And it’s even a challenge to the idea of history, the museum, because it’s based on the invariance of the object. We can see an object of the eighteenth century, a painting for example, and still be touched by it. That’s a very strange thing, because we don’t dress like people of that age, we don’t think like them anymore ... Or take Greek objects: something happens – something interacts between our perception and this object. This undercuts the idea of history which emphasizes the difference, the change, the transformation.
MH: Yes, in your writing on “media tempor(e)alities” you quoted Heidegger’s Being and Time on the question of the extent to which the object is historical (Ernst 2008; 2012; Heidegger [1927] 1962). There is a tendency to assume that the traces of use make an object historical.
WE: That’s the way Heidegger tries to answer it, but the question he poses, I think, is still open to discussion because we know most of the objects in a museum are traditionally understood as historical objects but they are present and they have a present impression on us. So there is dissonance, a cognitive dissonance: cognitively we know they are past but we are affected by the object as present. Now this is a big paradox, and this is a productive paradox actually, which shows that the museum is not just part of cultural history or an agency of cultural history. And even the idea of history is challenged: for a long time the museum tour or narrative would start in early times and end in the present, although they could be arranged in a completely different way. The archaeological reading would be to take objects which traverse this seemingly historical sequence. For a long time the museum as a history machine produced history by the illusion that things progress, so that we begin by experiencing rough or crude objects and then end up with the most elaborate versions, as in technical museums which show technological progress. A lot of nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums were built on this model, or rather they were not only built on the historical model but they helped to build the historical model. Because, by physically wandering through these museums, we got this idea of history as progress which was based on the Hegelian idea of progress.
MH: Yes it’s interesting that in the art historical museum you have this Hegelian notion of the progress of art, and yet at the same time it was punctuated by these masterpieces that were supposed to transcend time and that you were supposed to almost sit in front of and commune with in some transhistorical way.
WE: Yes, this was the aesthetics of the art museum, of the art piece in the collection, until the age of Winckelmann and others when suddenly art itself became historicized. It’s fascinating to see how, for a long time, art from antiquity would have a metahistorical perfection. There was no historical distance to it; there was just a perfection which to later generations was the guideline. And one was confronted with it in private collections or in public museums or collections. Then there were figures like Winckelmann in 1764, writing History of the Art of Antiquity, where he said that art is dependent on its historical contexts (Winckelmann [1764] 2006). Suddenly art itself became historicized. Museums like the Berlin Altes Museum, built by Schinkel, reacted to it by arranging pieces of art in a historical sequence. It’s a spatial sequence, because all the museum rooms coexist spatially, but it was arranged in a way that we get the idea of a historical progress. And Hegel, who was living near the museum, built a lot of his ideas influenced by this arrangement of a gallery of pictures in a historical way. We can take it very literally, this phenomenology of mind – he in the end writes how the world and spirit progress through a gallery of pictures. We can take it very literally and visit the Altes Museum in Berlin: he was living just a few hundred yards away, and so was very much influenced by the new way of arranging museums.
MH: Something else you said that really resonated with me was in your chapter in the Susan Crane book – it was where you are writing about archives and you say the “true tragic archive is the soil” (Ernst 2000, 28). And, while I suppose I think of archives as things that have been authored, things that have been put together and ordered, collections that have been cataloged, at the same time it’s interesting to think of soil as an archive; it is an interesting way to think of power and the museum and what museums occlude or cover up. It reminded me of when I was researching whaling museums: there’s always some display of whaling equipment and a couple of whales, but then I read how the blood and oil from each sperm whale soaked into the earth – an extreme amount so that the whole port stank and the ground was full of the oil (Henning 2011). Similarly, what you said about the tragic archive being the soil made me think of the way in which history materially embeds itself. The effects of human activity on the earth and so on are constructing an inadvertent record, an archaeological record, and that sometimes conflicts with the version of events the authored museum wants to present.
WE: Yes, and this again depends first of all on the physical evidence, those traces you can smell: with the old machines, if they are not cleaned too much in the museum, you can smell the oil. Now this is what physically would be the entropy of the material, the decay – the decay which physically provides the time era. In physics there is the law of thermodynamics which says there is a tendency from order to disorder: this is a law of nature which gives time an arrow at all in a physical sense. Now you can only experience this with physical objects. It might be the soil or a videotape: there is history at work in the physical sense and for that you need the real object. We need this experience and this again is a virtue of the museum as opposed to the experience which we make now. Because, for everything that is digitally there and you copy it, there is no decay; the information can be copied without loss.
MH: But the museum tries to halt decay sometimes and sanitizes things.
WE: Yes, and it erases history. I would almost say that the strengths of the museum now would be counterstrategies to this to the new negentropic virtue of the information society,2 where you cannot make a distinction between the original and its copy anymore: for a digital copy this is true. The copy is not a copy anymore; it’s a second version of the original. Then you lose any trace of history. The negentropic material almost is not at work; it’s just very marginally at work – but that’s another discussion.
Now this creates a different sense of culture, of time, all those emphatic notions that are now in our cultural discourse. This opens a big gap between the old culture, which is dominated by the experience of entropy, and the new culture, which creates the illusion that there is lossless tradition. Now this is fascinating and worrying at the same time, this idea of lossless tradition. Where is the authority which can decide which is original and which is not? Is our authority within the material or is it just metadata providing the authority? Now, these are all questions the museum, if it’s clever, can address. The museum could be the place where those new semiological challenges are being reflected because the new media themselves have no place where they can reflect this. The Internet itself has no place where it can reflect itself. But the museum is a space and a place and a time; when you visit a museum you reserve some time to be open to reflection and contemplation. Now museums could be used to reflect cultural mechanisms or cultural technologies as they take place in the contemporary media world. Because we need another place, in the Foucauldian sense, we need a place which is different from the media in order to reflect on the media. You cannot reflect on a medium within the same medium – according to the system theory of the position of the observer, you have to create a difference. And, by proudly not being a medium in the modern sense, the museum could say exactly, “This is a place where we can reflect about media,” because it introduces a distance, a distance which is a precondition for reflection.
MH: Do you think there are any museums or exhibits that are already doing that, or starting to do that, in an interesting way?
WE: Yes there are museums which are starting to do that. For example, of recent experience the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford in England.
MH: It’s now the National Media Museum.
WE: Which is in itself interesting. It started out as a history museum of television and photography and is now called the National Media Museum.
