Museums Objects and Collections, A Cultural Study. Susan M. Pearce. Leicester University Press. 1992

Museums Objects and Collections, A Cultural Study. Susan M. Pearce. Leicester University Press. 1992

Subject and Object : Mind and Matter

Modern Western thought places a low value on the material world and its products, paralleling traditional Christian morality: both are at odds with modern Western capitalism, which places an inordinately high value upon the possession of material.

Here, we are concerned with the role Western philosophy has allotted to material culture, a role which can be described as subordinate or secondary, in which objects are seen as merely the outcome or the product – or even detritus – of primary thinking, feeling and acting which is carried out elsewhere. They are regarded always as the means through which to activate an end predetermined without reference to them, in H.G. Wells’ phrase, while the created object slots into its appointed place in the scheme of things. This lowly significance attributed to material culture is, of course, the fundamental reason why, in general, it has been considered less worthy of study than literature, or politics, and why in the economic sphere the concern has been with production rather than consumption as a social phenomenon.

Page 17

Here (in Descartes?) we have the famous ego of cogito ego sum, the knowing subject possessed of the powers of thought, logical reason and deductive understanding, which is able to experience empirically the heat of fire and the nature of the winter dressing gown (as opposed to a summer dressing gown or a shirt), and to draw conclusions from these observations which, ultimately, are firm enough to bear the superstructure which we call modern rational science. In this, we note, the physical world is still measured and divided, and classifications are still created by the naming of things. The ancient duality of creator and created is translated into the scientific idiom of mind and matter. This has been taken for granted by traditional social scientists, political economists, anthropologists and historians, with the result that the world of material things has almost never been their prime concern, since that world is by its very materiality deprived of any independence, primary reality or possibility of possible intervention.

            From the standpoint of such post-modernist thought, this blind belief in human reason appears arrogant and insubstantial. More significantly for our present purpose, its view of the workings of the material world is naïve and wishful: these brutally concrete lumps are as tame or as ineffectual as traditional thought would like them to be.

Page 21

We are all acutely aware of how inadequate language is to encompass this kind of materiality and how frustrating it is to try to make it serve the purpose. We also know that one glance at the actual object will solve the problem and create immediate understanding, because we are capable of making fine perceptual discriminations between one object and another. This quality of material discrimination, presumably a combination of the eye, sometimes hand, and culture stored in the memory, is immensely significant in the construction of the social world. It is one of the most important factors which governs our view or choice of our material surroundings and so of the form our social life takes, but we are hard put to put to get it into coherent words and hence the inarticulateness which overtakes most conversations in which material detail arises.

The Social Life of Objects

Objects are all-pervasive in human social life, and society as we understand it could not exist without them. Their very commonness is one reason why they are so slippery and tend to drop out of traditional philosophical discourse. One way of putting their social centrality is to say that they are intentional inscriptions on the physical world which embody social meaning; a simpler way of putting much the same is to say that social ideas cannot exist without physical content, but physical objects are meaningless without social content. Idea and expression are not two separable parts, but the same social construct. It would be impossible to say which came first: the abstract idea of, for example, hammering, or the mental image of a hammer-shaped thing doing its job. ‘Think’ and ‘thing’ are not sequential because our thinking can only be explicit, and no matter how abstract this may appear to be, in fact it inevitably takes material form: beauty must have something to be beautiful, even if we wish to criticize every example known to us as falling short of perfection.

The distinctive insights [Saussure, Chomsky] and analytical techniques which these men have developed can be applied to objects as to languages because both operate as communication systems, but this does not imply a necessary superiority for language.

This quality of material discrimination, presumably a combination of eye, sometimes hand, and culture stored in the memory, is immensely significant in the construction of the social world.

