There seem to be so many interesting contradictions between the
idea of a museum and a concern with the preservation of forms of
human practice that are no longer current.
To preserve a practice, we need not a glass display case, but a
living practicing person. Someone's _life_ must be dedicated, in
some part, to maintaining a practice.
Of course this does happen. And a great deal more than perhaps
Edouard initially recognized. Many of the craft skills of the
last century or so are being 'revived', from quilting to the
making and playing of traditional musical instruments. And
curiously, these 'anachronistic' practices fairly readily form
links to the present social ecology, and economy. Perhaps because
our social surpluses are sufficient to indulge these activities
as 'pastimes' (for some of us); perhaps because it is a myth that
there is any irreversible evolution of social practices. Perhaps
any, or at least many, systems of interdependent social practices
are possible, and they do not need to be ones that arose
contemporaneously, nor does each one need to be maximally
efficient (if it is not in fact in competition with alternative
practices). Perhaps we overestimate the degree to which
competition for efficiency or scarce resources drives out the old
and forces acceptance of the new. Perhaps the new is not in fact
necessary, but only what is politically dominant.
One of the earliest tenets of postmodernism, in architecture, was
that the classical styles can harmoniously mix with modernist
ones, just as a city like Rome can mix, in a fractal mosaic,
patches of different ages and styles into a unified landscape (or
anyway one that we can learn to see a certain unity in).
We don't need to turn to 'living fossils' to find our past -- in
fact I rather doubt in most cases that there are such living
fossils: they are not fossils in their own ecology, and they are
probably not operating in the same way that comparable practices
did in the history of our own.
We do create sometimes 'living museums' as at Colonial
Williamsburg, where the practices and the artifacts are preserved
together. I have not been there, but I rather doubt that the
whole ecology is preserved, including the diseases, the slops,
etc. And I would be skeptical that one can gain much insight into
the functions of the practices that are preserved if they are
divorced from the complete ecology.
Whence the impulse to 'musee-ify'? Museums seem to be a very
culture-specific phenomenon, and a rather recent one. They are
not ecologically very much like the preservation of holy relics
or the keeping of sacred bundles. Museums radically de-
contextualize their contents; they are almost
institutionalizations of modern alienation. They may have begun
as displays of conspicuous ownership by wealthy eccentrics, and
have acquired some rational camouflage as scientific collections,
but are they not also a rather horrifying art-form? ripping
objects from the activity contexts that give them meaning, so
that they can be regarded as pure 'commodities' (I always expect
to see price tags attached to museum displays!), pure isolated
'objets' of the art of our century, the art of fragmentation and
reduction ...?
To the extent that this can happen to a living practice, it
represents a contradiction, since a practice cannot actually be
living except in integral relationship to a human social ecology.
But we are taught not to see the new ecological links that
support 'quaint revivals' of oldtime practices (as we do not
focus on the economics of museums). Perhaps that is coming to its
end. One step beyond modernism may be to stop fetishizing
isolated objects and practices and begin to consider how they
combine and interact, however heterogeneously, making whatever
impossible mixes and monstrosities. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU