Museum Materialities
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Museum Materialities

Objects, Engagements, Interpretations

Sandra Dudley, Sandra Dudley

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eBook - ePub

Museum Materialities

Objects, Engagements, Interpretations

Sandra Dudley, Sandra Dudley

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About This Book

This is an innovative interdisciplinary book about objects and people within museums and galleries. It addresses fundamental issues of human sensory, emotional and aesthetic experience of objects. The chapters explore ways and contexts in which things and people mutually interact, and raise questions about how objects carry meaning and feeling, the distinctions between objects and persons, particular qualities of the museum as context for person-object engagements, and the active and embodied role of the museum visitor.

Museum Materialities is divided into three sections– Objects, Engagements and Interpretations– and includes a foreword by Susan Pearce and an afterword by Howard Morphy. It examines materiality and other perceptual and ontological qualities of objects themselves; embodied sensory and cognitive engagements – both personal and across a wider audience spread – with particular objects or object types in a museum or gallery setting; notions of aesthetics, affect and wellbeing in museum contexts; and creative and innovative artistic and museum practices that seek to illuminate or critique museum objects and interpretations.

Phenomenological and other approaches to embodied experience in an emphatically material world are current in a number of academic areas, most particularly strands of material culture studies within anthropology and cognate disciplines. Thus far, however, there has been no concerted application of this kind of approach to museum collections and interactions with them by museum visitors, curators, artists and researchers. Bringing together essays by scholars and practitioners from a wide disciplinary and international base, Museum Materialities seeks to make just such a contribution. In so doing it makes a valuable and original addition to the literature of both material culture studies and museum studies.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781136616549
Topic
Storia
Edition
1
1

