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Kevin Hetherington is Professor of Geography at the Open University where he is also currently Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. He has researched on museums for nearly 20 years, including on museum access and disability, museums and disposal, museum theory, museums and urban regeneration, as well as on heritage and consumption issues. Recent books include Capitalism’s Eye (Routledge, 2007), Consuming the Entrepreneurial City (with Anne Cronin; Routledge, 2008), and Urban Rhythms (with Robin Smith; Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
3
WHAT, OR WHERE, IS THE (MUSEUM) OBJECT?
Colonial Encounters in Displayed Worlds of Things
Sandra H. Dudley
This chapter reflects on the dynamics of the moments, however brief, in which museum visitors stop to look closely at things on display. It explores some ways in which we might conceptualize what is distinctive about those moments, especially with a view to beginning a new consideration of the ontological and methodological position and potential of the museum and its collections in the twenty-first century. Nicholas Thomas has posited “the museum as method,” suggesting that it is time to move beyond concerns around representation as an analytical and practical starting point and proposing instead beginning with critical reflection on the implications of the “routine aspects of curatorial work, such as captioning objects and juxtaposing them in displays” for exhibitionary practice (2010, 6). Thomas’s proposition is centered on anthropological museums but has ramifications for the technology and praxis of museums more broadly. Also taking a stance honed in the anthropological museum, I too am seeking to move away from a central or initial focus on representation. My primary concern in this chapter, however, is not – explicitly at least – the museum’s methods, but the moments of encounter between things on display and museum visitors, and ways in which they might be envisaged and described. Most especially, this is an initial attempt to explore ways in which those encounters might be imagined from the object’s point of view, and to consider what might be some of the implications of doing so.
The chapter emphasizes the encounter between visitor and thing. What is in question are those moments when the visitor stops to really consider something that particularly catches the eye or especially intrigues or appalls; I am less interested in the more general perambulatory drift through galleries and the brief glimpses visitors may throw at the sometimes seemingly vast populations of objects and labels they pass by, though that is an important part of the context. Indeed, the “perambulatory drift” through the gallery is in reality more than contextual, although it is not my main focus here. Elkins, for example, writes of a walk through a grocery store:
I think that in the most evanescent way possible – a way so ineffable that the word “ineffable” is too coarse to describe it – I am aware of every single object in the store, which is to say I react differently to the presence of every object. Sometimes I return their gaze and even decide to buy them