Page 22

Page 22 

This huge gulf between our ability to perceive material and our capacity to express what we see linguistically suggests that objects play a larger part in the process which produce social structure than we are usually prepared to admit: suggests, indeed, that our ability to produce a world a world of things is a fundamental part of the ability to create social lives and to feel ‘at home’ in them. Miller calls this fundamental ability ‘the unconscious’, and relates to its operation to the role of play in the development of the young child, for whom artefacts precede language as the ‘principal means of articulating feelings and desires’ (1987: 99)

It is, however, also true that the work of art needs its frame, and by extension its larger frame of gallery and museum building, in order to succeed in drawing our attention to itself and to clarify its character as a ‘work of art’. The frame is not merely a technical necessity;…it is a particularly suitable example of how relatively unimportant objects work to create our understanding and response – in a word, our social selves. (Frames !?????)

Page 23  

The Real Thing

Objects, we have noted, have lives which, though finite, can be very much longer than our own. They alone have the power, in some sense, to carry the past into the present by virtue of their ‘real’ relationship to past events, and this is just as true for casts, copies and fakes as it is for more orthodox material, for all such copies bear their own ‘real’ relationship to the impulse that created them, and have their own place in the history of perception and taste (Jones 1990). This ‘reality’ is fundamental to the impulses which we know as the collecting process.

Page 24

Collecting: Body and Soul

We are accustomed to call each of these groups ‘a collection’ and to refer to the whole assemblage as ‘the collections’. The notion, then, of group identity and personal association is deeply embedded in the material itself and in the museum language.

Page 36

The making of a collection is one way organize our relationship with the external physical world of which collections are a part. Collection-forming is part of the relationship between the conceived as each individual human being, and the object, conceived as the whole world, material and otherwise, which lies outside him or her. Collections are a significant element in our attempt to construct the world…

Page 37

With this quality of animation (E: things are seen as having the qualities of living things, which means they (i) reflect and reinforce human life, or (ii) have lives of their own), collections and individual objects within them immediately acquire what we are accustomed to call a life of their own, the ambiguous relationship of control by objects of people and people of objects. Objects acquire a kind of power for good or evil….In another sense the psychological power of objects-endowed-with-life is at the roots of our experience of the material world.

Page 43

We are in a world strange and yet deeply familiar in which objects are possessed of their own transforming power, in which they act as if they had wills and characters of their own, acknowledged by the proper names which are given to them.

            The intense emotional excitement, which some kinds of objects can arouse in us, has been an acknowledged and enduring feature of European culture as far back as we can see, and shows no signs of abating.

The power of sword, cup and ring clings about clings about many objects in our museum collections, especially those, like prehistoric weapons or gold ornaments, which were probably believed to have such powers by their original beholders. ..all these reach out to us from behind their glass cases in ways which we cannot deny. This is true, also, of things which we greatly wish to add to our collections (both personal and museum) and of highly-prized objects for which such possession has been achieved. It belongs with the jealous exclusiveness which is itself part of the urge to possess and the sense of power which the act of possessing powerful objects brings.

            This power is by no means necessarily benign; at best it is two-faced and double-edged. Objects are a bridge between this world and the Other World, from which they sometimes have power to summon ghosts and revenants. Such evil objects achieve a powerful hold over our imaginations in stories like those of M.R. James, who as a Director of the FitzWilliam Museum at Cambridge knew what he was talking about. In Oh, Whistle and Ill come to you my Lad, the protagonist finds a whistle on the site of a Templar’s Preceptory, and when he blows the whistle its call raises a strange bedfellow (James 1953: 109 – 34). Such dark objects are the misshapen bastard brothers of objects-for-good. …They hold the same power, the same strength, the same valid reason for existence as the benign object, but they are not as respectable: they are the illegitimate, the left hand side of the family tree.

 



K.I.T.T. - Did 'he' have a 'mind'?



Objects with talismanic character are not, of course, confined to myths, major museums or closet devotions: they are part of common experience. Most of us have things like St Christopher medal’s, luck pieces and amulets of all kinds which, even now at the end of the twentieth century, we still half believe will operate magically on our behalf. Cars in particular attract this kind of special devotion. They too, like the swords, are given names of their own, and how many of a cherish a half-guilty conviction that the car itself once took evasive action by which an accident was avoided and the driver delivered from evil? Cars attract latter day mythology.

