Catalogue of Uncommon Curatorial Practices

Enlivened Artifacts: On the animation of artifacts in museum settings

by Dr. Erin E. Lynch

By the mid-19th century, Western practices of collecting culture for display had migrated from fashionable curio cabinets to the public eye, and museums set about systematically sorting the world “into drawers, glass-fronted cases, bottles, and filing cabinets” (Jenkins 1994: 242).  This way of organizing culture through display was designed to signify humankind’s “mastery” over their domain, including the power of colonial nations to capture and contain other cultures as objects of knowledge and markers of conquest. These practices of display also sensitized the visitor to the “look, don’t touch” codes of conduct in ocularcentric modernity (Classen & Howes, 2006).  Increasingly, however, there has been a cross-disciplinary acknowledgement both of what is lost in these practices of display (in terms of how objects become desensualized and “frozen” or muted in the traditional museum setting [Branham, 1994; Howes & Classen, 2006]) and of the necessity of embracing decolonial practices that re-animate the networks of living relations from which these artifacts have been rent. This involves what Matthews et. al (2021) call a paradigm shift, one that demands both the recontextualization of objects and a reorientation of the priorities of museum display from pure preservation to the restoration of relations.  This probe presents an overview of how museums are attempting to enliven their collections in a variety of ways, including through ceremony, sensation, and cultural exchange (Busse, 2008; Hafner, 2013; Pai, 2016; Matthews et. al, 2021).

The museum was traditionally a place for the disciplining of the senses.  With the rise of the public museum – which expanded access to collections beyond the vaunted few - contact between the lower classes and museum objects was viewed as something that needed to be managed. The museum thus became a site for instructing the masses on appropriate ways of knowing about the world (Classen, 2017).  The preservation of collections as the “raison d’etre” of curatorship also shaped the production of museums as a “hands-off” space (Classen & Howes, 2006).  The culture of display in museums disciplined visitors’ bodies by positioning them in relation to works of art and artifacts (cultivating not just an ocularcentric perspective but appropriate ways of looking) (Candlin, 2004, 2010; Rees Leahy 2012).  Take, for example, the Redpath Museum in Montreal.  Up until the 1950s, when the museum primarily relied on natural light, windows ringed the interior, and display cases were arranged so that visitors could walk around them and view specimens from a variety of angles. However, direct sunlight posed a threat to the collections (limiting the museum’s ability to display textiles and degrading pigments, for example), so the windows were closed off and display cases mounted against walls. This has the effect of fixing both the artifact and the body of the visitor in place, thus establishing a correct way of viewing the museum: close, but not too close (Lynch, 2024).

Despite all this careful construction of the museum as a space to discipline the senses, as Constance Classen (2017) points out, the sensory experience of the museum is often more diverse and transgressive than it is given credit for – historically people have not only seen but touched and tasted artifacts (see also Pai, 2016, on the illicit devotional touch of artifacts in museums). As other authors have noted, museums are also increasingly opening up other realms of sensory experience for visitors (Binter, 2014; Clintberg, 2014; Howes, 2014, 2022: ch. 6). These include exhibits liketouch tables or touch tours for the visually impaired (Clintberg, 2014), interactive exhibits, and digital augmentations (Lynch, 2023).

Related to ongoing practices of decolonisation both in the museum space and beyond, museology is also witnessing a transformation of practices of collection and display, what Matthews et. al (2021) call a paradigm shift.  This involves the recontextualizing of objects and a move towards repairing relations as part of the decolonisation of the museum and Indigenous representation. Sacred objects in museum collections are often removed from view – sometimes for reasons of cultural sensitivity, but with the end effect of further isolating them from their communities (Matthews et al 2021). While practicing decolonization in the museum has sometimes meant returning the artifacts themselves (through repatriation), it has also meant opening up the collections to new forms of learning in order to help repair relations (Matthews, 2014). Both approaches require breaking the museum mould of appropriating, preserving, and displaying items as an extension of colonialism’s desire to view, capture, and contain the “other” as a relic of the past (Garneau 2016). As Busse (2008) argues, the notion of “cultural property” both suppresses the diversity of life that ripples through collections and cuts off relations, and has thus outstayed its welcome in museum discourse.

Artifacts, clearly, have a life of their own that has been ill-served by many curatorial practices. However, museology is attempting to grapple with this disconnect between the animacy of artifacts – and their deep connection to people and places outside museum walls - and practices of isolated display (or straight up isolation). Matthews et. al (2021) use the example of how the Manitoba Museum invited a collection of pipes into its welcome display for the exhibit We Are All Treaty People.  The pipes were considered important to include because the Anishnaabe terms for treaty - Zagaswe’idiwin or Agwi’idiwin – translated to “agreement made with a pipe.” Far from being decorative or incidental, the artifacts were in fact central players in the treaties in question (serving as ambassadors, rather than simply as objects).  The inclusion of the pipes in the exhibit was challenging because of their sacredness. At the same time, the curators acknowledged that keeping the pipes hidden away would only further remove them from social life. 

The curators navigated this challenge through co-creation: speaking to the families and communities associated with the pipes to reimagine how they could be incorporated. This included making an invitation to the pipes to participate in welcoming others to treaty land (thus reanimating their traditional diplomatic roles).  This invitation invokes a different understanding of materiality – the pipes were not objects owned by the museum, but instead active participants in the original treaties and diplomatic emissaries from their home communities that could play an essential role in reconstructing relations (with Indigenous and settler visitors alike). In short, they were agents and that agency had to be acknowledged. Furthermore, inviting the pipes to participate in the display was a fundamentally multisensory and hands-on endeavour, wherein the pipes were smoked, feasted, and handed between Elders in ceremony (Matthews et. al, 2021). These ambassador-pipes offer us a useful window into the idea that things have a social force in the museum – artifacts can be powerful actors and collaborators in establishing, maintaining, and repairing relations, but only if they are enabled to rejoin social life (rather than languishing in the backrooms of museum collections).