MUSEUM MATERIALITIES

Objects, sense and feeling
Sandra H. Dudley
The more I looked at them, the more I studied them, the more I appreciated their beauty over and above the information about their context. They were beautiful! The more I described them and handled them, the more emotionally attached to them I became 
 My eyes opened.
Dr Ekpo Eyo, quoted in Vogel 1991: 195
This book is about objects, people and the engagements between them. It deals with the fundamentals of human experience of objects, specifically in the context of public display such as museum and gallery spaces. The volume aims simultaneously to return a material culture focus to studies of museums, and a museum focus to studies of human—object engagements. It heralds the re-emergence of the object as a focus point for understanding museums and what they do, and a concurrent renewal of the museum as a research site of great potential in wider explorations of interactions between people and the rest of the material world.
The book seeks to contribute to both museum studies and material culture studies. Each of these fields of enquiry has a long history of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity — in keeping with which, the chapters here explore understandings of objects, sensory experience, embodiment and affect developed through work informed by such diverse disciplines as cultural studies, social anthropology, sociology, philosophy, media studies, literary theory, psychology and neuroscience. The book's case studies are also rooted in contemporary museum practice, including exhibitions, education, outreach and artistic interventions, with authors variously focusing on displayed museum objects or art installations and interactions with them by museum visitors, curators, artists and researchers. Topics encountered include materiality and other perceptual and ontological qualities of objects themselves; embodied sensory and cognitive engagements with particular objects or object types in a museum or gallery setting; notions of aesthetics, affect and wellbeing in museum contexts; and creative and innovative artistic and museum practices that seek to illuminate or critique museum objects and interpretations. The book's authors include not only academic specialists in an extensive range of disciplines, but practising artists, curators and former curators and education officers too.
The attempt to focus on the material characteristics of objects and the ways in which those characteristics are sensorially experienced in museums, is an important part of the volume's rationale and a key focus of this first chapter. The ‘material turn’ (Edwards and Hart 2004: 3) in anthropology and related disciplines over the past twenty years has, rightly, led to concentration on the embeddedness of material objects in human social life and the meanings and values objects thereby acquire; yet arguably much of that ‘materialist’ analysis has simultaneously led us away from the reality, significance and very tangibility of material surfaces, encouraging us instead to leap straight into analysing the role of objects in social and cultural worlds, in the process missing out an examination of the physical actuality of objects and the sensory modalities through which we experience them. Despite, in other words, the renewed emphasis in much scholarship on the material — and indeed on the ultimately unbreakable, Janus-faced, definitive links that exist between it and the social — a great deal of material culture studies actually pay surprising little attention to the ‘irreducible materiality of things’ per se (Pietz 1985, cited in Spyer 2006). Exceptions include work on sensory culture — the ‘sensual revolution’ (Howes 2005) — part of a move away from the structuralist and poststructuralist dominance of language and discourse and the later pre-eminence of vision and ocularity, in both method and critical analysis. Another important area has comprised anthropological studies of art and aesthetics, wherein ‘aesthetics’ is broadly conceived ‘as a field of discourse that operates generally in human cultural systems, since like cognitive processes it can be applied to all aspects of human action’, not only art per se (Morphy 1994: 9). These sensory and aesthetic foci inform the rationale for this volume. Chapters here explore some of the ways and contexts in which things and people mutually interact; in the process, the book raises questions about how objects carry meaning and feeling, the distinctions between objects and persons, particular qualities of the museum as a context for person-object engagements, and the active and embodied role of the museum visitor. Each author addresses aspects of engagements with and experiences of objects in museum or gallery spaces. Indeed, the exploration of subjective experience — physical, multisensory, aesthetic, emotional, immersive — of publicly displayed objects, albeit from different perspectives, is the primary motif for the volume.
This book is not, however, simply an examination of strategies and technologies through which museums can seek to (i) maximize the sensory modalities visitors use to experience exhibitions and (ii) better enable audiences to interact with historical or other representations in the gallery space. Museums, and museum studies, to an extent are already substantively and constructively engaged with such issues. As will become clearer below, these engagements are generally not, however, of the ‘materialist’ kind called for and represented here, focused primarily or initially at least on physical, material and bodily experience rather than leaping immediately beyond into the important worlds of social context, social effect and the social and economic aspects of production and consumption.
A truly materialist approach necessitates a subtle, but important, re-jigging of emphasis in many areas of study, especially museums, influenced in part by phenomenology. Such a shift is already established in material culture studies — especially those areas influenced by sensory culture studies (e.g. Csordas 1994, Howes 1991 and 2003, Edwards & Hart 2004, Jackson 1996, Stoller 1989) — and indeed the possibilities of such a truly material emphasis were highlighted some time ago (e.g. Miller 1998). Yet this is an approach has not yet significantly influenced contemporary studies of museum collections and practices, with a few exceptions (e.g. the anthropologically focused Ames 1992 and Clifford's discussion of museums — and objects — as contact zones [1997], the more recent Edwards, Gosden and Phillips 2006a, and the more applied and less cross-cultural Pye 2007 and Chatterjee 2008). It is, as we shall see, a change of focus in which ‘the frame of museum contact’ (between cultures, periods, objects and persons) potentially ‘is recalibrated from museum space to museum object’ (Feldman 2006: 255; see especially Witcomb, and Wehner and Sear, this volume).

