Curatopia

Museums and the future of curatorship

Philipp Schorch, Conal McCarthy, Philipp Schorch, Conal McCarthy

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526118196
• eBook ISBN: 9781526118219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a curatopia, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial heterotopia? This pioneering volume addresses these questions by considering the current state of curatorship. It reviews the different models and approaches operating in museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world and discusses emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities. The collection explores the ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into more reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorship in the present, arguing that this is the most effective way for curatorial practice to remain meaningful. International in scope, the volume covers three regions: Europe, North America and the Pacific.

PART I

EUROPE

1 The museum as method (revisited)¹

Nicholas Thomas

The spaces of, and between, museums and anthropology today are full of paradoxes. Museums cannot escape the association of anachronism, they connote colonial dustiness. Yet in the early twenty-first century they are probably more successful than ever before – they attract more visitors, they loom larger in cultural life and they are better resourced financially, in general, than they have been at any time in the past. This is true in Britain, notably because of the allocation of a share of national lottery proceeds (through the Heritage Lottery Fund) to museum redevelopment. Virtually all major, and many smaller, institutions have had significant extensions or improvements at some time over the last twenty years. In many other countries, too, museums and art institutions have, over recent decades, been the recipients of investment on a grand scale. National cultural and historical museums have received this support, in many cases, because what they now exhibit and affirm is multiculturalism, a civic project that is resonant of an anthropological legacy.

It is a commonplace of the history of anthropology that the academic discipline was once firmly based in the ethnographic museum, but moved steadily away from it with the ascendancy of sociological questions from the 1920s onward. Though the 1980s and 1990s saw a revival of debate around art and material culture, mainstream anthropology arguably continues to drift away from the museum as a research resource or site of analysis. The paradox here is that, at the same time, the public have come to know anthropology almost exclusively through the museum. Up to and during the 1960s and 1970s, anthropologists, such as Margaret Mead, enjoyed mass audiences, and Lévi-Strauss was required reading across the humanities, but anthropology books today are read mainly by anthropologists (there are, needless to say, distinguished exceptions). Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s, ethnographic films were widely broadcast; but that television slot is now firmly occupied by so-called ‘reality’ programming, which is cheaper and more sensational. Hence anthropology is scarcely either read or watched by a broader public, but the numbers of visitors to both specifically anthropological collections and to survey museums that include extensive anthropological displays have risen very dramatically. The British Museum, which draws nearly six million people a year, is exceptional, but an institution such as the Pitt Rivers Museum, which thirty years ago was more a university facility than a genuinely public museum, can now attract around four hundred thousand.

Ethnographic collecting, collections and museums have been much debated, but the current ‘success’ of museums brings new questions into focus. Here I am not concerned with what lies behind the creation and resourcing of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), the Musée du Quai Branly or the National Museum of Australia, the ascendancy of the British Museum, or museum-friendly policies on the part of governments and local authorities – though of course there is much to be said about new conceptions of culture and governance, and the growing preoccupation with tourism as a driver for urban regeneration and economic growth. I am interested, rather, in how we (curators of ethnographic collections) conceive of what we are doing, if our institutions are embedded less in academic anthropology and more in a domain of public engagement. Does anthropology remain the discipline that informs anthropological collections, to be in turn informed by them? What kinds of knowledge underpin the interpretation of collections, what methods does that interpretation involve, and what knowledge does it generate? And – to move from theory and research to public engagement – how in the early twenty-first century should anthropological collections be displayed, what stories should they tell, what questions should they raise?

These issues are related to, but somewhat different from, those that have been conspicuous in the museum studies literature over recent years. This literature has been broadly divided between studies that might be considered technical, which range from documentation through conservation and display to public education, and a more critical, historical and theoretical discourse. The critical discourse has tracked (and often lambasted) the project of colonial collecting, diagnosed museums as disciplinary formations in Foucault’s terms, interrogated primitivist representation in display and otherwise explored the politics of institutions and exhibits.

If the issues that the critical discourse identified remain present, it makes a difference now that many of the poachers have turned gamekeepers. Critics, including Indigenous activists, have become curators, and the newer generation of curators have been trained by critics. A postcolonial understanding of the ethnographic museum has entered the mindset, not of the whole of the museum profession but of most of those who deal with ethnographic material, and contemporary native art. Hence, in many institutions, though certainly not universally, it is anticipated that originating communities are consulted around exhibition or research projects, they are indeed, increasingly, full collaborators. If this has become business as usual, that is surely positive, but it’s perhaps also a sign that the issue of representation is no longer the right place to start from.

At one time, it was self-evident that a museum anthropologist used anthropology to contextualise and interpret museum collections – that anthropology was the discipline that ‘went with’ the anthropological collection. Yet the activity and method of museum work was, and is, profoundly different from that of the academic discipline. Broadly, the academic project begins with theories and questions that are brought, through research methods, to the analysis of a particular case. If, obviously, the museum worker carries conceptual baggage, the practical project tends to start from, and stop with, the object. (Objects are its ‘stoppages’, in Duchamp’s and Gell’s sense.) There is something to be gained, I argue, from reflecting on the simplest of practices, such as writing a label, that of course are not simple at all.

If the museum is not only an institution or a collection but also a method, a kind of activity, that activity has its moments. The moments we might reflect on are those of the discovery, the caption and the juxtaposition.

