Look Left and Right

Resetting Museology in a Culture of Crisis

in Museum Worlds
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Kylie Message Professor, Australian National University, Australia

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This article, a short critical analysis, explores dominant social and museological approaches to understanding museum collections made from current-day political crises. It focuses on events and collections in the US, a nation that has a museum sector directly tied up in political decision-making and crises since its inception (Message 2014) and reeling more acutely from events leading up to and surrounding the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. The article does not universalize the American experience in relation to either museological trends or broader twenty-first-century political crises. Its reflections are based on observation of political and museological activity occurring in Washington, DC and New York.

This article, a short critical analysis, explores dominant social and museological approaches to understanding museum collections made from current-day political crises. It focuses on events and collections in the US, a nation that has a museum sector directly tied up in political decision-making and crises since its inception (Message 2014) and reeling more acutely from events leading up to and surrounding the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. The article does not universalize the American experience in relation to either museological trends or broader twenty-first-century political crises. Its reflections are based on observation of political and museological activity occurring in Washington, DC and New York.

Rather than working toward building a set of prescriptions to determine “what we might learn” (Campbell in Judkis and McCarthy 2021) from the US cases discussed, I probe conceptual difficulties and consider some of the theoretical ways in which the challenges of representing crisis in contemporary society have been approached in my own research observations and that of others across various disciplinary fields. I focus on the challenges for museums arising from collecting and interpreting the two perhaps unlikely but temporally contingent examples: First, the global COVID-19 pandemic that emerged early in 2019 and continues in March 2022 as I write this article, and second, the violent attack on the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC on 6 January 2021, when supporters of former US President Donald Trump sought to overturn his 2020 election defeat by disrupting the Congressional count of electoral votes that would formalize President-elect Joe Biden's victory. Central to the article is my contention that a conflation of crisis and normalcy has occurred and perhaps even become a uniquely familiar experience in recent years, despite our continuing expectation for crisis to function as an interruption of everyday experience.

Crisis

Crisis is typically associated with extremity, “a specific, unexpected, non-routine event or series of events that creates high levels of uncertainty and a significant or perceived threat to high priority goals” (Sellnow and Seeger 2013: 7). In an everyday, media-saturated world context, crisis is used commonly as both cause and explanation for a crucial or decisive situation, an historical conjuncture, or a turning point. It is used to describe an unstable situation in cultural, political, social, economic, or military affairs, particularly where the situation or event includes the threat or reality of an impending change. Social and political crises, in particular, are seen as destabilizing risks that call “existing power structures, norms of conduct, or even the existence of specific people or groups into question” (Van Prooijen and Douglas 2017: 324). In short, crises are commonly presented as endangering the future as we (think we) know it.

In the generic mythical past of the West, a life “without crisis,” as described by theorist Lauren Berlant, was considered a “good life” (Berlant 2011). Despite being widely critiqued as an imaginary concept (discussed in relation to museums in Message 2018), the good life offered, nonetheless, a stable signifier of normalcy that could be evoked to define what crisis is not. However, crisis is becoming an increasingly ubiquitous feature of the contemporary condition for all of us, as private individuals, citizens, and as members of diverse intersecting political communities. While our experience and expectations of crises might feel heightened, their frequency in recent years has led to a sense that they have become both a constant and ordinary feature of the present and “an omnipresent sign in almost all forms of narrative today.”

Crisis is, as political theorist Janet Roitman (2012) says, mobilized as the defining category of our contemporary situation, meaning that we experience crisis as both an ordinary and a defining (exceptional) feature of the present. How we collect from crisis, and the functions we anticipate crisis collections to provide, can tell us a lot about political attitudes today.