In the introduction to a special journal issue on museums and the Pacific provocatively titled “Museums and the Things in Them Should Be Alive,” Busse (2008) traces some of the new curatorial practices that embrace rather than attempt to discipline the entangled lives of artifacts. These include “less proprietary forms of curatorship” that aim to form rather than sever connections between people and object-agents (Busse, 2008: 193-194; see also Herle, 1997).  This might include enabling artifacts to have a life outside the boundaries of display cases (and sometimes, outside museums entirely). Hafner (2013) for example, discusses how Lamalama artifacts composed of bush materials were given a second life “on country” by temporarily recontextualizing them in traditional Australian Aboriginal bushlands. This practice reconnects object-agents not just with their traditional communities but with the land, which the Lamalama also understand to be a living relation with agency {1}. In these circumstances, the curatorial authority embedded in hands-off notions of preservation must give way to ideals of custodianship, with museums acting as storehouses for artifacts awaiting culturally appropriate uses (Herle, 1997: 67; see also Krmpotich & Peers, 2013).  As such, it is possible for artifacts to lead double lives, both inside and outside-but-related-to their home communities.  Enriching the life of artifacts in this way requires relinquishing the control (both representational and physical) afforded by static, hands-off display.

The origins of the public museum emphasized the value of the detached gaze in assessing the cultural worth of colonialism’s material spoils.  We can recognize the act of collecting and preserving the “salvaged” things of other cultures as violence in and of itself, but decolonising the museum also requires acknowledging our fundamentally impoverished view of artifacts as simply objects to be owned in the first place.  The reanimation of artifacts embraces Indigenous futures by refuting the colonial notion of Indigenous cultures as relics of a past age in need of preservation and control, banished to (cultural) death in a glass coffin. The vital decolonial work of reanimating museum objects instead acknowledges and honours the lives – past, present and future – of both artifacts and their relations. As Candace Weir notes (in the preface to Krmpotich & Peers’ [2013] book on Haida material heritage in museums, This is Our Life):

These are living pieces that we love and cherish. They are part of us: our drums, our paddles, our bent boxes, our musical instruments, our button blankets, our spruce-root hats, our cedar hats. It’s all about who we are … I came on this trip for my daughter. I know we are making a path for younger generations, for them to come and see who they are. (xv).

Notes

1. Though Hafner (2013) also notes that temporary loans, while still potentially valuable, may not prove sufficient to fully repair ruptured relations between communities, artifacts, and country.

Sources

Binter, J. T. (2014). Unruly voices in the museum: Multisensory engagement with disquieting histories. The Senses and Society, 9(3), 342-360.

Branham, J. R. (1994). "Sacrality and Aura in the Museum: Mute Objects and Articulate Space". The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 52/53: 33-47.

Busse, Mark. (2008). "Museums and the Things in Them Should be Alive". International Journal of Cultural Property. 15:189-200.

Herle, A. (1997). Museums, politics and representation. Journal of Museum Ethnography, (9), 65-78.

Candlin, F. (2004). ‘Don’t touch, hands OFF! Art, blindness and the conservation of expertise. Body and Society, 10(1), 71-90

Candlin, F. (2010). Art, Museums and Touch. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Clintberg, M. (2014). Where publics may touch: Stimulating sensory access at the National Gallery of Canada. The Senses and Society, 9(3), 310-322.

Classen, C. (2017). The museum of the senses: Experiencing art and collections. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Classen, C. & Howes, D. (2006). The museum as sensescape: Western sensibilities and indigenous artefacts. In E. Edwards, C. Gosden & R. Phillips (Eds.), Sensible objects: Colonialism, museums and material culture. Bloomsbury: London, 199-222.

Garneau, D.  (2016). Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing.  In D. Robinson and K. Martin (eds.) Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Hafner, D. (2013). Objects, Agency and Context: Australian Aboriginal Expressions of Connection in Relation to Museum Artefacts. Journal of Material Culture 18(4): 347-366.

Howes, D. (2014). Introduction to sensory museology. The Senses and Society,9(3), 259-267.

Howes, D. (2022). The sensory studies manifesto: Tracking the sensorial revolution in the arts and human sciences. University of Toronto Press.

Jenkins, D. (1994). Object lessons and ethnographic displays: Museum exhibitions and the making of American anthropology. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 36(2), 242-270.

Krmpotich, C., & Peers, L. L. (2013). This is our life: Haida material heritage and changing museum practice. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Lynch, E. E. (2023). Locative Tourism Applications: A Sensory Ethnography of the Augmented City. London: Routledge.

Lynch, E. E. (2024). Sensing the Redpath: An Introduction. Explorations in Sensory Design. Available online: https://www.sensorydesign.ca/redpath-sensing-introduction

Matthews, M. (2014). Repatriating Agency: Animacy, Personhood and Agency in the Repatriation of Ojibwe Artefacts.  In L. Tythacott & K. Arvanitis (Eds).  Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches. London: Routledge.

Matthews, M. A., Roulette, R., & Wilson, J. B. (2021). Meshkwajisewin: Paradigm Shift. Religions, 12(10), 894.

Pai, G. V. (2016). "Re-Enchantment in the Museum: Gaṇeśa, Hindu Art and the Living Divine.” Journal of Curatorial Studies 5(2): 162-185.

Rees Leahy, H. (2012) Museum Bodies: The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing. Abingdon: Routledge.