The museum object and materiality

There is a current, indeed dominant, view within museum studies and practice that the museum is about information and that the object is just a part — and indeed not always an essential part — of that informational culture. This approach has a long pedigree and has become an implicit part of discussions of the purpose and character of museums, be they characterized in relation to the by now extensive territory of learning in museums (c.f. Hooper-Greenhill 2007), social action (e.g. Gurian 2005, Sandell 2002), curation (e.g. Gathercole 1989) or to explorations of museums' historical development (e.g. in the context of exploring museum shifts from being ‘object-centred’ to ‘experience-centred’ [Parry 2007: 81]). It is a view in which objects have value and import only because of the cultural meanings which immediately overlie them and as a result of the real or imagined stories which they can be used to construct (e.g. Kavanagh 1989). The material object thus becomes part of an object-information package: indeed, in such a framework the museum object properly conceived is not the physical thing alone at all, but comprises the whole package — a composite in which the thing is but one element in ‘a molecule of interconnecting [equally important] pieces of information’ (Parry 2007: 80). In turn, from this perspective the package only has value as a tool in institutional practices which seek to create meanings with wider educational, social or political significance.
Museums' long-held aura as authoritative temples of enlightenment and culture rests upon the socially widespread belief that they hold in perpetuity, for the benefit of society, historically established data-sets comprised of objects and their documentation. Such repositories are available not only for repeated re-interpretation by scientists and art historians in different historical periods, but also as places of edification available to the ordinary visitor. If we are lucky, the museum-goer may come away informed, provoked, moved or inspired by the objects they see — but how? Is this simply a result of contextual information or at least object-information packages, and/or of exhibition design and interpretation? Or is it also something to do with physical, real-time, sensory engagements — even those which may be imagined — with material things, and the emotional and other personal responses such interaction can produce (e.g. variously Edwards, Witcomb, Rees Leahy, Ting, Watson and Golding, this volume)? If so, in what ways do those engagements come about, and how (if at all) do they differ in museums from those in the everyday material world which museum visitors and the originating communities of museum objects ordinarily inhabit(ed) (c.f. Taylor, Watson, Golding and Scarborough, this volume)?
Too often the possibilities for physical and emotional interaction with objects in museums are assumed to be non-existent or restricted to an elitist, ‘pure, detached, aesthetic response’ (O'Neill 2006: 104), unless they are enabled or underpinned by (largely textual) information provided by the museum. But might this dichotomous pair of response-types in reality be a little more complex? And while information is vital, might the conventional emphasis on it rather than on object, occasionally actually inhibit the varied possibilities of engagement across a socially extensive range of visitors, including those who lack prior knowledge of the objects they are looking at? To ask these questions at all, risks accusations of elitism or essentialism — but my objective is to explore the nature of objects and engagements with them, as a contributory part of contemporary investigations into how museums can effectively and inclusively enable people to reflect creatively, sometimes transformatively, on themselves and others, and to experience ‘beauty and knowledge as ends in themselves’ (O'Neill 2006: 111).
In the standard emphasis on meaning, important though it is and integral to it as the object may be, the object per se often seems lost: ‘Things dissolve into meanings’ (Hein 2006: 2). To say so does not imply support for a traditional, ‘essentialist’ model of the museum in which museums exist only to preserve, document and display objects, over a socially inclusive, ‘adaptive’ one in which museums exist primarily to serve society (O'Neill 2006: 97). Rather, I am seeking to shift the focus back to physical objects, but with a strong emphasis on their impacts — actual and potential — on real people (c.f. Edwards and Ting, this volume). There are, as we shall see throughout this book, so many possibilities in human—object engagements — yet such possibilities are, I suggest, sometimes severely curtailed by much of what a museum actually does. In particular, the museum's preoccupation with information and the way it is juxtaposed with objects — the biographies of historical objects and the persons associated with them, the classification and scientific significance of natural history specimens, the demonstration by ethnographic artefacts of aspects of particular ways of life — immediately takes the museum visitor one step beyond the material, physical thing they see displayed before them, away from the emotional and other possibilities that may lie in their sensory interaction with it. Of course, up to a point this is only as it should be: precisely because of the manner in which institutions have selected, categorized and preserved not only objects but also information pertaining to them, museums have indeed developed as ‘storehouses of knowledge as well as storehouses of objects’ (Cannon-Brookes 1984: 116, quoted in Parry 2007: 80). These epistemological functions and their political and moral ramifications are a central part of museums' historical and cultural rationale, and it is clear how important objects are in these processes (Bennett 1995, Knell 2007). But what are the experiential limitations of construing material objects as simply or principally elements in broader datasets and disciplinary paradigms? What are the implications of this conventional, informational approach for how things in museums are perceived and interacted with by curators and visitors? What opportunities might it foreclose? What might a different, material, even emotional, approach to museum objects contribute to the potential of socially inclusive museums to enable rich, physical and emotional, personal experiences for all their visitors? What would it be like for visitors more often than not to be able not only to read a text panel that explains an historical story associated with an object, but also to experience an embodied engagement with that object and thus form their own ideas and/or a tangible, physical connection with those who made and used it in the past?
There are two separate points wrapped up together here, both of which are key messages. The first, ontological point is that through our sensory experience of them objects have some potential for value and significance in their own right, whether or not we are privy to any information concerning their purpose or past. The second, more practical point is that creative, materialist thinking about embodied and emotional engagements with objects can provide more powerful alternatives or additions to textual interpretation in enabling visitors to understand and empathize with the stories objects may represent. From both perspec...

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