Contemporary Collecting

A question often posed about contemporary collecting regards the impossibility of knowing whether materials collected will have enduring significance or value as historical evidence (Flexner 2016; Message 2014). I want to expand this conversation by thinking instead about the contemporary rather than future role and relevance of decisions made regarding the exercise of collecting and affiliate activities like recording, documenting, interpreting, and so on. I use the generic term of “museum” here to cover all cultural and collecting institutions (which I understand simply as a group of similarly purposed institutions rather than as a homogeneous category) and, although my comments may have broader or international applicability, they arise principally from fieldwork conducted on the National Mall and in primarily Smithsonian museums since 2008, and secondarily from research into collections of Occupy Wall Street materials housed in New York (Message 2014, 2018, 2019). While there remains debate amongst the professional museum sector about who and what to exclude from definitions (Sandahl 2019), I'm more concerned, in the context of this article, to think about what contemporary forms of public culture do than how they are categorized.

In contrast with the 1970s and 1980s, when contemporary collecting was debated by a small group of museum curators as a new thing, recent years have seen increased scholarly and museological attention to the challenges and future value of contemporary cause-based collecting (Message 2014, 2018, 2019). However, there remains insufficient discussion about the relevance that the activity has for the social and political environment in which it arises, and very few ethnographic studies of contemporary collecting. Despite its lack of scholarly analysis, the booming memory industry, to which museums contribute through collecting activities, has become a core part of how we collectively commemorate everyday public experience. Playing a significant role in this transformation were the spontaneous memorials that mushroomed across New York City in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, which generated a particular turning point in materialization as a collective expression of grief and mourning through the creation of memory projects by the public and the interest of museums collecting the commemorative material produced.

And yet, our experience of crisis, be it individual or collective, private or public, extends far beyond the material memorials produced for and collected at particular sites and times. Although museums have used contemporary collecting from crisis events or sites to engage with or build relationships with various communities, they have less effectively (perhaps because of inadequate collecting policies, or resource or capacity shortfalls) recorded crisis responses that do not fit an increasingly singular “everyday memorial” mold.

One way to correct this oversight is to focus on the “everyday” and “normal” angle of the event and how people navigate it in their everyday lives, instead of highlighting its status as exception. This approach means engaging—ideally through ethnographic and place-based fieldwork—with diverse expressions about crisis experience. Granted, this approach does not sit comfortably with traditional collecting policies that have, at least in the past, typically expected accessioned materials to have value for being unique rather than commonplace (Message 2014).

However, to collect only regularized forms of crisis response means that what is recorded is not the experience of the event but evidence of how the event was commemorated. These emphases are not mutually exclusive but conflating them can create risks, argues political scientist, Sarah Gensburger:

Collecting “testimonies,” “diaries,” “pictures,” and other vernacular “objects,” but also “dreams” and “sounds,” became a social emergency for each day, increasing the number of social actors who became engaged in “curating” Covid and “preserving” its memory. These projects claimed to be documenting “people's experiences,” hearing “grassroots stories,” and collecting “ordinary memory” of the crisis. I think it is necessary to understand this Covid memory boom and to what extent it can also participate in giving a voice to some and not to others, even if the call for “ordinary memory” is born from inclusive intentions. (Gensburger in Craps and Gilbert 2021: 1396)

The vast populism of the COVID memory projects described by Gensburger has been matched by an equal level of fascination by museums (and competition between institutions) in collecting protest materials, like signs, T-shirts, and banners with slogans associated with social justice reform movements, rallies, and events (Message 2014, 2019).

While collecting from political events shares a genealogy with mainstream political conventions and campaigning in Western nations as well as labor and civil rights reform movements, it found a watershed moment this century in the Occupy Wall Street movement that commenced in September 2011 in New York's financial district to protest against economic inequality and the influence of money in politics. Just as 9/11 was a key moment for the production and collection of spontaneous memorials, the anti-government Occupy Wall Street movement was a key moment in the history of the production and collection of protest paraphernalia (Message 2019).

