Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium

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In the short term, yes: he was knowledgeable, dedicated to his museum, a great collector and brilliant at convincing others to donate their collections. He worked hard at putting things on display and was serious about teaching. He believed deeply in the mission of the museum. Exhibitions connect audiences with artifacts. The best writers on exhibition and interpretation remind us that exhibition is not a one-way street; it’s about meeting visitors where they are, about making connections. Freeman Tilden, in his classic book on interpretation, got this right: museums need to figure out how to connect their collections to their audiences. Nina Simon wisely titled her new book, The Art of Relevance. There is something special, and essential, about the curatorial way of knowing. But it can be problematic, too narrowly defined and sharply focused. Remember the Jenks Museum! Curators also need to learn, from audiences and communities, new ways of knowing objects. We need to add to shared authority, the mantra of museum reform over the past decade or two, shared ways of knowing, and new ways of sharing. We need to connect as well as collect. What curators need to do, I argue, is to share their collections, their knowledge, and especially their ways of knowing, with other people — with audiences and with community members. Curators know things. So do other people. Connecting will make both museums and communities stronger.

I’ll consider three kinds of connection, and what they us about what curators should know: connecting with communities, with audiences, and with each other. Reconnecting with Communities This book examines one of the most important and intriguing themes in art today: the often obsessive relationship between artist and museum. Entomology collections and staff, National Museum of Natural History. From NMNH Collections Program Photo Gallery, How do we better organize museums to build on the strengths we have — our knowledge of objects, collections, and context — and add to them the increasing importance of connection? I’ve used the word “connection” as the title of the second part of this essay. I thought about using the word “conversation.” What I’m really asking for is that the basic forms of curatorial knowledge — objects, collections, context — become part of a conversation that extends in all directions — before collecting, in the museum, and outward, to audiences of all sorts. A recent British survey of curators suggested that collaboration, flexibility and openness to new ideas were the keys to future curatorial success; I’m suggesting here some directions for that collaboration and openness.The first half of this essay explained the curatorial skills that allow deep connections between the curator and museums collections. That’s a necessary first step, but not enough. We define curatorial skills too narrowly defined when we limit them to collections. I want to expand the definition curatorial work to include all of the ways that collections might connect — with communities, with audiences, and with each other. Curators need to know how to make connections. Museum geographers Hilary Geoghegan and Alison Hess write that storerooms are “shaped by the emotion attached to the objects they house.” A storeroom, they write, is “a lively space…exhibiting a magical, enchanted materiality.” They highlight “the affective, emotional and sensual relationship between people and things.” Object Knowledge Clark’s photographs hint at the emotional connections between curators and collections staff and “their” objects. Curators like show off their storerooms. Seb Chan writes about discovering strange things in museum collections: “That is part of the texture and nuance that museum insiders love — and some of the best museum experiences are those where you chance upon a particularly quirky or strange set of objects.”

The challenge is how to open those curatorial conversations . I’ll end with a few questions that might serve as conversation starters… Just as good collecting requires understanding context, so does the good use of collections. Using collections requires knowing what was collected, as well as what wasn’t. What’s missing, and why? It requires understanding of the context of collecting, and of the history of the collections. Collections’ history shapes the way we use them and the stories we tell with them. We need to understand collections’ connections — those that were broken, those that survive, those that might be reknit. Curators need to reconnect collections with communities.

What Is Semantic Scholar?

One important aspect of this knowledge comes from the curator’s physical connections with the objects. They have the objects, and privileged access to them. Whatever there is to an object that can’t be can’t be described or photographed or digitized — that’s a place to look for particular curatorial knowledge. Geoghegan and Hess offer this list of some of these qualities: “three-dimensionality, weight, texture, surface temperature, smell, taste and spatiotemporal presences.” Join me for a visit to the museum storeroom, the place where curators engage with artifacts directly, thinking through the problems of exhibitions or research in a material, affective, way. A museum storeroom might be thought of as a kind of memory palace, an extension of the curator’s brain. Things are organized, available, visible on shelves or ready to be discovered behind neatly labeled cabinet doors. Museum curators have the privilege of access to the storeroom, of seeing the categories made physical, gaining a visceral understanding of how those categories came to be, what they reveal and what they hide. Storerooms highlight the materiality of objects, their heft and presence, a perfect counterbalance to the way that the registrar’s files capture their history and exhibitions their meanings.

Used for planting, eating, decoration, and ceremony, corn and seeds are central to Zuni culture. These samples in the Smithsonian collection may be all that remain of some Zuni heirloom plant varieties. Images: Keren Yairi, Recovering Voices, Smithsonian Institution. This publication provided a brief overview of the history museums and how they have progressed in terms of exhibiting collections and art and how this gradually evolved from ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ into the installation of avant garde art work. The book covered the various methods of how collections have been displayed in the past to signify importance and significance of the objects, such as, vitrines, plinths, drawer cabinets and specimen jars.This is not a new idea. George Brown Goode, the first director of the United States National Museum mentioned earlier for his insistence on curators’ special “museum sense,” also insisted that “No man is fitted to be a museum officer who is disposed to repel students or inquirers or to place obstacles in the way of access to the material under his charge.” Frederic Lucas, curator-in-chief of the Brooklyn Museum at the end of the nineteenth century, wrote that curators must “make the knowledge of others available and understandable by the public.” But in the longer term, clearly not. He did not lay a foundation on which others could build. He created a museum that was unable to change with the times. He failed to teach his colleagues or his audiences about the value of the collection. Jenks was a good at curating, but not a good curator. He collected, but never connected.

Collections are what make museums unique. Museum collections are more than objects; they are carefully chosen assemblages, the product of a curatorial way of knowing. They are sustained by curatorial expertise. Curators have a distinctive way of understanding objects, making arguments with them, and telling stories with them. Otherwise staid and practical curators slip into poetry when they try to describe this ability to understand objects. George Brown Goode, the first director of the US National Museum, called it “that special endowment… ‘the museum sense.’” Others talk about “object-feel,” or “a good eye.” Curators of scientific collections, too, exercise their own form of connoisseurship, of object knowledge: Philip S. Doughty, keeper of geology at the Ulster Museum, defined this as “Hunches, intuition…the apparent mystique is in reality a synthesis of a large mass of detail, the product of generations of talented geological curators who have developed, tested and refined skills and practices.” This is a vexed — and therefore important — time to be making a case for real artifacts and the skills and knowledge of curators. Museums are once again at a moment of revolution. Their position in the cultural landscape is uncertain. For some, their collections seem irredeemably tainted as colonialist. For others, the world of the digital and virtual seems more interesting than the actual and real. What can we learn from the materiality of the thing? “Mind in Matter,” Jules Prown’s seminal essay on material culture, calls for “sensory engagement” with the object. The material culture analyst “handles, lifts, uses, walks through, or experiments physically with the object.” What might using the thing tell us? Objects provoke affect; curators respond to them emotionally. Prown calls for “the empathetic linking of the material…world of the object with the perceiver’s world of existence and experience.” Fascinating examination of the museum’s unconventional role in contemporary art....Highly recommended.”— Library Journal

Wikipedia citation

Anthropology museums have a new understanding of source communities as essential to their work. The National Museum of Natural History’s Recovering Voices program, for example, works with communities from which collections were gathered not just to understand the collections, but also to document and revitalize language and knowledge traditions. This makes collections useful to the museum and also to the communities.