1991 Culture and Representation Exhibiting Cultures

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The Poeticsand Politicsof MuseumDisplay

Edited byIvan Karp andSteven D. Lavine

EXHIBITING CULTURESSmithsonianInstitutionPressWashingtonand London


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Copyright C> 1991 by Smithsonian InstitutioThe introduction to this book first appeared as "Museums and Multiculturalisnl:Who Is in Control?" in Museum News, March/April 1989, copyright (0 1989 by theAmerican Association of Museums. All rights are reserved. Reprinted with permission.A portion of chapter 17 first appeared as "Making Exhibitions Indian: Aditi andMela at the Smithsonian Institution," in Michael Meister, ed., Making Things inSouth Asia: The Role of Artists and Craftsmen, copyright @ 1988 by the South AsiaRegional Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Reprinted withpernlission. ContentsChapter 20 copyright 1990 by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.All other rights are reserved. Acknowledgements IXDesigned by Linda McKnight.Edited by Susan Warga.Production editing by Rebecca Browning. STEVEN D. LAVINE AND IVAN

Introduction:" Museum s and MulticulturalismKARP

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataExhibiting cultures: the poetics and politics of museum display I

edited by Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine.p. em.

PART I: Culture an d RepresentationIVAN KARP

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Based on papers presented at a conference entitled 'Poetics and Politics of Representation,' held at the International Center of Srnithsonian Institution, Sept. 26-28,1988; sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and other institutions.

CHAPTER I: The Museum as a Way of SeeingSVETLANA ALPERS

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ISBN 1-56098-020-6 (doth).-ISBN 1-56098-021-4 (paper)1. Exhibitions-Evaluation-Congresses. 2. Museum techniques-Evalution

Congresses. 3. Museums-Public relations-Congresses. 4. Culture diffusionCongresses. 5. Museums-Educational aspects-Congresses.. I. Karp, Ivan. II.Lavine, Steven, 1947-. III. .Rockefeller Foundation.

CHAPTER 2: Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects 33MICHAEL BAXANDALL

AM151.E94069' .5-dc20

199190-10188 CHAPTER 3: Resonance and Wonder 42

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. STEPHEN GREENBLATTManufactured in the United States of America.543 295 94 93 9200 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library MaterialsZ39.48-1984.

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CHAPTER 4:

CHAPTER 5:

The Poetics of Exhibition in JapaneseCulture S7MASAO YAMAGUCHI

Another Past, Another Context: Exhibiting Indian Art .Abroad 68

For permission to reproduce individual illustrations appearing in this book, please B. N. GOSWAMYcorrespond directly with the owners of the works, as listed in the captions. TheSnlithsonian Institution Press does not retain reproduction rights for these illustrations or l11aintain a file of addresses for photo sources. PART 2: Art Museums, National Identity, and the Status ofOn the cover and title page: Aboriginal dancers at the opening ceremonies of theCo,ntnonrvealtlJ Games, Brisbane, Australia, 1982. Photo by Eckhard Supp. Repro

Minority Cultures: The Case of Hispanic Art in theUnited States 79duced by permission of the photographer. STEVEN D. LAVINE


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PART I

Culture andRepresentationIVAN KARP

hat do exhibitions representand how do they do so?Exhibitions are placed in

museums that differ in age, collections, content, target audiences,national and regional orientations, and ambitions. The type orgenre of museum may be a difference that cuts across all these othervariables: art museums, cultural-history museums, and naturalhistory museums have different justifications for their activities aildradically different conceptions of how to use and prcsent their collections. Even within a single museum the staff 1l1ay have differingattitudes and orientations; morcover, because thcy arc organizationscomposed of diverse personnel with different interests, museunlShave difficulty developing an internal consensus and c l e a ~ l y definedobjectives.

