Grasping the World

The Idea of the Museum

Donald Preziosi, Claire Farago, Donald Preziosi, Claire Farago

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429680243
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Scienze sociali
• Sous-sujet: Sociologia

First published in 2004, this volume recognises that there is much more to museums than the documenting, monumentalizing, or theme-parking of identity, history and heritage. This landmark anthology aims to make strange the very existence of museums and to plot a critical, historical and ethical understanding of their origins and history. A radical selection of key texts introduces the reader to the intense investigation of the modern European idea of the museum that has taken place over the last fifty years. Texts first published in journals and books are brought together in one volume with up-to-the-minute and specially commissioned pieces by leading administrators, curators and art historians. The selections are organized by key themes that map the evolution of the debate and introduced by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, two considerable critics, who write with the edge and enthusiasm of art historians who have spent their lives working with museums. Grasping the World is an invaluable resource for students and teachers of art history and museum studies.

V.

Secularizing Rituals

Introduction:
Secularizing Rituals

Only retrospectively, though a narrative manipulation of the sequence of events, can the accidental of the first object become the beginning of a collection. In the plot it is pre-historic, in the story it intervenes in medias res. The beginning, instead, is a meaning, not an act.

Mieke Bal, Telling Objects: a Narrative Perspective on Collecting’ (1994)

In 1978 Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach published a scathing review of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; it is reprinted below as the opening article of this chapter. The essay appeared first in the centrist journal Studio International and soon thereafter in the radical leftist review Marxist Perspectives. Emphatically rejected by most of the museum establishment, their controversial thesis that the museum presented viewers with an architectural ‘script’ that bore ‘striking resemblance’ to ‘ritual’ in ‘traditional societies’ galvanized oppositional camps and inaugurated a new contentious era in the field of museum studies. The core of the authors’ critique is that the modern art museum translates the ‘ideology of late capitalism’ into an apparent but disingenuous monument to the freedom of the human spirit that actually reinforces and glamorizes ‘precisely the values and experiences it apparently rejects’ by elevating competitive individualism and alienated human relations to a ‘universal and timeless realm’. The authors compared MOMA’s floorplan to a labyrinth, a pan-cultural symbol of regeneration, but insisted that the building and its collection offered only a delusory ‘hall of mirrors’.

At roughly the same moment that Duncan and Wallach presented their politically charged argument that museums are effective ideological instruments intrinsic to the debased modern condition, historians of art studying the pre-modern world began to publish on the contexts in which museums and princely collections functioned in dynastic state formations before the creation of nation-states beginning with the French Revolution. Critical museum studies have grown out of diverse political sympathies employing a variety of methodologies, as the literature collected in Grasping the World only begins to suggest.

The most significant and, indeed, surprising, conclusion to be drawn now after a generation of intensive critical-historical inquiry is that the activities associated with collecting and display, while they may have historical roots in Christian liturgy and collections of relics and religious paraphernalia, rarely invoked religious ceremony directly Public and private museums, and cultural activities associated with them since early humanism, primarily involved scientific investigation and secular forms of political domination. The ancient past, not Christian doctrine, typically gave authority to practices associated with collecting - even in the case of ecclesiastical collections like those Paula Findlen discusses in Chapter 2 of Grasping the World - and no doubt contributed to the flexibility and longevity of the idea of the museum.

In her study of the earliest activities of collecting and display included in this chapter, Claudia Lazzaro characterizes the princely custom of keeping menageries of large and wild animals as a sign of power that sixteenth- century European heads of state revived, on the basis of ancient Roman tributes and gift-exchanges with one another and with Byzantine, West Asian, and North African rulers. Exotic animals and representations of them, along with other imported precious objects, including specimens from the ‘New World’, were all made familiar by their assimilation to the classical tradition. The Graeco-Roman heritage provided the conceptual framework for the cultural construction of wild nature in contrast to human civilization, a contrast performed in lavish and often violent public festivals staged to commemorate state events. Gifts were a double-edged commodity in a system of diplomacy through exchange: triumphal imagery explicitly invoked ancient forms of tribute, while simultaneously representing foreign ‘worlds’ in a role of subservience.

How do such historical practices, once central to the idea of princely collecting, bear on the contemporary critique of museums? First and foremost, the evidence suggests that the passage from religious to secular ‘rituals’ is inappropriately imposed on historical data, resulting in an unacknowledged narrative of cultural evolutionism. Duncan and Wallach cite a 1768 description by Goethe of the newly created Dresden Gallery as a sanctuary set up for the sacred purposes of art - and many other similar examples of period testimony could be given. Nonetheless, the narrative structure of positing the ‘end’ of a religious world view and the ‘beginning’ of a secular world that masks the survival of theological practices in modern society is not simply or even accurately an artifact of bourgeois thought inherited from Enlightenment thinkers.

It appears that we have inadvertently accepted at face value a position framed by Enlightenment philosophers that masks an older and more insidious hierarchy. The ceremonies and other activities associated with museums and princely collections were always ‘secular’ in both the premodern sense of worldly and the modern sense (acquired only in the nineteenth century) of non-religious. The humanist revival of classical antiquity, beginning in the fourteenth century on the Italic peninsula, spreading to the rest of Europe and its colonies over the next four centuries, gathered advocates as well as producing local variants (such as French or Finnish neoclassicism) and eliciting direct inversions (such as English nationalist sentiment or German romanticism).

