Applications of fictive or imaginative thinking to the archive or collection may question the created objectivities of archiving, curating and cataloguing. The museum object should be considered not only in terms of the history of design, but in the light of comparison between the actual use experience of the object at the time of its first use with use of the object now, both as intended and by virtue of its role as a museum or archived object; and all stages in between.
Thus we should compare a range of experiences of engagement with the object. This must indeed include the operations of conservation – how often does the fabric have to be checked for moth damage, by whom, and at what cost, will the book survive being handled? But it should also include questions relating to its original use experience – how was the spoon used, was the chair designed to fit a particular kind of body shape, who would have used the sword, what restrictions of movement did the dress enforce? Such issues are frequently addressed. But less so are the questions of how the spoon fits my mouth, whether the chair is comfortable to me, does the sword balance in my hand, what restrictions of movement does the dress allow me? – and what it does as a preserved object from the past – what does it feel like to have an antique spoon in my mouth, what does it feel like to hold or swish a bronze sword, etc? Equally important are how we might address the changing past between the creation of the object and now – when did the dead animal’s form start to become mineralised, how did people experience clothes becoming old-fashioned, when was the sofa replaced or put into storage, and with what value attached to it? Such experiences reveal more complex questions – what does the experience of physical engagement with a historic object or text do to my experience of time, is the experience modified by the number of people who have engaged in such an experience, am I being privileged, and if so what are the processes of privilege? The experience of riding on a bus that has been in use for 50 years is different from riding in a bus that has not been used for 50 years; though physical engagement with manuscripts in an archive may be ostensibly accessible to all, in reality there are many stages of enablement to go through, some of them rendered impassable as a result of social barriers.
As we move towards greater digitisation the questions of the use value of physical engagement become more pertinent: does the weight of the book tire the hand, how close to the eye does it have to be held, does the thickness of the paper speak of coarseness or importance? Digitisation renders everything optimally the size of the screen, and in doing so fictionalises; in going closer than the eye can see it lowers the worth of our actual visual experience. Digitisation, the destroyer of elitism, allows universal access, but at the cost of the real; though for the twenty-first-century museum visitor allowed to handle a Neolithic tool the real was only ever going to be a recreated reality, experience as an echo of experience.
Close and meaningful engagement with the objects of heritage value has in the past 30 years gone beyond observing, few museums not having a handling collection; the process of antique collecting and use has taught us that we can have close and meaningful personal physical engagement with the preserved object. Just as we have learnt that we can drink from the antique china teacup, we know that fully ‘bringing to life’ the preserved text may require performative engagement – singing from a score, reading aloud to others from a 19th century novel, hiding away with a diary, cooking with a recipe book. If these were intended usages what happens when the potential of this engagement is lost? Is it purely ‘preservation for posterity’? But, and this is a key point, these objects are no longer the objects they were; they have become ‘museum objects’, ‘archived objects’, their identity is that of something in a place distinct from the original, their context and how they are read is completely different (and this may function as an argument against cultural restitution). In this sense the archive is a fictionalising act, removing its contents from their real functions, if ‘intended’ can be taken as meaning ‘real’, and relocating them into at best a performance of this, a tableau of real life. And yet they are still themselves – unless through damage and reconstruction (as in the case of the Cutty Sark), there is hardly anything left of the original, in which the object exists in the definition of its boundaries.
Fictive exploration of the archive may question and dismantle barriers; where the archive is fictive in itself – Sir Thomas Browne’s Musaeum Clausum, Don Quixote’s library or that found by Pantagruel – this may question the archive’s relation to its boundaries, its constructs and orthodoxies. Noting such phenomena as the continued presence of destroyed objects in the British Library (digital) catalogue, we may find ourselves confronted with catalogue entries for the clothes in the emperor’s wardrobe.
Julian Walker