How does the archiving of an item change it, and how do we read the relationship between the different states? It is more complex than ‘the Greek bowl behind glass is a different thing from the Greek bowl in use for wine-drinking’.
Consider the following objects:
A Stone Age axe
The Vindolanda tablets (Roman personal letters on wood, from Hadrian’s Wall)
A 16th century lice comb
The manuscript of Gulliver’s Travels
A Bauhaus kitchen utensil
Our reaction to these objects within the context of seeing them in or knowing about their presence in the archive or museum differs.
For the Stone Age axe we are directed to how it was made and used, and we wonder now at the aesthetics of its shape; we have no idea how it feels in the hand, how well it works; there is a hiatus between made and used object and museum object.
We do not get to handle the Vindolanda tablets, but their contents affect us as we marvel at how close the sentiments expressed are to those we would express now; they collapse time because the communicative content remains largely unaffected by the change in context; they are objects which have survived, their main import is their message, which is not enhanced by a desire to touch them.
We marvel at how well the lice comb was made, but we would not use it; we might use something almost identical in form, and this is the source of its fascination.
The manuscript of Gulliver’s Travels is an object of academic study and/or a curiosity, a time-and-physical-contact denier; it does not affect how we know the story, but we want to touch it because it would give us direct access to the 18th century and to Jonathan Swift.
We understand the context of the Bauhaus item, we admire its form, and we want it; but it was made to be used, and it is not used.
The range of relationships between the item as created and the item as seen is complex and varied. If we argue that the object removed from its original context – geographical, behavioural, hegemonic – is less an object of use than one of academic, historical and aesthetic study and admiration, this denies part of the essential intention for the creation of the object. Which is fine, except that labelling often focuses on the context of its original use or creation. Our own reactions may include – I want to know how that feels, I want to know what that says, I want to touch that, I want to handle that, I want to own and use that.
Live art work I have done which tests the relationships between objects and sites as constructed and as now perceived has involved using preserved eating and drinking utensils from a museum collection for eating and drinking, and living and sleeping with my family in a preserved living-space-as-museum (Kettles Yard, which was constructed on the idea that the home is a better place than the gallery for the appreciation of art). Always this work has drawn me to the uneasy relationship between preserved object and intended object. Recently this has involved close study of some cheap magazines published 100 years ago, which were not intended to be preserved, but which are now so fragile that any study of them has to be carried out digitally; I cannot physically access something which still exists physically but which was made not with the intention that it should be physically accessible to me now; for what, in this case, is it being preserved? If we step outside the conventions urged by the frame of the archive and the museum, if we treat antique material as it was intended (for example wearing a Renaissance brooch), we are either breaking the rules, testing the rules, not knowing the rules, or secretively enjoying the privilege of the curator. I have watched the suppressed rage of a world-authority academic not being allowed to handle a manuscript of huge importance, the pages being turned by a young curator who had responsibility for it. The codes of conduct were known to all present.
As the processes of digitisation gradually remove access to the original it is important that we engage in conversations about the thingness of the preserved object. As the digital archive offers wider access to the visual, at levels enabled and determined by the gatekeepers, negotiation may open up or be closed down between what is allowed by direct physical visual access and what the digital allows by visual access beyond most levels of resolution and distance. Digital examination of a 16th century notebook may not allow the viewer to determine surface texture or size relative to the adult human hand, while it does allow visual access at the apparent distance of a few millimetres. An essential incompatibility emerges between depth and breadth of experience; the introduction of other kinds of access – carrying the notebook on your person, writing in it, losing it and looking for it, preventing others from looking at it, all essential to the experience of the notebook as tool, possession, personal property, as thing – are removed from discussion. Instead we are allowed, often led to, access as if our noses were pressed against the item.
As we move irrevocably from the economic and geopolitical environments in which great collections were built up, and look to economically manageable ways of both preserving and rendering accessible preserved items, we lose the delight, entertainment, wonder, and awe that were part of the cultures of collecting. The actual items come to exist as known of or known about. They are images, imagined, as much as lost or never-existing collections: the destroyed part of the Jesuit library in Brussels eaten by mice in 17731; the items in the Liverpool Museum destroyed in the Blitz in 1941; items lost in the fire in the Cottonian library in 1731 (at least one item survives in the British Library collection as a charred volume, unreadable but still with its catalogue reference); the bones of King John that were stolen during the disinterment of his body in 1797, followed by the apocryphal return of three sets of thumb bones; the entirely imagined Musaeum Clausum of Sir Thomas Browne (1684); Don Quixote’s burned library. Where do these items exist now? Is there a catalogue to this archive, a door with a key, an access password? May one enter?
by Julian Walker
1 Manguel, A, A History of Reading, London, Harper Collins, 1996, p198