These arc only SOlllC of the historical and institutional dinlcnsions that affect exhibiting and nlUSClUl1 practices. All exhibitions

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IVAN KARP"4cated through design, arrangenlent, and assemblage, can either aidor ilnpede our appreciation and understanding of the visual, cultural, social, and political interest of the objects and stories exhibited in museulns.

Th e consequences of putting objects into even the Spartan context of the ar t gallery makes the museum effect into an apparatus ofpower. If it ca n aid or ilnpede our understanding of what artistsintend and how ar t means, then its subtle lnessages can serve masters other than the aesthetic and cultural interests of the producersand appreciators of art. Surely this is why museums historicallyhave been such important instruments for articulating national identity, a theme taken up in Carol Duncan's paper in Part 2.

The messages communicated through the museum effect do nothave a predetermined content. Museums and their exhibitions aremorally neutral in principle, but in practice always make moralstatelnents; even the assertion that "art" is exempt from moral, social, and political judglnents implies ideas ab.out what is and is notsubject to certain fonns of criticisnl. The alleged innate neutrality ofmuseums and exhibitions, however, is the very quality that enablesthenl to becolne instrunlents of power as well as instruments of education and experience.

!-Iow the exhibition moves froln neutrality to instrumentality isdescribed in Michael Baxandall's contribution in this section. Baxandall describes exhibition as" a field in which the intentions of theobject's producer, the exhibitor's arrangelnent and display of theobjects, and the assulnptions the museunlgoer brings to the exhibitall conle into play. Th e parts of this set are always in complex anddynamic relationship to one another and change from exhibition toexhibition. Baxandall's fonnulation of these analytical categoriesallows us to perceive with special clarity that any exhibition experi-

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ence is the end product of the Inixing of different capacities and effects. Th e actors involved in the process bring to the making andexperiencing of exhibitions different abilities, assunlptions, desires,and interests. What each derives from the exhibition, in the end, issurely no t entirely what he or she intended. The exhibition is inevitably the contested terrain Steven Lavine and I describe in ou r introduction to this volume. The struggle is not only over what is to berepresented, bu t over wh o will control the means of representing.Other papers in this volume, especially Dawson Munjeri's accountin Part 5 of the colonial formation of the museum in Zimbabwe,describe the struggle over objects and identities in stark terlns. Whatis at stake in struggles for control over objects and the modes ofexhibiting them, finally, is the articulation of identity. Exhibitionsrepresent identity, either directly, through assertion, or indirectly, byimplication. When cultural "others" are ilnplicated, exhibitions tellus wh o we are and, perhaps most significant, who we are not. Exhibitions are privileged arenas for presenting images of self and"other."

From one point of view the most powerful agents in the construction of identity appear to be neither the producers of objectsno r the audience but the exhibition makers themselves, who havethe power to mediate alnong parties who will not come into faceto-face contact. Still, the audience has its ways of escaping control,from refusing to follow the exhibition plan to seeing their assunlptions about identity confirmed in the design and arrangement ofobjects.) In his comments on the conference session, Michael Spockargued forcefully for including "surrogates" for the visito'r in theprocess of exhibition design, a process he acknowledged as explicitly political in that it generates disputes over interpretation amongparties with rather different interests. This approach is advocated by


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Elaine Heumann Gurian in her paper in Part 3, "Museum Practices."

Alpers and Baxandall are concerned with the museum as aWestern cultural institution. The papers by Yamaguchi and Goswamy in this section raise the question of whether the museum effect has been produced in other cultures. If not, then we are forcedto ask whether it is appropriate to attenlpt to display objects drawnfrom other tilnes and places. The easy answer is no. We could arguethat the mUSeUITI is a uniquely Western institution, that exotic objects displayed in museums are there only because of the history ofWestern imperialism and colonial appropriation, and that the onlystory such objects can tell is the history of their status as trophies ofimperial conquest. In the case of exotic objects, the museum effectbecomes an "aura," as Walter Benjalnin called it,2 the consequenceof which is to mask the intentions, meanings, and skills integral tothe production and appreciation of the objects. These become irretrievably lost to the exhibition audience.

