Interpreting Objects and Collections

Susan M. Pearce, Interpreting Objects and Collections

Pearce’s book is an anthology of papers on the role of objects and collections in museums. The book is split into two sections on the two aspects. The study of objects (or specimens or artifacts) is part of the study of material culture in anthropology and archeology, while the study of collections is only a recent academic development. In part I, Hodder’s short piece divides analytical categories of objects into functionalist (materialist or utilitarian), symbolic (structural or coded), and historical meanings. A crucial idea is that objects in museums are removed from a context in which they have use value, to one divorced or alienated from their original use value. Does “display” count as a use, and what does that mean for the transformation of the object’s relationship to a person? What happens when objects or whole collections are removed from view for preservation?

Pearce herself, as well as Christopher Tilley, focus on the symbolic aspect, drawing on the semiotic theory of Saussure. Saussure divides language into langue, the “system of codes, rules and norms structuring any particular language” and parole, “the situated act of utilization of this system by an individual speaker.” (Saussure 1960). The building block of langue is the diacritical sign, composed of signifier, the utterance or acoustic image, and the signified, the concept referred to. Signs themselves are arbitrary and therefore only have meaning in a system of relations to other signs. With post-structuralism, meanings break down even further because signifiers and signified do not have a one-to-one relationship, meaning coming about from chains of meaning to related signifiers and signs, and meaning derived differently in different contexts, different interpreters, different reasons for interpreting–any specific meaning of a sign at any time is derived from the act of interpretation itself.

Semiotics when applied to objects means that objects become material ways of narrating the past. with multiple meanings for multiple interpreters, and can be both signifiers and signified. Pearce traces the different stages in a jacket from Waterloo, what the jacket meant for its original owner who kept it, to its meaning for the viewer in a modern museum. The jacket has both a metanymic meaning and metaphorical meaning. It has come to stand in for the Battle of Waterloo itself, but even then, had different meanings for victorious British upperclass as well as working class who sympathized with French Republican ideals.

Pearce begins Part II with some definitions on what is a collection. Durost defines a collection to be a set of objects whose value is not use value but derived from their relation to other objects or an idea of being one in a series. Aristide considers collection “obsession organized” and the drive for completion which separates collection from mere possession. Baudrillard suggests the difference between collection and accumulation lies in the motive of classification of the objects in a collection, but Pearce notes that the line is often blurred. Pearce summarizes by saying a collection comprises the ideas of “non-utilitarian gathering, an internal or intrinsic relationship between things gathered, subjective view of the owner, and the notion that the collection is more than the sum of its parts.” Danet and Katriel look at collecting as play, as an aesthetic experience, and as a striving for closure, completion, or perfection. Collections are not always actively pursued, a gradual accumulation of clothes in the closet may suddenly be discovered one day by the owner as a collection–a collection isn’t one until one thinks of it as one. Pearce notes three aspects of collecting–collections as souvenirs, involving a romantic connection to one’s past through the materiality of objects, collections as fetishes, collecting the objects for their own sake but without any systematic reasoning, and systematic collections, involving some abstract order such as classification or arrangement in evolutionary trajectory. Both souvenir and fetish collections are attempts to create a private world, through removal of objects from their social relationships in order to freeze time but in opposite ways, with souvenirs objects are alienated from a romantic self, while with fetishes, self is divorced from romanticized objets. Systematic collections lie in between these two poles, but with also the crucial difference that their purpose is public, not private, seeking to engage and instruct viewers in the abstract idea or system they are trying to convey by their arrangement in space. Bringing back in semiotics, collections of objects become languages, means of communication. Historical accounts of collecting by Eva Schultz and Susan Stewart (quoted in James Clifford) note that collection for museums in part arose out of a desire to represent the universe through collections of exemplary or representative objects whereby through metonymy the whole of the universe would be gathered under one roof–in natural history especially, this impulse was related to the impulse to compile encyclopedias, and was part of the Western desire to acquire knowledge of the entire universe through appropriation. James Clifford’s look at art collections focuses on the art-culture divide–masterpieces collected for their artistic, aesthetic, formal value (Zone 1), and artifacts collected for scientific anthropological study of cultures (Zone 2). In addition, both categories have splits between authentic and inauthentic (Zone 3 is inauthentic masterpieces and Zone 4 is inauthentic artifacts). Clifford traces how pieces can move between Zone 1 and 2, Zones 1 and 3 or 2 and 4, or 3 and 4, and the associated changes in meaning which occur in such shifts.