"Ancient Vases in Modern Vitrines: The Sensory Dynamics and Social Implications of Museum Display", Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 63. 1 (2020) 91–109. (original) (raw)
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The generic term ‘museum objects’ suggests that a uniform category is involved. But museums in various disciplines have exhibited objects according to quite different rules and have assigned values to them that depend on the standards of the field of inquiry concerned: aesthetic quality, value as a historical source, as a relic or as a representative item. Over time, various display conventions have become established, which appear to us today to be natural and that assign the objects to specific stimulus values. The aim of this essay is to achieve a better understanding of these exhibition practices and discipline-specific value standards. The study aims to discover why we have become accustomed to using objects in exhibitions in different ways, and it distinguishes between three types of object: work, specimen and witness. The hypothesis here is that each of these follows its own display conventions, forms of perception and standards of value. The present essay aims to situate these three types of object – work, specimen and witness – historically and in this way to articulate the differences in status that exist between them.
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Looking Into Artefacts: Opening temporal and geographical frameworks in museum displays
In this paper I place side-by-side recent galleries re-displays in European countries including the United Kingdom and France to open wider questions about trans-national history of design and material culture in the museum. Taking inspiration from cross-cultural objects emerging in Europe and Asia in the Renaissance and Early Modern period – from lacquer to pottery – I interrogate these museum-based approaches largely inscribed within national frameworks and closed periodisations. Instead, I propose ways of thinking about artefacts as multi-layered compounds, resulting from long-term temporal forces working across wide geographies, therefore complicating linear chronological and regional narratives.
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Introduction: Art and display in principle and in practice
Introductory essay for Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550-1750, edited by Gail Feigenbaum with Francesco Freddolini. This book explores the principles of the display of art in the magnificent Roman palaces of the early modern period, focusing attention on how the parts function to convey multiple artistic, social, and political messages, all within a splendid environment that provided a model for aristocratic residences throughout Europe. Many of the objects exhibited in museums today once graced the interior of a Roman Baroque palazzo or a setting inspired by one. In fact, the very convention of a paintings gallery—the mainstay of museums—traces its ancestry to prototypes in the palaces of Rome. Inside Roman palaces, the display of art was calibrated to an increasingly accentuated dynamism of social and official life, activated by the moving bodies and the attention of residents and visitors. Display unfolded in space in a purposeful narrative that reflected rank, honor, privilege, and intimacy. With a contextual approach that encompasses the full range of media, from textiles to stucco, this study traces the influential emerging concept of a unified interior. It argues that art history—even the emergence of the modern category of fine art—was worked out as much in the rooms of palaces as in the printed pages of Vasari and other early writers on art.
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Medieval art on display, 1750-2010
PhD Thesis, 2013
This thesis asks how the curatorial framing of medieval objects - the processes of selection, classification, display and interpretation - affect how medieval objects are made legible within the museum. It investigates how different collectors and curators have deployed medieval objects over a period of two hundred and fifty years of museological practice. Throughout this history, medieval objects have been appropriated within a range of museological narratives that have positioned them variously as objects of curiosity, utility, scientific analysis, nationalistic interest and as sites of scholarly and popular attention. My purpose is to inquire how the epistemological re-positioning of objects is articulated through their presentation within the framework of the collection, museum or temporary exhibition and to question how the mechanics of display facilitate particular readings of medieval objects. I then consider how certain curatorial approaches may produce unintended effects that render the medieval object illegible or problematic in unexpected ways. I also acknowledge that unforeseen exhibitionary outcomes may not be solely due to the effects of curatorial intervention but may be wrought by the agency of objects themselves. This thesis therefore examines medieval objects as active participants that play a crucial role in influencing the communication of curatorial objectives and in affecting how they may be apprehended through exhibitionary practice. The thesis examines sixteen chronologically presented case studies, beginning in the mid eighteenth century and concluding in the early twenty-first century, that represent important or influential episodes in the history of the display of medieval art. It traces a selective history of the various ways medieval objects have been culturally positioned at particular points in time to reveal how curatorial techniques have worked to reinforce or undermine the perception of medieval objects as carriers of specific meanings. Through the examination of historical approaches to the display of medieval objects I reveal how familiar tropes of display, such as the use of specific lighting techniques and stained glass have characterized the museological staging of medieval objects and how these have endured into the twenty-first century. Drawing on performance theory, material culture theory and sensory theory I identify how the biographical histories, material characteristics and sensory properties of medieval objects have been re-activated or suppressed by curators to encourage audiences to engage with them in specific ways. This theoretical approach reveals a previously unacknowledged sensory cultural history of engagement with the medieval object and highlights how historical approaches that have privileged embodied engagement with objects continue to inform contemporary museological practice. I also draw on Actor-Network theory to illuminate how medieval objects may be understood as active agents within the chain of correspondences that links people, objects and exhibitions at particular points throughout this history. In this way I delineate an exhibitionary landscape through which we can understand medieval objects as multi-authored and polysemic entities but principally as the products of exhibitionary practice.
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Through the lens of the glass cabinet: entering the material realm of museum objects
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This article discusses questions of spatial configuration and display design in museums, and how this affects the way museum objects are perceived. Based on an in-depth analysis of the Glass Cabinet at Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, Denmark, the article explores how the glass items on display are seen not as singular objects, with a curated (hi)story to tell, but more as a collected mass of disparate glass objects with a material reality of their own. When looking at these objects, the spectator is placed within a large glass enclosure which protects the objects on display from the curious hands of museum visitors. However, this glass ‘vitrine’ also has the effect of putting the museum visitor on display, thereby challenging conventional subject-object relations within museums. In order to discuss the particular subversive ways in which the Glass Cabinet presents its objects, the article will partly draw on museological research on object collections and museum display, and partly ...
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