Lisa Anderson at the Australian Museum
"...the informal history of the Museum, those unofficial stories, hidden in memory or archive, which record the stories of people and places, those very tangled webs of human desire and intrigue ... enliven our institutions, which would indeed be cold and coffin-like if we humans behaved according to the institutional constructs spawned by our mad, Alice-in-Wonderland Bureaucracies, but which, of course, we don't."
Museums are strange, hybrid creatures. Born of Kunstkammers and cabinets of curiosities, playrooms in which the European elite collected the cultural artefacts of the world as toys for their amusement and edification, these institutions became in the 19th Century one wing of that vast state apparatus called education, designed to produce orderly citizens of the nation state. In the logic of this gaze we were taught how to look at the world, as the wild mythologies of earlier centuries were subdued by a supposedly objective and privileged view of the universe and those things within it.
This collecting and display function has been wedded to research functions as the collections, those coffins of nature and culture in all their weird idiosyncrasies, are subjected to the most sophisticated versions of the educated gaze. Add to this vast institutional apparatus for seeing, codifying, knowing and controlling, the last twenty years of critical analysis, which subjects that very Museum institution to interrogation about the nature of its aims and its techniques of display and you have an institution which is of a hydra-headed complexity, and, at the same time, rather quaint.
A museum employee for nine years, I often wondered at this impression of quaint eccentricity—as if one were watching a cultural institution aging and dying before one's very eyes... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline