5, Jenny Chamarette starts from the premise that the museum itself does a similar disappearing act. Yet, by bringing cinema into the museum, Chamarette argues, the museum (as well as cinema) is put on display. This idea, that cinema can work critically to make the museum’s framing visible, recalls a point made by Alexander Horwath, director of the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, that the detachment of artists’ film from both commercial cinema and the art museum enables it to reflect critically on both institutions (Sperlinger and White 2008, 119). Chamarette focuses on the Pompidou Center in Paris, where, she suggests, filmmakers have challenged the status of the museum as the protector of cultural heritage or patrimony. She gives the example of Roberto Rossellini’s 1977 film Le Centre Georges Pompidou which, she argues, subtly critiqued the ideas of high culture and democratization that underpinned the new museum, as did the sociological analysis of the center, undertaken at the same time under the direction of Pierre Bourdieu (Fabiani and Menger 1979; Heinich 2003).
For Horwath, the film museum is the in-between space that artists’ film can occupy (and has occupied in the past), an institution closely related to cinémathèques and film libraries, and one that has marginal status compared to the art museum (Sperlinger and White 2008, 120). The Pompidou both collects and shows moving image work within an art museum context. But, according to Chamarette, the meeting of cinema and museum at the Pompidou is not a tale of the incorporation of one by the other but of a clash of spaces, conventions, and expectations; a relationship of mutual suspicion as well as interdependence. That this is not always the case is suggested by Wasson’s account of the “harmonious and mutually interdependent” historical relationship between the two institutions in the United States (Chapter 26). Even at the Pompidou, Chamarette suggests, the relationship has ultimately been productive: faced with the resistance and challenges of film, the Pompidou Center has been able to renegotiate itself and to challenge what a museum can be and do (Chapter 5).
“Mediazation” can involve a closer relationship with commercial environments than some public museums are used to. Maeve Connolly discusses how, initially, experimental art projects in television were made possible by television broadcasters themselves, but these declined with the development of a deregulated neoliberal and commercialized media environment. New “participatory and discursive activities” have flourished, and art projects continue to reflect critically on both television and art institutions and practices. However, some museums and galleries adopt broadcast formats or collaborate with broadcasters, not in order to reflect on these, but simply to try to engage a broader public, and in the process become full participants in a “celebrity-driven cultural economy” (Connolly, Chapter 6).
Bringing things to life
In Chapter 1, Ernst suggests that museums need to focus on their own specificity, particularly the strengths that result from the presence of the material object. In my own chapter, I recount how museums have a history of being hospitable to reproductions and facsimiles, and argue that the value attached to direct experiences of authentic, original artifacts is associated with the notion that they are under threat from mediation (Henning, Chapter 25). The physical, material qualities of museum artworks became all the more vivid when they could be used to set the art object apart from the media object or photographic facsimile. While mediation in the form of information, context, and framing is necessary to make objects meaningful, it also appears to put a distance between visitors and the artifact, to diminish the potential for wonder, to “kill” the object.
The rhetoric of “bringing objects to life” is commonly used, even though most Western museums subscribe to the Western scientific view that the objects in their collections do not have life in any real sense. In her chapter, Fiona Candlin addresses this notion, asking “why museum exhibits are commonly perceived to be in need of resuscitation” (Chapter 13). She sees the use of the terms “live” and “dead” to describe museum objects as metaphoric (except where talking about living animals or animal and human remains). The dead object is one where “the practices and responses associated with its former functions have been sidelined and ... scholarly and aesthetic responses dominate.” A live object, by contrast, continues to elicit responses related to its previous role. Candlin is using a distinction derived from the early nineteenth century argument of Quatremère de Quincy, who saw museums as destroying artworks by removing them from their previous contexts and uses. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, in her writing on anthropological displays, suggests that the question of how much context is brought with an object into the display is really a question of where to make the “cut” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; see also Henning, Chapter 25). This cut not only produces the object as object by severing it from the world of which it was a part, but also destroys its use value.
The metaphoric sense of animate, lively things predominates in the anthropological concept of the “social life of things,” and in actor network theory where “nonhumans” (often, but not exclusively, technical objects) are understood as “actants” able to take on “delegated” human actions and capacities as if alive (Appadurai 1986; Latour 1992). However, Ivan Gaskell argues in his chapter that “to use a thing as though it were alive is not the same ontologically as for it to be alive” (Chapter 8). Some societies and cultures do hold certain objects to be sacred, numinous, or alive: and many such objects reside in museum collections. As Gaskell explains, both “life” and “things” are unstable concepts that are not settled even within a Western philosophical or scientific framework. Yet, many Western museums assume that the things in their collection are not alive in any meaningful sense. Gaskell argues that museums that hold objects in their collections that are sacred objects of veneration, or considered as living by their originating communities, need to begin from the premise that the Western biological sense of life is not the only valid one. He concludes that we need to consider “variable worlds” in which the quality that is “life” itself varies, and to understand museums as the mediators between these worlds (Chapter 8). Museums that facilitate acts of veneration such as smudging with smoke and touching, enable sacred objects to be returned to communities for rituals, or participate in reciprocal exchange carry out this mediating role more equitably than those “encyclopedic museums” that claim to be cosmopolitan yet refuse to countenance such exchanges.
While Gaskell is interested in the treatment by museums of sacred or numinous objects, Candlin is interested in the ways in which small, informal museums avoid the sense of deadened or impotent objects by not separating objects from the originating community, by being situated in an environment “broadly consonant with its interests” and by mediating its objects in such a way that they seem more immediate and “alive” (Chapter 13). The notion of liveness as something that is produced through display practices also resonates in anthropologist Petra Tjitske Kalshoven’s chapter. She writes about living history and re-enactment practices that animate museum objects, bringing them to life through replication and performance in ways that “both defy and celebrate the sanctity of the museum space” (Chapter 24). She sees this in terms of play, which, following Johan Huizinga’s famous study Homo Ludens ([1950] 1967), she describes in terms of the construction of temporary “worlds apart.” In Kalshoven’s account, museum objects are given back their usefulness, but as replicas, miniatures, and in the context of the intense experience of historical re-enactment. For her, the liveliness of objects comes in their integration into play, or via the careful staging of objects in exhibition giving