It goes without saying that curators choose or select objects for display (or for other purposes such as loan, publication, reproduction on a postcard or whatever) but these terms imply operations more rational than might be apt. ‘Discovery’ is more ambiguous; it often involves finding things that were not lost; identifying things that were known to others; or the disclosure of what was hidden or repressed. What needs to be considered is not the ‘selection’ of artefacts and artworks but their discovery, the encounter with arrays of objects and the destabilisation which that encounter may give rise to. For example, a search for a ‘good’ or ‘representative’ piece may put at risk one’s sense of a genre or place. One may be distracted by another work, or by some aspect of the provenance or story of an object which is not good or not typical. This is in one sense entirely unremarkable, it is the contingency of dealing with things, but in another sense it represents a method, powerful because it is unpredictable.

To assert that there might be value in looking for, at or into things, in a manner only weakly guided by theory, or literally misguided, in the sense that direction given by theory is abandoned as things are encountered along the way, sounds like the affirmation of an antiquarian curiosity, an indiscriminate and eclectic form of knowledge, one surely long superseded by rigorous disciplines and critical theories. But there are two reasons why ‘happening upon’ things might have methodological potency. The first is that a preparedness to encounter things and consider them amounts to a responsiveness to forms of material evidence beneath or at odds with canonical ethnographies, national histories, reifications of local heritage – and subaltern narratives. In other words, ‘happening upon’ brings the question of ‘what else is there?’ to the fore. That question has confronted, and should continue to confront, claims about great art, cultural traditions, historical progress and celebrated acts of resistance.

Second, the antiquarianism which this discovery licenses is not that of George Eliot’s Casaubon but of Sebald. Not the self-aggrandising accumulation of ancient citations or specimens, but a distracted meditation on larger histories of culture, empire, commerce and military enterprise, marked by madness, violence and loss, as well as more obscure personal projects, humanitarian missions and idiosyncratic inquiries. If this is an eclectic antiquarianism, it is one that throws wide open the questions of history – what, out of all that has happened in the past, are we to remember and consider significant? What presence, and what bearing do histories and their residues have, on our various lives?

If the moment of discovery gives us a good deal to think about, that thinking must be carefully and deliberately depleted in the act of captioning. By captioning I mean not only the literal composition of a line of text that might accompany an image or object but the business of description and the discursive contextualisation of any museum piece. There has been a great deal of circular argument about whether ethnographic artefacts should be described and presented as works of art or contextualised anthropologically (as though these were the only, and mutually exclusive, options). I am interested not in this sort of debate, but in the point that labelling or captioning, like discovery, involves a particular kind of research that turns on simple questions, such as ‘What is it?’ Is a certain object a decorated barkcloth or a painting? Is a shield a weapon? Is a toy canoe or a diminutive spirit house a model canoe or model house? Is a walking stick an orator’s staff or a souvenir? Is a certain carving a spirit figure or a copy of a spirit figure commissioned by an ethnologist? The question is asked, only incidentally to get the answer right, for the particular piece. The method is the use of the object in the exploration of what these categories and distinctions might mean, where they come from, where they mislead, where they remain useful or unavoidable.

The moment of juxtaposition arises because objects are seldom exhibited on their own. Whatever ‘it’ may be, one has to ask what it goes with, what it may be placed in a series with or what it may be opposed to. Again, it goes without saying that a chronological ordering of works by a single artist or an assemblage representing a particular culture each asks objects to speak to different conventions. My interest is not in the burden these classificatory or narrative conventions carry but in the moment in which other possibilities are present, and the scope for the ‘simple’ question to become a question of itself. Can objects that belonged to the secret, esoteric, ritual life of mature men (please not ‘of a community’) be placed with quotidian tools? Where does difference become incommensurability? When is it wrong, and when might it be right, to put incommensurable things together?

If it has been taken for granted for several generations that the locus of innovation in disciplines such as anthropology has been ‘theory’, there is now scope to think differently and to revalue practices that appeared to be, but were actually never, sub-theoretical. This comment has not tried to map out in any rigorous way what an understanding of ‘the museum as method’ might entail. My general point is simply that one can work with contingencies, with the specific qualities and histories of artefacts and works of art, in ways that challenge many everyday or scholarly understandings of what things are and what they represent.

This work has diverse products, including cataloguing data made use of mainly by museum insiders. But among the most important are displays and exhibitions that make wider statements for diverse public audiences. In this context the question of how, today, ethnographic collections are to be shown and interpreted is in practice answered. In the UK, the most general response employs the ‘world cultures’ rubric. Material from diverse parts of the world presents diverse cultures side by side, not least in order to represent and affirm the cultural heritages of immigrant, ethnic minority, communities. At some level, there is no problem with this, it is broadly desirable, and to some extent anyway unavoidable – even a lightly contextualised array of material from around the world must in effect present and offer for comparison a set of ‘world cultures’.

If, however, this is the primary paradigm, it may sell a collection short, and fail to capitalise on its most fertile associations and their salience to cultural and historical debate today. Ant...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• Introduction: conceptualising Curatopia: Philipp Schorch, Conal McCarthy and Eveline Dürr
• Part I: Europe
• Part II: North America
• Part III: Pacific
• Afterwords
• Index