No participant in the conference took so pessimistic a position,and Inany of the papers provide exanlplcs of how to successfullyexhibit meanings and intentions across cultural boundaries. Morethan any other paper, Stephen Greenblatt's account in this sectionof the contours of experience available to the exhibition audienceprovides a solution t the impasse of confronting an unintelligibleworld. Greenblatt describes two modes of experience available in anexhibition. rThe first is resonance, "the power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, toevoke in the viewer the cOlnplex, dynanlic forces from which it hasemerged and for which it may be taken by a viewer to stand." Theopposite mode is wonder, "the power of the displayed object tostop the viewer in his or her tracks, to convey an arresting sense of

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uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention." Resonance and wonderare idealized distinctions that have the merit of isolating for us aspects of how an exhibition is experienced in the real world ofexhibition-going. Through examining resonance and wonder we canthink more systematically about the options available for makingand experiencing exhibitions.

Greenblatt desires to defend wonder against what he sees as theextremes of context-oriented art exhibitions that deny to the audience the experience of appreciating the object for itself. But Greenblatt does not define wonder as an eternal, universal experiencesought through the connoisseur's approach to art; rather, he historicizes and contextualizes the sense of wonder by arguing that wonder has a history and a content that changes over time. Greenblattfirst shows that wonder is an experiential goal that has providedgrounds for the display of objects from the Renaissance through thccontemporary period. In the early H.enaissance, wonder was manifested in the display of sumptuous and expensive objects. Eventuallythe definition of wonder changed from sumptuous display to theappreciation of crafted form that Svetlana Alpers argucs is definitiveof the museum effect. Greenblatt describes this historical movementas "a transformation of the experience of wonder froln the spectacleof proprietorship to the 111ystique of the object." MichaelBaxanda]]3 demonstrates that a similar change in attitudc occurredeven within the Italian Renaissance itself, where the elllphasis onexpensive materials specified by the artists' patrons gave way to anappreciation of the-effects on the viewer produced by- the a ~ t i s t s ' command of consummate skill. The beginnings of change in thesense of wonder may have COllle rather early; the change occurredover a long period of time and the transformation is still incomplete.


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Greenblatt's account enables us to conclude that such seemingly invariant experiences as "wonder" must be set within the context of their own cultural formations, subject to change over timeand from place to place. No r can we assume that wonder is not affected by the techniques of display. Greenblatt describes the contemporary use of "boutique lighting" as an attempt to impart won-der from outside, to give the object a sense of mystery that isderived not from itself but from the apparatus of commercial display. Boutique lighting thus provides an instance in which the spectacle of possession is presented as if it were the mystique of the ob-ject. Greenblatt almost suggests that the future history of the senseof wonder may .be for it to return to its roots as a spectacle of possession. If this earlier sense of wonder coexists with wonder as themystique of the object, then tension always exists between thesetwo modes of aesthetic experience, and exhibitions have to struggleto resolve the tension in favor of one definition of wonder over theother.

Greenblatt succeeds in delnonstrating that both wonder andresonance have a history. This achievement solves the dilemma ofcross-cultural translatability raised above and provides a strongerfoundation for the display of objects of other cultures in exhibitionsthat can combine both aesthetics and context. The difference between Greenblatt's approach and the assertion of universal aestheticvalues that is so characteristic of the great survey museums is thatfor Greenblatt. it becomes the responsibility of the exhibitors to construct for their audiences displays that show continuities and differences between the aesthetic evaluations and contexts in which theobjects can be appreciated. The historicizing gaze advocated byGreenblatt implies that knowing and experiencing other times, otherplaces, and other cultural fonntltions can be achieved only by con-

