Introduction: Museum, Exhibitions, Collecting

Rebecca Cramer Steiner

This special issue of Museum Anthropologyillustrates the breadth of current interest inmuseology and museum studies by provid-

ing an art-historical perspective on recent debatesinto how definitions of race, gender, ethnicity, andfreedom of expression are shaped through museumagendas and exhibition narratives, all the whileconfronting how such practices treat issues of cen-sorship, discrimination, and fascism. With recentlypublished texts — including such important worksas Tony Bennett's The Birth of the Museum (1995),Carol Duncan's Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public ArtMuseums (1995), Susan Pearce's anthology Inter-preting Objects and Collections (1994), and Irit Ro-goff and Daniel Sherman's edited volume MuseumCulture (1994) — the notion of the museum as anactive institution continually fabricating identitieshas become an important line of questioning in art-historical rhetoric and practice. Just as the afore-mentioned texts raise awareness about the museumas an institution of cultural production, so the pa-pers that comprise this issue address similar ques-tions regarding the means by which the dispositionof museums preserve certain desired identities, aswell as the ways in which collecting practices, own-ership, and the exhibition of material objects of cul-tural production have, through the ages, functionedto construct explicit propagandistic narratives. Cer-tainly cases like the 1989-90 Robert Mapplethorperetrospective which found itself at the center of cen-sorship debates, Hitler's Degenerate Art exhibitionin 1937 where the museum site was used in an at-tempt to invalidate a targeted body of work by art-ists deemed depraved, or, conversely, that theeighteenth-century English aristocracy sought tovalidate itself by making the requisite "Grand Tour"

through Italy to collect Greek and Roman antiq-uities that would decorate their homes and attest totheir having made this cultural pilgrimage, all dem-onstrate how the implications of collecting and thepower of the exhibitionary realm throughout his-tory provide a privileged view into the politics of thegoverning body in power, the values and culture ofthe society on display, or the vested interests of aparticular individual or collective group. The dia-logue in this issue of Museum Anthropology contin-ues this line of study by further exploring howmuseums as institutions of cultural productionauthenticate those identities on display in their hal-lowed halls. These essays also inquire into the waysin which the history and ethnography of museums,the nature of cultural exhibition and display, andthe tradition of collecting itself act to construct per-sonal, professional, national, and political identitiesthrough the ways in which select objects of materialculture are presented.

As in the symposium program from which mostof these papers are drawn (see below), the articlesare paired according to the issues they raise and theresulting dialogue they foster. Paula Young Leeframes the body of papers presented in this issuethrough her inquiry into the accepted nature andpresumed definition of "the museum." Questioningthe complicity of the museological body—the coinedterm and the institution itself— she problematizesthe authenticity of such a neutral cultural con-struct. In keeping with this discussion, ElizabethGray Buck explores the performative implicationsof the museological paradigm through the unusualbequest of a nineteenth-century artist — where hisartistic output and home (the museum that housesthe artist's work) were deliberately scripted with

Museum Anthropology 20(2):3-4. Copyright ©1997 American Anthropological Association.

4 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 20 NUMBER 2

the absence of the artist in mind, and where theartist's absence is ultimately as much a part of themuseum as his actual presence.

Ellen Sacco and Carolyn Gray Anderson take astheir subject the individual collector — looking athow each respective collection of objects illustratesthe collector's unique methodology and identity, andimposes various narratives on the public domain.Anderson targets recent scholarship on the method-ology of Aby Warburg — one facet of which is thedrive to collect and order, exploring how a Renais-sance art historian "might provide a scholarly modelfor modernists." Sacco explores the collection ofnatural history in Charles Willson Peale's Philadel-phia Museum in the late eighteenth century, andanalyzes the interplay between the scientific taxon-omy of races, the contemporary politics of slavery inthe United States, and the identity of those whoworked in and inhabited the museum itself.

Lynn Kellmanson Matheny and Sonnet Retmandiscuss the multiple narratives that can emergewhen photography is used as propaganda to inventand document particular desired identities — theformer addressing through a particular exhibitionnarrative how the fabrication of individual mythcan continue to generate repercussions in the publicdomain over time, the latter unveiling through a1930s government-sponsored collection of docu-mentary photographs the multivalent agendas thatoperated even as a designated national or collectiveidentity was being selectively formulated. In herdiscussion of the Museum of Jurassic Technology,Lise Patt concludes the volume by presenting the

"museum about the museum," wrestling with theimplications of ideology versus object, and the no-tion of the invented museum versus the inverted mu-seum.

The diverse papers presented in this issue con-stitute for the most part the proceedings of the 31stAnnual Art History Graduate Student Symposiumentitled Museums, Exhibitions, Collecting, held atthe University of California, Los Angeles. Changesto the original program involve the exclusion of Mi-chael Lobel's paper "Inconspicuous Consumption:Reading Warhol's Collection" as the author had al-ready agreed for it to be published in a forthcomingissue of the Art Journal. In addition, Paula Lee'scontribution to this volume differs from her originalpresentation entitled The Musaeum of Alexandriaand the Formation of the Modern Museum in Eight-eenth-century France," which is to appear in the ArtBulletin. The essay Lee includes here emerged outof the symposium and its ensuing roundtable dis-cussion.

Museums, Exhibitions, Collecting was held onSaturday, April 20, 1996, and was co-organized bymyself, Afroditi Davos, and Elizabeth Lopez. Wewould like to acknowledge the generous support ofthe UCLA Art History Graduate Student Associa-tion, the UCLA Graduate Student Association, theCampus Programs Committee of the UCLA Pro-gram Activities Board, UCLA Art Council and TheFriends of Art History. We would also like to extendspecial thanks to the Department of Art History andespecially Professor Donald Preziosi, without whomthis event would not have been possible.