Curating Lively Objects

Exhibitions Beyond Disciplines

Lizzie Muller, Caroline Seck Langill, Lizzie Muller, Caroline Seck Langill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429620836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Curating Lively Objects explores the role of things as catalysts in imagining futures beyond disciplines for museums and exhibitions. Authors describe how their curatorial collaborations with diverse objects, from rocks to robots, generate new ways of organising and sharing knowledge.

Bringing together leading artists and curators from Australia and Canada, this volume addresses object liveliness from a range of entwined perspectives, including new materialism, decolonial thinking, Indigenous epistemologies, environmentalism, feminist critique and digital aesthetics. Foregrounding practice-based curatorial scholarship, the book focuses on rigorous reflexive accounts of how curating is done. It contributes to global topics in curatorial research, including time and memory beyond and before disciplinarity; the relationship between human and non-human across different ontologies; and the interaction between Indigenous knowledge and disciplinary expertise in interpreting museum collections.

Curating Lively Objects will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of curatorial studies, museum studies, cultural heritage, art history, Indigenous studies, material culture and anthropology. It also provides a vital resource for professionals working in museums and galleries around the world who are seeking to respond creatively, ethically and inclusively to the challenge of changing disciplinary boundaries.

Part I Troublesome objects

1 Decolonising archives

Killing art to write its history

Brook Garru Andrew Interviewed by Paris Lettau

Paris Lettau

We meet for this discussion in the wake of French President Emmanuel Macron’s enthusiastic declaration to an audience of students at the University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, that African cultural heritage can no longer be the prisoner of European collections. This was followed by the publication of the Sarr-Savoy Report Macron commissioned, which ambitiously “defends the path toward permanent restitutions” of African heritage (Sarr & Savoy 2018: 28). There has been high profile international resistance to the report’s recommendations, not least in the Victoria and Albert Museum Director Tristram Hunt’s well-critiqued attack that to “decolonise is to decontextualize” (Hunt 2019).

It is worth remembering that, historically, returning artefacts from museums was not necessarily a radical proposition. Conservative elements of nineteenth-century French society were all too eager to return cultural heritage to the Church and nobility after the looting and destruction of the French Revolution. Within a year of the British invasion of the Australian continent, French revolutionaries were destroying Christian chapels and abducting sacred religious objects and monuments, and Napoleon’s armies were pillaging masterpieces from the nations of Europe and North Africa. In 1793, the Louvre was opened in the former Royal Palace as a public showroom for Europe’s masterpieces and, shortly after, the Museum of French Monuments was established as a depot for Christian objects rescued from iconoclastic destruction. Following the revolution, elite cultural conservatives called for the restitution of the Church’s cultural heritage and, through the Bourbon Restoration, after 1816 most objects held by the Museum of French Monuments were returned.

Macron’s declaration is foreshadowed by two centuries of First Nations struggles to decolonise colonial archives, to accomplish that remarkably successful programme of cultural restitution that was, historically speaking, so swiftly achieved in the nineteenth century by the Church and nobility. Today, huge stockpiles of First Nations cultural heritage and human remains are still locked up in colonial collections around the world.

Your work engages in complex, difficult and, at times, uncomfortable ways with this ongoing archival legacy of colonialism. You were at the forefront of a new generation of First Nations artists who emerged in the 1990s and achieved unprecedented access to colonial archives. Since then, you have worked with an immense archival collection of First Nations cultural heritage scattered around the globe. There are actually moments I wonder how much your work really does succeed in distinguishing itself from the archive. From the beginning, your work was archivally embedded, including your now famous Sexy and Dangerous (1996), which drew on a then anonymous photograph from the Mitchell Library, New South Wales. But the curatorial aspect of your work has become even more pronounced in recent years, as you have moved beyond the traditional artistic confines of collaged paintings and photographs into museum-scale, archivally grounded installations like your major 2018 retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria, The Right to Offend is Sacred. And now the 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN, of which you are Artistic Director.

The pivotal question is what art – its discourses, practices and forms – brings to bear on the archive and this present-day movement of archival decolonialism that your work connects with. As an artist, your practice is in obvious ways unlike that of a curator of a collection, or a diplomat or politician working to decolonise and repatriate the colonial archive. Art operates inside an uncertain, largely interpretative and aesthetic framework. You show this framework does have considerable work to do. Not only for drawing on the archive as a resource to make works critical of colonialism (as if the archive were just a stockpile of material laying freely at the feet of the artist and without any predicting order), but also in transforming the meaning of objects and images contained in the archive – and therefore transforming the archive itself.

