Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations

312 Pages·2009·5.14 MB·English

by  Sandra Dudley

MUSEUM MATERIALITIES
This is an innovative interdisciplinary book about objects and people within museums and
galleries. It addresses fundamental issues of human sensory, emotional and aesthetic experience
of objects. The chapters explore ways and contexts in which things and people mutually interact,
and raise questions about how objects carry meaning and feeling, the distinctions between objects
and persons, particular qualities of the museum as context for person-object engagements, and
the active and embodied role of the museum visitor.
Museum Materialities is divided into three sections – Objects, Engagements and Interpretations
– and includes a foreword by Susan M. Pearce and an afterword by Howard Morphy. It examines
materiality and other perceptual and ontological qualities of objects themselves; embodied
sensory and cognitive engagements – both personal and across a wider audience spread – with
particular objects or object types in a museum or gallery setting; notions of aesthetics, affect and
wellbeing in museum contexts; and creative and innovative artistic and museum practices that
seek to illuminate or critique museum objects and interpretations.
Phenomenological and other approaches to embodied experience in an emphatically material
world are current in a number of academic areas, most particularly strands of material culture
studies within anthropology and cognate disciplines. Thus far, however, there has been no
concerted application of this kind of approach to museum collections and interactions with
them by museum visitors, curators, artists and researchers. Bringing together essays by scholars
and practitioners from a wide disciplinary and international base, Museum Materialities seeks
to make just such a contribution. In so doing it makes a valuable and original addition to the
literature of both material culture studies and museum studies alike.
Sandra H. Dudley came to the University of Leicester’s Department of Museum Studies in
2003, from the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. She is a social anthropologist, and
author of publications on material culture, museums, exile and Southeast Asia, including the
forthcoming Materialising Exile.
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MUSEUM MATERIALITIES
Objects, Engagements, Interpretations
Edited by Sandra H. Dudley
First published 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2010 Sandra H. Dudley for selection and editorial matter;
individual chapters, their contributors
Typeset in Garamond by
HWA Text and Data Management, London
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Museum materialities : objects, engagements, interpretations / edited by Sandra H. Dudley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Museums – Social aspects. 2. Museums–Psychological aspects. 3. Museum visitors.
4. Museum exhibits–Social aspects. 5. Museum exhibits–Psychological aspects.
6. Material culture – Social aspects. 7. Material culture – Psychological aspects. 8. Senses
and sensation – Social aspects. 9. Emotions – Social aspects. 10. Aesthetics – Social aspects.
I. Dudley, Sandra H.
AM7.M8723 2009
069.01–dc22 2009018951
ISBN 10: 0–415–49217–3 (hbk)
ISBN 10: 0–415–49218–1 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–49217–1 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978–0–415–49218–8 (pbk)
FOR GRANDMA
IN MEMORY OF MY VALIANT MOTHER
SALLY MARGARET DUDLEY
1942–2008
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CONTENTS
List of figures ix
List of contributors xi
Foreword xiv
SUSAN M. PEARCE
1 Museum materialities: objects, sense and feeling 1
SANDRA H. DUDLEY
PART 1
Objects 19
SANDRA H. DUDLEY
2 Photographs and history: emotion and materiality 21
ELIZABETH EDWARDS
3 Remembering the dead by affecting the living: the case of a miniature 39
model of Treblinka
ANDREA WITCOMB
4 Touching the Buddha: encounters with a charismatic object 53
CHRISTOPHER WINGFIELD
5 Contemporary art: an immaterial practice? 71
HELEN PHEBY
6 The eyes have it: eye movements and the debatable differences 89
between original objects and reproductions
HELEN SAUNDERSON, ALICE CRUICKSHANK AND EUGENE McSORLEY
PART 2
Engagements 99
SANDRA H. DUDLEY
7 Experiencing materiality in the museum: artefacts re-made 103
ALEXANDER STEVENSON
CONTENTS
8 Virginia woolf’s glasses: material encounters in the 114
literary/artistic house museum
NUALA HANCOCK
9 When ethnographies enter art galleries 128
LYDIA NAKASHIMA DEGARROD
10 Engaging the material world: object knowledge and Australian Journeys 143
KIRSTEN WEHNER AND MARTHA SEAR
11 Watch your step: embodiment and encounter at Tate Modern 162
HELEN REES LEAHY
12 Reconsidering digital surrogates: toward a viewer-orientated 175
model of the gallery experience
BRADLEY L. TAYLOR
PART 3
Interpretations 185
SANDRA H. DUDLEY
13 Dancing pot and pregnant jar? On ceramics, metaphors and creative labels 189
WING YAN VIVIAN TING
14 Myth, memory and the senses in the Churchill Museum 204
SHEILA WATSON
15 Dreams and wishes: the multi-sensory museum space 224
VIV GOLDING
16 Making meaning beyond display 241
CHRIS DORSETT
17 Authenticity and object relations in contemporary performance art 260
KLARE SCARBOROUGH
Afterword 275
HOWARD MORPHY
Index 286
viii
FIGURES
2.1 Photograph by Kajsa Hartig, 2008 22
3.1 The model of Treblinka by Chaim Sztajer 40
3.2 An example of the attention to detail in the model 43
3.3 The cut-outs in Himmelstrasse lining up in front of the gas chambers 46
4.1 Buddha Day 2008 in the Buddha Gallery 53
4.2 Flowers in the hands of the Buddha following Buddha Day 2008 54
4.3 The Sultanganj Buddha following Buddha Day 2004 66
5.1 Anthony Caro, Promenade, 1996 75
5.2 Deer Shelter Skyspace, James Turrell, 2006 78
5.3 Wedgework V, James Turrell, 1974 79
6.1 Example of the contemporary semi-abstract designs used in the experiment 93
6.2 Mean fixation durations in relation to viewing time, image format and
art expertise 94
6.3 Mean saccade amplitudes in relation to viewing time, image format and
art expertise 95
7.1 ‘Dragon’, original floor tile 104
7.2 Observation drawing of the ‘Dragon’ 105
7.3 ‘Dragon’ palimpsest 106
7.4 ‘Three-horned bull’ palimpsest 108
7.5 Diagram illustrating points of separation from original artefact through to
final exhibition 111
7.6 Visualisation of ‘rhizomatic’ research structure 112
8.1 Store Box 56, Charleston Archive 115
8.2 Virginia Woolf’s glasses 117
8.3 Virginia Woolf, June 1926 118
8.4 Vanessa Bell’s bedroom, Charleston 120
8.5 Painted cupboard, Vanessa Bell’s bedroom, Charleston 121
8.6 Dressing table, spare bedroom, Charleston 124
8.7 Dressing table, spare bedroom, out of season, Charleston 125
9.1 Shrines for the Animita Romualdito in Santiago, Chile 130
9.2 Souls of Bandits, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod 133
9.3 Animita of a Child 1, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod 134
9.4 Animita of a Child 2, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod 135
9.5 Missing, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod 136
9.6 Urban Miracles 3, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod 137
ix