Page 146 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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relationship of the museum to the archive, to index card systems, to mass
reproduction and to the database. The second section picks up Nora’s notion
of modern archival memory and attempts to show how Walter Benjamin’s work
on memory and experience offers an alternative model for thinking about the
relationship of archival history to individual memories and collecting practices.
The third and final section of this chapter considers the return to curiosity in
contemporary art, in virtual museums and in new exhibit design. It explores
something which is anticipated in the Foucault quotation above: the way in
which new media and the internet seem to imply new epistemological and
aesthetic models, which have more in common with the private curiosity cab-
inets or Wunderkammern of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries than they do
with the late Victorian public museum.
To the archive is delegated the task of remembering. This kind of collective
memory cannot be separated from the apparatus of governance. State archives
delimit what counts as the material of history, what constitutes the past. The
material records they contain constitute the official versions of events and rep-
resent the organization of lives according to state regulations (as in the registers
of births, marriages and deaths). Their documents do not simply record what
happened but were also actors within it: shaping social relationships, laying
down the law. Unlike archives and libraries, museums tend to be understood as
collections which are displayed according to an organizing narrative, yet neither
archives nor museums can entirely contain their contents. Inscribed within the
archive are other memories and other narratives which leak through the official
documents. Social historians sift through the archive for these, reconstructing
other histories and counter-memories. While the classificatory system of the
archive keeps its documents in order, the museum does this more effectively
through a combination of classification and display. Display gives things their
documentary and evidentiary function. In the storeroom, they are ambivalent
and frequently opaque, difficult to read purely in favour of one version of
history or another. This fact is made most explicit in those artists’ projects
which have taken existing museum collections and organized them to display
hidden histories or counter-narratives. Perhaps the most renowned of these is
Fred Wilson’s exhibition Mining the Museum where he displayed and relabelled
objects from the collection of the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore. In
this way, Wilson made the collection speak of the hidden histories of African
Americans and Native Americans which the Historical Society displays had
suppressed (Wilson 1994; Karp and Wilson 1996).
Other artists’ projects have drawn attention to the irrationality of the
museum, and the connection of its collecting and archiving practices with the
consumption practices of the wealthy. In his 1969 exhibition Raid the Icebox at
Rhode Island School of Design, Andy Warhol insisted on exhibiting whole