Materiality Matters: Experiencing the Displayed Object:
exploit this active, two-way engagement between people and things
We should do so not only in order to enrich the ways in which visitors are able to connect with the people, stories and emotions of the past, but for another, more radical reason too. Specifically, we need to recognise that the experiential possibilities of objects are important and objects can often ‘speak’ to us, even when we know nothing about them at all.
Indeed, my suggestion that objects can, sometimes at least, have a voice, a significance, a relevance, a meaning, for visitors without the provision of context and interpretation, would be described by many as obfuscation or fetishism, and even risks accusations of elitism.
Things that fall into a space somewhere in between these two extremes—a space where, although we recognise that, of course, context matters, the thing must not be lost, things must not “dissolve into meanings” (Hein 2006: 2). The emphasis on context must not, in other words, act to inhibit our opportunities to engage with things, even—and here’s the rub—those we know nothing about.
Had the information about the horse been displayed next to it in the form of a label or text panel, I am certain it would have interfered with, even prevented altogether, the powerful and moving reaction I had to the object for its own sake: I would have been distracted by the text…
So what was the value of that initial encounter?
But what about the value of a powerful response to an object just for itself, and not because of how it might enhance learning or appreciation of the wider aspects of an exhibition?
Is there any such value in a museum environment?
Many of us would not question this claim if it concerned only art, or perhaps conceptual art at least—we can accept that the role of such art is precisely to move, shock, amuse or puzzle us, or even to stimulate our acquisitiveness, our desire to possess the object.
My interest is not, however, in Kantian or connoisseurial emphases on “pure, detached, aesthetic” responses to things (O’Neill 2006: 104). In fact I am trying to get at the opposite, at the scope for very personal, very individual, very subjective, very physical and very emotional responses to material things: responses which have the potential to be very powerful indeed, but which are inhibited by so much of what museums do and are expected to do.
