Museums as authorative institutions: Politics of collection and display:

Representation, musealization, exhibition.

Museum effect: art-making, visuality, wonder and resonance.
Exhibitions as display of values of the curators: cultural products and cultural
transmitters Aesthetic and interpretive authority
Conflicts of interpretation & representation:
Collection, Exhibitions as sites of struggles between the producers of the objects:
artists or source communities), curators and encompassing institutions, and the
public (spectators/audiences/communities/civil society).

Cultural property and repatriation.

Reception and interpretation (active audiences, community education, needs and
claims).
Erosion of museum authority

Exclusion & Inclusion.

Audiences are claiming their rights as diverse communities (Karp
1992: 12)
Talk about communities and cultural diversity/production of difference
through museums mask or encompass power struggles but also
citizenship making, conviviality, shared spaces
Shared history, contacts and collisions, interconnections, inclusive we/usmoments and experiences, what brings us together.
Civic culture, public culture. Claims for shared authority.
Participatory/collaborative curation. Culturally diverse contexts of collecting,
exhibiting, visiting, participation. Cross-cultural understanding
Collaboration between communities and museums not only through
museum outreach programs, but between museum communities, global
museum networks, shared collections, shared custody.

Wonder and Resonance in the Kunstkammer

Wonder
the power of the displayed object to stop the
viewer in his or her tracks, to convey an
arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an
exalted attention (Stephen Greenblatt 1991)

Resonance
the power of the displayed object to reach out
beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world,
to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic
cultural forces from which it has emerged and
for which it may be taken by a viewer to stand
(Stephen Greenblatt 1991)

Art/Visuality

Art museums

Artifacts
Context/Narrative

History/Culture Museums
(i.e., ethnographic museums)

The Museum Effect: "A way of seeing"

"Attentive looking" Visuality Wonder
All objects are turned into works of art (Svetlana Alpers 1991)

What the museum registers is visual distinction,

not necessarily cultural significance (Alpers 1991: 30; my emphasis).
"Museums turn cultural materials into art objects.
The products of other cultures are made into something that we can look
at." (Alpers 1991: 31)
The Museum Effect: "the tendency to isolate something from its world, to
offer it up for attentive looking and thus to transform it into art like our
own" (Alpers 1991: 26)

The Museum Effect as displayed in the Kunstkammer

The museums of Europe have a long history of encouraging attention to
objects... as visible craft.
"This was a good part of the rationale of the early museums, those
encyclopedic collections of Renaissance princes.
Much has been said of the ideology of power, political and intellectual,
engaged in both the collecting of objects and the taxonomic manner of
ordering them.
"But I want to stress that what was collected was judged to be of
visual interest"
(Alpers 1991: 25-26; my emphasis)
The taste for isolating this kind of attentive looking at crafted
objects is as peculiar to our culture as is the museum as the space or
institution where the activity takes place (Alpers 1991: 26; my emphasis).

Museums as monuments and epitaphs:

sites for the preservation of worlds on the wane

Museums function, partly by design and partly in

spite of themselves, a monuments to the fragility of
cultures, to the fall of sustaining institutions and
noble houses, the collapse of rituals, the
evacuation of myths, the destructive effects of
warfare, neglect, and corrosive doubt (Greenblatt
1991: 43-44).

Cultural heritage

The aura of a fragile authenticity

Induction of wonder
Precariousness of the Museum Effect
The so-called boutique lightning that has become popular in
recent years
"---a pool of light that has the surreal effect of seeming to
emerge from within the object rather than to focus upon it from
without--is an attempt to provoke or heighten the experience of
wonder, as if modern museum designers feared that
wonder was increasingly difficult to arouse" (Greenblatt
1991: 49; my emphasis)

Museums alone cannot create a sense of cultural

identity...

"What museums particularly offer is an object base

-the collection of the real, material remains of the past-

"as a sort of yardstick that people could use

(if they were taught the skills)

to evaluate cultural mythologies

(George Macdonald 1992: 162).

