In a sense, the objects Clifford refers to have the agency to reconfigure the colonial inheritance that defines them as museum objects in the first instance.
The times are a-changing
Recognition of the need for a new style of museology arose during the 1970s from a widespread dissatisfaction with elitist museums that, in both subtle and overt ways, excluded much of the populace. This form of elitism is parodied in the character of Dr. McPhee in the comedy-adventure film Night at the Museum (dir. Shawn Levy, 2006). McPhee (played by Ricky Gervais) is director of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, an institution experiencing poor audience attendances, which is unsurprising given his obnoxious disdain of visitors. Although Gervais’s character is a fabrication, it epitomizes the type of museology rejected by theorists keen to advance an inclusive museum that is accessible to a range of audiences. Disapproval of museums and skepticism about their use of authority is nothing new and reflective of a discourse that goes back to eighteenth-century criticism of the Louvre. There was particularly strong disdain shown toward museums by the early twentieth-century European avant-garde. F. P. Marinetti, in his 1909 Futurist Manifesto for example, called for museums to be flooded as they were graveyards for art, while the French poet Paul Valéry was expansive about the indefensible accumulation of artifacts in the Louvre. Cultural critic Theodor Adorno (1967) drew on Valéry’s adverse criticism in an essay in which he likens museums to family sepulchers of works of art. He frames the shift that occurred in museums, from an artwork’s use value to its exchange value, in terms of the death of art. Closer to the present, Douglas Crimp began his essay “On the Museum’s Ruins” (1985) by quoting Adorno’s “museum mortality” and suggesting the time was ripe for a Foucauldian analysis of the museum and art history, a challenge taken up by Tony Bennett (2004) who, however, viewed the museum not as a place of confinement like prisons and asylums, but instead as part of a larger exhibitionary complex of discipline and power (see Chapter 1 by Tony Bennett in this volume for further discussion of this difference).
Peter Vergo described the old style of elitist museology as a fossil, expanding the metaphor by pejoratively comparing the museum and the coelacanth, whose brain shrinks in the course of its development so that “in the end it occupies only a fraction of the space available to it (2000, 3). The new museology championed by him and others is predicated on museum collections, displays, programs, and texts that are relevant and accessible to diverse communities. However, what has happened is that, in explicating the parameters of an inclusive museum, a compensatory discourse has arisen that reflects a corresponding type of exclusivity. The inclusive museum has become exclusive through its inclusivity. This is a dilemma that emerges from the requirement to position museum practice in such a way as to enforce meanings that correspond to accessibility and the rhetoric of social inclusivity (Tlili 2008). The issue here is not the merit of inclusivity per se, but the normalizing of a new didacticism as a discursive formation that may ultimately hinder the very renewal that the new museology has all along sought to facilitate (Baker forthcoming).
An early example of the new museology’s interpretation of a museum constructing knowledge to further its own ends is Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach’s 1978 analysis of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Duncan and Wallach read the layout of art across MoMA at the time of their writing as a gendered narrative that promotes American abstraction. In the narrative, American abstract art is transcendent over other art, notably paintings and sculptures of European female nudes. They describe how the museum’s layout as a labyrinth creates a particular experience. Traditionally, the ordeal of going through a labyrinth is a “male spiritual endeavour in which consciousness finds its identity by transcending the material, biological world and its Mother Goddess” (Duncan and Wallach [1978] 2002, 493). What visitors to MoMA experience is a “ritual walk” through “an irrational world in which everyday experience looms as monstrous and unreal compared with the higher realm of dematerialized spirit,” in this instance the realm of abstract American art (486). This experience accords a particular meaning to American abstraction that positions it favorably within an art hierarchy. This advantages the museum, which collects and champions this art. The insight of the labyrinthine experience at MoMA is not in dispute; what is relevant is the difficulty of considering a visitor’s experience to the museum outside this ritual intent. There is no space within the discursive parameters of Duncan and Wallach’s analysis for an alternative reading, as the ritual effect they discern is all-encompassing; there is no concession to an affective or cognitive intelligence that may be immune to the ritual. An irony is apparent here, as the totalizing effect of the critical interpretation would seem to parallel the all-encompassing caliber of the ritual discerned in the museum.
Alan Wallach has continued to write about the role of North American art institutions as producers and conveyers of ideologies. In 2001 he criticized the exhibition Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People at the New York Guggenheim, arguing that the rebranding of Rockwell by an iconic modernist museum represented “a triumph of corporatization.” Wallach observes that American art museums in late capitalist society, “In their operation and approach to the public, have increasingly come to resemble the corporations that, for the most part, now support them” (2003, 100). He continues: “at the museum, visitors simply put themselves in the hands of the professionals and experts who furnish them with information and insight. In this respect, they are not very different from corporate clients in need of specialized services” (107). An outcome of this corporatization is that a museum visit is no different, in a structural sense, from a trip to a shopping mall or to Disneyland.
It may be that there is a structural similarity between a walk-through of a shopping mall or a Disney theme park and a walk-through of a public art or natural history museum; nevertheless, in notable ways the events are experientially distinct. An anticipated adrenalin rush at Disneyland, achieved with like-minded thrill seekers strapped inside a spacecraft simulating warp drive, is distinct from the surprise of tears in a whaling museum, for example, when encountering a jar of bottled blubber flensed from a harpooned whale. The latter encounter may occur regardless of the level of connoisseurship of visitors, and the knowledge a museum may think it is generating, in this case the industrial manufacturing of whales into oil and corsetry. However, there is often a lack of attentiveness in the museology literature to the potency of direct sensations. This does not mean that the museology that has been built around critical theory should be rejected or connoisseurship slighted. As a knowledge base, critical theory is imperative in analyses of the infrastructures that underlie the modern and postmodern era, including our understanding of how museum exhibits and architectures impact on socially constructed aspects of human experience. As such, analyses such as Duncan and Wallach’s ([1978] 2002) remain vital. Alongside this type of interpretation, however, is the fact that objects can disarm any fixity of meaning that is accorded to them. This is not to concede to a form of uncritical subjectivity, but is a means to expand how we evaluate the influence of objects on people in the museum context. It is a move away from the idea of museums as a storehouse of static objects exhibited for the didactic purpose of generating knowledge, to the museum as a dynamic site that complicates strict demarcations between “things,” and in particular the opposition in traditional humanist thinking between human and nonhuman worlds.
Affect, not emotion
Giving autonomy to affective intelligence makes it more tenable to pay critical attention to posthuman perspectives that seek to shift thinking outside the privileging of Homo sapiens over nonhuman worlds. It makes it feasible to attend to the myriad of durations and spaces these worlds encompass outside of human-centered linear historical time and space. In respecting the affective capacity of all things and the operation of a realm of activity beyond the current framing of human cognition, we can theorize alternative modes of addressing the different worlds that we affect and that are affected by us. This projects a stance that reveals the anthropocentrism of humanist-oriented views of the world. Humanism is the legacy of Enlightenment thinking and revolves around setting aside superstition via the determination that all things are knowable through reason. Humanist thinking, as the phrase implies, is anthropocentric.
