Academic Sessions: London 2008
Displaced Objects: Perspectives from the Museum and the Academy
Session Convenors:
Christiana Payne, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Oxford. 01865 483582 cjepayne@brookes.ac.uk
Catherine Whistler, Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford. 01865 278045 catherine.whistler@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
Speakers:
Lisa Slade (Monash University, Melbourne) Kleptomania: Colonial collecting and curiosity in the antipodes
Laura Hollengreen (University of Arizona) Presence, Absence and Aura: Possibilities of the empty vitrine and other display strategies in the wake of repatriation legislation
Barbara Lasic (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) Constructing the Wallace Collection
Sabrina Norlander Eliasson (Stockholm University) Fraud or Major Historical Document? On the Martelli collection in the National Museum of Fine Arts Stockholm
Ruth Barnes (Ashmolean Museum) West Meets East – A curator’s passage to Asia
Margaretta S. Frederick (Delaware Art Museum) Samuel Bancroft’s Pre-Raphaelite Collection: Relocated, reconfigured and reinstalled
Leslie Topp (Birkbeck College, University of London) The Mad Objects of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Contexts old and new in a planned exhibition
Alexandra Stara (Kingston University) Displacement as Enchantment; The poetic potential of the museum
Session Abstract:
Most of the objects in museums can be described as displaced: remote in temporal and/or spatial location from their original contexts. Landscape paintings are displayed in cities; colonial objects in imperial centres; provincial treasures in metropolitan capitals; objects intended for sacred or domestic settings in public and secular spaces. The history of museums is inextricably intertwined with histories of expropriation and inequalities of power and wealth, as well as with the conceptual (and physical) re-location of other cultures, whether historical or contemporary, in highly influential ways.
At a time when many museums are being refurbished and collections re-interpreted, these questions are never far from the surface. How do museums attempt to recreate the original context of displaced works? How have they done so in the past? How can temporary exhibitions achieve the same objective? Should museums be more self-conscious and explanatory about the processes and events that have led to their collections being in their current location? Or should museums consider the ‘rationalization’ of their collections? Academics and curators may approach these issues in dramatically contrasting ways: academics are relatively free to be polemical, but the museum curator has to bear in mind the practical problems of funding, legality and the potential of visual displays. This session will include papers from both perspectives in the hope that it will contribute to greater mutual understanding.
Papers will consider the history of display and interpretation, the history and status of disputed works, and current initiatives which attempt to relocate displaced objects in a new context.
Christiana Payne, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Oxford. 01865 483582 cjepayne@brookes.ac.uk
Catherine Whistler, Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford. 01865 278045 catherine.whistler@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
Speakers:
Lisa Slade (Monash University, Melbourne) Kleptomania: Colonial collecting and curiosity in the antipodes
Laura Hollengreen (University of Arizona) Presence, Absence and Aura: Possibilities of the empty vitrine and other display strategies in the wake of repatriation legislation
Barbara Lasic (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) Constructing the Wallace Collection
Sabrina Norlander Eliasson (Stockholm University) Fraud or Major Historical Document? On the Martelli collection in the National Museum of Fine Arts Stockholm
Ruth Barnes (Ashmolean Museum) West Meets East – A curator’s passage to Asia
Margaretta S. Frederick (Delaware Art Museum) Samuel Bancroft’s Pre-Raphaelite Collection: Relocated, reconfigured and reinstalled
Leslie Topp (Birkbeck College, University of London) The Mad Objects of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Contexts old and new in a planned exhibition
Alexandra Stara (Kingston University) Displacement as Enchantment; The poetic potential of the museum
Session Abstract:
Most of the objects in museums can be described as displaced: remote in temporal and/or spatial location from their original contexts. Landscape paintings are displayed in cities; colonial objects in imperial centres; provincial treasures in metropolitan capitals; objects intended for sacred or domestic settings in public and secular spaces. The history of museums is inextricably intertwined with histories of expropriation and inequalities of power and wealth, as well as with the conceptual (and physical) re-location of other cultures, whether historical or contemporary, in highly influential ways.
At a time when many museums are being refurbished and collections re-interpreted, these questions are never far from the surface. How do museums attempt to recreate the original context of displaced works? How have they done so in the past? How can temporary exhibitions achieve the same objective? Should museums be more self-conscious and explanatory about the processes and events that have led to their collections being in their current location? Or should museums consider the ‘rationalization’ of their collections? Academics and curators may approach these issues in dramatically contrasting ways: academics are relatively free to be polemical, but the museum curator has to bear in mind the practical problems of funding, legality and the potential of visual displays. This session will include papers from both perspectives in the hope that it will contribute to greater mutual understanding.
Papers will consider the history of display and interpretation, the history and status of disputed works, and current initiatives which attempt to relocate displaced objects in a new context.