Page 22 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

6 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

museum objects will be obedient and complicit, just as Snow White is when she
awakes, and the prince announces his love for her and declares she shall become
his wife. Yet why should the object, once ‘brought to life’, be passively feminine
and obedient? The cultural theorist Bill Brown says,
We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working
for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get
filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution,
consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily.
(2001: 4)
At their most thinglike, objects also somehow seem most alive – we curse them
and hit them, think of them as truculent and obstinate. When things don’t do
what we want, they begin to ‘stand out so much as objects that they seem like
subjects’ (Maleuvre 1999: 242).
Between the serried glass coffins of the late nineteenth-century museum and
the elaborate and sometimes hi-tech displays of today are a whole series of
attempts to jolt the poisoned apples and remove the museum objects from glass
coffins, allowing them to flourish and live and breathe. Yet the removal of the
glass case (and, in the case of paintings, the heavy gilt frame) may bridge the
gulf between audience and things in one sense, but it does not necessarily mean a
more intimate, comfortable and straightforward relationship between audience
and displayed object. In fact, things can seem simultaneously alive and distant,
unapproachable, recalcitrant. The notion that material things might turn on
their owners and attack them is the basis for countless modern stories in which
everyday objects become uncooperative, rebellious – and then malicious and
dangerous. The fantasy of compliant femininity turns into the horror story of
violent femininity; perhaps the most well-known example is the film Christine,
directed by John Carpenter (1983) and based on the Stephen King novel, about
a possessed and feminized car.
Another fictional account which deals with hostile, anthropomorphized
objects is Dennis Potter’s novel Ticket to Ride (1986). The central character,
travelling in the buffet-car of a train, takes his gaze from the window to the
carriage and discovers he no longer knows who he is, where he is going or who
he is with. The plate of leftover food in front of him seems to scream at him, the
arrangement of cutlery appears as a coded message, and the things on the table
seemed to argue amongst themselves. For the amnesiac, inanimate things
become animate and significant, though he is unable to read their significance.
As this story reminds us, the object is framed not just by a material enclosure,
or even (in the case of the painting) by its own composition, but by what the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls (after Max Weber) ‘webs of significance’
(1993: 5). Our ability to interpret the things of this world is dependent