'Representing Difficult Pasts within Complex Presents ... - T2M

Introduction
Museums can be perceived as analogous to artworks (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004:2), stemming
historically from the Kunsthammer, or curiosity cabinet, to the collectively constructed archive of today’s
museum. They involve the reassembling of the world based on speculative ideas which shape a series of
installations, or exhibitions, which claim to represent concrete reality, presenting an inside-out view of
culture (Preziosi 1996). Consequently, museums, whether scientific, or humanities based, present
ourselves to ourselves. They evoke memory and familiarity in our own attempts to construct a ‘history’,
and also notions of difference and otherness, through what is deemed unfamiliar, exotic, geographically
or historically removed, categories shaped through representation which define and imagine communities
of belonging and exclusion (Anderson 1983).
The glass cabinet has been argued to both distance and frame artefacts, fetishizing them by
‘conferring an instant aura of preciousness’ (Henning 2006:8), acting as a lens that ‘sets apart’ objects
from each other. Even the glass case removed does not prevent this distancing within the museum context
(Henning 2006:6) – a conundrum which results in, Kirshenblatt (1991) argues, ‘an act of excision, of
detachment, an art of the excerpt. Where does the object begin and where does it end? … Shall we exhibit
the cup with the saucer, the tea, the cream and sugar, the spoon, the napkin and placemat, the table and
chair, the rug? Where do we stop? Where do we make the cut?’ (388) She suggests not the term
‘ethnographic object’, but ‘ethnographic fragment’. These fragments become separated from their original
meanings, argues Strathern (1990), to become marginalised within the self-referential domains of a
refined form of aesthetics, ‘The exploration of internal design, the attention to artefact qua artefact, the
preservation of exemplars … a self-referential universe (39). Such fragments become recontextualised
within a ‘rhetorics of value’ (Kratz 2011) – processes of circulation, recontextualisation, exhibition
production and interpretation, through museum design, lighting, architecture, labels and texts, which
shape visitor interpretation.
With the above in mind, creating a new museum offers an opportunity for new artistry and a
rethinking of concepts, an opportunity even, to rework tropes of museum-ness, even to turn the museum’s
gaze on itself 1 . The ‘poetics and politics’ (Kratz ibid.) of display can be utilized in such circumstances to
1 A suggestion recently made by Professors Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz at a panel discussion concerning
Cape Town’s Iziko Museum’s Social History Collections. Social History Collections: Registering Change in Iziko after
Apartheid. Iziko Slave Lodge. 16 September 2010. Also see Legassick and Rassool 2000 concerning a call for
restitution and de-accession of human remains at Iziko museum. The exhibition ‘Mis-cast’ depicting the storage of
human remains at Iziko also raised similar issues.
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