Brook GARRU Andrew

What you say about the French revolution and the dismantling of Christian icons at the same time that the colonial looting began is really interesting in terms of how it reflects on the present moment and the discussions about decolonisation and museum collections. It is a game changer that President Emmanuel Macron recently advocated for the restitution of African objects and artworks held in French museums. The report he commissioned recommends that French law – which has so far hindered the practicalities of restitution – be changed to allow “the final and unconditional return of heritage objects to the African continent” (Katz 2018). This is a provocative and important admission. An international public confession that such actions were unlawful and need to be reversed is both music and absurdity to the ears. As the current representative of the French, he is acknowledging that: African objects in museum collections, and by extension their influence over modernist art, are indeed not culturally owned by the French; the majority of African objects were actually stolen, as part of military and colonial projects; and a significant amount of cultural heritage is not available to its peoples. This proposition is transformational because it opens new ways to re-write history that account for the power of racism and colonial subjugation.

Macron’s promises resonate in Australia, where First Nations communities have long campaigned for the return of objects from European museums but also of Aboriginal human remains, which were subject to Western collection and trade well into the twentieth century. Today, some museums like the Natural History Museum, London, and Cambridge University’s Duckworth collection still refuse the repatriation of Aboriginal human remains. We need to remember this – the insidious nature of colonisation continues to disregard the need for closure and healing in separating Aboriginal people from their ancestors.

A national committee for the repatriation of Aboriginal human remains, including members Lyndon Ormond-Parker, Phil Gordon and Christine Grant, has been working to establish a National Resting Place – a place for human remains that are without provenance to rest with ceremony (Advisory Committee for Indigenous Repatriation 2014). There are currently over 700 human remains in Canberra, housed in a suburban storage unit like a shed, and many thousands more in institutions abroad (Daley 2014). We need a resting place for our ancestors. Macron’s admission gives hope, albeit chaos for the institutes that hold these objects and human remains, as restitution or repatriation will undo the delusion that Aboriginal people’s bodies and objects are somehow inferior to Western humanity.

This very important work is context for my practice and thinking through the handling of human remains and cultural objects, and the liveliness, or not, of objects: I tend to think of it in terms of what is rendered harmless and harmful. For example, my work Vox: Beyond Tasmania (2013a) is a sculptural vitrine within which are displayed cultural objects and the paraphernalia of anthropology including documents relating to phrenology. It includes half a real skeleton that was gifted to me by a former student of medicine at the University of Melbourne. Phrenology created a market for human remains, especially the skulls of Aboriginal peoples, from the eighteenth century and well into the twentieth century. In such contexts, the skull that was a real human being, and now is the ancestral remains for descendants, became a study tool in a Western university and was rendered a harmless object of study.

Figure 1.1 Brook Garru Andrew, Vox: Beyond Tasmania and 52 Portraits, 2013. Installation view, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, Australia. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Christian Capurro.

Figure 1.2 Brook Garru Andrew, Vox: Beyond Tasmania and 52 Portraits, 2013b. Installation view, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, Australia. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Christian Capurro.

In my work, I try to create a powerful experience where history speaks back. It is a process of reframing this detritus of research into a powerful voice. The combination of human remains with the textbooks of phrenology – including photographs of skulls and the graphic material rendering racial types – is reframed, becoming part of the evidence of historical atrocities. It is well-documented that the trade in human remains included grave robbing and collection of remains following events of massacre on the frontier.

I am interested in how ordinary objects can become transformed; in the example of Vox: Beyond Tasmania, a seemingly harmless object becomes harmful. The ethnographic objects in the vitrine include a stone axe and shield from Wiradjuri country and texts, all referencing the immensity of materials gathered to study Indigenous bodies internationally, from the colonial exploits. Finally, there is a large wooden megaphone standing nearly two metres high butted up against the vitrine/sculpture glass facade, with a 20 centimetre circular hole cut in the glass, this hole is an exit for the imagined amplified voice of the skull projected out of this massive vitrine.

