Religious Objects in Museums

Private Lives and Public Duties

Crispin Paine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

In the past, museums often changed the meaning of icons or statues of deities from sacred to aesthetic, or used them to declare the superiority of Western society, or simply as cultural and historical evidence. The last generation has seen faith groups demanding to control 'their' objects, and curators recognising that objects can only be understood within their original religious context. In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the role religion plays in museums, with major exhibitions highlighting the religious as well as the historical nature of objects.Using examples from all over the world, Religious Objects in Museums is the first book to examine how religious objects are transformed when they enter the museum, and how they affect curators and visitors. It examines the full range of meanings that religious objects may bear - as scientific specimen, sacred icon, work of art, or historical record. Showing how objects may be used to argue a point, tell a story or promote a cause, may be worshipped, ignored, or seen as dangerous or unlucky, this highly accessible book is an essential introduction to the subject.

1 OBJECTS CURATED

How curators ascribe a new significance to their objects, but still offer them respect even when keeping them under tight control

Curators make new meanings for objects coming into the museum, and have a large degree of control over how they are understood by visitors. What is or should be their purpose? What is their responsibility to their visitors and their museums' funders? What, if anything, is the curators' responsibility to the religious background of their objects?

Curators¹ retain control over the way religion appears in museums because they retain the power of choice. Objects are inevitably the slaves of their curators, who choose which ones to acquire, whether to display them or put them in store, and how to display them. To a very great extent, this gives curators the power to determine how their visitors understand them and respond to them. In his classic 1989 survey of public opinion, Nick Merriman (1991: 62) found that forty-four per cent of his interviewees identified museums with churches, temples or monuments to the dead. It has often been observed how museums can be deliberately built to look like classical temples or Gothic cathedrals, and how close are the parallels with temples and churches in the ways in which visitors (the laity) are expected to behave; we shall look again at this in chapter eight. Many people have pointed out that there is a parallel, too, between curators and clergy. It is no coincidence that 'curate' and 'curator' both mean carer—someone who cares, in the one case for souls and in the other for collections. Curators also share with priests an arcane knowledge and an authority to control the access of lay people to the 'sacred' things they control (Curtis 2003: 30). In that sense, all museum collections are 'sacred'—in the sense of things set apart, separated from the world at large and treated in prescribed, formalized, 'ritual' ways. Here, though, we shall look in a much less metaphorical way at curators and their collections, and at how museum people behave towards museum objects regarded overtly as in some sense 'religious' or 'sacred'. As the conservator Chris Caple (2000) so tellingly puts it, the question is, should we treat a 'lucky rabbit's foot' differently to any other rabbit's foot? That should not sound flippant—it is only a matter of degree. Should we treat a consecrated murti differently to any other Indian statue? Should we treat a consecrated Host differently to any other piece of bread?

THE CURATOR'S TASK: MAKING MUSEUM OBJECTS

Once an object is taken out of its original context, it willy-nilly changes its meaning. This was pointed out by Quatremere de Quincy at the very time the modern museum was invented in Napoleon's Paris (McLellan 1999; Sherman 1994): by taking objects out of context, a museum robs them of their identity and value. It cannot be avoided. When an old farm tool is taken from the corner of the shed and displayed in a folk museum, it inevitably stops being a farm tool and becomes a museum object. It does so, indeed, even if it is left where it is and the shed itself becomes a museum. How much more is this true of a religious object removed from church or temple or home? 'Take the crucifix out of the cathedral and you take the cathedral out of the crucifix' (Fisher 1991: 19).

