concerns a theme that has already come up–whether the role of museums is to reinforce established identities or to provide a space for critical reflection. In his view, emphasizing individual and collective memories, while responsive to immediate needs and more populist in its orientation, runs the danger of not fulfilling the museum’s public function of providing professional histories that retain a critical framework and help to contextualize difficult histories. Responding to the event of September 11, therefore, required the Smithsonian to think through how to respond to the immediate need to memorialize and document people’s memories and emotions while also building the base for a collection that could also engage with the moment as a historical moment that also needed interpretation and mediation. That the museum has not been able to do the latter, either in exhibition form or through a comprehensive collecting policy at the time of writing, is, for Gardner, deeply troubling. Gardner’s chapter is thus a careful intervention in American public history debates in which there is a strong argument that calls for museums to become more democratic by engaging with people’s memories rather than fashioning critical perspectives on history. At stake are not only notions of professionalism and its role in the public sphere but also questions about the extent to which museums should shape public consciousness or merely reflect existing cultural formations.
In many ways, Liza Dale-Hallett, Rebecca Carland, and Peg Fraser’s chapter (25) shares Gardner’s concerns, arguing that Museum Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia, too was faced with the need to provide a mourning house for those directly affected by the disastrous bushfires but recognized that this need also presented an opportunity to document the event in ways that would challenge people’s understandings of the Australian environment, of climate change, and of its impact on how we should live in the place. What is different is that, in the Australian case, ways were found to insert a critical voice alongside the memorializing voice, no doubt because in Museum Victoria’s case it was dealing with a natural rather than a political disaster and because there is extensive debate about the implications of climate change on our attitudes to nature and our lifestyles. Despite the difficulties faced by the National Museum of American History, however, both pieces are a reaffirmation of the belief that museums can and ought to claim a critical role in contemporary public debates, that their collections are a resource for the development of reflexive forms of knowledge production, and that they should do all this while also finding ways to address people’s needs for a place that deals with the ineffable–in this case with trauma. That finding ways to achieve these aims involved rethinking museum methods around collection, documentation, and display only goes to show that questions concerning museum practices and methods are inherently related to our concepts of what museums are, could, and should be and that thinking through these questions requires both analytical and conceptual toolkits. They are therefore deeply theoretical as well as practical endeavors.
Methods, agency, andtheproduction ofknowledge
Interactions between methods and agency, and the knowledge production that can subsequently develop out of this process can become clearer if we take Nicholas Thomas’s suggestion that we need to be more open to thinking about museum methods as a form of theorizing. Another suite of essays gathered across the different sections of our book demonstrates quite clearly how specific museum practices reflect particular theoretical positions, disciplinary formations, and approaches to the world, revealing in the process something about the nature of museums as cultural institutions. The first of these is Ien Ang’s contribution, in which she questions the very possibility of radical institutional change in art museums. A cultural studies academic, Ang positions much of her work along the lines of the engaged academic who does not want to position themselves on one side of a theory/practice divide (see Ang 2006). In her contribution to this volume (Chapter 11), however, Ang discusses the difficulties of holding on to such a position when faced with the institutional conservatism of the art museum. Her chapter is a reflection on her experiences during a research project that followed an attempt by both the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art (both in Sydney, Australia) to extend their reach into communities that do not normally attend art museums or engage with art. Ang found that, despite the recognition on the part of these museums of the kinds of criticism that have been leveled at their kind, they were unable to let go of one central premise–that they, and only they, had the right and the expertise to define what art is. This position, she argues, made it impossible for these museums to live up to their aims to democratize both themselves and access to art, making them unable to truly collaborate with the communities with which they were trying to engage. For Ang, this means that the institutional function of the art museum remains one of proselytization, of carefully guarding not only who gets to define what art is but also what artworks constitute art, just as Bourdieu and others have argued.
One has to go outside the public museum to find other players in the discursive production of what constitutes art, but, as Jim McGuigan’s chapter (12) on the activities of the Saatchi Gallery makes clear, this is not without its problems either. While not cloaking their activities under a democratic discourse, the Saatchi Gallery represents, for McGuigan, a new conjuncture in which neoliberal forms of capitalism have the power to create new categories of art by their collecting activities and, in the process, erase any of its critical potential. Any vision of the public function of art–as a site of critical discourse, as a healer, or as an instrument of cross-cultural communication–is lost, even if, as Ang’s study demonstrates, such claims tend toward the utopian.
The ways in which museums produce an understanding of what Art is through their curatorial and interpretation strategies is also central to Haidy Geismar’s chapter (10). Geismar is concerned with teasing out the two-way relationship between contemporary art and museums of anthropology, analyzing the ways in which museum methods, once again, constitute not only the object but also the disciplinary frameworks that inform their display and interpretation. Her contribution thus moves between a focus on the aestheticization of anthropology museums and the interventions of contemporary artists in anthropology museums. Like Ang, her target is the way in which we come to understand Art through museological practices, in this case, that of the anthropology museum.
Theorizing and critiquing particular museum methods is also the focus of Fredrik Svanberg’s contribution (Chapter 19), which focuses on collecting practices. Once again, we find that the turn to materiality drives this analysis as well. In his case we find an argument that turns around conventional approaches to thinking about the role of collecting in museums, from one that represents the world to one that actively shapes how the world is perceived and, in the process, regulates that world. As he puts it, “collecting is first and foremost about the management of the world outside the collection that collecting achieves through the management of heritage objects.” Turning positivism on its head, Svanberg uses the concept of assemblages as possessing agency to argue that collections also have agency, shaping not only the world outside museums but their own internal system as well. Recognizing this is, he argues, the first step to achieving institutional change and ensuring that museums develop a more polysemic practice that does not divide the world so sharply into us and them–a hope that he argues could be achieved by thinking through the possibilities afforded by the digitization of collections and their records.
Svanberg’s focus on the concept of agency is only one instance of this theme. As we have already seen, agency is a driving theme in discussions about objects as well as visitors. In terms of understanding the function of museums as public institutions, however, there are a further two discussions that we could bring together under this theme. The first is Kylie Message’s arguments concerning the significance of curatorial agency in shaping the agenda of contemporary museums. The second is the agency of source communities discussed by Howard Morphy.
In a context that often conflates an understanding of museums as governmental institutions with the idea that they answer to the needs of the state, it is often too easy