ICOM International Council of Museums - Museo Estancia Jesuitica ...

Harris: The Museum is not transparent
collector who is called “the eye of Napoleon” and who oversaw the looting of art works
from many cities. This unusual exhibition brought together paintings, porcelains and
drawings and revealed the extent of the pillaging. Although many works were later
returned following the demise of Napoleon, many of The Louvre’s masterpieces were
acquired through war and ransacking – and this was admitted in the exhibition.
Most collections are not interrogated by museums and, therefore, museums miss an
opportunity to exhibit their own roles in making history. The museum as an institution
has failed almost always to understand itself in relation to history. It has failed to
acknowledge that in choosing limited fields of history for its exhibitions that it has made
choices which necessarily position the museum as political. In broadening the field of
history which they choose to represent, many museums seem to assume that they
have responded fully to the New Museology. However, in assuming that this type of
museum response is adequate, the museum has simply switched one view point for
another.
Museums and history: Katta Djinoong: First Peoples of Western Australia
This paper now argues two key reasons to explain the failure of the museum institution
to engage with its own museological position and its intimate, but unarticulated
relationship to history. The first is that the museum institution is still formed by its
imagination of itself as a scientific place which is not historical, and the second,
paradoxically, is that it is now positioning itself as a cultural leader on history issues.
These issues are examined by looking at aspects of Katta Djinoong: First Peoples of
Western Australia, an exhibition which looks at Aboriginal life in the western third of
Australia, that is, in the state of Western Australia. It was first opened in 1999 and then in
2004 relocated, still within the state museum. It examines broadly Aboriginal ways of life,
but most of the exhibition focuses on the impact of European settlement and relationships
between the colonisers and Aboriginal people. Issues covered include violent
confrontations, health problems, and the long history of the systematic removal of children
from their parents, with different versions of the same event offered in some cases.
Although the exhibition has been mostly well received and is a radical departure from
former displays which tended to approach the Aboriginal people as anthropological
curiosities, it is clear that there remain problems with the curatorial voice which are
substantially related to the museum’s failure to highlight its own role in the history of
European-Aboriginal relations and history.
The museum as a scientific institution
“Scientific” connotes an aloof stand to the material being considered. As a scientific
institution the museum collects material culture and inspects it. The scientific mode is
one of detachment from the object scrutinised. However, detachment is no longer a
sustainable position. Griffiths’ (1996) analysis of collecting in the early days of
European settlement illustrates the complex relationship that collectors had towards
their objects. They were often very attached to their collections of Aboriginal artefacts
which were displayed in the close familial environment of their living rooms, but
paradoxically they had utter detachment from the people who had made the objects.
“When we get close to the ‘frontier’ – and Johns (a collector) was not very close – we
find it evaporating either into intimacy or distance. Collection was often an act of
distancing. But history and the hierarchy of sources value its products as those of
intimacy. When we focus on R.E. Johns in his sitting room in central Victoria in 1860,
even there we find our collector caught in an abstract international intrigue about
people no one knew. The second-hand nature of his collection may have given his
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