            The objects are, in the language of older anthropology, external souls: external because physically distinct and separate, but souls because the meaning projected onto them brings them into the exterior of our personal lives. A number of theories have been advanced to account for this curious aspect of our relationships with the objects which we own and collect. Melanie Klein constructed an object-relations  theory in which the interaction of the infants body with the external world embellishes ‘object relations’, through the process of Projection whereby states of feeling and unconscious wishes are expelled from the self and attributed to another person or thing, and Interjection whereby qualities that belong to an external object are absorbed and consciously regarded as belonging to the self. These ‘objects’ include both things and persons, and also part-objects, which the child invests with powerful fantasies pleasing and frightening, or indeed both, for at the core of Klein’s theory is the awareness that good and bad alternate or coexist within the same object.

            Adrian Stokes continued the development of Klein’s ideas by concerning himself with the sensations aroused when the body relates to the object world, either through contemplating its separateness, or in attempting to merge with and absorb what is before it. He expressed this as:

           

Our relationships with all objects seem to be discernable in terms of two extreme forms, the one a very strong identification with the object, whether projective or introjective, whereby a barrier between self and not-self is undone, the other a commerce with a self-sufficient and independent object at arms length…the work of art is par excellence a self-sufficient abject as well as a configuration that we absorb or to which we lend ourselves as manipulators.

            (Stokes 1978, III, pp. 151 – 2)

Page 45 - 46

This broad line of theoretical development was sustained by D.W. Winnicott (1974), who understood the role of fantasy in the young child as leading to illusion and a certain structure of play. He designates an ‘intermediate area of experience in which a child begins to tell the difference between body parts and non-body parts and in so doing creates ‘transitional’ phenomena and objects: so, for example, a soft toy which can be sucked and cuddled up to can take the place of a breast, although the child knows that it is not one. What is important about this experience is the capacity to play with illusion, to use imagination working on an external object to create something for which a need is felt.

Page 74

 

Page 44 - 46

The emotional relationship between projection and internalisation which we have with objects seems to belong with our very earliest experience and (probably therefore) remains important to us all our lives. Equally, this line of thought brings us back to the intrinsic link between our understanding of our own bodies and the imaginative construction of the material world….

Life, says Donnington, will offer some kind of meaning to everyone in so far as he can find his own way towards selfhood. The self includes both our conscious and our unconscious components, but its working seems to involve an increase of consciousness, and as we progress through life we become more aware of life’s inherent opposites and manage to integrate them better into our personalities, and come closer to being whole persons, truly integrated and truly individual (1963: 67 – 8). For all this, the ring is the symbol.

The potential inwardness of objects is one of their most powerful characteristics, ambiguous and elusive though it may be. Objects hang before the eyes of the imagination, continuously re-presenting ourselves to ourselves, and telling the stories of our lives in ways which would be impossible otherwise.

Page 47

Collecting is one way of living within chaos and transforming it, briefly, into sense.

Page 55

Collections and the Extended Self

‘Valid material possessions…act as signs of the self that are essential in their own right for its continued cultivation, and hence the world of meaning that we create for ourselves, and that creates our selves, extends literally into our objective surroundings.’

(Rochberg-Halton 1984: 335)

A number of studies carried out in America unite to demonstrate how significant possessions are to the self-image (e.g. McClelland 1951; Prelinger 1959; Furby 1978), and interestingly these tend to suggest that the critical factor to which we believe we possess or are possessed by an object: control: one way or another, is what makes an object become more a part of the self.

            All such ‘objects’ act as reminders and confirms our identities, and probably our idea of out identity resides more in such objects than it does in any idea of ourselves’ as individuals. They also seem to ease our passage through life, and to act as a medium of passage.

Page 55

Czikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981)… suggest that we invest ‘psychic energy in an object or group of objects to which we have directed effort and time the energy is part of self, an expenditure of self, and so its products are equally, regarded as a return of the self’. In his most important book, Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre suggested that doing is merely a transitional state or manifestation of the more fundamental desires to have or to be. Sartre maintains that we want things in order to enlarge our sense of self, and that the only way in which we can know what we are is by observing what we have.

