Curious Lessons in the Museum

The Pedagogic Potential of Artists' Interventions

Claire Robins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317155522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

Amongst recent contemporary art and museological publications, there have been relatively few which direct attention to the distinct contributions that twentieth and twenty-first century artists have made to gallery and museum interpretation practices. There are fewer still that recognise the pedagogic potential of interventionist artworks in galleries and museums. This book fills that gap and demonstrates how artists have been making curious but, none-the-less, useful contributions to museum education and curation for some time. Claire Robins investigates in depth the phenomenon of artists' interventions in museums and examines their pedagogic implications. She also brings to light and seeks to resolve many of the contradictions surrounding artists' interventions, where on the one hand contemporary artists have been accused of alienating audiences and, on the other, appear to have played a significant role in orchestrating positive developments to the way that learning is defined and configured in museums. She examines the disruptive and parodic strategies that artists have employed, and argues for that they can be understood as part of a move to re-establish the museum as a discursive forum. This valuable book will be essential reading for students and scholars of museum studies, as well as art and cultural studies.

PART I ARTISTS, MUSEUMS AND EDUCATION IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

1

Shifting priorities for learning in the museum

Introduction

This chapter provides a brief museological and pedagogic backdrop against which to position artists’ interventions. Acknowledging that education has been threaded through museum collections from the outset, it examines some of the conflicting aims for the use of visual and material culture in the pursuit of knowledge and in support of taste. The artists’ intervention (currently rather than historically) has become one strategy for brokering between museum collections and visitors, therefore, the focus in this chapter is on identifying the shifting priorities for learning in the museum and the concerns of artists who have been drawn to particular collections and to consider how museums have shaped visitors’ experiences of collections.

It presents a complex picture of the points of intervention, eschewing notions of simple opposition or confluence with dominant museum discourse. The chapter is divided into sections that emphasise social and cultural changes that have influenced the museum’s configuration of pedagogic imperatives. It identifies the role that artists have played in dislodging ‘normalised’ interpretation, display and other practices.

Public museums owe their provenance to the Enlightenment project; they are products of the modern period. Since their inception in the late eighteenth century they have been developed, deployed, enjoyed and scrutinised as pedagogic and political institutions. But the museum’s pedagogic role, predicated in the present climate on the deceptively simple egalitarian principle of extending access to learning from collections and exhibitions beyond a professional or elite minority, continues to divide opinion and fuel debate.1 So too does the issue of how knowledge might be extracted and constituted from the examination and interpretation of exhibited materials.

If it is possible to accept museums as axiomatically pedagogic then the discourse of these institutions, which has been disrupted or contested by artists’ interventions, is similarly concerned with knowledge and its presentation and dissemination. It is through such discourse, with its increasingly sophisticated systems of representation, that artists have made interventions and revelations, and brought new insights to public attention

Pre-Enlightenment collections: a curious education

Until the time of Elias Ashmole, in the closing years of the seventeenth century, cabinets of curiosities remained associated with a ‘mysterious and hierarchical vision of society’, fundamentally indebted to the legacy of scholasticism and its allegorical perception of the world. Behind the mystery of each object – unique fascinating and marvellous – there loomed the shadow of an ancient body of learning that had been lost, and which in order to be revealed once more awaited only the meticulous, impassioned gaze of the collector.2

It may seem that reviewing the condition of learning through collections prior to the eighteenth century is remote from the work of contemporary artists and the central concerns of this book. However, the open-ended, imaginative and poetic possibilities for interpreting the world in pre-Enlightenment collections – possibilities that were somewhat punitively banished in the rational ordering systems that followed – are important precisely because they continue to have an influential hold on artists. Early collections, such as those that formed the Tradescants’ ‘Ark’ in Lambeth (established 1629), do not offer an evolutionary model of development through to the museums of today. Their historical significance is often charted in contrast to the scientific meta-narratives that have dominated museum experiences for the last two centuries. But the analogous way of understanding the world that they propose also appears to have accrued a little more attention as the assuredness of the meta-narrative has faded.

In the museum’s proto-period, as cabinet of curiosity or Wunderkammer,3 educational and political roles were not entirely absent but had yet to achieve clarity in their expression. In most accounts of the transition from pre- to post-Enlightenment collections, disorganisation and confusion tend to characterise the ‘pre’ period, while the ‘post’ period is denoted by the order and rationalism of newly-formed classification systems described as a direct outcome of scientific progress (mainly referencing Linnaeus4 and philosophical thought5). However, these stark polarisations are somewhat misleading and contemporary manifestations of cabinets of curiosity as ‘cupboards filled with miscellaneous artefacts’ also serve to perpetuate a flawed idea of random collision and simple subjective value. More accurately, it is not that early collections had no sense of order, but that the order and ideas that they intended to communicate appear alien, sometimes bizarre and often ill-informed to contemporary Western understanding.6 If one is desirous of gaining a rational understanding of material phenomena and its properties then these collections, with their superstitious and fanciful aspects, are easily dismissed. However, as artists and theorists have suggested we should perhaps not be too hasty to disavow as nonsense all that does not cohere with traditional Western epistemic values.