Observation of collecting techniques employed by different actors across different kinds of crisis events beyond just the examples and typologies I address in this article reveals increased instances of “helicopter” collecting, where a collector drops into a memorial site or protest scene, scoops up materials, and removes them for later use or sale. This style of collecting decontextualizes materials from the place in which they leverage meaning, and often removes authorship. It can change the meaning of materials by reframing their intent to suit the agenda of the collector over the producer, or inaccurately represent the relationships between the memorial or protest materials, the views of the producer or sign bearer (in the case of a protest), and the people moving around and interacting with that person (Message 2014). Relocating materials within a museum is likely to further align them with the institution's cultural and historical connotations and, whether by design or accident, can lead to depoliticization of decontextualized materials.

Despite initially being experienced as a point of crisis, there has been a narrowing if not a conflation of the conceptual distance between our understanding of COVID as a singular interruption and the sense that it has become part of the fabric of everyday life. Of course, this is unsurprising as we move through our third year of the pandemic. In contrast with Gensburger's critique that scholarship about memory projects has not adequately accounted for the context in which these are produced and collected, others have suggested that COVID has encouraged critical reengagement with questions of equity, inclusion, and agency (Gross 2021: 2).

If we draw together the lessons from research undertaken during the pandemic in sociological fields, we can see that extending the remit of our study beyond forms of commemoration or political expression to the context within which these circulate can build understanding that traumatic memory is not ontologically an exception to everyday experience. Understanding that crisis and context coexist is important to understand that ordinary or everyday dynamics and experiences inform how people remember traumatic events as well as how they experience them within the context of their normal lives (Gensburger 2019: 17 in Craps and Gilbert 2021).

Recognizing the interwoven nature of crisis and context feels, to me at least, like an accurate representation of what it feels like to live at the present time. Progressing this feeling from my own personal response to a broader scholarly approach useful for the museum and collections sector requires thinking through issues museum scholars are already expert at, including by whom, where, when, and how collection narratives will be written, as well as what imaginaries they will construct and what agendas they will represent.

Challenges to Museology

A great deal of collecting undertaken through the pandemic has targeted popular, feel-good records at the expense of less “progressive” evidence, including expressions of anti-vaccination sentiment (examples in Craps and Gilbert 2021; Spinney 2020). This trend has reiterated the perception that museums are inherently “progressive,” and perhaps even politically motivated, left-wing institutions (Message 2022).

Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg have recently made the astute observation that, while scholars who study progressive (social justice) activism are unlikely to deny that the explicit use of techniques of memory creation can be undertaken by nonprogressive actors, they are, however, likely not to address the issue in their analysis. Their contention that the “progressive bias” of memory scholars and workers “is not so much a matter of explicit design, but committed by collective omission” (Gutman and Wüstenberg 2021: 5) is worth considering in relation to museum practice and scholarship.

Collections made from materials used at politically conservative or right-wing events are much more difficult to depoliticize or appropriate through the framework of political neutrality typically expected from national museums than are collections of COVID memorials. My point is not that these collections are not made, nor that curators act from an intent to strip out political views they do not personally or institutionally agree with (the opposite is true: see Message 2014, 2019), but that collections of materials advocating political violence, for instance, are already set at a remove from mainstream political opinion and public expectations about what museums do. The difference is further illustrated in contrast to the collection of COVID memory projects which are, by and large, publicly viewed as uncontroversial and both readily and reasonably turned (“tuned”?) to the function of nation- or community-building.

It is not surprising that museums, as institutions with significant skin in the game of nation-making, are uncomfortable engaging with right-wing materials such as what might be found at the US Capitol riot or protests against existing historical institutions and monuments. With some important exceptions (discussed in Message 2022), many, particularly national, museums have been reticent to engage with articulations of citizenship that go against the majority view of acceptable ideology and behavior (including what I call the citizenship of hate, Message 2022).

Although, for example, there was reporting of material from the events of the January 6 Capitol attack being collected, it was not clear how or where (or if), this would be accessioned, cataloged, or exhibited (Judkis and McCarthy 2021). It is beyond the scope of this article to probe the whereabouts and subsequent treatment of these collections, but previous research shows that for many decades museums have excluded collections of hate-related evidence from their normal accession and exhibition procedures (Message 2014). My own research into this topic is ongoing, but my hypothesis is that even when (and if) the materials are formally accessioned, they will have significant and often unresolvable ethical issues that will make it unlikely they will ever be exhibited, certainly within a timely manner as part of the public debate about contemporary political issues.

