The theme of this year’s Alliance
annual meeting is “storytelling.” However, if you are attending the meeting in
Baltimore today, you probably aren’t reading the Blog! For those of you who
can’t join us this year, recurring
CFM guest blogger Zoe Mercer-Golden shares some thoughts on the power of
storytelling, based most recently on her experience with Yale University Art
Gallery
From
the time I was small, I was teased about my love of stories: I eavesdropped on
conversations at the grown-up table, snuck books into bathrooms when I became
bored at parties, and acted in plays that I wrote with friends. Stories that I
read and told shaped my life and continue to be central to who I am today.
I
now tell stories in a different context: art museums. For the last three years,
I have spent hundreds of hours researching and designing tours that tell the
stories behind and around art objects. I share anecdotes about artists and the
realities of their lives, and explain the political and social narratives surrounding
different objects. If the piece in question makes reference to a particular
text, myth or legend, I discuss the larger symbolic importance of that
narrative to a people or a nation. These stories help the objects come alive
for visitors, who are often looking for points of access for objects that come
from unfamiliar cultures or time periods.
This
past year, I have begun telling a new set of stories on my tours: the story of
how objects entered museum collections. Within the clean, well-lit halls of art
museums, we (those who work in art museums and those who visit them) tend to
imagine that the stories behind the objects’ presence are as unmarked as the
museums’ walls. The reality is far more complicated—often, in fact, quite
distressing.
Last
summer, I visited many of Europe’s greatest museums, principally in former
imperial capitals. While the objects that I studied mostly had been removed
from their countries of origin in the last three centuries, some had been
removed even earlier. “Art appropriation,” the blanket term for the removal of
objects or artistic styles from their original contexts, is by no means a new
phenomenon: the ancient Mesopotamians practiced it, as did the Greeks, Romans
and ancient Chinese. For the last three hundred years, art appropriation has
been largely (though not exclusively) conducted by Western powers inside their
colonial territories. Humans took and continue to take the artwork of other
countries and cultures both to prove “I was here” and to signal their own
cosmopolitan taste. Art appropriation demonstrates political power, social
prestige and the capacity to mobilize on a massive scale.
The
end result of these appropriations are massive museum collections full of
objects that were stolen or purchased at absurdly low prices. While some objects
were lovingly excavated by knowledgeable archeologists, many were excavated by
under-trained researchers who were out for quick cash; others were simply
lifted by wealthy travelers looking for souvenirs. Few objects and sites were left unscathed by
dynamite and axes. War and colonialism left a bloody legacy behind, and
facilitated the violent removal of beautiful works of art.
Contemporary
museum collections thus present a serious problem: our museums contain objects
that, for their educational and aesthetic value, we are loath to give up. Yet
it is hard to avoid experiencing at least some residual feelings of guilt or
shame when thinking about the way in which these objects entered museum
collections. We now care about objects we don’t want to return that signal histories
of oppression in which the museums that house them are implicated. How, then, can
museums reconcile these histories with our current tortured awareness?
I
have found that story-telling, and other self-reflective educational practices,
while not a permanent or complete solution to this problem, is at least a
beginning. People everywhere, most especially teachers and students, struggle
with how to discuss the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Telling
stories in museums tied to concrete objects is a useful way to start difficult
conversations about the parts of history many would like to efface or ignore.
Good
facilitators of this conversation will make clear the strong arguments on both
sides of the debate: those who demand the right of return did suffer violence
and destruction, and have a strong claim to their cultural heritage; yet if we
believe that cultural heritage is a global inheritance, we also acknowledge
that all people have a right to learn from all cultures, and that global
museums are rare places of cross-cultural dialogue. Sending all appropriated
objects home would diminish museums in general, and might even harm the objects
in question, even if maintaining the status quo seems unjust.
 |
| Assyrian Relief, Yale University Art Gallery |
In
the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, we have a number of objects
that can be used to as points of departure for these discussions, especially
our ancient Assyrian reliefs from the palace of Assurnasirpal II in Kalhu.
Removed by Protestant missionaries trying to prove the literal truth of the
Book of Isaiah, the reliefs pay testament to a difficult time in American and
European history—and to the continued heightened emotions that many people feel
about that part of the world. My job as a teacher becomes using these reliefs
to explain the many different imperial and cultural histories that are attached
to these panels, and to the ways in which they have been re-purposed for
centuries to mixed effect.
