The metaphor centers in particular on encounters between individual colonizers (administrators, travelers, missionaries, etc.) and inhabitants of the colony; it is not concerned with the wider engagement between the colonial center or administration and the colony. It could nonetheless, perhaps, be objected that, because the museum is not their original home, the things in the museum are not properly analogous with dwellers in a colonized territory. Yet, earlier notions of “pristine” precolonial societies and landscapes are now understood to have been myth (e.g., Sluyter 2001). Furthermore, in the museum there is a commonality, a solidarity, between all those things, sensed by any stranger who enters the place where they now reside: they are all there, all appearing to be stilled and rendered mute and passive by being so, unable to resist being looked at but at least massed in their presence, as they stay while visitors come and go. Museums and visitors alike expect them to represent people, communities, and stories, somehow to carry or be associated with meanings; but as physical things they are apparently just there, theoretically solid, three-dimensional presences and colored, dull, or shining, textural surfaces. Yet their full physicality remains tantalizingly out of complete experiential reach and unable to provide diverse sensory stimuli, confined as they are behind glass, rope, or a “Please Do Not Touch” sign. As Fabian puts it:
Even in a modern museum that does without vitrines, who, with rare exceptions, is allowed to touch or smell these objects? … exhibits of objects actually frustrate our bodily desire to explore their materiality. … It is as if just enough materiality were preserved for artefacts to make them count. (2004, 54)
Encounters with things in museums thus appear to be dominated by the visitor’s gaze alone. It is the visitor who, on entering a gallery and being confronted by an entire domain of newly unfamiliar things, seems free to determine which way to walk around the space, which artifacts to look at in detail and which to pass by without a glimpse, which to make the effort to find out more about, and how long to stay. Of course, in reality museum methods – object selection and juxtaposition, exhibition design and interpretation – all play a large part in influencing how and at what visitors look; nonetheless, it seems that the things lying still and silent in glass cases do not themselves direct the active movements, glances, or perusals of the viewer. Similarly, in the colony the colonizer’s privileged gaze enacted un equal power relations in the encounters that took place and in the resulting views that were formed by the incomers of the colonized, creating and reinforcing longer-lasting distinctions between the two (see Fanon [1952] 2008). In a process analogous to Césaire’s ([1950] 2000, 42) “equation,” in which “colonization = ‘thingification’” and “thingification” is the process by which the colonized’s past and agency are destroyed and negated in order to justify the “civilizing” process of colonization, the museum’s displayed items appear to become scrutinized, passive, robbed of any historically derived social agency of their own, their meanings determined by others.
Thus far, this seems a rather negative view in which the museum’s objects become decontextualized, lifeless, and without voice. It is a picture not so unlike that of the already familiar metaphors of the mausoleum or the ruin, somewhere rather sad and depressing (see Adorno 1983; Boon 1991; Crimp 1993). The complex reality of the colonial metaphor, however, is rather different. Power relations between visitor and displayed object, just as between colonizer and colonized, are in actuality ambivalent, contested, and shifting, influenced by an array of factors. For example, visitors/colonizers either do not come alone or do not necessarily find themselves alone once inside the walls and, as the work of vom Lehn and others demonstrates, social interactions in the museum can be “of profound relevance to the ways in which an aesthetic experience is ‘created’ (vom Lehn and Heath 2004, 46). “What is seen, how it is looked at, and its momentary sense and significance,” vom Lehn and Heath go on to conclude, after analyzing a piece of video footage of two women in the British Museum, “are reflexively constituted from within the interaction of the participants themselves” (2004, 49). Furthermore, just as not all colonizers saw and acted in similar ways, neither do all people in the museum. As Comaroff demonstrates for nineteenth-century South Africa, far from being a “coherent, monolithic process … the very nature of colonial rule was, and is, often the subject of struggle among colonizers,” as well as between colonizer and colonized (1989, 661). Some will objectify the occupants of the colonized territory less than others, working harder to make a connection with the inhabitants of the glass cases they pass by, twisting and moving their bodies to gain alternative perspectives, pressing noses to glass. Others will work for greater interaction with the displayed object, perhaps seeking to contribute to the stories it is used to tell, illicitly ignoring the “Please Do Not Touch” signs accompanying artifacts on open display, or even lobbying the museum for fewer objects to be behind glass.
Yet, to the visitor, the things on display still appear largely passive and silent, as colonized peoples appeared to colonizers. To the person looking in, gazing at artifacts in the vitrine or indigenes in the colony, what is seen is captured, overpowered, objectified, a resource. But is this how it might seem from the point of view of the artifact, the colonized? And why should we even consider such a perspective?
The thing returns the gaze
Examining the object’s purview allows two important areas to be explored: first, it permits fuller consideration of the role of the characteristics of things – physicality, tangibility, and other sensual qualities – in how we perceive and respond to them; second, as will be outlined later, it enables reflection on different ways of knowing and the relative balance of power between them. The former area, as we shall see, leads into discussion of the effects and what is sometimes – and not uncontentiously – referred to as the agency of objects. It is clear in everyday encounters with artifacts in any cultural domain that the physicality of things has an impact on how persons sense, interpret, and interact with them. An individual’s personal, cultural, social, and historical contexts may strongly influence the meanings and values they attribute to a particular item, but that piece’s material characteristics will nonetheless also have significant effect. Thus an artifact with the form of a bowl or cup and composed of metal or ceramic, for instance, in its very shape and solidity, indicates something quite different to (and indeed may elicit different behaviors from) any observer than, say, a flat rectangular item made of woven cloth.
Indeed, objects’ physical qualities can stimulate potent effects in those who encounter them. When I visited the Francis Bacon: In Camera (March 27–June 20) exhibition at Compton Verney, England, in 2010, for example, among the most powerful objects for me were not the completed iconic paintings central to the show but two large damaged canvases displayed in the last room. I found them highly moving, initially solely because of their size and the sheer physicality of their mutilated state: the central, visceral gash in the canvas, the flopping forward of part of the ripped material, and the hanging threads, like filaments of skin casting shadows onto the white, gallery wall visible behind what should have been the middle of the picture, rendered a piece of visual art into a very poignant, raw, gut-torn, three-dimensional tactile object, even though I could not touch it. Subsequently I read in the accompanying texts that they had been torn by Bacon himself, presumably because he had decided, for whatever reason, that he did not wish them to form part of his extant legacy of paintings. This information added to their pathos and impact, but also, in tying the paintings’ materiality to the specificity of one person and his actions, both reified and constrained them.
Affective responses to