Art and Culture the Passive

Art and Culture The Passive Aggressive Potential of Collecting Collections at first glance seem to be the epitome of passiveness; they quite literally sit there, sometimes doing their own collecting of dust bunnies, waiting for the crucial observer to stop by and value them. The idea of collections, however -- the rules that govern their creation and the discourse that may or may not come to be when they are observed -- these are anything but passive.

In "On Collecting Art and Culture," James Clifford contends that collections are themselves artifacts of the society that did the collecting and the time period in which it was collected, and as such they are loaded with the value not only of their constituent parts but also with the value of their own creation. For Clifford, collections carry meanings from the past and the present. What Clifford does not do, however, is extend the value of collections into the future.

Clifford begins his discourse by referencing a poem by James Fenton, "The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford." The poem traces a child's experience in a museum, and touches on a mystical and dangerous possibility offered by the collection. While the museum offers intellectual stimulation and satisfaction for morbid curiosity, it also provides entrance into "the kingdom of your promises / To yourself" (qtd. In Clifford 51), a place both Fenton and Clifford warn against entering.

Clifford reads the subtle power of collections as a call to a sort of Jungian consciousness -- a "path of too-intimate fantasy…a forbidden area of the self" (51). While Fenton's poem seems to describe an intensely individual experience, Clifford escalates this consciousness into an examination of collections as a revelation of what he calls "cultural 'selves'" (Ibid.). His essay unfolds as a discourse on the metahistory of collecting.

After tracing and even mapping the rational matrix by which societal products are collected and classified in his "art-culture system," Clifford extends that rational categorization to collections themselves. Where individual artifacts are collected and valued according to their worth as artistic creations, their symbolic power as cultural representations, or their rarity as specimens of their kind, collections are valued as snapshots in time. Therefore, he argues, we must "resist the tendency of collections to be self-sufficient, to suppress their own historical, economic, and political processes of production" (59).

For Clifford, collections must not "suppress" the circumstances of their production because it hides their value as episodes along a chronotope -- specimens of the time and place of their creation, with all the cultural residue of that time and place. For some, however, collections possess a value far beyond their existence as specimens.

Richard William Hill explores the active potential of collections as artifacts in his essay, "Getting Unpinned: Collecting Aboriginal Art and the Potential for Hybrid Public Discourse in Art Museums." Hill speaks from his experience as a curatorial assistant at the public Art Gallery of Ontario, and unlike Clifford he takes a personally engaged view of collecting. He begins his exploration of the role of collections in public museums by recounting a childhood experience of bug collecting.

When asked to select a bug for pinning, he found that he "had trouble getting [his] head around the idea that you would kill something simply so you could have it around to look at" (Hill 195). This moment constitutes for Hill a moral imperative that extends to all collecting: one MUST consider the impact of the act of collecting upon that which is collected. He finds an especially poignant example of this in the collection of American Aboriginal art.

While the collection of art and artifacts from these cultures is important, it is not nearly as important for Hill as the discourse that can be brought about in society as a result of these collections. The most valuable attribute of a collection, and the most valuable service of a museum, is the ability to "cause productive trouble" in the form of human conversation and reflection (195).

In the case of Aboriginal art, the collection should, if offered sensitively and intelligently, instigate public discourse on the inequities between the honor and respect heaped upon the artifacts of Aboriginal cultures and the neglect and disrespect offered to the cultures themselves. While Clifford offered a highly analytical examination of the interconnectedness of art and culture, and the value of the art-culture system in understanding collections themselves as artifacts, his system in the end is only a system -- a method for observation, rational understanding, and categorization.

Collections for Clifford are a product of culture only, and therefore offer value only to the present and only as a vision of the past. For Hill, however, collections have the power to be not only a product of culture, but a producer of culture. By stimulating "a lively and potentially untidy public discourse" (194), collections and the museums that house them have the power to shape the society that creates them, beyond just reflecting that society.

In this way, Hill's vision of collection is one that takes an active interest not only in the past and present of human endeavors, but in the future as well. Perhaps Hill would read the poem by Fenton differently than Clifford. Perhaps Hill would invite us to enter that "forbidden woods" (Clifford 51) of intimate personal engagement with collections, breaking.