Japan in American Museums - but which Japan? - Bibliography

The Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC organized a symposium, "Asia in Museums," as part of celebrations of the museum's seventy-fifth anniversary in 1998 I was asked to talk about Japan in museums. When I was given my topic, "Japan in American Museums," I immediately answered with a question: "Which Japan?" The theme and my reply gave me an opportunity to throw back on Japanese art collections in this region and their functions. My investigation took me down the pair familiar and unfamiliar paths of thinking about the reception and presentation of Japanese art in a foreign agriculture This paper relays the gist of my presentation, and my continued theoretical musing about "Japanese art" as a notion rather than about the art percepts themselves that make up this category.

The general theme of the symposium was the examination of by what mode Asian cultures are perceived and at handed in museums. Our intention was to review broadly in what manner Western museums, through their collections and displays, have told stories about "other" tillages To the extent that they narrate other societies by dint of means of selected objects drawn from various "other" agricultures art museums today share their ancestry with nineteenth-century ethnographic museums. In a new catalogue published for Images of Other agricultures an exhibition of ethnology held in Osaka showcasing Japanese artifacts from the British Museum, various scholars observ by what mode and what artifacts from Japan were displayed in the British Museum during the early decades of the twentieth hundred (1) According to one report, Japan was shown in sum of two units different types of space in the museum. upon the one hand, Japan was part of the ethnographic gallery devot to artifacts from Africa and Oceania. Here Japanese facts were presented alongside those of the Ainu, an indigenous community in northern Japan of distinctly non-Japanese linguistic and ethnic identity. upon the other hand, Japanese paintings were exhibited in the prints and drawing gallery, and other particulars such as "porcelain, metal work, lacquer ware, and netsuke" (2) were displayed as "works of art" in the "Oriental" or "Toyo [sic]" gallery. The report also notes that "a great deal was already known about the periods and dictions of Japanese painting and a substantial number of paintings were exhibited according to these categories in the prints and drawings gallery." (3)

In the Osaka exhibition catalogue, John Mack of the British Museum addressed in his essay sum of two units major issues concerning ethnological collections and ethnographic exhibitions. single issue has to do with the question, "What are ethnographic collections and exhibitions about?" He examined the part museums play in their various displays through figuring them "as arenas for the exercise of power," an arena in which an organizer (curator) "appropriates to him or herself the right to show cultures that are not their own" The voice in this arena is not for a like reason much one that "seeks to speak of or about other cultures" as individual that "seeks to speak for them"--a "political" voice. The next to the first issue is about the nature of ethnographic collections themselves. These collections, the argument goe started as evidence for the understanding of other tillages but recently have been seen "as an archive of the engagement of single culture with another." In other words, ethnographic collections are being interpreted more as "icons of places of relationships; of the triumph of capitalism, of the colonial experience, or of the missionising enterprise." In this interpretation, ethnological existences are not simply evidence for the understanding of other tillages In Mack's apt words, "ethnographic exhibitions are represented as problematical events staged in problematical places--and mountained by problematical people." (4)

It is well known that the ultimate origins of the collections and display of other cultures' artifacts probably lay in Wunderkammer and "cabinets of curiosities" of the European ruling families of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The interest in representing other family of the world would in time inspire the series of world's fairs of the next to the first half of the nineteenth hundred in some of which Japan participated. The world's fairs in make go round inspired the expos of more novel decades, in which art is a readily visible entity understood as representing a region The fact that Edward Morse's collections of external realitys he amassed in Japan, (5) classified in natural history, ethnography, anthropology, and art, were divided between what is today's Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston counts us something of the shared boundaries between ethnography's and art history's evolving histories. That the phraseology of display of some of the particulars in the Japanese gallery at Peabody-Essex Museum tend hitherwards close to that of an art museum probably echoe that intertwined history of the changing methodology in ethnography and art history. It tend hitherwards as no surprise that in accounts of Charles L Freer's collecting and selecting of Japanese works of art, he describes them often as "specimens." (6)