Museum Studies: Museums, Politics, History

Instructor: Kavita Singh

April 22 to 23, 2010 | 9.30 am to 5.30 pm
M. C. Ghia Hall, Mumbai

Day I:

Histories and pre-histories of the Museum:
In the long history of collecting, individuals and institutions have for centuries amassed artefacts or natural specimens. Royal treasuries, temples, universities, army camps, curiosity cabinets… all have been sites for the storage, display and even the study of objects. But these collections are fundamentally different from museums. What is a collection? And how does a collection turn into a museum? A fundamental feature of the museum is that it makes precious objects become accessible to the public in the museum. As such, museums are bound up with the ideals and processes of democracy and universal human rights. This session will look at forms and systems of pre-modern collecting, and the historical circumstances responsible for the formation of museums, taking up the Louvre and the British.

Colonial Collecting:
Colonialism led to a prolonged, intimate, and unequal encounter between European powers and distant peoples and lands. If in the early years of the Age of Exploration, exotic objects were collected as curiosities, the fascination with exotica gave way to a systematic and governmental collection and documentation of raw material, natural resources and human skills available in the colonies. The rapidly expanding empirical information had to be accommodated within new knowledge structures; the 19th c growth of museums in Europe is largely attributable to impulses from colonialism. This unit will first look at the encounter between colonial powers and ‘primitive societies,’ through specific case studies from sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania that exemplify the relationship between avowedly Enlightenment values and violence. It will then briefly trace the history of the colonial museum in India.

Nationalism and National Museums:
National museums tend to put on display the long histories of their nations’ civilization and culture, and make claims about unity, diversity and other forms of imagined communities that hold the nation together. National museums are ubiquitous today and function as ornaments and badges of honour of the nation-state. It is odd to realise then that the ‘National Museum’ is primarily a post-colonial phenomenon, one that first proliferated across newly decolonised nations of Asia and Africa in the mid-20th c. Ironically, by the end of the 20th century, the National Museum model was so successful, that it was absorbed into the fabric of museums of erstwhile colonial powers. This session looks at the National Museum- as a concept, with a specific history and location. It then studies the phenomenon of the National Museums in South Asia. How has nationalism played out in the husbanding of culture and heritage in South Asia? As India, Pakistan and Bangladesh divide and re-divide and choose different forms of self-definition, we follow the ways in which their cultural policies and key institutions reflect these changes.

Repatriation, Reparation and the Mirage of Justice:
One of the most fraught areas in international cultural relations today centres around the calls for repatriation of cultural property. Here, nations, groups, or individuals call for the return of objects that were unfairly seized from them or their ancestors, at times of war, colonialism or other extraordinary circumstances that allowed and shielded the illegal transfer of cultural property. Calls for repatriation are thus calls to redress past wrongs, and seem to be a cry for justice. At the same time those who hold these artifacts justify their continued possession by invoking the law, or by deriding ‘narrow nationalism’ against a supposedly ‘universal’ value of heritage, which unties the relationship between the object and
the place of its original location. Repatriation debates raise important issues about the law, ethics and heritage.

Museums of Modern Art:
What is it to museumize the modern? The iconic MoMA, the first museum for modern art in the world, provides an interesting case study. We study the influence of MoMA’s canon, its white cube aesthetic, and the relationship between its pure aesthetic and Cold War politics. We then briefly look at the proliferation of modern art museums in the MoMA mode outside the West– in Iran, the Philippines, and India. What do these museums signify? Finally: for the past twenty years, the iconic modern art museum has been not MoMA but the Guggenheim, whose franchise model has prompted critics to call it McGuggenheim

Day II:

Blockbuster Exhibitions:
The exhibition of treasures from the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1976 is counted as the first blockbuster exhibition. Since then, the blockbuster has become a phenomenon, if not a genre, of the museum world. Inevitably, the emergence of the blockbuster phenomenon is accompanied by severe critiques. We use debates around blockbuster exhibitions to examine the assumptions about the arts, public good, entertainment and market forces.

Holocaust Museums:
Another form of museum that has emerged in the 1970’s, the holocaust museum has become an established genre that has rapidly proliferated across the globe. Embedded in legacies of unspeakable horror, and speaking from a moral position against amnesia – and at the same time developing a tourist circuit, what does the holocaust museum do? We study a number of museums dedicated to memorializing the Jewish holocaust at the hands of the Nazis in WWII, and go on to see the proliferation of the holocaust museum model at sites in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, and Rwanda.

Kavita Singh is currently Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where she teaches courses on the history of Indian painting and museum and curatorial studies. She has published on Sikh art, Indian folk and courtly painting and the history of museums in India.