Any reluctance to address antisocial forms of activism has not spared museums from themselves becoming targeted by a growing cohort of angry culture warriors and extremist political actors. The spate of nooses found in museum grounds on the US National Mall in Washington DC throughout 2019 and 2020 (Miller 2019; Shabad 2021) suggests that even where a space for potential dialogue and education exists, it has been appropriated as a symbolic opportunity to promote fear. Right-wing attacks on museums indicate a high level of understanding by actors of the relationship between museums, contemporary socio-political dynamics, and memory work (which is always ultimately a future-oriented activity), and the ways memory can be utilized to transform symbolic meanings. It shows clear comprehension that collective memory is, and has always been, a site of political struggle, in which different stakeholders compete for legitimacy for their interpretations of the past. This means that museums are not just targeted by hate crime perpetrators because they happen to be “there,” but because of what they represent, politically, as a site that embodies a form of citizenship that is contested by the activists.

Museums and museum studies are not alone in grappling with these challenges, which have also been described in relation to memory studies by Gensburger (2019), Gutman and Wüstenberg (2021), and by Phillip Stenmann Baun, who argues that scholarly work on far-right memory practices is “still in its infancy” (Stenmann Baun 2021: 1). In contrast, some fields have been more open to analyzing the increasing normalization of representations of hate and racism. Speaking, for example, about the erection of a gallows on the grounds of the US Capitol Building on 6 January, geographers Anne Bonds and Joshua Inwood argue that:

To locate white supremacy within the realm of militias, mobs, and Trumpism not only misunderstands white supremacy as a structuring relation, but also reinforces it by reducing it to the extraordinary and spectacular, and within the worldview of extremists. Rather, we maintain that white supremacy must be understood as ordinary. (Bonds and Inwood 2021, my italics)

In contrast to Gensburger's criticism that representing COVID memory projects as “ordinary” ensured the political neutrality of collections, the invocation by Bonds and Inwood of the “ordinary” status of white supremacy emphasizes the extremity of the everyday where, rather than being exceptions to a norm, traumatic episodes of crisis coexist with and contribute to ordinary civic life. Their approach undermines presumptions about the “naturalness” of the everyday by arguing that it has been structured by both historically imbedded and explicit forms of racism and a contemporary propensity toward outrage to normalize the conditions by which extremism is enacted.

Observations Bonds and Inwood (2021) make about the normalization of hate are consistent with my research into earlier activism by the American right-wing Tea Party movement, specifically focused on the “Restoring Honor” demonstration held at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC on 28 August 2010 (Message 2018). It is also reinforced by media observations of 6 January that, while the “spectacular violence” of far-right expressions, signage, and militia uniforms captured the attention of the public watching, “the vast majority of attendees were ordinary pro-Trump protesters” (Cabral and Macleod 2021).

Museums share the cultural spaces occupied by rioters. They have a responsibility for representing extremism as a part of normal life but need to do so in such a way that does not platform or legitimize the content or modes of expression being used. They can only do this by showing that the trauma of racism and hate is both exceptional (a crisis) and an ordinary part of life (associated with generations of structural racism).

Outrage Culture

Outrage culture is a response to a world where crisis has transformed from an emergency event to a state of continuum. This is not the same as the normalization of our experience of “living-with-COVID,” whereby crisis is flattened, in a sense, by the sameness and omnipresence of the memory projects collected by museums. It refers instead to a culture where everything becomes symptomatic of extremity (crisis) and is treated with equally heightened levels of repeated emotional reaction (outrage), where the critical ability to provoke sustained attention to the causes that matter, or even to easily describe why whatever it is we are raging against is truly outrageous, risks being lost. Freeman's assessment in 2018 that “[t]he politics of outrage is fast becoming a political norm, each flareup lowering the bar of acceptable rhetoric and producing an upswing in belligerent posturing” (Freeman 2018) registers an extension of a pattern that has been repeated frequently since the Tea Party took a foothold within the public imaginary, up to and including the US Capitol riot in 2021.