The very roles that museums desire to play in civil

society leave them open to accusations that they
are responsible for features of the social order
such as pervasive discrimination and injustice.
As definitions of inclusion and exclusion become
more negotiable, museums are asked to explain
their history of exclusion, and to fashion inclusive
ways of going about their work

(Ivan Karp 1992: 10)

Contact Zones
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 1992
Social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with
each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and
subordination --- like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are
lived out across the globe today (Pratt 1992: 4)
The space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples
geographically and historically separated come into contact with each
other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of
coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict (Pratt 1992: 6).
'Contact zone is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence
of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures,
and whose trajectories now intersect... I am to foreground the interactive,
improvisational dimensions of colonial encounter... How subjects are
constituted in and by their relations to each other... In terms of
copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices,
often within radically asymmetrical relations of power (Pratt 1992: 7).

The Museum as Contact Zone

James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late 20th Century, 1997
In many cities... contact zones result from a different kind of travel: the
arrival of new immigrant populations... Negotiations of borders and
centers are historically structures in dominance.

To the extent that museums understand themselves to be interacting

with specific communities across such borders, rather than simply
educating or edifying a public, they begin to operate---consciously and
at times self-critically---in contact histories...
Museum practices of collecting and display look different in a contact
perspective. Centers become borders crossed by objects and makers.
Such crossings are never free and indeed are routinely blocked by
budgets and curatorial control, by restrictive definitions of art and
culture, by community hostility and miscomprehension (Clifford 1999:
204).

The Museum as a Contact Zone

Until museums do more than consult (often after the curatorial vision is
firmly in place), until they bring a wider range of historical experiences
and political agendas into the actual planning of exhibits and the control
of museum collections, they will be perceived as merely paternalistic
by people whose contact history with museums has been one of
exclusion and condescension.
It may... be utopian to imagine museums as public spaces of
collaboration, shared control, complex translation, and honest
disagreement...
The current proliferation of museums may reflect the fact that, as
historically evolved, such institutions tend to reflect unified community
visions rather than overlapping, discrepant histories (Clifford 1999:
207-208).

Museums as Contact Zones

Innovative museum professionals have long been interested in ways to
put objects in a fresh light, to make them new.
Explicit contact relations now place this kind of search in a different
conjuncture, imposing new collaborations and alliances.

Thus, the multiplication of contexts becomes less about discovery and

more about negotiation, less a matter of creative curators having good
ideas, doing research, consulting indigenous experts, and more a matter
of responding to actual pressures and calls for representation in a
culturally complex civil society.
Contact work in a museum thus goes beyond consultation and sensitivity,
though these are very important.
It becomes active collaboration and a sharing of authority (Clifford
1999: 210).

My script for the interview with Steven Engelsman

(pre-researched cues for an open-ended, informed conversation)
1) Personal background: Mathematics -> History of science -> Exhibition
curation (Science & Technology) -> Museum management (Ethnology Leiden ->
Vienna)
2) Weltmuseum -> Rationale for name change from Ethnology Museum
(ethnologization as an outdated representational strategy)
3) Exhibitions: Politics and aesthetics
4) Communities: Sources, cultural property, repatriation

5) Meaning / Value of objects. Reception, interpretation

6) Future of museums:
a) management (e.g., privatization, funding)
b) Relations with communities
c) Museums in the cultural policies of Vienna, Austria, the European Union,
the World

Anticipated content of the interview

(From personal background in history of science) Missions of the museum:
Historical: 1) Amazement, 2) Colonial knowledge and control, 3) postcolonial
museum anthropology;
Virtual or Possible, in the Making: 4) Not about them without them
What Not about them without them entails:
Exclusion Inclusion
Collaborative, participatory collection management
Collaboration between museums (museum networks, shared collections)
Collaboration with world artists (not ethnologized), global art
Communities: Recognition of cultural diversity. Promotion of cross-cultural
understanding. Concessions to source community (repatriation).
Community/producer/artist empowerment???
Co-authority, sharing custody of collections
Privatization?