IN-PERSON: Prague – Section B

Abstract

Museums are peculiarly bound to notions of life and death, almost as if to remove objects from everyday cycles of growth, use and decay exposes the objects to interpretations of the presence or absence of life. Museums are frequently described as either evocative of life, like in Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, or sites of death as Adorno describes in his essay Valerie Proust Museum. In this paper, I propose an alternative taxonomy of living artefacts, ranging from the overtly living (those that breathe and move), spiritual or animated artefacts, the dormant and deceased. I am interested in implications of considering something live or dead, and what the political impact is of describing artefacts in relation to these terms. To use the terms life and death, a hierarchy of signification is being created and reinforced (to mirror generalities in western society: the living should be protected; the dead should be mourned). There are political implications to the use of the terms life and death that affect the artefacts directly (care, value, potential, interpretation, loss, or temporality, for instance) and it is interesting to consider how these terms affect the justification for a collection, and if the potential application of these terms can be understood in relation to other collections of artefacts other than the museum. If there is a reconsideration of the boundaries of the living in museums collections, what are the implications for the warehouse, the recycling plant, or the hard drive?