            We can control our own collection in a way in which we can control little else in the world, and the collection can then take on anthropomorphic features. As Goldberg and Lewis have put it (1978: 64), ‘Many collectors who are inhibited and uncomfortable in social interaction, surround themselves with favoured objects upon which they project human like qualities. They practically talk to these objects; they find comfort in being with them and regard them as friends!’

            The notion of collections as our extended selves account for the way in which we use the metaphor of the body for collections in ordinary curatorial speech. So we talk about ‘the body of the collection’ meaning what is perceived as its main content or ‘corpus’, and the  ‘heart of the collection’, meaning those pieces which are seen as central to its meaning.

Page 56 – 57

A Kind of Immortality    

The extended self which collections represent is intended to extend beyond the grave. In a general study of strategies of identity preservation, Unruh (1983) found, unsurprisingly, that people attempt solidification of identity first through letters, journals, memos and poems which are meant to be left behind; secondly, they accumulate objects like photographs and jewellery; finally, they distribute these things to persons who are believed to be willing to care for them and in so doing honour and remember the donor, acts which are accomplished by pre-death gifts, wills and promises.

Page 63

‘This [painting] is my great, great grandfather. I’ve had it since childhood. It’s more than just a portrait – it’s a person! I’d grab it right away in a fire. [Without it] my life would be lessened. I’d go on living, but it would deplete my secure ‘lump’. It would mean that I wouldn’t be able to hand it down to my children. ….It’s part of the continuity of who I am, where I came from, where I’m going.’

Rochberg-Halton quoting a Chicago Informant (1984: 171)

Page 65

And yet we know, in our hearts if not in out minds, that souvenirs are moving and significant to each of us as individuals, otherwise we would not keep them. What, then, is the nature of these pieces? Souvenirs are intrinsic parts of a past experience, but because they, like human actors in the experience, possess the survival power of materiality not shared by words, actions, sights or the other elements of experience, they alone have the power to carry the past into the present. Souvenirs are samples of events which can be remembered, but not relived.

            The spiral is backwards and inwards as the original experience becomes increasingly distant, and contact with it can only be satisfied by building up a myth of contact and presence… Souvenirs, then, are lost youth, lost friends, lost past happiness; they are the tears of things.

Page 72

Objective Desire : Fetishistic Collecting

An appropriate place to begin the discussion of fetishistic collecting is the collection assembled by Sigmund Freud. Freud’s collection numbered some 1,900 pieces of Roman, Greek, Assyrian, Egyptian and Chinese antiquities. The collection was described by Edmund Engelman is this way:

Antiquities filled every available spot in the room. I was overwhelmed by the masses of figurines which overflowed every surface. To the left of the door was a large bookcase covered with tall ancient statuettes. In the corner at the end wall facing these statuettes, was Freud’s chair, almost hidden by the head of the couch…To the left and right of the door were glass showcases filled with hundreds of antiquities. These were set up in several rows; every bit of cabinet space was filled…I was amazed by the unbelievable number of art objects.

(Engelman 1976: 137 – 8)

People who knew Freud well, like Ernest Jones (1955: 393), describe how he was in the habit of bringing new pieces to the dining room table, how before beginning work each day he would say ‘Good morning’ to a favourite Chinese figurine, how he would fondle a piece during the consultation with a patient (Spector 1975), and how he constantly rearranged the pieces in his rooms.  

The first and overpowering impression that Freud’s habitat makes on the visitor is the profusion of things…The sculptures have their assigned shelves and glass cases, but they intrusively invade surfaces intended for other purposes: bookshelves, tops of cabinets, writing tables, even Freud’s much used desk. (Gay1976: 17). People who knew Freud well, like Ernest Jones (1955: 393), described in how he was in the habit of bringing new pieces to the dining room table, how before beginning work each day he would say ‘Good Morning’ to a favorite Chinese figurine, how he would fondle a piece during the consultation with a patient (Spector 1975), and how he constantly rearranged the pieces in his rooms…

Freud's Desk

This kind of collection is made by people whose imaginations identify with the objects which they desire. powerful emotions are aroused by the objects which the objects seem to return, stimulating a need to gather more and more of the same kind. the urge is to samples, and as many as possible, rather than to examples - a notion we shall return to when we consider sytematic collection. the whole process is a deployment of the possessive self, a strategy of desire, and this is part of the reason why this mode of collecting is described as fetishistic.

page 81

'Fetsih' and fetishism have recently come into museum studies from the broader field of investigation. Psychologists, of course, need the two words to describe a particular form of sexual orientation. Freud (1977) described the fetish as part of the body seperated from the whole, or an object substituted for a bodily part, which then, like underwear, become the focus of sexual gratification in its own right.

