Sentient Relics

Museums and Cinematic Affect

Janice Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317057123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Sentient Relics explores museums through cinema and challenges the dominant focus of museum theory as an inclusion–exclusion debate. The author responds to the Enlightenment, 'rational' museum of reason contrasting this with the museum of affect and reveals these 'two museums' operating alongside one another in a productive paradox. In structuralist-orientated museum theory the affective realm is often subsumed within the imperatives of Marxist theory and practice, identity politics, semiology and psychoanalysis. Sentient Relics, while valuing the insights of ideologically focused meaning-making, turns to the capacity of the affective realm of experience to transform the passive subject and object relation. The author uses museum encounters and cinematic affect to engage with problems of difference, temporality, emotion and the sublime. In so doing the book advances research in museum studies by demonstrating what is at stake in pragmatically working toward a deeper understanding of the museum socially, culturally and philosophically.

1 Museum trouble

Complicating the ‘new’ inclusion

Andrea Witcomb observes that the association of museums in the popular imagination is often with the exotic – as dark, musty places full of strange objects. She thinks that ‘a history of the way museums have been represented in film would . . . reveal how museums are often thought of as spaces for illicit behaviour rather than the space of conformity normally accorded to them within academic analysis’.¹ It is important to imagine the museum as a mediator outside its association with stasis – a condition often expressed through analogy with a mausoleum. Sentient Relics is not a history of museums in films, but does acknowledge the discrepancy Witcomb highlights. As fictional sites – not only in mainstream feature films, but also in arthouse cinema and ficto-documentary – encounters with artefacts and galleries will often disrupt the notion that museums are sites of cultural conformity. Lapses in socially acceptable behaviour or breaches in the rational order of things, disrupt cultural norms and the certitude of empirical ways of knowing the world. The mischief may be light-hearted or intense, either way it threatens institutional authority. Whatever the gravity of the mischief, the status quo frequently finds itself in grave trouble in the cinematic museum.

Museum objects in films often facilitate this troubling of common sense, exemplifying the cinematic/museal affect of undoing the familiar that I am interested to explore. Strange things do not happen every time a museum appears in a movie, but there is a waywardness to encounters in museums that occurs often enough to warrant examination. I’m not encyclopaedic about approaching unusual occurrences in museums as fictional sites, rather I touch on how this might relate to imagining difference and otherness. My interest in particular is with subjective positions that gesture to ways of being outside apprehension of identity as fixed to a particular place and time. Moreover, imagined in the movies, ‘subject–object trouble’ happens within the belly of the rational, didactic museum. I’m interested in ‘museum trouble’ as indicative of a fascination with radically different otherness. A desire expressed in cinema as a curiosity for objects and experiences that are not of the everyday and that are frequently neither comfortably human nor nonhuman, a curiosity found in a range of genres and in both mainstream and arthouse films.

In critical museum analysis, attention tends to focus on objects reflecting the historical and cultural identities of the human subject they represent. Cultural identity is a significant focus of museology in response to the concerns of critical and cultural theory with museums’ past representations of peoples and groups deemed to be other to the dominant Western cultural position. An outcome of this focus is the micro-management of museum objects to ensure that object–subject identities respond with sensitivity to museology’s past misappropriation and neglect of cultural difference.

The misuse of objects is often conveyed by metaphors suggestive of the diminished object of traditional museology. Objects are described as frozen in time, ossified, contained, entrapped and so on. Even metaphors that in a postmodern critique might conjure escape or transformation, such as being unmoored or unsettled, only function to indicate that the object of museology is cut off from its purpose, origin and maker. The association of museology with the death of the object is a discourse as old as the museum, but it gained traction in the mid twentieth century with the counter-cultural concern to expose the inequality and elitist practices of institutions, including and particularly museums. We see the association conveyed, for example, in Unsettled Objects (1968–9), a series of photos by artist Lothar Baumgarten, of ethnographic artefacts displayed at Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. One of these objects is spied through the glass of a museum vitrine – a miniature wood carving of a canoe and Indigenous occupant who, it can be inferred, has ceased paddling in order to appraise the camera/viewer. The miniature vessel as an ethnographic object captured by the camera, is flanked and overwhelmed in scale by much larger canoes on either side of the display. The documentary style of the series and the diminution of the canoe, as with other objects at Pitt Rivers in Baumgartin’s series, implies that objects lose their meaning when they are detached from their original identity and relocated in a museum. Baumgarten presents an unmoored object to show how, for such objects,

The uprooted character of their new existence reduces them often to the aesthetic or curious nature of their appearance . . . In the name of science, they have been stripped and deformed, reduced to research material . . . There is no peace to be found for them as acquisitions.²

Baumgarten’s anthropomorphised canoe stripped of its cultural identity is now a scientific specimen. Such objects, he notes, are toys not witnesses.