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Culture and Representation

trast and comparison. (Michael Baxandall also advocates using contrasting elements in exhibitions in his piece in this section.) Thiscontrast and comparison is the only solution I see to the seelningimpasse of being unable to present the objects of an "other" without replacing their view of how an object m ~ a n s with ours. 4 Butthis requires an exquisite degree of self-consciousness on the part ofthe exhibitors about their own assumptions and how they organizethe representation of other cultures:s

If resonance and wonder can alter so much over time evenwithin one culture and historical period, how much differencewithin these concepts can be discovered when we examine othercultures? Marshall Sahlins says of the worldview of the Hawaiianpeople that "Hawaiian history repeats itself, since only the secondtime is [something] an event. The first time it is myth.,,6 He arguesthat the Hawaiians who killed Captain Cook were sacrificing a godwhose appearance in the guise of Captain Cook was the fulfiJJrnentof a mythic prophecy. Cook and his crew were incorporated into aHawaiian pantheon in a fashion that showed that the Hawaiianswere guided in their response to historical events by the reality theyattributed to myth. After Cook's death his relics became objects ofritual display. This Hawaiian attitude finds its echoes in Masao Ya-maguchi's paper on Japanese attitudes toward display. Yamaguchishows that in Japan objects are not transparently defined as simpleelements of the material world. The very word for object, "'OnO,formerly had the additional meaning of "spiritlikc." ~ r h i s attitude isre,lated to the Japanese technique of lnitate, the art of c i t ~ t i o n , inwhich an object or reference is taken to stand for another time,place, or meaning. Yamaguchi finds this technique manifested insuch diverse activities as parades and shop displays. For example,Initate is manifested in the wonderful Japanese art of creating irnita


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tion culinary displays that serve as a means of advertising restaurantmeals.

In japanese display, objects are not so much appreciated for thecrafted fonn they can be shown to exhibit, bu t for the degree towhich they reproduce a mythic world. Crafted form is no t an end initself bu t is pu t in the service of representation. This may be a casein which resonance controls wonder. "fhe strongest patallel Ya-nlaguchi can find for the display of objects is with performancegenres such as kabuki in japan, in which fidelity to a script is highlyvalued. 'The result is that the object is no t valued in and for itself,but for how well it represents the nonempirical imagined world.What appears to be at stake in the Japanese display of objects isresonance with shared cultural knowledge about mythic worlds. Anexhibition of japanese ar t that takes as its theme the evolving skillsof the artists would nliss the Japanese point of view, much as achronological exhibit of Dutch landscape ar t would miss the inten-tions of the artists and their original audiences.

Yamaguchi concludes that the skill in representation so highlyvalued by contemporary Japanese is 111anifested no t only in theirarts but also in such quotidian settings as shop displays of toys.On e can see parallels between his paper and Michael BaxandafJ'saccount of the three agents involved in exhibition. The producer,the exhibitor, and the audience must share a set of skills utilized inproducing and appreciating objects if exhibitions are to achievetheir effects. Baxandall may be drawing on his earlier account ofRenaissance ar t7 in which he showed that skills such as perspectivewere acquired by artist and audience alike in ordinary settings suchas 111athenlatics education, and that these skills were culturallybased and very different froln ou r own. The possible differences incultural resources that are involved in the production and apprecia-


tion of objects we regard as being in ou r own tradition ITIUst makeus wary of projecting ou r current assumptions onto objects drawnfrom other cultures. No r can we blandly assume that the way weexperience exotic objects in contemporary settings is similar to theway such objects are or were experienced in their original settings.