Collections in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries undoubtedly were more subjectively accrued than those that succeeded them and some appear to be extremely whimsical in character. From an educational perspective this was a time when the cult of curiosity and wonder reigned. In this period selected artefacts and natural specimens enjoyed an unprecedented autonomy as ‘purveyors and enigmas of the universe’.7 Voyages of discovery and colonisation circumscribe collecting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The underlying principles of many early collections reflected a unifying principle for understanding the world, something along the lines of: God is prolific, prodigious and ingenious; be impressed, be in awe and be afraid. However, there were signs in other collections of a new order, an attempt to represent the knowledge of the world in miniature; yours to possess and control. The emergence of a new secular context for collections, developed in the private and guarded treasuries of the aristocracy (and eventually the bourgeoisie), symbolised not only a shift in power and wealth away from church but also the beginning of the unsettling of theology from its hegemonic epistemology. Travel and mercantilism created the conditions for the rise in popularity of ‘curiosities’ and ‘wonders’ and moreover enabled artefacts and specimens to be more readily accrued outside the curatorial auspices of the church. The ideal museum of the 1560s, according to Samuel Quiccheberg’s treatise on museology, was: ‘a theatre of the broadest scope, containing materials and precise reproductions of the whole universe’.8 This, of course, is not so distant from the simultaneous pedagogic development of public museums and encyclopaedias some two centuries later.

CONSTRUCTING MEANING THROUGH SPECTACULAR VISIONS

A burgeoning awareness of the construction of meaning through display technologies also predates the educational quests of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Religious collections, in particular, employed theatricality and spectacle to rival any twenty-first century interactive display. They demonstrate an enthusiasm for laying claim to objects from the material world, which could be displayed in order to impress a vision on a credulous audience. Spectacle’s part in an affective repertoire of persuasion can appear, by definition, to be immune from human activity but in fact it often took the form of some participant activity, albeit activity that was intended to be inaccessible to any projected review or correction.

The manner in which the Church laid claim to objects from the material world to impress a vision on its ‘audience’ provides an example in ideological persuasion that would be transposed as collections expanded from church to aristocracy and much later to the public sphere. The intentions, according to Stephen Bann,9 were to entertain and astonish audiences whilst simultaneously inculcating them into the doctrines of the Church. Learning, in these instances, was formed around the act of looking, animated by a process of showing and fixed by the dual forces of context and narrative.

Bann’s account, of viewing religious collections in the Middle Ages, draws on Erasmus’ satirical description of a visit to Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury Cathedral, made between 1512 and 1514. The extract below points to the theatricality of the event and its intended effect, but is then somewhat undermined by the tongue-in-cheek re-telling of the experience:

‘He opened up for us the chest in which the rest of the holy man’s body is said to lie’

‘You saw the bones’

‘No that is not permitted nor would it be possible without the use of ladders. But within the wooden chest is a golden chest; when this is drawn up by ropes, it reveals immeasurable treasure’

‘The cheapest part was the gold. Everything shone and dazzled with rare and surpassingly large jewels some the size of a goose egg. Some monks stood about reverently. When the cover was removed we all adored. The Prior pointed out each jewel by touching it with a white rod, adding its French name, its worth and the name of the donor. The principal ones were gifts from Kings.’10

From early collections to the present day a continuum can be observed whereby art and artefacts are arranged as purveyors of narratives and devices for publicly instituting meaning. But, as can be detected here, there is a gap between what is projected and what is received. Whilst some audiences may have complied to be desired ‘empty vessels’ waiting to be filled with particular educational narratives this did not hold true in all cases. Erasmus’ parodic tones unsettle the didactic intention of the lesson, opening a possibility to undermine the intended meaning.

DISPLAY AND CONTAINMENT, MARKING DIFFERENCE

Early collections, as their names suggest, placed great importance on display apparatus and paraphernalia such as cabinets and cupboards.

The founding secret that lay at the heart of cabinets of curiosities was thus dual in nature: their intention was not merely to define, discover and possess the rare and the unique, but also, and at the same time, to inscribe them within a special setting which would instil in them layers of meaning.11

Cabinets, cases, panels, boxes and drawers spoke of many different orders. But there was a notable overarching desire to establish continuity between art and nature. These categories of artificialia (art and artefacts) and naturalia (specimens) were exhibited cheek by jowl in many early collections such as the cabinet of Francesco Calozari (1622). Here, prize possessions were displayed on a kind of altar. The collection was not without hierarchy or order, but this was a much more personal matter. Rarity was often the a priori justification for an object’s presence and placement within a display hierarchy. However, rarity was certainly contingent, for example geographically as in the case of ethnographical objects, or in relation to time, as with many relics. Priorities for viewing would often be constructed around how fiercely items were desired. Objects that obscured their origin, problematised classification or defied explanation were particularly prized. Coral, for example, was in great demand as an ambiguous object that straddled two essential categories of artificialia and naturalia. Strangeness and size were often qualifying qualities, as pioneer collector John Tradescant’s12 letter of 1625 testifies. He requests of Edward Nicholas, secretary to the Navy, that voyages to North America and West Africa would supply examples of wonders from the natural world – ‘a riverhorse’ (hippopotamus); an elephant’s head ‘with the teethe in it very larg’; ‘the greatest sorts of Shellfishes Shelles of Great flying fishes & Sucking fishes with what els strang’.13

SCOPOPHILIA AND THE IMAGINATIVE ALLURE OF ANECDOTE

When viewing such collections as those of Francesco Calozari or Johann Septimus Jörger14 the eye was privileged above other sense experiences. According to Celeste Olalquiaga, ‘these collections privileged an...