Sainsbury Galleries of African Art, such interventions may end up condoning the lacunae in the museum’s narrative and work, against the artist’s own intentions. This is particularly poignant in Douglas Camp’s case because of her well-known sympathies for Ken Saro-Wiwa which resulted in her producing a Living Memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa. The sculpture, in the form of a steel bus, was unveiled in November 2006 outside The Guardian newspaper’s central London offices. Saloni Mathur’s chapter (23) discusses a more overtly critical art intervention in the Victoria Memorial Museum in Kolkata. Like other artists’ interventions commissioned by museums, this was a temporary installation which thus raises the issue of the ephemerality of many experimental projects. Where postcolonial critique is allowed to be doled out only in small doses, its agency is necessarily limited, leaving behind only the trace of the catalog or the listing in the past exhibitions section of a museum website.
This was also the case with a 1993 intervention commissioned from the Canadian Anishinaabe artist Robert Houle by Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). Houle’s Anishinaabe Walker Court was a site-specific response to the German artist Lothar Baumgarten’s 1985 Monument for the Native Peoples of Ontario, which the museum had purchased for its permanent collection. The Baumgarten work, kept on continuous view for more than eight years, consists of an elegiac inscription of the names of the Native peoples of the province, including Houle’s nation, painted in trompe l’oeil Roman typeface on the neoclassical arches of the AGO’s historic Walker Court.26 In 1992, in response to this work, Houle renamed the space “Anishinaabe Walker Court” and lettered the names of First Nations in a modern lower-case font, each enclosed by quotation marks, on the walls of the arcade surrounding the Walker Court.27 The dialogue between Houle and Baumgarten concerning the false construct of the “disappearing Indian” animated the AGO for a space of months before Houle’s work was dismantled.
The desire to find new ways to recreate the relationship between museums and their publics can lead to a shift in emphasis from the museum as a repository and a place where the authoritative knowledge of academically trained curators is disseminated to the public, to the museum as a site of dialogue, debate, healing, and advocacy for social justice. Stimulated by desires to further democratization and decolonization, museums have sought to introduce new voices and perspectives into their displays and narratives, and they have also looked for new modes of outreach that can deliver museum collections, exhibitions, and programs to larger, more diverse, and often distant publics. Christopher Morton and Gilbert Oteyo, in Chapter 14, have explored the ethical and intellectual issues raised when attempting to exhibit archival photographs from different periods in Kenya’s history to the communities represented in them. In Chapter 16 Kimberly Christen discusses the challenges, benefits, and transformational impacts on conventional museum practices of online curating in her analysis of projects involving the Waramungu Aboriginal community in the Central Desert of Australia and the Inuvialuit peoples of the western Canadian Arctic (see Khan 2002; Lang, Reeve, and Wollard 2006; Harrison, Byrne, and Clarke 2013).
To be fully realized, however, the transformation of the museum must engage all areas of museum activity, not only exhibitions and research, but also education, marketing, and even registration and conservation. Miriam Clavir’s chapter (17) examines the challenges to traditional Western concepts of conservation, a profession with particularly close ties to Western concepts of science and historical preservation. She shows how some museum conservators have sought to create more elastic practices informed not just by the priority of physical preservation but also by diverse concepts of cultural preservation. Clavir developed her own approach at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, an institution that also introduced the model of visible storage into modern museology in 1976. Indigenous artists have used this facility, which makes collections visibly accessible to the general public in glass-fronted cases and plexiglass-topped drawers, to study historical works as sources for their own renewal of these carving traditions – a notable artistic development that was gaining momentum during those years. In the 2010 redesign of its visible storage, the museum took a further and more transformative step. Rather than organizing its collections, as previously, according to a Western system of classification, it consulted members of originating communities regarding how they wanted their collections to be ordered and displayed. Jennifer Kramer’s chapter (21) discusses one of the museum’s consultations and the resulting installation. Gwyneira Isaac (Chapter 13) explores the related example of the Zuni nation’s A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center in conversation with its director, Jim Enote. There, too, an Indigenous community is using the development of its museum as a context for recovering Indigenous modes of conceptualizing and categorizing knowledge.
The emphasis on social action that grew out of movements of decolonization and institutional critique has coincided with a technological revolution whose transformative impact has reached into every corner of human activity. Museums have sought to exploit new media not only to enhance their physical exhibitions and expand their publics, but also to archive their own exhibitionary histories. Critical museology, with its focus on museum and exhibition histories, has drawn renewed attention to institutional archives and their value in documenting progressive phases of experimentation. Reesa Greenberg’s chapter (20) explores the highly variable ways in which a series of landmark feminist art exhibitions have been documented on their respective museums’ websites. Her analysis illustrates the almost serendipitous nature of the permanent legacy left by even the largest and most revisionist of temporary exhibition projects. While some of these sites attempt to reproduce a real-space exhibition and thereby extend its life, others preserve an archival record of the exhibition as a past historical event. As Greenberg shows, the contrasting structures and levels of information required by these different approaches are not always well defined in relation to web design, inclusiveness of data, and other features.
But new media also have necessary limitations and these are perhaps most evident in the social dimensions of museum experience that are lost in the creation of virtual exhibitions. These can either be adaptations of real-space exhibitions or self-standing entities that have no real-space correlatives. Here, too, a great deal of experimentation has been underway, but certain limitations are intrinsic to the medium, as exemplified by the web versions of the two exhibitions commemorating Canadian Aboriginal residential schools that are discussed by Jonathan Dewar in Chapter 4. Like other virtual exhibitions, they can be accessed anywhere the Internet is available, and they will be seen by people unable to visit the physical exhibits. But they will also largely be viewed in isolation, without the social bonding that is possible when visitors share an experience in real time and space. The transformative power of new media is, however, most evident in its ability to create access to heritage materials for viewers who may be located thousands of kilometers away from its physical storage. In this context, Paul Basu’s discussion of the Sierra Leone Heritage website in Chapter 15 shows how inventive uses of web technology can make it possible to combine remote access to collections, multivocal interpretation, and the exhibition of intangible culture in ways not possible in conventional museum spaces.
Conclusion
Change in museums, as in other institutions of modernity, results from negotiations of traditions and adaptations of technologies. The case studies presented in this volume evidence the importance of pressures exerted on museums for decolonization and greater democratization. Both, of course, have deep roots in twentieth-century cultural politics, but they have gained momentum from the speeded-up flows of capital, people, and media and their active engagements with institutions shaped by imperialism and modernity (Appadurai 1996). We opened this introduction by posing a question about the degree to which these changes amount to something we could call “transformation,” understood as a true paradigm shift that has evolved in response to these new demands and opportunities.
We
