Tag: museums

In the crisis of the seen

The admissions essay I wrote for the Master of Museum Studies program at the University of Toronto – where I begin my studies, remotely, next week! We were asked to discuss an issue the contemporary museum faces.

John Berger writes of the plasticity of the image:

Now appearances are volatile. Technological innovation has made it easy to separate the apparent from the existent. And this is precisely what the present system’s mythology continually needs to exploit. It turns appearances into refractions, like mirages: refractions not of light but of appetite, in fact a single appetite, the appetite for more. (11–12)

Years ago, Plato called the image trouble in the Republic, and things have just got tougher since then. Now we have deepfakes. Now algorithms construct photographs of faces that never were. Meanwhile, other algorithms surveil actual faces in the streets of London, Beijing, and cross-reference them with our browsing histories and GPS location data. Berger called it the New World Economic Order, and frames it here as a crisis of the seen, a crisis in which all of us who live by the image, artists, designers, museums, archives, are implicated.

From the Washington Post. Left: original (Mario Tama/Getty Images). Right: altered image (Salwan Georges/Post).

The U.S. National Archives are right now feeling heat for altering an image of the 2017 Women’s March, “so as not to engage in current political controversy” (Kennicott), an irony that would be hilarious if the stakes weren’t so high. Only in the high flood of images we move through could so crude a change ever have hoped to go unnoticed. Having been found and called out though it’s not neutralized: a manipulation doesn’t have to be effective to have effect. The change made here forgets the disinterestedness that should be an archive’s first principle, and that itself is a blow to the body politic.

Xu Bing, Unscrolled, still from Vancouver Art Gallery (YouTube).

Meanwhile, artists are doing, museums showing, work that investigates the image, what it does, and how, and to what end. At the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2015, Xu Bing’s Unscrolled made the thinghood of its picture manifest. You walk up to a luminous Chinese landscape, then around it to see the dreck it was made from, fir branches, cigarette butts, with florescent lightbulbs framing it. What seems a picture of something far off actually is some things right there: debris arranged in a fully exposed act of illusion-making. Another piece in the exhibit, Sun Xun’s Cosmos, put you in an oblong room with four animations of diverse styles on walls Sun had also inscribed with calligraphy ink. I was pinned through my head to a fifth wall not there to see. Usually, we take an image to be representation at a distance. Sun’s work made the image a construction you are inside. My verb tenses are liquid here because the image is always present tense.

Unscrolled, still from Vancouver Art Gallery (YouTube).

In my life I’ve gone three places to learn the world—books, universities, museums. Having spent my professional life so far writing books and teaching university classes, I’m hungry now for new ways to tackle the questions always at churn in me. What is an image? What does the physical book mean in a digital age? How does a museum founded on colonial premises decolonize itself? I have lots more. I don’t want to write essays or devise classes on them—I want to do deep, multi-modal, immersive, real-time inquiries, where I’m not the subject or main investigator, but a facilitator, and the gorgeous shapely tangle that results is open to public view and participation.

My writing and teaching have got me this far. As an artist, I see an exhibition as a second-order artwork, an assemblage of artworks, documents, ephemera, framing materials, made real by being together in a place. As a teacher, I see one as a many-tiered, experiential syllabus, with diverse modes and materials at play in an immersive, experiential environment. When I learn more about exhibitions, these notions may fall away as naïve. I won’t lose my sense that a good exhibition gives a moving, collaborative shape to cultural intelligence.

I want to foster culture in this new-to-me way. And I want to learn how in your pro-gram, more than any other I’ve researched or applied to. I’m drawn by the broad training you offer, also by your strengths in my areas of interest, exhibition design, museum education, curation. I’m buoyed by the thought of an internship under your faculty’s guidance; when I visited, I was taken with many things, but most impressed by how conscientiously you guide students toward their professional roles. And I’m drawn, as a writer, translator, and editor, by your relationship to the Book History and Print Culture program. I don’t know if I’ll end up in a small museum, doing a bit of everything, or at a large institution in a specialized role, creating exhibits, say, of ancient papyri or early modern incunabula, but I believe your program offers the best preparation I could hope for. 

WORKS CITED

Berger, John. The Shape of a Pocket. Vintage, 2001.

Kennicott, Phillip. “The National Archives Used to Stand for Independence. That Mission Has Been Compromised.” Washington Post, 18 Jan 2020.

Plato. The Republic. ca. 380 BCE. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Hackett, 1992.

Sun Xun. Cosmos. Vancouver Art Gallery, Unscrolled: Reframing Tradition in Chinese Contemporary Art, 2014–2015.

Xu Bing. Unscrolled. Vancouver Art Gallery, Unscrolled: Reframing Tradition in Chinese Contemporary Art, 2014–2015.

The image up top, though it bears the weight of Plato’s Cave Allegory, is massless & easily thieved. I took it from this discussion of the allegory as it pertains to screenwriters.

Colonialism, a museum construct

In a couple of weeks I’ll begin a Master’s in Museum Studies at the University of Toronto. Need an outlet for my nervous excitement! So I’m posting a few essays I wrote during the application process.

This is the admissions essay I wrote for the University of Washington’s Museology program. (Everyone I met there was lovely & I wish I could take two programs at once.) We were asked to respond to a museum trend discussed in the 2019 issue of TrendsWatch, & I wrote on decolonization.