It is not just ethnographic museum objects that are anthropomorphised as lost and unsettled. The poet Paul Valéry (in Le probléme des musées, 1923) aligns his personal discomfort in the Louvre (having his walking cane removed and not being allowed to smoke) with that of a gallery of overcrowded sculptures. There is a ‘cold confusion [that] reigns among the sculptures, a tumult of frozen creatures each of which demands the non-existence of the others, disorder strangely organized’.³ For Valéry and Baumgarten objects are diminished by the loss of their use, value and cultural connectedness. What this does is to shape the complexity of an object to the history of its production. I would like to approach things somewhat differently and suggest that in the very act of being evoked as an unsettled object, the canoe at Pitt Rivers, for example, acquires a certain audacity. Detached from an essential meaning bound to its maker and the photographer’s intention, the canoe traverses the multiple worlds of its viewers’, making virtual connnections and reassembling thoughts in ways the maker cannot have envisaged. Or perhaps the artisan whittling the little canoe did so with an insight that the work might endure. The point to pursue is that what some critics like Baumgarten and Valéry might discern as the loss and ossification of an artefact once placed in a museum, has given this canoe an unexpected potency to affect and be affected. With each viewing and new reproduction the canoe becomes relevant in contexts that may acknowledge its original cultural identity but that also reimagines its currency in the present.

Complicating the prospect that ‘unsettled’ artefacts are always negatively stripped of meaning, is not to deny the significance of acknowledging and exposing exclusionary practices in museums (past and present). Rather, the objective behind highlighting the naturalising of a discourse around cultural identity is that it may hinder the very renewal that the idea of inclusion could facilitate. What I suggest is that there is a narrow understanding of difference in the way ‘inclusion’ is conceived. It is understandable that the institutional mission of public museums is to represent the identity of all peoples and groups equally through acquisitions, exhibits and access. Measures of inclusion reflect the importance Western multicultural institutions place on cultural diversity and tolerance. There is however another way to approach inclusion and this is to value difference beyond situating its meaning in identity. I extend here what we might glean from the flexibility of cinema to diminish the importance attached to identity in favour of the pleasure of experiencing other modes of living in the world beyond the anthropocentric concerns of the individual subject of Humanism. There is, I believe, a human desire to encounter alterity and herein lies the power of cinema. What this alludes to is that there is more going on than meets the critical eye when a museum or film is interpreted solely on the ideological implications of its textual elements. Desire is a contradictory fascination that cannot be pinned down to one meaning, much as the museum itself.

Reading the gallery in silent film

The earliest film set in an art exhibition also happens to be one of the first movies made, Robert W. Paul’s 1898 Exhibition.⁴ Paul’s silent film suggests that a film can be a narrative with ideological implications while also an affecting personal museum encounter (as this experience is represented in the film and for an audience). Exhibition is a short comedy (one minute) comprised of two scenes.⁵ In the first scene a mature (presumably) married couple sit on a bench beneath signage that indicates there is an art exhibition through a curtain entrance beside them. The man takes ‘refreshments’ from his wife’s wicker basket, it seems they have come off the street to escape the rain, she carries an umbrella, and perhaps they are from out of town. Having consumed his beverage they follow two well-deported women who have entered the exhibition. In the second scene, set within the exhibition space, the man ignores the paintings hanging on the wall, and a bust of Queen Victoria, and becomes attentive instead to a near-life-size sculpture of Venus.⁶ His fascination for the nude figure annoys his wife who, with the assistance of her umbrella, extricates him from close inspection of the marble – her insistence is indicated by the film’s alternate title, Come Along Do! The film’s comedy arises from a man who is harried by his wife for indecorous gawping at a nude statue. His encounter with the nude was intended to humour late nineteenth-century viewers through its mild titillation and the connotation of the constraints of married life.

From a twenty-first-century vantage point, the short film offers a glimpse of gender and class difference in late nineteenth-century England. The former through an objectification of the female form and ‘nagging’ wife, and the latter through the couple’s unsophisticated behaviour, particularly gawping. ‘Gawping has long been associated with peasant and working-class behaviour . . . while composed silent contemplation is associated with middle-class aesthetic appreciation and self-possession’.⁷ The ‘ordinary’ couple located in an art gallery, a place for aesthetic reflection, triggers the comedy for its intended audience. But while the film is imbued with meaning at an ideological level, it is also relevant that this is a pleasurable mischief from a serendipituous encounter with an object in a gallery ruffling the feathers of social propriety.

Exhibition is a precursor for countless visitor experiences in films that complicate the idea that museums are static sites where people (and artefacts) conform to standard expectations of social and cultural decorum. The museum as a static site of conformity is often destabilised by encounters with material objects that are intensely felt, uncommon and/or dangerous. The pedagogical role of museums dwells as much in incidents of passion as it does in characters acquiring knowledge through predetermined meanings and given interpretation. This pertains to a variety of encounters whether the seduction by Venus in Exhibition or an encounter with a sinister portrait in Ghostbusters II. The museal provocation problematises that there is a fixed way to construe what goes on in a museum. The visitor experience – as this experie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Sentient Relics
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Museum Trouble: Complicating the ‘New’ Inclusion
• 2 Fissures and Cracks: Unfettering Identity from the ‘New’ Inclusion
• 3 Outcasting Oedipus: The Autonomy of affecting experience
• 4 Show Time!: Psychoanalysing the Museum to Death
• 5 Dangerous Identity: Museums in Vertigo and the ‘Truth’ of False Objects
• 6 Museums and Cinematic Time
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index