*Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations*
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Oleh : Admin_Tikar Pandan
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Komunitas Tikar Pandan Banda Aceh menolak proyek mercusuar BRR:
pembangunan museum tsunami seharga 70 Miliar. Berikut ini adalah ulasan
Jonathan Zilberg, antropolog dan kurator tamu Episentrum Ulee Kareng,
mengenai politik museum, yang dikutip dari Leonardo On-Line.
by Ivan Karp, Corrine Kratz, Lynn Szwaja and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto,
Editors Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2006 632 pp., illus. 70 b/w.
Trade, $99.95 Paper, $27.95 ISBN: 0-8223-3878-5; ISBN: 0-8223-3894-7.
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg (Honorary Curator in Komunitas Tikar Pandan
Banda Aceh)
MUSEUM Frictions sets the agenda for the conjuncture of critical theory
and practice in the museum world and arts and heritage industries as
they continue to grapple with the effects of globalization. The last in
a trilogy on museum anthropology, the first being Exhibiting Cultures
(1991) and the second being Museums and Communities (1992), the series
constitutes the tangible heritage of the Rockefeller Foundations and the
Smithsonian Institutions investments in funding, inspiring and assisting
museum programs, exhibitions and scholarly research. If the first two
volumes provided the proverbial intellectual wheels for critical museum
studies in the nineties, this volume provides the connecting chain to
combine and advance all this knowledge so as to produce the conceptual
power to sustain such intellectual energy in museums and the heritage
industry for years to come.
Inadvertently perhaps, Museum Frictions represents a productive
conjunction of anthropological interests in the politics of cultural
representation with philosophical issues previously more central to
Cultural Studies, specifically in terms of the shared interest in Jurgen
Habermas' notion of the public sphere. Working within this legacy it is
an exceptional example of inter-disciplinary fertilization in which
anthropologists have responded to Tony Bennet's groundbreaking
contribution The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995)
which advanced his earlier work "The Exhibitionary Complex" published in
New Formations in 1988. No less significant is the opportunity that this
engagement has provided for Bennet himself to advance his notions of the
museum as a differencing machine and to develop a more qualified notion
of the public sphere in order to more effectively engage the
particularities of globalization. The total effect is a wonderfully
energized set of emerging theoretical discourses and practices in
tactical museologies and museum reconfigurations in which
activist-scholars are applying and debating critical theory in the
service of creativity and cultural production. Herein, the institution,
activities, politics and even pre-colonial histories of museums become
as much sites of observation, critique and action as do the nature of
the exhibits themselves.
The study presents a diverse field pointing to the ever- expanding
conceptualization of what constitutes a museum and its aims and content.
These include conflicts, tensions and anxieties within tangible and
intangible heritage industries including community museums, slavery and
holocaust museums as commemorative contexts for expressing grief,
national parks as spaces of death, colonization and opportunity,
Disney-ification and the neo-liberal Bilbao-effect and much else.
Despite this profusion of materials, a singularly powerful thread is
woven intermittently through the text, namely the conceptual work
performed on Bennet's notion of the exhibitionary complex in developing
the related notions of experiential and the expositionary complexes as
deftly considered by Barbara Kirshenblatt ---Gimblett. Extending this,
and almost by way of epilogue, Fred Myers, combines Bourdieu and Bennet
proposes an "exhibitionary field of cultural production" and explores
revelatory Aboriginal regimes of value and the way in which academic
seminars complementing exhibitions highlight the dislocations that exist
between the various participants. This adds tension to Howard Morphy's
prior questioning of the very notion of the exhibitionary complex in
which he proposes that exhibitions might more accurately be understood
in terms of complex motivations and negotiated and highly motivated
outcomes used by individuals, institutions and communities in order to
achieve their different objectives.
Critique and extension of the Habermasian notion of the public sphere
aside, similarly fascinating ideas and instances stand out such as the
new term "tactical museologies", the refusal in cases to include
specimens or originals, the use of originals to magnify the aura of the
copy and the simulacrum, the use of auto-critique to limit the
inevitable controversies which result from exhibitions and even the
destruction and removal of specimens to honor the intent or cultural
logic and mores of the creators. From all these fascinating instances to
the surprise and wonder in the Lucky Market in Phnom Penh and the
transgressive flexibility of micro-museum circuitry in Peru, Frictions
provides a radically opened up notion of what museums are and what such
institutions can achieve --- particularly in post-conflict and/or in
disenfranchised and aggrieved communities.
In the spirit of the book, it is important to highlight at least two
theoretical and philosophical frictions that exist within the text,
firstly between Tony Bennet and Martin Hall over globalism's assumed
power, and secondly, between the ancestral figures of Walter Benjamin
and Andre Malraux over the power of the image versus the "authentic"
object. As I see it, the ideal result of such intellectual frisson in
this volume would be for activist-scholar-practitioners currently
outside of this privileged community to generate applicable insights and
energy out of these internal frictions. By transferring such tensions
and knowledge from one context to another, they could empower themselves
to use museums as democratization and educational machines and in the
embryonic case advanced below to engage the apposite visions of Benjamin
and Malraux in which photographic (now digital) imagery can vastly
extend rather than destroy the power of the aura of the original and
thus the reach of the local.
In Banda Aceh today, there is a smoldering if largely unknown debate
amongst intellectuals engaged in civil society initiatives over a
proposed Tsunami museum, in which photographic imagery would presumably
constitute much of the museum's collection. Arts activists in the
organization Epicentrum critique the planned museum as a perverse
diversion of reconstruction funds considering that the Aceh museum built
in 1914 survived the tsunami completely intact and is poorly funded and
greatly under-used. Simply put, the frictions addressed and theorized in
this publication remain to be tested in future applied activist settings
such as these which exist in the extreme periphery of the international
museum community. And there, especially in such emerging democratic
environments, without the benefit of reading this book and becoming
familiarized with these tactics and theories, professionals in museums
and those interested in the museum world will not be able to
conceptualize just how important, how exciting and how potentially
productive the use of museums in promoting civil society initiatives is
proving to be.
http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/sept2007/museum_zilberg.html
Tanggal : 2008-01-12
