Things are Changing: Museums and the Material Turn (original) (raw)
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The Object Matter of Museums: designing otherwise
DESIGN OBJECTS: MUSEALIZATION, DOCUMENTATION AND INTERPRETATION, 2023
The theoretical and ethical debate fostered by the reflexive turn of the last decades is increasingly guided by the concern to recover a sphere of political action of the museum: activist and decolonial in nature, deeply entangled in the world and built from an intraactive engagement with it. As a consequence, the museum tends to address the emergent and the urgent through situated practices that collectively analyse and respond to circumstances in the world. In doing so, the contemporary museum seeks to create conditions for visitor engagement by empowering their unmediated voices to be heard. This text aims to explore the critical space between the apparent decolonial vitality of the museum and how diffractive practices may be designed in a postcritical and postrepresentational context, arguing that approaches based on artistic and design processes of speculative fabulation (as Design Culture) are helpful for thinking and acting in these spaces of experience, acting as a tool of philosophical enquiry, which promotes responsiveness to «know» and «do» differently in the present. Pragmatically, it highlights three modes of speculative (moderated) design engagement with the present and the future to help museums to break out of their ontological blindness and fulfil their critical and transformative potential.
Making things matter. Meaning and materiality in museum displays
Nordic Museology (pp. 133–141), No 2, 2015
An international and trans-institutional study, the present postdoctoral project analyses the production of prehistory, art history and cultural history in various museum displays in Berlin, Copenhagen, London and Stockholm, from c.1880 to c.1920. The collection galleries and permanent exhibitions are analysed as interfaces of meaning and materiality, with a focus on the different concepts of knowledge that were brought into play when making history, namely scholarly knowledge, aesthetic experience, didactic learning, technical expertise and notions of how to live well. More specifically, the project combines two theoretical perspectives, the poetics of display and displays as mediations, and analyses how museums made history through more or less locally decided interconnections of moral models, display techniques, historical remains and reproductions, and didactic, epistemological and aesthetic ideas. The three-year project, 2015–2018, is conducted partly in the aforesaid cities, and chiefly at the Centre for Museum Studies, IKOS, University of Oslo.
Through the lens of the glass cabinet: entering the material realm of museum objects
Interiors, 2019
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 ...
in Moritz Baumstark and Robert Forkel (eds.), Historisierung. Begriff - Methode - Praxis, Stuttgart/Weimar : J.B. Metzler, forthcoming May 2016. This essay examines an important transformation in public history in relation to two institutions, the British Museum in London and the Neue Museum in Berlin and their identity as collections and monuments in their own right . In an analysis of the crisis of the commemorative monument in contemporary Germany James E. Young recognizes the continued desire for a form of monumentality, observing a general move from the heroic to the ironic as “the need for a unified vision of the past, as found in the traditional monument, necessarily collides with the modern conviction that neither the past nor its meanings are ever just one thing.” To what extent can a similar shift be observed as these museums construct institutional memory and how does this contribute to “institutional survival” , to renewing their mandate to preserve and to be themselves preserved and transmitted for the benefit of future generations? When we consider the British Museum and the Neue Museum as representative models of the ‘universal museums’ of the first museum age , it follows that it is significant to see how, in today’s ‘second museum age’, both of these museums have incorporated specific representations of their institutional past into the partial or full renovation of their houses . The Enlightenment gallery at the British Museum reveals how artefacts relating to a former ‘order of things’ have been used to produce an overarching vision of the museum’s initial encyclopaedic project. The case of the Neue Museum, whose newly renovated building can be seen as an exhibit in itself , is considered from the point of view of the remains of the historicist murals created in the 1850s and 1860s and the meaning of their role in a ‘new’ (2009) museum narrative.
2022
On the occasion of the 20-year anniversary of the /ecm Master Program in Exhibition Theory and Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna Thursday, May 5, 2022, 10am–9pm The museum is dead. Long live the museum. This, or something similar, could be the brief summary of numerous conferences, debates, and publications in the field of curating and museum studies over the past 20 years. The critique of the museum has been widely discussed. We have heard a lot about crisis and departure, we have heard about “tired museums” and the “end of the museum,” only to debate in that same breath untapped possibilities for thinking about the museum in new and different ways – as a space of assembly and as a contact zone, as a place of criticism, polyphony, and negotiation. Something seems to be on the move, and so it is not surprising that talk of the “museum of the future” is booming. Claims of diversification, digitalization, and democratization have become ubiquitous, while at the same time institutions are more than ever focused on privatization, economization, competition, and precarization. How can we as critical curators and museologists think and act within these contradictions? And how can critical theory become critical practice?
Another history of museums: from the discourse to the museum-piece
Anais do Museu Paulista: História e Cultura Material, 2013
The history of museums could get inspired on the procedures of material studies and of Anthropology in order to take a new stand and move away from the institutional approach and consider the approach of objects traditionally labelled as museum objects. The so-called "museum pieces" are supposed to have a number of characteristics, particularly some great historical and artistic qualities, sometimes an heritage quality, but above all the ability to make "friends" around the community or around the world. In all these respects, it is proposed here a number of research procedures that may supplement or enrich the directions usually assigned to the history of institutions.
Embracing the Physical in Museums
Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations deeply explores various conceptions of and relations to museum objects. This collection of essays, woven together with reflections by the editor, mounts a challenge to a dominant paradigm in the material culture of museums. Although museums collect, preserve, protect, and display objects, museum practice often confers superior value to the ideas that the objects represent over the objects themselves. Rooted in Western cultural traditions that venerate mind over body and the general over the specific, the essays assert or imply that museums privilege information transfer and education over direct sensual engagement and visitor-centered personal experience. Shining light directly on this tension, Museum Materialities does not suggest that museums must choose either objects or ideas. Rather, it explores diverse possibilities for engaging with and interpreting objects, and the consequences that result. Without offering prescriptions, the authors advocate a position—to reconsider the traditional use of objects as vehicles for ideas, and to embrace objects as actors in object-subject interactions.
Isis, 2005
This survey outlines a history of museums written through biographies of objects in their collections. First, the mechanics of the movement of things and the accompanying shifts in status are considered, from manufacture or growth through collecting and exchange to the museum. Objects gathered meanings through associations with people they encountered on their way to the collection, thus linking the history of museums to broader scientific and civic cultures. Next, the essay addresses the use of items once they joined a collection, whether classificatory, analytical, or in display. By thus embedding the study of scientific practice in material culture, this approach contributes to constructivist histories of science. The final section addresses the role of objects in the experience of the visitors, emphasizing how fruitful the history of museum objects can be in the study of the public engagement with science.