The anthropological literature, both that drawn up by early psychologists and of later writers, use the word rather differently. The standard reference works trace the word back to the Portuguese feticos, meaning ‘a charm’, which was used in the fifteenth century to describe contemporary Christian relics, rosaries, and holy medals.

More to the purpose here, fetico also means ‘made by man’ and carries the idea of something ‘artful’ or ‘magically active’. It was from this web of connections that the anthropologists appropriated the word and used it to describe material objects which were worshipped for their magical powers, believed to be inherent rather than deriving from an indwelling god or spirit.

Page 82   

It is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, that fantastic form of relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent being endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one or another of the human race. So it is the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

(Marx 1906: 203)

This seems to mean that through the operation of the capitalist system, the commodities that people produce come to have a life of their own, irrespective of their makers, the circumstances of their manufacture, or the personal relationships which all this involves. These commodities-endowed-with-life then operate in an independent fashion, detached from direct social relationships, and capable themselves of being the partner in a relationship with humans, an operation which Marx saw as a distortion of the proper relation between men and goods, an aberrant evil typical of mass production society.

Page 83

The fetishistic nature lies in the relationship between the object and their collector, in which the collection plays the crucial role in defining the personality of the collector, who maintains a possessive but worshipful attitude towards his objects.

Here, the subjects is subordinated to the objects, and it is to the objects that the burden of creating a romantic wholeness is transferred. 

Page 84

Peter Blake's Studio



Madlibs Studio



Objects in Action

….we hope to show that although the meanings of objects are constituted by past human experience, and in this sense objects are as passive as the traditional view holds, their embodiment of meaning has an active role in relation to the experience of individuals. Objects are therefore actors in the story, not just the reflection of action, and themselves have a role in creating change in what we call the process of history.

Here, then, we might say that we are not considering the history of objects, but how objects make history. We might put that another way, and say that we are concerned with some important aspects of communication, of how people communicate with objects and with each other.

….for Hegel, ‘object’ means the whole of the world outside the subject, including not only material culture, but everything which may be called social practice. ‘Process’ is an important idea which plays a major part in all phenomenological theory. Objectification means the double process in which the subject, the individual, externalizes himself by creating an entity of whatever kind – including material culture – which then assumes and external existence in an object; but then re-appropriates this externalization through an act of sublation which takes back the creation to use it as a part of the next burst of creative activity. In this way subject and object are brought together, and neither is given priority.

Page 211  

….we have the apparently paradoxical situation in which the viewer is forced to reveal aspects of himself in order to experience a reality which is different from his own, because it is only by leaving behind the familiar world of his own experience that he can take part in the excitement which objects offer…

Page 219

Conclusion: Objects Make History

The moments of a reliquary’s commissioning and manufacture is the first moment in its history when it plays its part in the behavioural/reception process of interaction already described, and the long- and short-term reasons for the specific choices which brought it into being derive from Giddens’ social structure within which the individual actors move. Henceforward, the reliquary will carry, as only objects can, the accumulated meaning of its past, drawn from all three of Braudel’s levels, which gathers density as time goes by. The reliquary-as-accumulated-meaning then becomes an actor in its own right, stimulating behavioural/reception responses to it when it is encountered anew by individuals at various points in the flow of history.

Page 226

The starting point for the analysis presented in this chapter was Husserl’s idea of two interacting forces which he called ‘essence’ and ‘phenomena’. Very roughly, Husserl’s ‘essence’ comprehends inherited social meaning, which both Giddens and Braudel have shown us ways of understanding, and his ‘phenomena’ are concrete social events, including objects, which embody meaning but which, as Hegel suggested, then in turn trigger other meanings. How this triggering happens is analysed by behavioural and reception theory, and ideas about how we can understand the whole process have been developed by Giddens and Braudel.