Appeals to the authority of European civilization, past and present, retain one overarching feature: they grant superiority to ‘us’ over ‘others’. The presently widespread notion that museums present the public with the secular equivalent of religious ‘ritual’ needs to be re-thought in light of historical attitudes towards ritual in these circumstances. Is it possible that the anthropological model of ‘ritual’ in its application to museum activities reinscribes a Protestant criticism of Catholic ceremony already previously inscribed in the writings of certain Enlightenment writers? Such an investigation is beyond the scope of this volume, but well worth consideration.

Duncan and Wallach and others blame the ‘ideology of late capitalism’ for transforming communal activities into subjective experiences that deny individuals any real community or spiritual transcendence. Recent investigations of collecting and display bring to light long-term continuities that point away from religion as the simple cause and towards deeper-seated relationships between material display of status in general (‘symbolic capital’, to use another term introduced by Bourdieu) and profiteering. Lazzaro’s study deals with gift-exchange in a barter economy. The remaining case studies in this chapter foreground the formation and maintenance of collective identity in the emerging era of an international monetary economy - European states ran on ‘capital’ before the era of industrialized capitalism. Luxury goods or ‘surplus accumulation’ presents its own, as yet under-studied, dynamics. The idea of the museum foregrounds these complex social processes.

In a short article included below, contemporary with Duncan and Wallach’s critique of MOMA, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann presented in 1978 the first results of his extensive study of the court of Rudolf II of Prague, Holy Roman Emperior and first among European collectors as well. Rudolf II’s collection functioned partly as a form of public display to express his imperial magnificence directly and to reinforce his claims to power symbolically. Much like the animals (actual and imitated by artistic means) that Duke Cosimo II and other rulers flaunted less than a century earlier, Rudolf’s Kunstkammer was regularly used for formal diplomatic functions. To make this princely form of self-representation intelligible, Rudolf II also built and decorated rooms on his Prague estate for displaying his collection on the classicizing model of the Italian tribuna, originally a type of room with niches for the display of sculpture. The arrangement of rooms built around 1590 to house Rudolf’s collections attests to the systematic organization and programmatic arrangement of materials, grouped under the ubiquitous Aristotelian categories of naturalia and artificialia then in use throughout Europe, as contributions by Giuseppe Olmi and others in Chapter 2 of this volume describe. Kaufmann concludes that Rudolf’s collection signified the ruler’s mastery of nature - his actual possession of the universe in microcosm was an expression of his symbolic mastery of the greater world.

A similar iconography is the subject of the next essay: Hans-Olof Boström’s study of a diplomat and private dealer who assembled portable ‘curiosity cabinets’ or Kunstschranken foregrounds the theme of profit that threads through all the articles in this chapter. In this seventeenth-century continuation of gift-exchange as an enterprise run by private individuals for profit, Philip Hainhofer, a silk merchant from an Augsburg mercantile family ennobled by the same Rudolf II for successfully interceding between Catholic and Lutheran factions, assembled luxury articles on speculation for sale to wealthy patrons. Boström describes Hainhofer’s miniature Kunstkammers as collections of objects once made for utilitarian purposes re-utilized for their symbolic value relative to the subject who owned them, conferring a personalized identity much like the collections assembled by Rudolf II and other rulers and members of the intelligentsia, except that Hainhofer’s material identities were ‘ready-mades’.

Class differences were fluid throughout the early modern history of this collecting tradition, as burghers emulated the self-fashioning strategies of the aristocracy. Hainhofer’s greatest masterpiece ended up with a king, Gustavus Adolphus II of Sweden, but only because the Town Councillors of Augsburg purchased it as a gift for the king to avert a Swedish invasion in 1632. Kunstschranken, like their more magnificant relatives on a larger scale, functioned as models of the cosmos, containing mobile objects grouped in a gradual transition from Nature to Art. They served as interactive memory theatres for diversion and amusement - Boström describes them as shorthand versions of the macrocosm that mirrored the ‘ungraspable world though an intelligible, unchangeable, and easily memorized order’.

Hainhofer assembled his collections for profit, providing an interesting case study of the important role that capitalism played in the gradual transition to a consumer society during the roughly two centuries pre-dating the Industrial Revolution. Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny likewise studied the twinned mechanisms of profit-making and surplus accumulation necessary for fashioning a personal identity and attaining social status. Their essay, excerpted here from Taste and the Antique (1981), shows that the modern idea of the museum is inextricably linked with the history of accelerating consumerism in the mid-eighteenth century, the formative period of nationbuilding. The seemingly insatiable desire of an educated bourgeoisie for certain luxury goods - ancient sculpture is the focus of this study of eighteenth-century Rome - emulates longstanding aristocratic forms of displaying power (and displacing it to a symbolic level). Royalty, however, derived their power directly from inherited forms of property-ownership - not indirectly from the ownership of objects that conferred social status symbolically, and was attained sheerly by economic means.

The common denominator throughout the upper and middle classes is the symbolic value attached to classical antiquity to provide patrimony. Haskell and Penny emphasize a social network involving natives and foreigners. They document the activities of significantly placed individuals such as Cardinal Alessandro Albani, whose entrepreneu...