Page 147 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

ARCHIVE || 131

collections of objects just as they were arranged in the storerooms, to the
irritation of the curators. The shoe collection, when exhibited in its storage
cabinet, became a display of Imelda Marcos-style consumption. Objects were
shown in various states of disrepair: the chairs used for spare parts, paintings
that were ripped and stained. Mouldy catalogues were exhibited as if part of
the collection, and fakes from amongst the paintings were chosen in favour of
authentic masterpieces. On top of this, Warhol ‘specifically requested that each
of the individual items in the exhibition, whether valuable or not, be catalogued
as completely as possible’ (Bright 2001: 284). Warhol’s exhibition did not use
the museum’s collection to construct counter-memories, or alternative histor-
ies, but rather to challenge the whole notion of the museum as an organized,
objective or systematic ordering of things. The museum director had expected
artist-curators to curate an exhibition according to their own arbitrary taste
and so, assuming Warhol perhaps possessed classic ‘camp taste’, had tried to
direct him toward valuable domestic items such as porcelain figurines and rich
fabrics (Bright 2001: 284). What he hadn’t expected was that Warhol would use
the opportunity to expose the arbitrariness of the museum itself.
We could read the exhibition as part of Warhol’s larger negotiation of
sexual identity insofar as the rapidity and lack of selectivity with which he
chose things (which Deborah Bright describes as ‘like a shopaholic on speed’)
are associated with a lack of subjectivity that he cultivated, most famously
in his repeated assertions that he wanted to be a machine. However Bright
suggests that the exhibition bore the marks of Warhol’s ‘proletarian sens-
ibility’, putting overaccumulation on display and exposing the economic and
social motivations which the museum represses (2001: 288). More recently,
many artists have made it their job to interrogate, critique, mimic and
expose the museum itself. The list is very long but would include (in no particu-
lar order) the artists Hans Haacke, Louise Lawler, Annette Messager, Mark
Dion, Marcel Broodthaers, Thomas Struth, Christian Boltanski, and Jimmie
Durham, amongst many others (Putnam 2001). Through the work of such
artists, as well as through that of innovative curators in all kinds of museums,
local and national, museums have reflected openly on their own practices.
Exhibitions now challenge the ways in which certain objects and collecting
practices are deemed more valuable than others (for instance in ‘People’s
Shows’; Mullen 1994). The historical relation of museums to colonialism, to
capital, their complicity in the reproduction of ideologies of race and gender,
and their reliance on collecting practices such as hunting, are no longer com-
pletely repressed or unspeakable. The arbitrariness of acquisitions policies
and the ways in which histories can be constructed and reconstructed through
collections have been explored through new exhibition practices. These
practices make explicit how the museum may seem to be about the past and