Page 227

We can analyse the making of meanings in museums. The information of a collection is an outward extension of the inward self, a private effort to shape the world and create romantic sense of a souvenir, fetishistic or systematic kind. The material held in museums, accumulated through these emotional and intellectual processes, is (more or less) selected for acquisition because it is seen as belonging in the ‘durable object’ class, and as embodying knowledge, understanding and value in a particular sense, a knowledge and value which is socially constructed and which museums paly a large part in verifying and sustaining.

….as we have seen, the bias of traditional historiography towards the written or spoken, but in either case linguistic, narrative has relegated objects to a secondary place…

Page 257

Objective Knowledge

This means [Popper’s Objective Knowledge: An evolutionary Approach (1979)], put rather crudely, that there is an external world of objective reality, and that there is also a world of experiencing and behaving human beings. Beside these, there is the ‘third world’ of critical arguments and ‘the state of a discussion or the state of critical argument’. The third world contains journals, books and libraries and, Popper might have added, museum collections and exhibitions. Popper meets the argument that all these are essentially symbolic expressions of subjective mental states, and intended as a means of communication meant to induce subjective mental states in the audience or viewer…

Page 259

Once produced, an artefact takes on an autonomous and objective reality which is independent of any knower: a book remains a book even if it is never read (p.115 Popper)

Page 260

The notion of common humanity which all individuals share, and which therefore offers some possibility of mutual understanding, is best expressed not in high-flown terms, but in more basic ways. We all seem to share a lust of the eye, an interest in bright, shining things, which presumably has much to do with the way our optic nerves work and the way our minds understand what is seen. We share a pleasure in material intricacy, presumably because our hands are capable of achieving this kind of thing. A nicely plaited cord, it seems is a nicely plaited cord the world over. At a more limited level we share a delight in the miniature, of large rendered in small, which perhaps has to do with the smallness of human young and the relatively long time which they remain small. As Gombrich has pointed out, the enjoyment rhythmic movement is common to all normal humans, and on this foundation rests music, dance, poetry and decorative art (Gombrich 1979)…It is from all these relatively humble things that social structures are elaborated, and the subtler creations of mind and art are brought into being.    

Material inference is fundamental to the way we construct ourselves as individuals and as societies.

Page 261

Objects, then, constitute social life and bring it into being. They carry the value which their society ascribes to them, and they help to create value. They, and the values and meanings which are ascribed to them and which they stimulate, are constantly changing as society changes.

This principle gives curators some solid footing, provided we accept that we are creating the past for the present and that all notions about good and bad interpretations are social facts, subject themselves to change. We work for here and now, not for then and always.

Page 262

It is apparent that the nature of the concrete interpretive act which emerges from the metaphorical effort is essentially that of a work of art, in the sense of a specific creative endeavour which is intended to have significance and which will be judged by those who view it. A work of art, whether expressed as a picture or an exhibition or any other communication event, addresses itself to a chosen set of human circumstances. It sets out to convey an intelligible, if complex, message from selecting from the muddle we call life and composing the selection into the best possible pattern to convey the artist’s thoughts and feelings. The sum of this selecting and structuring process, which emerges as meaning, is clearly intensely subjective. But at a fundamental level artistic creation supposes that people share a common mind capable of grasping poetic truths about the human condition; if a communication effort departs so far from this norm that it makes no sense to a viewer prepared to bring a degree of sympathy to its understanding, it has failed, but if it strikes a chord of sympathy, then it has begun to achieve something. Such works are freestanding, and they themselves belong, once finished, to Popper’s objective third world, where they are available to all comers. They will be judges according to the fruitful insights which they seem to offer the receptive mind about our human nature and the world in which we live.

Page 263

We ourselves – I who write these words and you who find yourself reading them – are actors in the story. It is our better understanding, as we live our lives, of the process of making meaning which enables us, as museum workers and visitors, to analyse the nature of our relationship to the material which comes from the past, and to perceive how it affects us, for good or ill.

Page 264