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Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium

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If we add to traditional curatorial knowledge — “museum sense” and connoisseurship — an appreciation of the living stories of objects, we get a new understanding of the complexity of artifacts. We can build on new scholarship that puts material things — and thus museum collections — at the center of culture and history. The challenges to traditional material culture studies re-enliven it, suggesting new ways to learn from things Connecting with Audiences Displaying art and artifacts — making exhibitions — is a skill that depends upon the curator’s intimate knowledge of the objects, their knowledge of context, and their connections to audience. A good exhibition is an argument from art and artifact, designed to communicate with its audience. Conversation 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.

Bercaw contrasts the National Museum of the American Indian, which worried that many of the objects in its collection were tainted by colonialism and the legacy of violence and domination, and not useful to indigenous ways of knowing, and the NMAAHC, which embraced objects — but not the objects already in the collection, but new objects. She writes “We have the power of the Smithsonian, which values the authority of the object, but we have no collections to de-colonize.” NMAAHC’s collecting initiatives offer a revealing insight into the way that connecting serves collecting and community. That museum built its collections by connecting with communities that hadn’t been ready to trust the Smithsonian with their stories until the new museum came along. Reconnecting with Artifacts 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.” 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 trend towards collaborations between artists and museum curators has in some cases involved the rehanging of existing collections or redesigning of gallery spaces. In this way the probing instinct of the creative mind counterbalances the sense of permanence associated with the museum in a dialogue involving elements of the past, present and future.

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.” Museums need both collections and connections. Curators need to collect, and connect. It’s the combination that give museums their power. Collections

Fascinating examination of the museum’s unconventional role in contemporary art....Highly recommended.”— Library JournalMany objects come with a history, and community connections; and all too often, those connections have been lost, or ignored. So many museum objects carry with them the legacies of colonialism, violence and domination, and are defined by a process of curation that excluded some peoples and turned others into objects. 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.

From Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Portable Museum’ Boîte-en-valise of the early 1940s to the latest interventions by artists in museums’ displays, merchandise and education, artists of the last seventy years have often turned their attention to the ideas underpinning the museum. What I want to argue is that collections should remain an essential elements of museum work, but that we need to add to it a second kind of knowledge: connections. Collections and connections, together, are the foundation on which museums can build their future.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. This book examines one of the most important and intriguing themes in art today: the often obsessive relationship between artist and museum.

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