Note: I wrote this essay for ART 343 Feminist Art History at Allegheny College in spring 2024, after a class field trip. Lightly formatted for the web, otherwise as submitted.
My prompt: How big of a role do museums and their curators play in representations of a culture? Evaluate the Cleveland Museum of Art in the context of this question.
Museums and their curators both have the power to educate as well as misinform and misrepresent. During our class trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), I found myself revisiting the idea of representation and how curators retain the power to form the narrative of how cultures and their objects are represented. I believe that curators and their museums have a large impact on the narrative of cultural representation and the Cleveland Museum of Art in particular has areas where it can improve its cultural representation and areas of privilege.
Space and Representation
The Ancient American and Native North American sections were two areas in particular that I feel need improvement. Through the architecture of the museum, the contemporary art section has an overwhelming presence over the entire museum in which these sections suffer the most. I almost passed by the entrance to the Ancient American not knowing it was a door at first. The lighting is dim, and the exterior is dark, creating an uninviting atmosphere. In contrast, the contemporary art section has a very functional entrance with signs and other attention-grabbing features, especially being overall brighter. Not overly lighting the area is important to artifact preservation so the museum is doing that well, but on the other hand the space was full of hard shadows around the displays and the overall atmosphere felt very looming creating a negative audience experience overall.
I was especially shocked to see the Native North American room was resigned to a hallway room connected to the contemporary art section. This instinctually puts a bad taste in my mouth however I hope the construction they were doing at the time will act as a remedy to this injustice. As it stands the space provided for the Ancient American and Native North American art is not sufficient for providing an example of equal representation especially when compared to the immense amount of space the European art got in comparison.
As for the displays themselves, the art inherently lends more to the side of the artifact and notably, they are spaced very close together. The distance between each object is a lot shorter in this room compared to other rooms that would be qualified as artifacts such as the armory. The armory was a centerpiece and a grand display of European history. This creates an argument for the unconscious bias the curators and museum architecture designers may have had which led to the lack of space in rooms dedicated to certain cultures. An audience may subconsciously compare the large amount of breathing room that the other objects in the museum have to the lack of room the Ancient American artifacts have. This may lead to presumptions that these artifacts are less filling, less interesting, or less important. The room is restrained into being a side attraction to the museum’s other focuses just from the sheer lack of attention it receives. There were very few people in the north galleries of the building and the west wing, notably non-European galleries. During my visit there was no-one in the Chinese galleries for the thirty minutes I spent there. Surely the lack of audience attention is not entirely on the curators, but the unconscious bias of the curators and museums does play a role in the creation of these rooms that can lead to audience neglect. I would argue that inclusion in the museum itself is not enough to say there is equal representation. Just including the objects themselves is not enough because that does not guarantee them a space or positioning that will be seen by an audience. Where the objects are now has led to neglected rooms and unseen cultures. Certain artifacts are not given the equal treatment compared to the other objects in the rest of the museum because the curators decide what will be popular and what will not by the sheer locality of the displays.
Consent and the Curator's Power
There were signs in the museum, pictured below, within the Native North American section that stated that the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act protected certain objects from view unless consent was given by the parties involved. This sparks the greater question of cultural consent and the ability of a community to consent to how they will be represented in museums, a privilege that is not allotted to ancient cultures. In the end, curators retain the power of choice on how objects are displayed and what is not displayed which ultimately determines how the public will respond and understand the culture (Paine 2013, 24). Even more, one curator's bias can lead to a trail of misinterpretations which may impact other curators' choices and lead to the rewriting of our understanding of history. This has happened in the past where Alfred H. Barr’s story of modern art became the precedent in which other modern art histories followed (Reily 2018, 13). Self-representation looks vastly different across the world and across many cultures. Some made portraits, others made sculptures, and for others, self-representation can look a lot more abstract. Regardless, it just takes one curator to misinterpret these choices in self-representation to create a completely new narrative. That is why it is extremely important that in places that hold artifacts and even secular objects, the museums try to accurately represent them instead of creating a false narrative.
Objects Out of Context
Quatremere de Quincy, a french archeologist and theorist, once pointed out that by taking objects out of their context, a museum robs them of their identity and their value which cannot be avoided (Paine 2013, 25). This is especially apparent within the Indian and Southeast Asian and Chinese sections of the museum. Many of the artifacts there are Buddhist in nature however they have been taken out of that context and into the new context of the museum by various means, some of which are very questionable. As for the displaying of these objects, some ask “What would the objects want?” (Sullivan 2015, 10) but I believe a more productive question may be to ask, “What would the culture want?”. Although it is impossible to answer this question for many of the displays at the CMU, we can only hope it is something that the curators are considering when making their decisions.
Ultimately, the objects and their cultures are at the will of the curators and museums they appear in, they choose whether to display their objects or not, what to acquire, and how (Paine 2013, 24). I question if certain artifacts were only intended to last for a limited amount of time or were desired to serve a singular purpose and museums are altering the intentions of these cultures to serve the museums’s purpose. The museum and its audience are the ones who serve to gain from the displays of these artifacts, not those who made them. History education is essential, but acknowledging the dynamic between people of the past and present is important as well because it stresses the privilege that comes with the conception of a museum. There is a privilege that comes with gazing upon these artifacts that without museum intervention to preserve and restore them would not be around today. People do not have the entitlement to gaze upon objects from the past just because they are alive. Tearing apart graves and stealing objects would not be acceptable to a currently living culture so why do it to the people of the past? The ancient cultures should be treated with respect just as much as living cultures. Just because they do not have the voice to say “no” does not mean we can just ignore what they would want when it comes to representation and what goes on display.
An Impossible, Necessary Goal
Representing cultures and their objects in exactly the way that they would consent is necessary but also impossible to do. The CMU does try its best to give a voice to the cultures that can no longer speak in the modern day, but it can never be definitive on whether or not these are the true representation of these cultures and not facade strung together by the curators themselves.
It is impossible to create and come to a consensus on an entirely equal and one-hundred percent accurate representation of cultures, I recognize that the CMU does work to achieve that. The museum itself is constantly going through updates, renovations, and shifting of displays. The museum may not be the best representation now, but in the future, it may be possible to improve the neglected sections of the museum. Additionally, curators may take even more steps to ensure the ancient cultures they are creating a representation for are getting a voice in how and what is represented.
References
- Paine, Crispin. 2013; 2020; 2012;. Religious Objects in Museums: Private Lives and Public gasDuties. English;1;1st;1st; ed. London; New York;: Berg Publishers. doi:10.5040/9781474215411.
- Reilly, Maura. Curatorial activism: Towards an ethics of curating. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2018.
- Sullivan, Bruce M. 2015. Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces: Exhibiting Asian Religions in Museums, edited by Bruce M. Sullivan. 1st ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. doi:10.5040/9781474256346.