Necrography: Death-Writing in the Colonial Museum (original) (raw)

2021, British Art Studies

When it comes to the study of artworks as material culture, there are few more familiar idioms than that of the "life-history" of the object. From Arjun Appadurai's formulation of "the social life of things" (1986) to Bruno Latour's business-school model of "actor-networks" (1993), over the past generation a particular variety of materialist anthropology has taken root in those parts of historical studies that deal with things. 1 "If humans have biographies, so should things", some historians of science have proposed. 2 In the history of art meanwhile, the reception of Alfred Gell's influential text Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory recast artworks as "indexes", distributing the agency of artists, as part of the "relational texture of social life", where biography is expanded from human into the non-human realms. 3 As if anthropocentrism were in the top ten problems with art theory (a field that is perhaps more accurately not human enough). Through this consumption of anthropological theory, the analogy of artefactual histories with human lives has come to be inculcated as a genre of historiography. In the process, I want to suggest, older, deeper, longstanding forms of object-oriented inclinations and prejudices have been refreshed and emboldened. At times the notion of object biography has served to fix the boundaries of things rather too firmly by tending to overestimate physical constancy in the face of movement between shifting human contexts, what Igor Kopytoff called "regimes of value". 4 But for conservators, archaeologists, curators, and others who work with physical things, it is always clear that any object is at least as unstable as its context; that any life-history is always a life course, with ageing, decay, maintenance, death, rather than just serial recontextualisation. In other words, it is clear that any object or artwork is always to some extent a form of event and an endurance, rather than being purely reducible to some kind of subject. Contexts can also decay. Cultures, as any student of anthropology must learn, can be degraded. No contemplation lasts forever. Even theories can decompose. The world can outlive an idiom. Maybe this is what is now happening to the idea of object life-histories. The primary institutional context that was physically and laboriously assembled and constructed by anthropologists for their theoretical studies of material culture-those Euro-American spaces, variously called the "ethnological", "anthropological" or "world culture" museum, filled with the cultural heritage of the global south transported under colonialism-is not simply decaying. It has failed. The central role of such collections in the objectification of so-called "non-Western" human cultures was not Brass Head of an Oba, currently on view in Gallery 352 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1550-1680, metal sculpture, 27.3 x 21.3 x 21.9 cm. Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller (1979.206.87). Digital image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain).