jump to navigation

Relexivity (and an animal icon) at the Melbourne Museum 15 December, 2007

Posted by helenreesleahy in Museum Related Blogs, exhibitions.
1 comment so far

Institutional reflexivity and the uses of performance in museums are topics that frequently arise in our teaching and research. This week my first visit to the Melbourne Museum prompted reflection on both issues.

The Melbourne Museum opened in 2000, following a reorganisation of the Victoria’s nineteenth-century state museums. Within the museum, Bunjalika (meaning the land of Bunjil, one of the main ancestral beings of south-eastern Australia) is the Aboriginal cultural centre and Keeping Place, which includes a meeting and performance space where community events and ceremonies can take place. Reflexivity and performance are also inscribed in the displays in Bunjalika, which do not attempt a totalising survey of Aboriginal culture, but rather tell a conflicted narrative of contact, power and mis/understanding between colonialism and Indigenous peoples. In a section called ‘Two Laws’, the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer, finds himself on the other side of the glass case. A life-size model of Spencer (director of the National Museum of Victoria from 1899 to 1928) is installed within a vitrine, nicely drawing attention to the politics of looking within the museum. The dialogic approach to interpretation is extended in a nearby video installation in which two actors play the parts of Spencer and his contemporary, an Aboriginal elder called Irrapmwe, respectively. In the piece, the two men, each an ‘expert’ in the context of his own cultural traditions, reflect on the conditions of their relationship and the subsequent uses of Irrapmwe’s material culture within the museum, including issues of display, authorship and restitution.

Meanwhile, as some of you may know, my colleague, Sam Alberti, is developing a research project on ‘iconic animals’ in museums. It is a wonderful topic – and the Melbourne Museum houses a wonderful example: the famous race horse Phar Lap, whose success on the track cheered up hard-pressed Melburnians during the Great Depression. Poor Phar Lap died quite young, but he is just as popular in his afterlife, mounted in a glass case … As one member of staff said to me, the first two questions that visitors ask when they come to the museum are, where’s the lavatory (or words to that effect) … and where’s Phar Lap?

Any student who wants to find out more about the Melbourne Museum, send me an email and I can give you some references.

“Assembling Culture” Research Workshop, Melbourne 12 December, 2007

Posted by helenreesleahy in conference, hot topics.
1 comment so far

Assembling Culture was a research workshop held here at the University of Melbourne on 10th and 11th December. The workshop was convened by Tony Bennett (Open University and CRESC) and Chris Healy (University of Melbourne) and brought together a dozen scholars from Australia and the UK who spent two days discussing the potential of Actor-Network and Assemblage Theory for the analysis of cultural production.

The richness of the workshop derived from the range of disciplinary perspectives represented (including sociology, history, cultural studies, anthropology and museology) and the diverse subjects of the participants’ papers. These ranged from 19th century life assurance (Liz McFall) and craniology (Kay Anderson) to those ubiquitous contemporary commodities, bottled water (Gay Hawkins) and mobile media (Gerard Goggin). Sharon MacDonald discussed her recent work on the post-war history of the former Nazi rally grounds at Nuremburg. Both Evelyn Ruppert and Tim Rowse analysed the practices and uses of censuses in relation to indigenous people in Canada and Australasia respectively. Practices of assembling objects and also people were directly addressed in papers including my own work on the emergence of a public art culture in London in the early 19th century and Tony Bennett’s analysis of French museums of anthropology. Tony also introduced all of us to the wonderfully named Society of Mutual Autopsy in Paris whose members carried out autopsies on each others’ bodies when they died.

The diversity of subjects addressed in the workshop certainly demonstrated the flexibility of conceptualising culture as an assemblage, with a particular focus on the role of different forms of expertise in cultural practices. Inevitably, it also raised debates about the application and interpretation of Actor-Network Theory to these topics and, in particular, its political implications. For museology students interested in this exploring this theoretical approach, you could make a start with the work of Bruno Latour, John Law and Manuel DeLanda. The workshop was supported by Australian Cultural Researchers Network, the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC), and the Ian Potter Foundation at the University of Melbourne. A special issue of a new CRESC journal, The Journal of Cultural Economy, based on the workshop is being planned.