Thus, (whether he or she likes it or not) the curator's first task is to give the object, once collected, a new meaning for its new life in the museum. Normally that is one—or a combination—of three broad categories of meaning: as a beautiful/powerful/meaningful work of art, as a scientific specimen, or as an illustration and evidence to a story being told. We shall see in the next chapter that the curator cannot do any of this alone, for though he or she can do a great deal to manipulate that relationship, in the end the meaning of any object depends on how it is understood by its interlocutor, the museum visitor. The curator uses increasingly elaborate and sophisticated display techniques to ensure that the visitor responds to the object in the way he or she wants. Nor are such techniques limited to architecture, design of displays, lighting, text and so on. The very act of creating a collection, or juxtaposing one object with another, creates meaning of itself. Sue Pearce, in her seminal book Museums, Objects and Collections (1992), quotes a Newfoundland Museum label announcing, 'When you look at an artefact you are looking at a person's thoughts.' One might add that when one is looking at a collection one is looking at a conversation. It is the forming of collections, not merely the acquiring of individual objects, that lies at the heart of the curator's role. The curator's task is to assemble individual objects into a collection, and thereby to create meaning greater than the sum of the individual objects.

Does the curator's own faith or lack of it affect the experience of religious objects in his or her care? Does the faith of curators make it easier or more difficult for a religious object to reveal and communicate its once and 'real' meaning? Is it better to be curated by an insider or an outsider? It is sometimes claimed that, in social history museums at least, religion has been ignored largely because curators (in Europe, at least) have tended over the past generation or two to be agnostic (Paine 2010a: 14). Possibly, the growing interest in the subject reflects a change? At present, it seems we have no information on the beliefs of curators; anecdotally, some of the key exhibitions of religious objects are attributed to curators and museum directors interested in and sympathetic to religion, or at least with a religious family background, but the mere fact that religion is so prominent in world politics may be sufficient explanation. We need, anyway, to remember how exceptional secular Europe is in the modern world.

ASCRIBING RELIGIOUS QUALITIES TO OBJECTS

Museum curators routinely divide the information they have about objects into 'intrinsic' information and 'extrinsic' information (Ambrose and Paine 2012: 191). Intrinsic information is that carried by the object itself, merely awaiting someone to 'extract' it. Intrinsic information includes the object's shape, its colour, its material and its condition. All of this may tell us a great deal about the object. Just by looking, we may be able to estimate its age from its style and its function from its shape and wear. And we can also deploy an increasingly sophisticated range of techniques to extract more information. Extrinsic information, on the contrary, is information derived from outside the object: where it came from, who owned it, how it was used, etc.

But there is a third category of information, distinct from the extrinsic. This is information ascribed to an object, rather than derived from studying the thing itself, or certainly known about it. It includes its significance to an individual or to a group, for example grandfather's beloved clock, which for the whole family encapsulates his memory; the tree regarded with affection by the whole village, whose felling causes real distress; or the frisson many suddenly lose again when they learn that a painting is a fake. 'Significance' is a concept that has made big inroads into museum thinking in recent years. It originated in Australia, where the Collections Council defines it rather broadly:

Significance means the historic, aesthetic, scientific and social values that an object or collection has for past, present and future generations. Significance refers not just to the physical fabric or appearance of an object. Rather, it incorporates all the elements that contribute to an object's meaning, including its context, history, uses and its social and spiritual values. When you consider this information you can draw informed conclusions about why an object is significant. Significance is not fixed—it may increase or diminish over time. (Russell and Winkworth 2009)

Significance is the meaning an object or place has for a person; that meaning certainly derives from the intrinsic and extrinsic information he or she has about the object, but is different from either. If a newly coined word is acceptable, it is 'adtrinsic' knowledge. Adtrinsic information is also the religious meaning people ascribe to objects. Here, indeed, it is at its most dramatic.

Other commentators have given other names to the meaning people ascribe to the same object in different circumstances. Thus, Carrier (2006) speaks of the 'envelope' that makes an object a work of art, emphasizing the transformative effect of the art museum itself, while Walter Benjamin (1973: 218) speaks of 'cult value' being replaced by 'exhibition value', emphasizing the changing utility of the object itself as replication deprived the object of its 'aura', which derived from its uniqueness and its role in cult:.

