Image from the Peabody Museum's "Collections Online"
A curator of African art from the Menil Collection in Houston led a session in the Peabody Museum yesterday, and I found the experience to be both enchanting and odd. We encountered beautiful, delicate artifacts: an intricately beaded and painted painted Kuba mask, an oiled funeral reliquary, a decorative cup, and a figure of a woman carrying a child upon her back — items presented to students around a seminar table as a camera man and a teaching fellow politely interrupted intermittently to remind us to pass around a microphone, or to request that the curator repeat herself. The session was being filmed for distance learning. Carefully balancing each piece in their gloved hands, the archaeologists held them up for our view.
The introduction to basic concepts of curating made me far more conscious of the careful thought invested in the positioning of artifacts in space to create an encounter between a museum goer and the selected objects, of creating relationships between pieces through distance, angle, framing, and modes of presentation. The museum and its curators lovingly seek to craft our experience of these objects. The video camera made me recognize that the impulse to increase accessibility and potential reach — an effort to share unique experiences and to move beyond limited resources of space and time — sometimes comes at the expense of more fluidity. We are both freed and confined more and more by mediated experiences.
While university museums matter, they are still disconcerting. These monuments perpetuate and perform power imbalances. It was the oddest feeling to wander through the Pacific Islands gallery — located on the floor just above the Native American and Latin American exhibition halls — and to experience its eerie resemblance to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu in its physical layout and its glass and wooden display cases. Is it the missionary influence or a shared museum culture that creates such striking similarity? To see “candlenut” and feather leis, kahili, fishing hooks, and tapa on display, objects sheltered from the bitter cold of Cambridge and completely displaced in space and time, saddened me even as I heard children exclaiming with excitement “Wow!” as they scurried from case to case. That sense of wonder and discovery is what museums evoke, these built edifices holy to the muses and devoted to study and learning. In such institutions labeled repeatedly with recognized names like Bishop and Peabody, it’s hard to pinpoint what’s conserved and what’s lost.
Haruki Murakami, who spoke recently in Jerusalem to accept a literary prize, says, “Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”
Within their walls, perhaps museums, like novelists such as Murakami, no matter how distanced or mediated continue a parallel effort of “concocting fictions with utter seriousness,” in an attempt to stand on the side of the egg, to preserve a fragile humanity and its artifacts without inadvertently crushing them.
