As for any act of interpretation, grouping things together under a common narrative is not an objective process free from larger museum politics. As we shall see, it is precisely through this unhinging from institutional dependency that independent curators gain the status of public intellectuals.
Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s idea that every document of a civilization is also a document of barbarism, Vesna Madžoski argues that in the context of colonial museums these precious objects stand for a representation of history written by the victors: “the acquisition of the majority of those objects is anything but innocent; they were brought from somewhere, taken from someone, dead or alive” (2013: 32). The narratives of colonial museum objects as unique artifacts of a civilization, for example, in the Louvre or the British Museum, conceal the barbarity of their acquisition inflicted by violence and colonialism.
The Sarr–Savoy report (2018), commissioned by the French government, stirred a potent debate in European museum and acquisitions discourse related to the unconditional return of museum objects that were acquired through looting.6 A curator at the Musée d’Orsay cannot possibly admit that the collections they host are results of colonialism or looting as this would create the discursive conditions for colonized countries reclaiming these collections (“why you do not give them to us if you admit they are stolen?”). The curators’ role then in these museum environments can even entail something more sinister, that is to enable “educated” narratives that would neutralize, if not silence, the colonial relations that made the appearance of these objects possible. Thus, apart from being caretakers of collections, curators are also tamers of objects, or sharpen the edges of collections by positioning them in discourses and institutional rituals. This is not to say that objects inhabit some “vibrant matter”, which, if left uncontrolled, will spread havoc to their museum hosts (Bennett, 2020); but to say that—as in every representation of knowledge—the act of positioning objects within organized narratives presumes that some of their aspects are highlighted while others are silenced. Ethnographic or national Western museums are an obvious case in point, but one can think of representations pertaining to knowledge of national cultures in general. For instance, the representation of victory against Nazis in World War II is a case in point of conflicting interpretations; American museums highlight the role of the American army, Russian museums the victory of the Red Army and the liberation of Auschwitz, National Museums in the Baltics tell a story of competing totalitarianisms, and so on. The curatorial storytelling of objects chooses which stories to tell and which to exclude, which to highlight and which to undermine.
The curators in these national spaces must adjust, more or less, to national narratives as they are state employees who need to accommodate their story to the larger imperatives of nation building. The “liberation” of the profession of the curator from institutional shackles marks a symbolic revolt precisely against this figure of the curator as an institutional and state employee.
The Aspirational Imaginary of Curating
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