CURATORIAL CONTROL

In 2007, Simon Knell, Professor of Museum Studies at Leicester University, achieved the apparently impossible: a witty and engaging account of recent museum history. In it, he notes:

The supposedly objective collection conceals irrational passions, poetry, debts, claims, and so on, mixed with all those museum inadequacies and vices: neglect, territorialism, bias, poverty, ignorance, and misunderstanding. And while we rightly push objects and collections to the fore as the distinguishing features of museums, we need to remember that if those objects are 'made to speak', they do so through a human act of authorship with all its editing, contextual manipulation and censorship. This combines in an interpretative coupling of speaker and listener where both are manipulating meaning, often unknowingly. But in this 'conversation', is the object active or passive? (Knell 2007: 7)

The answer is surely that the object plays an active role in a triple alliance with curator and visitor. But it is willy-nilly curators (in our broadest sense) who play the key role in controlling collections and determining what museum objects say.

In the 1990s, academic interest in museums accelerated. One of the academics' great contributions was a new appreciation of the social role that museums can play, and the political role they must play, whether they are aware of it or not (Vergo 1989; Bennett 1995). Especially, they drew attention to the way in which too many museums have effectively excluded large swaths of the population. People who have never been educated or conditioned into appreciating art or science or history, and who have never developed the habit of museum-going naturally feel excluded from a unfamiliar environment, and all too often feel patronized, as well. Curators have always been conscious of the challenge of presenting their collections in ways that their visitors will accept and understand. Offering too much information when most visitors know little about a subject can be as alienating as offering too little to experts can be patronizing. Adopting the wrong tone, whether in the design of the displays or in the wording of panels and labels, can be equally off-putting and excluding. If curators have usually been conscious of this in their own institutions, now they were told how this has a much wider political effect in supporting the status quo, and further empowering the educated elite for whom museums are familiar and friendly, rather than patronizing and alien. Moreover, the choices curators make in collecting and in choosing objects for display are also political decisions, for the formation of collections is a meaning-making activity. The 'new museology' (a term used rather differently by the museum profession than by academics) which has swept through the museum world since the 1980s is all about forcing museums to break out of their elitist box and to engage with the public which—through taxes or admission charges—pays for them. This campaign has gone along with that of reaching out to marginalized groups. Museums have been taking very seriously their commitment to engage with minority groups of all kinds, whether unrepresented social and economic groups, the LGBTI communities, ethnic minorities or people with disabilities. Of course, there has been a big element of fashion in all of this, as well as a real reflection of changing political, economic and cultural concerns. At its worst, it has been simply a matter of ticking the boxes required by politicians and funding bodies. What is more, the idea that museums in the past were mainly elitist institutions, interested only in their narrow scholarly and upper-class interests and clientele, is largely an Aunt Sally—in reality the showman tradition deriving through Phineas Barnum from the fairground is just as strong in today's museums as is the scholarly tradition deriving through Elias Ashmole from the antiquary's study or nobleman's cabinet.² For all that, the new museology has transformed museums in many parts of the world, and created a generation of curators and other museum workers with a real commitment to ensuring that their museums both reflect and serve the interests of the whole of their communities.

Who determines how museums should serve their communities, and indeed what museums are for? In the UK, this question has arisen fiercely in recent years in what has been called the 'instrumentalism' debate (Holden 2004). As with so many public services in the past generation, central government has made big efforts to ensure that its spending achieves intended results, and it has done that by setting targets for outputs that relate—hopefully—to broad outcomes in the field of social development. Thus, museums have been required, in return for their annual grants, to achieve specified levels of visitors from specified social and economic groups, ethnic minority communities and people with disabilities. They have been required to develop formal learning services in direct support of the National Curriculum. This approach has been nicknamed 'instrumentalism'. In recent years it has suffered a backlash, government being criticized for not appreciating that museums are intrinsically valuable, and that micro-managing a service through the setting and assessment of targets is anyway a thoroughly inefficient way of achieving ends. This defence is just a small part of the defence mounted against the apparently world-wide attack by governments on the humanities in general (Bate 2011). Proponents of the 'intrinsic' argument do not challenge the broad aims of government, but call on government to trust museum workers to use their judgement in working out how to achieve them, and call on museum workers to articulate much more clearly the value of museums.

