A digression of sorts...
"Zoos, museums, art galleries all do this from different angles, taking the
object of attention out of the complex mesh of cultural, political and
emotional ties surrounding its' creation or prior existence, and putting it
in a suitably 'scientific' environment in which guilt-free consumption can
take place."
I made a similar point recently, and was asked whether there are means for
recuperating the context of things on display in museums. I took this as a
question about whether museums etc could expect to be anything other than
sites of alienated consumption or hidden labour, as compared with the
'original' places of production and aside from museums etc as sites of
production themselves.
For instance, one could take a shortcut through your remarks and conclude
that the displays you mention were meaningful contributions to what was once
a German sense of identity. Likewise, one might argue that possession and
display of the Elgin Marbles are or have been necessary to the production of
Britishness.
But these exhibits could also be presented as critiques of the production of
national identity or cultural memory. On this basis, an exhibit about the
Elgin Marbles could focus on the controversies of possession and display. A
village-in-the-zoo might be developed a means of critique rather than a
display of exoticism. Even so, the Marbles would still be possessed and
displayed by a museum, the village would still be in a zoo, and both would
be devoid of the kind of context mentioned above. The expropriated artefacts
and/or their re-presentation become double-coded in a highly ambigious way,
(re)producing something of value through more-or-less problematic means.
Pernkopf's anatomy book sounds like another case in point. The book is a
decontextualisation of an extreme sort, the labour of its production hidden,
airbrushed, disappeared. It is then presented as a thing of extraordinary
value: a masterpiece and a standard of reference.
This leaves us with (at least) a couple of dilemmas. One is about the
possibility of recuperating context, or doing it justice in some manner,
while continuing to use the display format. Another is about the dichotomies
between the condition of things-as-themselves (whatever that might mean...),
the condition of things as representatives of their (missing) context, and
the condition of things as (re)productions of value where they represent not
themselves, but something like cultural identity or scientific value, while
also obscuring the circumstances of their production.
The latter condition is in some sense the inverse of the middle condition,
where the museum etc functions as a site of anti-memory, a place of
forgetting. Instead of being a referent for a missing context, the thing
becomes a referent for something else entirely. The Marbles and their
missing context are no longer about Hellenic antiquity, but about modern
politics. In that case, where do they belong?
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