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.
Notes
1 1 “Object” and “thing” are variously distinguished in meaning in different branches of theory (e.g., Brown 2001; Hood and Santos 2009). In most of this chapter, I use them interchangeably.
References
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11 Callon,