For me, the archive can provide evidence of hidden atrocities. As part of a sculpture in my exhibition The Right to Offend is Sacred at the National Gallery of Victoria (2017), I displayed an original letter from 1854 by the settler James Dixon, describing a massacre of Aboriginal people on a battlefield of the Australian Frontier Wars in Victoria’s Western District. In this example, the archival object became very useful; these objects can become lively and active. What might be seen as a harmless correspondence between friends, one on the frontier of Australia and the other in England, is actually powerful evidence of frontier massacres, and these events which number in the hundreds have been mostly absent from the historical record. I received that evidence through a rare book dealer. However, it is not just a letter from 1854. In the artwork, it becomes a sacred object or an icon.

I do seek out positive examples of reclamation or empowerment through objects in my practice. When you’re looking at Indigenous cultures, you don’t study objects alone. The meanings of objects are not revealed until they’re connected to other objects and they all work together to create a story, or a movement, or a dance, or a place. They need everything together. It’s like a house, you need your salt and pepper with your table, in the kitchen.

A good example of this is the former Blacktown Native Institution, which was the first government programme to remove Aboriginal children from their families in the early nineteenth century, so it is key to the history of assimilation and race relations in Australia (Blacktown Native Institution Project). The interesting thing about the former site in Western Sydney, which now looks like a vacant lot on the side of a highway, is that the traditional owners, the Darug, have reclaimed it as a site for cultural rejuvenation, for dance and practising culture. Over the past decade, they have been inviting First Nations artists to make work on the land to activate the site, and holding significant gatherings, through a programme supported by the Museum of Contemporary Art’s C3West Program and the Blacktown Arts Centre. In October 2018, the site was formally handed over, with a transfer of ownership back to the Darug people, and they are now working towards creating a living memorial to the Stolen Generations on the site.

PL

Your idea of how ordinary objects are transformed in your work is fundamental. The archival material you draw on – taken from major colonial institutions, as well as a personal collection of historical postcards, textiles, photographs, newspaper cuttings, and books – document and reveal often obscure localised histories not immediately recognised by the viewer. They are “ordinary”, or you could even say “weak” objects and images, to borrow a phrase from Boris Groys. Weak, not because they are visually uninteresting, but because they are generally anonymous images that have survived historical oblivion because archives have safeguarded their preservation and protection. Groys writes that weak images “seem to be endangered, put in the apocalyptic perspective, ready to disappear” (2010: 118). In your work, they are like little islands of time, little potentials for new memories, that have been lying dormant before presentation in your work.

I’m thinking, for instance, of your recent large-scale installations but also 52 Portraits (2013b), comprised of enlarged photographs of nineteenth-century postcards portraying unknown people from places including Sudan, Argentina, Syria, and Australia. From the perspective of the hidden potential stored away in archival images, 52 Portraits is more revealing than a work like Gerhard Richter’s 48 Portraits (1971–98), which draws on already well-known “strong” images of icons like Albert Einstein and Oscar Wilde, who survive historical oblivion because they exist in a vast collective memory.

But part of the redemptive aspect of your work is clearly the act of transformation in which you turn these images into powerful images, using formal devices taken from advertising and pop-art that give scale and visual presence to its subjects. In Sexy and Dangerous (1996), for example, you present the image of a young Aboriginal man as if he is a celebrity icon of the mass media, like an Andy Warhol screen-print of Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley.

Beyond the romantic acceptance and even fetishisation of the weak image, which is evident in Groys’ description above, you rescue weak images from disappearance by making them appear as if they were icons; you transform the weak image into something with a different kind of power, into a strong image.

In doing so, your work suggests the potential for new meanings, as if a kind of “potential energy” were stored away in the colonial archive that can be put to new uses, formed into counter-memories and drawn on as a source for restitution. From the perspective of cultural rescue, this is a powerful proposition because it shows that the weak energy hidden away in the depths of the archive can be reanimated, given an afterlife.

BA

Your point about the “potential energy” stored away in archival objects raises the questions: What is an object? What is an icon? Are these just static things, or a series of actions? I’ve got two examples from my recent practice in mind. They’re in some ways the yin and yang of it.

One would be Pablo Picasso’s Buste de femme (1943), a painting that I worked with at the Van Abbemuseum, as part of the research programme Deviant Practice. The Picasso is one of the treasured works of their collection. For the installation, I turned the Picasso on its side at a ninety-degree angle. That was a difficult process to go through. I don’t dislike Picasso as an artist. The question is more about him being exalted as the genius within European society, which is evident in the way he is described in museum contexts and art history. This genius status is intertwined with Picasso’s use or misuse of so-called primiti...