Talk Back (and Forth)

I am looking forward to the ideas that will grow through this forum. I will play the role of moderator and faclitator.  If writers wish to communicate with me outside of this space, feel free to email: Alice Lesnick, alesnick@brynmawr.edu. Thanks!

I too greatly appreciate this poem.  It helps me think about the mystery of the door as it suggests that in addition to ignorance and misunderstanding, the mystery of this door can connect to strategies of concealment and narrative: ". . it tells, a beautiful tale . . . of mystery.

Anisa and Grace, I am happy to share this poem here, which was inspired by each of your words during our workshop.  Readers will see the traces in what you have written in this forum.  Thank you!

In the Museum

• A cemetery for stolen flowers
• Cool smells warm hands
• Mechanized betrayal pumping viscous rumors
• The weakness of one place
• The strength of another place
• In the library of stolen things, history
• Breaks against the radio waves
• Power on

I’ve been mulling over what I saw, heard and learned at the Feb. 18th panel discussion on “evolving methods for talking back.” I was captured, for starters, by Whitney’s description of her intention to use the concept of “backtalk” (which “goes against the norms,” and so is “often seen as rude”) to challenge the ways in which African art has been exhibited and categorized. What I kept noticing, throughout the panel, was a tension -- really, this seemed to me a profound encounter -- between the aspirations of backtalk and those of the sacred.

I was struck first by the ways in which the “backtalk” panel had been set up in accord with the usual protocols of academic conversations: a series of questions, responded to in sequence by a series of experts in the field, an art historian and two Africanists. The event really wasn’t structured, in other words, to invite “backtalk,” or pushing back by those of us not trained in these discourses. I noted similar tensions again later in the evening, in the movement between challenging, and showing respect for, our keynote speaker, Nontombi Naomi Tutu, and also saw such contradictions at play throughout the panel.

I was struck, for instance, by the repeated use of language of the sacred: the description of ritual objects, not originally made for museums, that had been re-placed in aesthetic and cultural contexts that did not value their unique provenance. When it was asserted that “something can not lose its status as a sacred object,” its qualities of “awesomeness” and “awe-full-ness,” to “become ‘just’ art,” it seemed as though the claim to, and category of, the sacred was being used to fend off profane questions, including the impertinent backtalking ones this exhibit had been designed to showcase.

Although one of the panelists described museums, in her own childhood experience, as “great equalizers,” “places to wander with friends,” they have of course been experienced quite differently by others; Brian linked above to an article asking us to remember “how exclusive and exclusionary the institutions of archaeology and the museum have been for most of the modern period.” One of my students also testified to her family’s felt sense of exclusion: in their experience, museums’ obligations to preserve their collections had trumped any obligation to make art available to the public.

One of the panelists similarly identified the “ethical obligation” of museums to “safeguard objects”--to maintain their status as sacred. Not perhaps in the sense they were first understood and used, but in the sense of being preserved, untouched, in the church of art (from Brian’s article again: “The sacred value of holy objects in the pre-modern period was understood to be particular…But those who hold museum objects to be sacred…insist that a museum artifact's sacred value is universal”).

So I’m wondering now whether safety must always come first, in such practices? (Later in the week, I heard current Friends in Residence @ Haverford speak about their concept of “safety fourth,” which they placed after a range of other values, such as creativity….) And I’m wondering, too, how protocols of safety are related to rituals of the sacred. I left the panel with a clear sense of the contradictions—really, it was such a deep encounter!-- between “talking back” and “keeping safe/keeping sacred.”

Thanks, to all, for all of this.