l" Affinities need to be denlonstrated rather than asserted. If in Japanr~ , I / " ~ objects are secondary and imnlaterial forms such as nlyths primary,r: what is the museum exhibitor to do?ib A rigorous attempt to resolve problenls of translation and topresent another culture's aesthetic standards is described in Gos-wamy's paper on his curatorial role in the design of two exhibitionsthat were organized according to an indigenous Indian aesthetic

concept called rasa. The concept of rasa is related to an Indian aes-thetic theory based on inllnediate enl0tional response, known onlyin broad outline terms to the average Indian exhibit-goer but havingan elaborate intellectual history known primarily to specialists. Rasais one of those protean cultural concepts that have nlore or lesscontent depending upon the context of use and the training of theuser. Goswamy set as his theme the nine rasas of Indian art. Histwo exhibitions were organized not according to chronology, typeof object, or artist, but by the aesthetic response of the viewer. Arasa is quite cOlnplex. I t nvokes synesthesia and is associated no tonly with feeling but with taste and color. Each rasa has its coun-terpart in a more specific feeling, called bhava, which is generatedout of the experience of a specific object. Thus given the proper pre-conditions, the immediate feeling or Inood (bhava) of love may beswiftly and blindingly trallsforrned into an intense erotic sentinlcnt(rasa). This is a good exalnple of a difference in the cultural re-sources used to produce and appreciate objects. The enlotional andaesthetic progress mandated by the theory 'of rasa exhibits an order


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that is the reverse of that expected in the Western theory of personhood, in which the elevation of erotic feelings over love is thoughtto be rather adolescent.

Goswamy organized his exhibition into sections defined by dif- .ferent rasas. (In the San Francisco installation, the designers cooperated with him more than in Paris.H) Th e experience of the exhibition was heightened by having each room painted in a colorassociated with the rasa. Still, how was it possible for an Americanaudience to experience the exhibition as an Indian audience would?One answer that will come up again in the section on exhibitionpractices is that the failure of conventional expectations to workmay give rise to an imaginative attempt by the audience to experience exhibitions in other than familiar ways. The experience of contrast or shock can lead to a reorganization of knowledge and experience, just as it does for the anthropologist in an alien culture orfor those of us entering a new occupational setting.9

Cross-cultural exhibitions present such stark contrasts betweenwhat we know and what we need to know that the challenge ofrcorganizillg our knowledge beCOITICS an aspect of exhibition experience. This challenge may be experienced in its strongest form in.cross-cultural exhibitions, but it should be raised by any exhibition.Almost by definition, audiences do not bring to exhibitions the fullrange of cultural resources necessary for comprehending them; otherwise there would be no point to exhibiting. Audiences are leftwith tw o choices: either they define their e x p e r i e ~ c e of the exhibition to fit with their existing categories of knowledge, or they reorganize their categories to fit better with their experience. Ideally, itis the shock of nonrecognition that enables the audience to choosethe latter alternative. The challenge for exhibition makers is to provide within exhibitions the contexts and resources that enable audi-


ences to choose to reorganize their knowledge. What these contextsand resources .should be is the debate that animates the papers inthis volume.

NOTES

1. Natural-history exhibits display objects that are not produced by humanagents wh o have goals and intentions. The theory of evolution is used innatural-history exhibitions to explain how species evolve. These exhibitions

! do no t examine the intentions of plants and animals. Problems arise when(

objects made by humans are exhibited in natural-history Inuseums and theexhibitors believe that theories of nature can substitute for accounts of cultural factors such as beliefs, values, and intentions. A good example of the' "

. " problems that arise is provided by the diorama, an exhibiting form that claims~ ~ ; to present nature in an ideal form (see Donna Haraway, "Teddy Bear Patri~ : , archy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, t 908....;.1936," Social Text 11 rWinter~ ~ . 1984-85].) Not only are intentions presulned rather than exhibited, but the~ ; history of culture an d society is wiped from the record as persons and things

become ideal examples of certain types. In this way, the cultural and historicalspecificity of the human society is turned into an exalnple of a universal

natural history.2. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969).3. Michael Baxandall, Painting and r ~ x f J e r i e n c e in Pi(teellth-Centllry Italy(London: Oxford University Press, 1972).