The 'intrinsic' approach has in turn been heavily criticized, not merely for its historical ignorance (most museums were founded for very specific educational and other societal purposes), and for its failure to explain what this intrinsic value really is, but above all as a mere defence of the privileges of the self-interested clique of professionals who run museums. Mark O'Neill of Glasgow has been heavily involved in this debate. In 2008, he published a very critical analysis of the processes that resulted in the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art in London (O'Neill 2008: 301). The project for the new gallery set out with laudable aims, to 'develop interest in, and to promote understanding of, the diversity of Islamic art, and to inspire in all people an appreciation of its beauty' (Moussouri and Fritsch 2004), and that 'people get a balanced view of the great Islamic civilization of the medieval and modern periods to see what a wonderful civilization it was. We hope people will see that the Islamic civilization of the past was very self-confident and open to the outside world.' 'Front-end' visitor research was carried out, including with a weighted sample of Muslims. The main request from those consulted was a 'desire to see Muslim cultures from the inside, not just from the "neutral" perspective of the curators, to understand their contemporary relevance and human meanings as well as their cultural and historical backgrounds.' Yet, by the time the gallery was completed, most of this approach had got lost. What we have is an old-fashioned art gallery in which objects are seen almost entirely from an aesthetic and art-historical perspective.

Having shown how good intentions fell victim to a very traditional curatorial approach, O'Neill goes on to criticize the gallery and to analyse the results. He makes what are, in the context of current sensitivities over Islam, very serious criticisms. Above all, the gallery fails to meet the consultees' desire to 'see Muslim cultures from the inside'; the perspective is exclusively curatorial. Even more seriously, 'The whole display could be read (by both Muslims and non-Muslims) as showing that Islam's days of greatness are over and its current state is one of decline, meriting no respect—a view often represented in the media. Muslim consultees specifically asked for this to be countered by the inclusion of contemporary Islamic art and images of Islamic culture, a request which was denied.' Thus, great art objects do not speak for themselves, they respond to their visitors, and the message they can be understood to give can be dangerous indeed. Moreover, the gallery misses its golden opportunity to address the 'Islamic' of its title as well as just the 'art': 'The narrow, singular perspective through which the material is seen also fails to take the opportunity to evoke Muslim spirituality, as Seeing Salvation in the National Gallery in 2000 had done for Christianity.'

Since O'Neill made his attack, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has published a summative evaluation of the gallery (Fakatseli and Sachs 2008). Hie V&A should be warmly thanked for publishing this, for it is quite critical of the success of the gallery, even on its own terms. The findings of the evaluation 'may suggest that the gallery does not provide sufficient help with furthering visitors' pre-existing knowledge and enhancing their understanding of more challenging and complex issues of Islamic art'. Moreover, visitors were predominantly white, middle-aged and middle-class, and spent an average of four minutes in the gallery! Disappointingly, the summative evaluation does not really refer back to the front-end evaluatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Objects curated: How curators ascribe a new significance to their objects, but still offer them respect even when keeping them under tight control
• 2 Objects visited: How religious objects relate to their visitors
• 3 Objects worshipped and worshipping: How objects in museums can be worshipped or even 'worshipping'
• 4 Objects claimed: How religious objects are demanded 'back' from museums
• 5 Objects respected: What respecting a religious object means, and how respect is shown
• 6 Objects demanding and dangerous: How religious objects are put into museums to render them harmless, and how relics can turn the museum into a shrine
• 7 Objects elevating: How objects in museums can be purely secular, yet as works of art or works of nature have spiritual power and the ability to elevate the soul
• 8 Objects militant: How religious objects are converted and fight for their new masters
• 9 Objects promotional: How religious objects promote the faith of their masters
• 10 Objects explanatory and evidential: How religious objects explain their faith and their culture
• 11 Conclusion: What have we learnt and how can we help religious objects in museums fulfil their public duties?
• Notes
• References
• Index