When Christopher Columbus landed on the island now called Hispaniola, he wrote home in wonder. The forests of Guanahaní, he told his royal patrons, were “the greatest wonder in the world.” “Divine Majesty,” he wrote, “ha[d] marvellously bestowed all this” on the Spanish Empire. The island inhabitants were “marvellously timorous” (Greenblatt 68–76 passim, all emphases added). Columbus drew his starry-eyed discourse of the marvellous, by which he dispossessed the Taíno of their lands, from medieval European sources: travelogues, encyclopaedias, bestiaries. John Mandeville, for instance, at the court of the Chinese Emperor: “And then come jugglers and enchanters, that do many marvels; for they make to come in the air, by seeming, the sun and the moon to every man’s sight” (155). When Columbus set sail, the West’s take on marvels and monstrosities in foreign lands had already been museological—awestruck, analytical, acquisitive—for centuries.

Image of the ydrus (water-snake) from the Aberdeen Bestiary.

The ydrus, or “water-snake,” said to be found in waters of the Nile. A fictive creature that “enters the crocodile through its open mouth, rolling itself in mud in order to slide more easily down its throat,” and eats its way out from the inside. Aberdeen Bestiary, ca. 1200. The Western practice of describing impossible fictions in close analytical detail, as if observed first-hand—as if in hand—goes back at least to Pliny’s Natural History.

Finding little gold, fewer spices, Columbus caught several Arawak to take home as exhibits—the first of many persons to be installed in display cases they bore on their own backs. Guido Abbattista:

“While not all of these people were transported for exhibition purposes, the idea of exhibiting them was never very far away, even when the primary role of the non-Europeans was that of informers, apprentice interpreters, future guides and intermediaries, or guinea pigs for Europeanization experiments.” (n.p., emphasis added)

Museums are, as a recent article in Trends­Watch makes clear, a colonial construct. Some own works taken from occupied territory; some use classification schemes indebted to racist pseu­do-science; some preserve power structures held over from colonial administration (“Confronting the Past” 25–27). But we should also say, colonialism is a museum construct. If explorers at their difficult, dangerous, and often (early on) profitless work had not stirred fully-formed museological longings at home—longings to marvel at, to label and classify, to collect and preserve, even at the cost of deracinating—the colonial project might not have got off the ground. From the start, a mu­seological frame, built of shining gestalts and occult dreams, gave the colonial project a form, diverse forms.


From Mandeville’s Travels. Mothers in the land of Prester John place their dead infants on a funeral pyre in great joy, for “they go to Paradise where the rivers run milk and honey” (189). Did such an image ready the eye for a woodcut like Staden’s, below? British Library, Harley MS 3954, ca. 1400–1450, f. 59v.

TrendsWatch describes the vital work of decolonizing the museum: repatriating artifacts, ensuring representation for indigenous parties, telling the truth about past and present injustices (29–30). But in settler col­on­ialism, we all have a museum inside, an invisible structure of labels, taxonomies, acquisition practices, preserva­tion tactics. And if that reckless, sweeping claim is right, then to decol­onize the mu­seum must also mean, to use a phrase from Aimé Césaire (31), decolon­izing the mind.


A woodcut (1557) by German explorer and shipwreck survivor Hans Staden (Warhaftige Historia n.p.). Michel de Montaigne took Staden’s account of cannibalism among his Tupinambá captors for truth in his defense of indigenous cultures in “Of the Caniballes” (1580). Other parts of that essay, Montaigne based on conversations with three Tupinambá captives on exhibit in Rouen (Hoffmann 209). Montaigne wanted to decolonize his mind and had only colonial encounters to do it with.

When I ask myself how a museum might decolonize its mind, the questions come out like riddles. What’s a museum that doesn’t fret to conserve its holdings? (I think of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.) What’s a museum run by its most disempowered stakeholders? (Recall Guattari’s clinic at La Borde.) A museum managed without internal hierarchy? a museum that makes no acquisitions? a museum that occupies no land anywhere? A museum-without-walls guides its guests from site to site by GPS locator. A museum-of-other-senses commissions sculptures, soundworks, & olfactory landscapes, hire docents hard of sight to guide, & turn out the lights, dethroning the imperious gaze …

Works Cited

Abbattista, Guido. “European Encounters in the Age of Expansion.” European History Online, Institute of European History, 24 January 2011.

Césaire, Aimé, and Rene Depestre. “An Interview with Aimé Césaire.” Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham, Monthly Review, 1972.

“Confronting the Past: The Long, Hard Work of Decolonization.” TrendsWatch 2019. Center for the Future of Museums, pp. 22–31.

Cruz, Cynthia. “Notes Toward a New Language: On La Borde.” Harriet Blog, Poetry Foundation, 27 April 2015.

“De ydro” [Of the ydrus]. The Aberdeen Bestiary, f. 68v. U of Aberdeen Library.

Greenblatt, Steven. Marvellous Possessions. Chicago UP, 1991.

Mandeville, John. Travels. Harley MS 3954, ff. 1r–69v. British Library.

Montaigne, Michel de. “Of the Cannibales.” Essays, translated by John Florio, London, 1603, pp. 100–107. Internet Archive.

Smithson, Robert. Spiral Jetty. 1970. Great Salt Lake, UT.

Staden, Hans. Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen, Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen [True history and account of a land of wild, naked, fierce cannibals in New World America]. Marburg, 1557. Internet Archive.

The image up top: Thomas De Bry, Christopher Columbus Landing on Hispaniola (Wikimedia Commons)