.pdfKatharina Morawek
UNFREEZING THE MUSEUMS: THE POWER OF DISPLAY
The history of the concept of “the museum” is closely connected to the history of modernity, especially the constitution of the national state and the establishment of the modern idea of science. National museums were built at the same time scientific racism was established and ethnographic collections began growing. These techniques of knowledge production are at the same time instruments of colonial power; the images that were produced were embedded into a bourgeois notion of culture and were crucial for the constitution of the master concepts of “culture” and “nature” which were connected to racist and sexist stereotypes. Since the beginning of colonialism and the nation-state, the construction of the community has always been connected to the construction of “the other.” These museums are archives and sediments of knowledge with images and techniques at their very core, linked to colonialism, modernization, capitalism and enlightenment. There is an internal joke being passed around between employees in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna: “We are working on the second largest graveyard in Austria.” Actually, it is more a morgue, with thousands of skulls and bones, in many cases, the remains of victims of the extermination politics during National Socialism. In the archive of the anthropological department, biologists and other researchers can find boxes with data which arose from racist measurements. A debate of conflict about the provenience of those objects is not taking place; rather those who are responsible avoid any comments concerning restitution claims. Being interested in the production of images and knowledge, one has to look at the museum as an institution that produces images and knowledge, language and displays, and establishes relations between (natural) science and artistic techniques. In fact, the politics of display often possess an authoritarian demand of display: “this is how it is,” establishing or re-establishing so called “cultural differences.” This practice of producing differences in its specific history has seldom been questioned until today, and we here are not only speaking of ethnographic museums, but also of institutions displaying art: the hype on “Chinese” or “Balkan” art – whatever that should mean – shows how closely those types of display are connected. The “auratisation” of objects, where pieces or works of art are staged in order to produce certain narratives, should be looked at very closely. Those spatial arrangements are in fact, the results of highly political decisions. We all know the dioramas that are so popular in museums of natural history and that do, through lighting and scenery, more than remind us of filmsettings taken from the film “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” It is a simple operation: objects without names, “without histories” are arranged to produce an atmosphere of “everyday” aesthetics, to tell us: “This is real.” The violent history of many objects is hardly reflected in their display. The fascination of many natural history museum curators with objects possesses a certain logic: objects are something that remains, that are not as “elusive” as words, which represent “high culture.” Here, the same distinction between nature and culture is made again: nature, being intact and bare of every “western contamination,” is accredited especially to those, who are so essentially constructed through such processes, representing “the others” to those who are doing the defining. In this context, we can talk about the concept of “freezeing” (or “congealed”) that manages to maintain cultural artefacts in a state of preservation, desiring to keep them clean of any progress or external influence such as so called “technological development.” What are the consequences, especially for the museum, arising out of this analysis? Postcolonial thinkers carried them out for a long time as well. How can these observations mean even more for the future of museums and the politics of display?
A set of questions, at the minimum arises:
- Is the history or policy of the collections being visibly reflected, or by which means do we see attempts to hide it?
- How can politics of display get rid of binary logics of normality/abnormality, the internal/external or male/female?
- Which, and how many of these policies, quoting Gayatri Spivak, “don’t make the same mistakes”?
- How should one exhibit, how should one display, without making the same mistakes, without ethnicising and objectivising techniques of “othering”?
- How do current emancipatory perspectives, activist knowledge and reclaims go along with these demands?
- Which functions would the museum have, if the expropriated objects were given back?
- How should empty showcases be used?
- How should “the self”, and not “the other” be exhibited?
A new understanding of exhibiting is to be drawn, and concepts are to be laid down: new museums, where not the histories of cultural difference are told, but cultural histories that reflect the variability of popular and everyday culture.
Katharina Morawek is an artist and a theoretician based in Vienna.