The normalization of outrage can also be seen as a logical extension of the culture and history wars and more recent cancel culture debates over truth in representation that occurred intensively throughout and since the 1990s and early 2000s in the US and other Western nations (Message 2014, 2021). Images of outrage now pervade our media, as headlines attest (Bruinius 2018). Generally understood as an extreme and urgent reaction of shock that is sometimes expressed through humor or indignation that may or may not be based in a personal response (where, for example, an individual feels their rights or beliefs have been violated, infringed, or threatened in some way), outrage is often synonymous with anger, about which Freeman says:

Anger has a peculiar power in democracies. Skilfully deployed before the right audience, it cuts straight to the heart of popular politics. It is attention-getting, drowning out the buzz of news cycles. It is inherently personal and thereby hard to refute with arguments of principle; it makes the political personal and the personal political. It feeds on raw emotions with a primal power: fear, pride, hate, humiliation. And it is contagious, investing the like-minded with a sense of holy cause. (Freeman 2018)

Within the context of outrage culture, however, many of the crisis events I am concerned with, including the US Capitol attack (and the 2010 “Restoring Honor” rally) are flashpoint moments linked to the project of pushing the window of public discourse to the right.

The broad media distribution of the visual imagery of the US Capitol attack (Judkis and McCarthy 2021) has contributed to changes in mainstream discourse that have supported a shift in the window of mainstream public discourse. Previously radical ideas and statements that may have once been considered unacceptable (such as extreme or racist statements) come to appear reasonable, or at least debatable, when the space of public discourse has moved, and ideas once considered to be extreme now appear moderate or benign relative to the new center. This shift creates, in turn, a new fringe that is more extreme than that which was once extreme but now socially acceptable. The resulting post-Tea Party, post-Obama realm of public discourse played a significant role in generating a political context in which the election of Donald Trump became politically viable, and in which, in the six months following 6 January 2021 and the impeachment trial (and subsequent acquittal) of former President Trump, “a seemingly fracturing Republican Party has coalesced around the so-called ‘Big Lie,’ reframed January 6 as a ‘normal tourist visit’” (Shammas 2021 in Bonds and Inwood 2021).

The actions and the symbolism and imagery that have gained ubiquity in recent decades have not only irrevocably shifted the “Overton Window” (Lehman 2009) but have done so in ways that heighten the obligation of museums to engage with practices of hate, racism, and expressions of antisocial or uncivil citizenship. The responsibility requires engaging with assuredly difficult truths—as well as representations and distortions of truth; however, it is critical that museums engage with what contemporary expressions of hate say about our national imaginaries and communities today, that they do so by representing these contemporary expressions within the longer histories of structural racism, and that they reflect on the roles museums have played as instruments of social and political governance. It is incumbent upon museums to do this contextualizing historical work, because white supremacy is not singular and transhistorical. The nooses always reappear (Milloy 2017), and increasingly, they have made their reappearance on museum grounds.

Rather than seeing the recurring challenges raised by right-wing and conservative populist protest and reform actions as a symptom of institutional crisis for museums, we can see them as evidence of the critical role museums play in society. To understand how to approach complex questions, including how to preserve the cultural production of protest movements (especially when they may include symbols of hate such as gallows, nooses, and swastikas), why and what should be preserved, who should do the work of preservation, for and on behalf of whom, and who can claim the ownership of social movements’ legacies-in-the-making, museums might learn from emerging scholarship about memory activism, including from Gutman and Wüstenberg, who argue that:

Like many scholars, we believe that certain kinds of memory activism can do much to invigorate democracy, while other kinds may pose a danger against which we want to work as citizens. However, we argue that a systematic study of memory activists needs to capture not only progressive, but also populist and “uncivil” civil society groups (Alexander 2006). Thus, our “value-neutral” definition of the memory activist overcomes a progressive bias in existing studies of memory activism and is essential for a comprehensive understanding of how memory “from below” contributes to political transformation. (Gutman and Wüstenberg 2021: 2)

Conclusion

This article has presented a discussion about the political and social context in which museums operate, and to which they contribute. It has focused on the political connection between museums and crisis to consider how contemporary crises encourage a repositioning of museums and a resetting of museology to better reflect the ways in which museums can be perceived as a manifestation of crisis, how museums can be identified as targets for memory activism, and the agency museums themselves hold as memory activists.

My main intention in formulating this commentary has been to argue that, as museums continue to grapple with increasing multinational and global climate emergencies as well as local political crises, the decisions they make in regard to representing contemporary events through collections have wide-ranging political implications. Observation of commemorative responses to COVID and the material culture of political protest such as the US Capitol attack might also demonstrate the ubiquity of changes in cultural standards following the normalization of outrage as a symptom of political crisis. Looking beyond collected materials to analyze practices of producing, protesting, and collecting—or omitting to collect—contemporary expressions produced during crisis is critical for museums that seek meaningful engagement with the politics of culture.

References

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  • Bonds, Anne and Joshua Inwood. 2021. “Relations of Power: The U.S. Capitol Insurrection, White Supremacy and U.S. Democracy.Society and Space, 9 August. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/relations-of-power-the-u-s-capitol-insurrection-white-supremacy-and-us-democracy.

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Contributor Notes

KYLIE MESSAGE is Professor of Public Humanities and Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. She is Research Fellow of the National Museum of Australia, external advisor to the Vietnamese Museum of Australia, a member of the International Advisory Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and a member of the steering committee of the CHCI Public Humanities Network. Her books include Collecting Activism, Archiving Occupy Wall Street (Routledge 2019), The Disobedient Museum: Writing at the Edge (Routledge 2018), Museums and Racism (Routledge 2018), Museums and Social Activism: Engaged Protest (Routledge 2014), New Museums and the Making of Culture (Berg 2006),

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Museum Worlds

Advances in Research

  • Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Bonds, Anne and Joshua Inwood. 2021. “Relations of Power: The U.S. Capitol Insurrection, White Supremacy and U.S. Democracy.Society and Space, 9 August. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/relations-of-power-the-u-s-capitol-insurrection-white-supremacy-and-us-democracy.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bruinius, Harry. 2018. “Outrage Nation: Can America Overcome its Addiction to Anger?Christian Science Monitor, 7 December. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/1207/Outrage-nation-Can-America-overcome-its-addiction-to-anger.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Cabral, Sam and Roderick Macleod. 2021. “Capitol Riots: Five Takeaways from the Arrests.BBC News, 8 February. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55987603.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Craps, Stef and Catherine Gilbert. 2021. “Memory Dynamics in Times of Crisis: An Interview with Sarah Gensburger.” Memory Studies 14 (6): 13881400.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Flexner, James. 2016. “Dark and Bright Futures for Museum Archaeology.” Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 4: 13.

  • Freeman, Kate. 2018. “America Descends into the Politics of Rage.Atlantic, 22 October. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/trump-and-politics-anger/573556/.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Gensburger, Sarah. 2019. Memory on My Doorstep: Chronicles of the Batalan Neighbourhood, Paris 2015–2016 (trans. K. Throssell). Leuven: Leuven University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Gross, Jonathan. 2021. “Hope Against Hope: COVID-19 and the Space for Political Imagination.European Journal of Cultural Studies 25 (2): 448457. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494211004594

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Gutman and Wüstenberg. 2021. “Challenging the Meaning of the Past from Below: A Typology for Comparative Research on Memory Activists.Memory Studies 15 (5): 10701086. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980211044696

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
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