Page 23 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

OBJECT || 7

on acculturation. Culturally determined acts of interpretation enable us to
distinguish the significant from the insignificant.
The museum aids interpretation by the arrangement and labelling of arte-
facts, by its rules of access and the ways in which it frames objects. Lighting,
fabric, plinths and even the plain white walls of the white cube art gallery, all
serve the same framing and demarcation purpose as the glass case. Museum
things, set free from their frames and cases, do not become indistinguishable
from other kinds of things, because the museum environment becomes the
frame which endows its contents with significance. In modern art or hands-on
exhibitions, one frame goes, only for a larger one to take its place. One way of
thinking about what museums do to things is to do with the distinctions
between things and objects. Simply put, museums turn things into objects.
According to ‘thing theory’, the distinction between things and objects is to do
with their relationship to a human subject (Brown 2001: 4). We encounter a
thing as a thing when we bump into it, or when it breaks down. Things are also
unnameable, unintelligible, vaguely apprehended – ‘that thing over there’.
Objects, on the other hand, are interpretable, meaningful, things made into
evidence, documents, and facts (Brown 2001: 5). Things exist as objects in
relation to a society which values and interprets them. As the philosopher Hilde
Hein sees it, ‘objecthood, like textual meaning, results from multileveled acts of
attention by individuals, social groups and institutions. Socially objectified
things are imbued with meaning, layer upon layer, within sanctioned structures
of reference’ (2000: 64).
Another way of looking at this is that a thing becomes an object by being
placed in a new network of relationships. Objecthood suppresses the rebellious
and obdurate character of things, while the rational organization of the mod-
ern museum militates against an anthropomorphic or animistic relationship
with what it contains. It would seem that we only project human characteristics
onto material things, or conceive of them as alive, at times of breakdown. Yet
this isn’t quite true. The recognition that animistic thinking was a central part
of modern culture came in the nineteenth century. In the early part of the
century, European anthropologists and philosophers described the religious
practices of peoples on the west coast of Africa, as animist and fetishist. The
use of ritual objects was seen as indicative of a ‘primitive’ animistic way of
thinking which had been supplanted in Europe by a more ‘rational’ relationship
with the material world.
Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, which he outlined in 1867,
effectively turned this theory on its head, finding the primitive in the heart
of the modern, by applying the concept of fetishism to modern capitalism.
He explained how the market in industrial society, and in a capitalist economic
system, makes us experience material goods anthropomorphically. People