Objects in museums, products in shops: people, memories and meaning

Objects in museums, products in shops: people, memories and meaning

By Rosário Caeiro

My profession takes place amongst museum objects: working on inventory, production of content and catalogues for exhibitions and communicating with the public. And in each of these tasks, Andy Warhol’s well known expression always comes to mind: “I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.” The phrase is almost absolute. But why would things loose meaning once we look at them too much?

My first task at the Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon, was the inventory of a collection of indian textiles that had been part of a big exhibition commissioned by the grand daughter of Mahatma Gandhi. The identity of the commissioner was no coincidence (and interestingly, being the grand daughter of Gandhi is more relevant than her name). If we remember the story of India and Gandhi’s

role in the making of the country, we realise the importance of what appears to be insignificant. The historical context is that the textile manufacture incentivised

by Gandhi was crucial to the independence of the country. Thus, a seemingly banal object like a spiral sewing cotton wheel took on symbolic autonomy and became the icon of the present day indian flag. Each Sari carried the weight of this information, and it is was necessary to inventory this, in regard to physical features such as dimensions, colours, patterns, technical details, context of production, authorship, and so on and so forth, a list of categories and subcategories through which the inventory was organised.

But beyond inventory, objects cannot exist without people: it is they who keep and produce them. Simultaneously people, cannot fully represent themselves without recurring to objects. In anthropological thought, objects are taken as social facts. They are carriers of information, have a social life and contextual meaning. In the museum, since objects are dislocated from their original context, they automatically change their semantics, but always represent diverse symbolic paths of the past and present. In contrast in a shop, objects represent above all symbolic paths of the present: they are made to be used today or tomorrow (besides being made for looking). We can appropriate (or purchase) objects of a shop in the very instance that we gaze upon them. Particularly in the museum shop, where there are replicas of displayed objects and collections of gifts, based on the displays, the object of admiration can be acquired and enjoyed beyond the gaze.

In the internal work of museums, objects are considered privileged sources of information. Objects acquire hundreds of meanings through the many people who look at them. And despite their immutable essence, the displacement from original context means that museum objects gain new lives. In truth they become different objects: testimony to the materiality of a locality, époque and personal biography but also shaped by the the person studying it in conservation or simply a visitor contemplating it through the glass display. For example: an object on display which is a work tool but which we do not have information about regarding its use, loses its original meaning but gains many other meanings. It evokes memories and emotions from the visitors beyond itself.

Looking at objects gives them meaning. We interiorise impressions, emotions, construct memories, produce, interpret and appropriate discourses. In museum displays or in the shop display the objects are offered for different ends. It is the notion that a product on sale can be understood as a worthy object, or a niche object, which makes companies hire studies like the one’s Couture does: analysing behaviours and experiences of people in their relationship with objects in order to recommend paths for this relationship to be ever more fluid, organic and significant.

Indeed, objects stored in reserves or displayed in glass cases, sustain in a very fragile manner, memories of their original context. It is these unstable and subjective constructions, based on sensations and impressions, which challenge us to arrive at tactile and phsyical translations that can last through time.

Although expressed via a scientific basis (of anthropology and history), the memories revealed in object catalogues and exhibitions, result from an appropriation and construction and are therefore always unstable discourses, in as much as we ourselves are unstable. When we bring to the forefront this relationship between museum objects and shop products, in regard to the possession and purchase which the latter allows, the challenge of a model like Couture comes to light: how does one find common denominators that can work in this unstable environment? Or to put it differently, how can we make instability the way of being of a brand or product - one of the strongest characteristics of contemporary life, in the sense that we try to signify a lot of things at the same time, to speak to numerous universes and audiences. Any user experience must have a starting point, even if to distort it straight away, and even if the starting point is to embrace instability.

Going back to the museum, in our daily life and the study of objects in museums, we tend to undervalue what is subjective, preferring to give a uniform meaning to things. It is understandable, given that a museum is not and will never be a shop. With the exception of those dedicated to contemporary art, one would have a hard time finding a museum with open answers and inconclusive information about objects. That responsibility is placed in the hands of the visitor which interprets the object. Which brings us back to Warhol’s phrase and what it means.

Contradicting himself, Warhol (and Duchamp and others) gave other meanings to common objects such as a can of soup (may he have looked at it for too long?). Extracting the subjectivity of the process and attributing direct meaning to museum objects leads to a tendency for stereotypical discourses. Which ultimately, leads to less thought and questioning and means that we say almost nothing about why Mona Lisa is a masterwork.

We arrive at a dilemma: are museums reductionist and functional just as the discourse of brands where we absorb what is given as a matter of fact?

Definitely not. In a museum by beholding an object we appropriate it (or should appropriate) its meanings, interpreting them in accordance with a set of emotions and personal prejudices just as we do when we acquire an object in a shop. We begin from a relationship of empathy and identification stemming from our personal path and social context. This is precisely the same process of appropriation, construction and affirmation of identity, which expresses itself

through objects we consume in everyday life. Because the meaning of objects is not contained only in its materiality, but rather in the manner in which we relate to it. The idea of user experience brings a new dimension, applied to this relationship between object and person.

This perspective implies an understanding of objects and their role in our daily life. Viewing them as containers of social life, the challenge moves on to understanding the motives which lead us to using them, the meaning we attribute to ourselves through them and how we evoke and construct identity and memory.

13/04/2012