I 4. See James Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modcrn," Art in A",er.ica 74, no. 4 (Apr. 1985), on the concept of affinity used to justify the Museunlof Modern Art's exhibition "Prilnitivism" in T w e n t i e t h - ( ~ e n t l J r y Art: Affinityof the Tribal and the Modern.5. Anthropology has recently gone through this exercise, and nUlllerous tcxtsexist that describe the cOlnplex situation of fieldwork (see, for exanlple, IvanKarp an d Martha- Kendall, "Reflexivity in Fieldwork," .in Paul Secord, ed.,Explaining Human Behavior rLos Angeles: Sage Publications, 1982]), theassumptions that underlie the classificatory schemes into which cultures areslotted (see, for example, Johannes Fabian, Time and the ()ther: How An.thropology Makes Its Object rNew York: Columbia University Press, 1983 J),and how the rhetorical and literary devices used in writing about culturescommunic.ate assumptions about them (see, for example, Jallles Clifford andC;eorge Marcus, Writing C;ulture rBerkeley: University of California Press,


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1986]). On e of the goals of this volunle is to extend the insights of thisliterature to fornls other than the written text for representing cultures.6. Marshall Sahlins, Historical Myths and Mythical Realities (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1981), 9.7. Baxandall, Painting and Experience.8. Th e history of different installations of the same exhibition raises interesting issues we were unable to cover in this conference and volume. In ou rdiscussion we have tended to collapse the curator and designer into onecategory-the undifferentiated "exhibitor." Yet conflicts between people concerned with content and those responsible for execution are notorious in theInuseutn world. Very often claims are Inade to represent important interests inthese disputes, such as artistic integrity, the views of the audience, the valuesof the cultures to be represented, the integrity of a disciplinary point of view,and so on. These disputes are nlonlents when the ideological arnlature thatjustifies different genres of museums often is brought into play, and much isheard frolll curators about "aesthetic values" (the art museum), "authenticity" (the history museum), or "science" (the natural-history or science-andtechnology museum). How this affects the actual installation of exhibitions isa history yet to be written. James CJifford raises a very important and neglected dilnension in his contribution to this volunle, "Four Northwest CoastMuseums: l 1 ravel R.eflections." The genres he discerns are majority and minority mUSeUtllS, types that cut across the art/context distinction (though seehis caveat about the terrn 111il'lority). He sees a difference in the visual narratives of these types of museurllS. Majority institutions tell a story that tends touniversals, \vhile nlinority and conllnunity institutions tend to personalize an dexpress their narrative in terms of oppositional culture. Clifford puts his distinction forward as no Inore than a hypothesis, but he has brought into focusone of the effects that the relationship between museum and community canhave on exhibiting practices.9. Ivan Karp and Martha Kendall, "Reflexivity in Fieldwork."

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CHAPTER I

The Museum as a Way ofSeeingSVETLANA ALPERS

O ne of the clearest Inemoriesfrom, Inuseum visits of Iny childhood is of a crab. It was a giantcrab, to be precise, which wasin a glass case, a quite hard-to-find case, in the Peabody Museum(actually, in the Museum of Comparative Zoology) in Cambridge. AsI remember, it'was the scale that was so astonishing. I had never seena -crab that size and had therefore not imagined that it was possible. Itwas no t only the size of the whole but of each of its individual parts.One could see the way it was Inade: huge claws, bulging eyes, feelers,raised bumps of shell, knobbly joints, hairs that extended out aroundthem. It was placed at the corner of a case so that one could walkaround' from the front to the side and take it in from another view: asmallish main body delicately supported on improbably long legs, likethe tines of some huge fork or rake.

I could attend to a crab in this way because it was still, exposedto view, dead. Its habitat an d habits of r e s t ~ eating, and moving wereabsent. I had no idea how it had been caught. I am describing lookingat it as an artifact and in that sense like a work of art. The museumhad transformed the crab-had heightened, by isolating, these aspects,had encouraged one to look at it in this way. The nluseum had madeit an object of visual interest.

The museums of Europe have a long history of encouraging at

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1991 Culture and Representation Exhibiting Cultures

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