On the Museum's Ruins. - book reviews

As Donald Preziosi has noted in these pages,(1) the literature upon museums is immense: more has appeared in the past decade than in the previous hundred Much the same can be said of the literature upon collecting. This review alone considers the proceedss of no fewer than twenty-eight authorial intelligences (twenty-six writers, individual interview subject, and one photographer) upon the subjects of collecting and museums.

One might wait for to find a considerable variety of opinion, approach, and regard among so many authors. Although there are certainly a certain quantity of exceptions, most operate within a narrow band of opinion and a limited framework of concern however varied their subject matter may be. greatest in quantity are teachers in tertiary education. Many commit to a small number of past writers for the authority of their opinions, notably Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, all of whom have had interesting things to say about collecting, museums, or cognate make submissives Few of the present authors live up to their predecessors in this respect

The first issue I wish to address is that of distinction: distinction, first, between individual collecting and museums, and, next to the first among different museums. Sometimes these (and other contemporary) body s imply that we can treat the practice of individual collectors and museums as a continuum admitting of differences of degree; at other times they imply a difference in kind between individual collecting and museum practice. This diversity admits a convenient alternation of authorial interpretation, writers sometimes casting individual collecting as beneficial sometimes reprehensible. The same applies to museum practice. The change from individual collection in a domestic setting to public institution (of for instance, Sir John Soane's collection and London residence donated to the British nation through Act of Parliament in 1833 discussed by the agency of John Elsner [Elsner and Cardinal, pp 155-76]) can be interpreted as either a shift of step on a common scale, or a change in kind. on the contrary which interpretation is appropriate and when, in accordance with rational argument rather than rhetorical convenience?

If we must be thoroughly aware of the ambiguity of the relationship between individual collecting and museums, we must also be aware of similarly ambiguous relationships among museums. The range of museums referr to in the whirls under review spans the breadth of institutions usually described by dint of that term. It includes the Museum of Advertising and Packaging in Gloucester England (its institutor Robert Opie, is interviewed by dint of Elsner and Roger Cardinal [Elsner and Cardinal, pp 25-48]) the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC (examined by dint of Anne Higonnet [Sherman and Rogoff pp 250-64]) the Tower of David Museum of the History of Jerusalem in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem (analyzed by the agency of Ariella Azoulay [Sherman and Rogoff pp 85-109]) and the Altes Museum, Berlin (discussed by means of Douglas Crimp [Crimp, pp. 282-325]) These alone show a huge variety in bourns of culture, scale, ostensible object collections, patronage, and management.

Confinement of discussion to public characteristics easily masks the considerable differences among these and other museums discussed in the three turns The resultant entity is expung of distinctions and leads a textually singular existence as "the museum." Not sole does the term "the museum" (as notwithstanding that characterizing all museums) suggest an essentialism supposedly eschewed by means of many of the authors themselves, on the contrary it also partakes of caricature, a genre that hangs on exaggeration and simplification more fitted to polemic than to scholarship. To erect and deploy a fictional amalgam called "the museum" is in itself no more irresponsible or useless than to speak of other exquisitely acceptable collective entities, such as "society," "the working class," "the bourgeoisie," or "the academy." However, writers and readers must always beware of the genuinely polemical, as opposed to analytical, use of generalized entities that assume the collapse of distinctions. of that kind collective terms express or mask assumptions and ideologies. Many of the authors search for to define how "the museum" is constituted as an institution, suggesting that it masks assumptions and ideologies. We might also ask: in what manner is "the museum" as an authorial terminus constituted, and what assumptions does it, as a confine express or mask?

To show "the museum" most of these accounts bring museums to selected constituent ultimate parts of physical existence - buildings, collections, percepts - within a common setting of connection public, and reception (Sherman and Rogoff p xiv). This betrays a point of view at one time mechanistic and academic. Moreover, the dominant point of view of the authors is that of a casual museum visitor. This is not absented as though natural and inevitable, rather than as strictly contingent, partial, and limited. like a point of view grants privilege to display, and implicitly diminishes other actual or possible museum functions. (Indeed, certain legitimate museum functions are routinely denigrated: storage is an example.) This is like presenting "the university" exclusively from the point of view of an undergraduate, consisting solely of faculty who exist alone when actually teaching or during office hours, thus defining the institution in a strictly limited manner.