Museum Theory. Группа авторов

      4

      ANARCHICAL ARTIFACTS

      Museums as Sites for Radical Otherness

       Janice Baker

       But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues You can tell by the way she smiles …

      Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna”

      This chapter considers what museum objects might do at the level of affect rather than what they are interpreted to mean in the critical literature at a didactic or ideological level. The notion of affect is far from straightforward, as it refers to impressions or impacts that shift us from one state of being to another, yet are outside the radar of our specific, conscious thought. It is part of the chapter’s intent to tentatively propose a theory of affect and affectivity in the context of museum objects.

      As a brief introduction, Nigel Thrift, in developing his theory of nonrepresentation, provides a useful starting point with the suggestion that “affect is a different kind of intelligence about the world, but it is intelligence nonetheless, and previous attempts to either relegate affect to the irrational or raise it up to the level of the sublime are both equally mistaken” (2008, 175). A recent anthology of writings edited by Patricia Clough (2007) reflects the “affective turn” she discerns across disciplinary discourses. Her view is that people in Western capitalist societies are networked to such a multiplicity of information, communication, and technological influences that we need to rethink what constitutes the affective in relation to the social, and hence to subjectivity. In this chapter I focus on what constitutes the affective in relation to museum objects in order to add a material network into the pot of influences, in this case the singular potency of material objects to change how we think about interactions between human and nonhuman worlds.

In much of the scholarly literature on museums, the opportunity to investigate affective intelligence tends to be closed off by the parameters of the critical theory underscoring the analysis (see Baker 2008). Affects are not deemed to have autonomy or agency beyond the historical, social, and cultural forces that the critical theory seeks to address. The term “critical theory” refers here to a set of disciplinary methods, approaches, and theories that Jonathan Harris has identified as constituting a shift from traditional art history to a “new,” “radical,” or “critical” art history (2001, 7). These sets of theories and approaches are apparent in considering a not unrelated shift from traditional museology to the “new” museology, and encompass Marxist political, economic, and social theory; feminist critiques of patriarchy; psychoanalysis; semiotics; and structuralism. It is axiomatic to these theories and approaches that people’s experience of the world, affective or otherwise, is framed ideologically by an individual’s or a community’s beliefs, convictions, and ideas. In reflecting on the limits of this axiom, the discussion in the chapter considers that serendipitous impressions and impacts play more of a role in our awareness than is accounted for in the critical literature. Additionally, meaning shifts with each person’s response to an object in a dynamic process of mutual exchange. The exchange generates a reaction regardless of any meaning that may be extant when an artifact is read as an ideological text. The chapter suggests that limiting the autonomy that can be given to the quality of experience at the level of affect is unfortunate, as it diminishes theoretical investigation into the transformative capacity of museum objects.

      A contrast between the type of museum described in the academic literature and the museum imagined in fiction tells us something about our approach to visitor–object encounters. The museums we encounter in films and literature are frequently the abode of artifacts that “exhibit” extraordinary powers and behaviors which defy the commonsense notion that they are static objects. The museum of the imagination is characterized by unlikely and extreme events or acts of transgression that transform both artifacts and characters. We might consider this a narrative representation of the way that objects have an unexpected and sometimes profound impact. Ideologically oriented analyses of museum objects and displays cannot feasibly approach the possibility of such wayward events having an impact through experience outside ideology. Methodologically framing the meaning of a museum object so that it confirms, for example, the operation of Freudian or patriarchal repression doesn’t acknowledge that the very same object might escape the psychic or socially constructed drama. When an object, be this a multimedia installation, a Greek vase, or a Renaissance painting, acquires its meaning within the ideological framework intended by a museum or critique, its didactic value may be enhanced, but the object’s agency or potency to bend, or perhaps to even nullify intended meaning, may well be diminished.

There are some critics who are keenly observant of objects in museums exerting a silent eloquence that reconfigures intended or expected meanings. This may happen in a range of ways, but invariably involves a disruption to the intended staging by a museum. The interesting point here is that museums are creators of their own contradictions; they have a certain self-reflexivity, such as when objects in their collections reject the narrative formulations in which they are placed. One example is Kevin Hetherington’s (1997) marvelous account of Ozzy the owl, a seventeenth-century slipware jug which, set among more “salubrious” ceramics in the City Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent in England, has an anomalous presence that creates a fold in the narrative of the museum space, in terms of place, aesthetics, and connoisseurship. Hetherington explains how the museum is configured to guide visitors not only in terms of where to go within the fixed geometry of Euclidean space, but how to discursively understand objects within this space: “Agency is … mediated by the space itself and by the semiotics of its heterogeneous materiality” (1997, 201). He then details how the owl jug undoes this discursive space by the unwitting creation of an uncertain topology. The Ozzy the owl jug became famous when it was accidently “discovered” on BBC TV’s Antiques Roadshow. It came to be given a primary display location in the Stoke museum outside the usual narrative placing of slipware. This display saw a crude, popular slipware jug replace an authoritative source book about ceramics. Ozzy’s “owl-becoming” involved a series of unintended slippages, a fold between times and spaces which “Neither the owl, the museum staff, the visitors, nor the Antiques Roadshow intended” (214).

      Another example of the self-reflexive museum is expressed in James Clifford’s (1985) call to “reinvigorate the fetish” in ethnographic museums. Clifford does not base his comment on a naive criticality toward non-Western objects that ignores relationships between the construction of colonial narratives and the power wielded by museums. As an anthropologist, he is acutely aware of the museum’s legacy of configuring exhibits to construct knowledge to sanction agendas of power. Given this legacy and the function of national museums in imperial exploits, such as the looting of European collections to fill the Napoleonic Louvre and the aftermath of European imperialism, it is entirely unsurprising that museology has been vigilant about interrogating relations between knowledge and power, and that this is a relation generally held by critics to be an inherent feature of the museum. Clifford’s point, however, is that there is a value in acknowledging the myriad of standpoints from which non-Western objects can be encountered: “Seen in their nomadic resistance to classification they could remind us of our lack of self-possession, of the

Скачать книгу