Museums have since their creation organized a structure that enabled them to interact and engage with the spectator. Here is a high standard definition of what can be a Museum given by the International Council of Museums¹, "permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment, for the purposes of education , study, and enjoyment ".
By this definition we are given a very flexible approach of what a Museum can give to its community. Nevertheless this kind of approac h is not always perceptible by the communities that make part of it, or supposedly should benefit from the institution.
The politics that are hidden behind such institutions are not always the clearest and also tangible by the people that are concerned by the management of the museum.
My aim with this essay is not to investigate how funds are acquired and how horrid are the consequences of that processes. I do not have any intentions in this essay to create similar approaches as Hans Haacke² to its exhibitions and the way he approaches corporations and institutions by creating institutional critiques and being a beneficent of the art system by criticizing it.
I would like analyze today and purpose for this week discussion the fact that takes the museums to display and choose their objects or artifacts. There is an interesting approach to this problem given by Masao Yamaguchi³ when he says “the act of collection involves processes of making latent meaning manifest. Display, therefore, is the artistic creation of new sensitivities toward the world”. This interesting reference contradicts the above of a neutral space and clear intentions. Here we see that inevitably the museum becomes the facilitator of the creation of an aura in the object or artifact. This becomes even more problematic if we think of what happened during the past centuries with the appropriation of objects with no apparent value, and their display was faced as brilliant technique to bring other cultures to the eyes of the western society. The consequences as many of you might know was that the objects were understood as artistic objects without giving to them a proper context until the modern days when the Museums were faced with the necessity of reevaluate their role in society and because of that reformulate the image that they wanted to give to its audience. Once again I come again to Masao yamaguchi when he says that “acts of display do not necessarily cover territories that are well explained and easy classifiable. They involve an intellectual venture into that which is inexplicable and incapable of classification in order to search for new types of order.
After all this we come to the conclusion that several questions should be asked to ourselves and to the institutions that manage the exhibitions that are offered to the communities.
In first place:
How did the objects come to be displayed?
What is at stake in categorizing them as ‘museum quality’?
How were they originally used?
What cultural and material conditions made possible their production?
What were the feelings of those who originally held the object, cherished them, collected them and possessed them?
What is the meaning of the viewer’s relationship to those same objects when they are displayed in a specific museum on a specific day?
Finally:
Do we want a strong initial appeal of wonder that then leads to desire of resonance? Or the other way around!
All these questions are in some way answered by the museums nowadays, but the responses that the viewer receives are far way from being satisfactory.
I believe is our responsibility to ask these questions because the museum is much more than a display case!
