OBJECT LESSONS
RECONSTRUCTING MUSEUM HISTORIES AT MICHIGAN
In the academy, libraries, museums, and laboratories have shared histories as spaces of experimentation, speculation, wonder, and of constituting new knowledge. Designed as a site-specific intervention that reflected on collecting histories and futures in the academy at a moment of transition, Object Lessons opened on October 13, 2017 in the University of Michigan’s historic Ruthven Museums Building. As its last public exhibition, Object Lessons activated the memory of the museum building and accompanied the closing of an important chapter in the history of the university’s museums on the occasion of the university’s bicentennial. While research museums and collections were on the move into new permanent homes and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History prepared its temporary closing, we asked how collecting had begun and developed at the University of Michigan over the course of the last 200 years. We first pursued these questions in a book by the same title, co-edited by Kerstin Barndt and Carla Sinopoli (available HERE), and in the exhibit that this website documents and makes available for further research and reflection.
Combining artifacts and specimens from museum collections, artistic interventions, and historical documents, the exhibition featured four principal themes:
- Michigan’s first geological surveys and the beginnings of state-focused collecting and mapping, including the first faculty led student expedition to the Upper Peninsula documented in stereographs
- Joseph Beal Steere’s nineteenth century world expedition and the beginning of global collecting in zoology, botany, archeology, and ethnography
- Meditations on lost collections and the differences between research and teaching collections
- Alexander Ruthven and the 1928 museum building.
EXHIBITION SPACE
In converting the former museum library into a temporary gallery, we posited the space itself as our “exhibit A:” right off the Ruthven’s inviting rotunda, the library had served as a nexus between public exhibitions, their audiences, and curators working behind closed doors on research. We aimed to work with the space rather than against it, to utilize library furniture if possible and to preserve traces of its institutional history. When we found original tile flooring under the old (grey and dusty) institutional carpet, we recognized this to be a part of the library once used as Alexander Ruthven’s office during his tenure as museum director. We consequently decided to undertake the labor-intensive work of removing the carpet in all rooms. While the Ruthven tiles in one room thus offered a late “homecoming” to one of the director’s desks (which had had a useful, decades-long afterlife in a faculty office in the Museum of Anthropological Archeology), the excavated floor in the other room showed imprints of the metal shelves that held the museums library.
We also turned other elements of the library’s architecture and furnishing into core exhibition elements. Wooden desks, chairs and sideboards, as well as the metal cage for the library’s rare special collection items were integrated into the exhibition concept. Referencing the display aesthetic of renaissance cabinets, the cage evoked the space of a zoo – allowing us to exhibit precious taxidermy, bird eggs, and expedition gear from the Museum of Paleontology and Zoology at a safe remove from the visitors’ touch. The cage, like the furniture from the old library, thus became a witness in its own right to an architectural history put on display – counterbalanced by purposefully designed modular display tables to showcase particular constellations of artifacts, bird skins, shells, photographs, rocks, letters and other natural and printed matter.
“Experiment is the Creation of a Phenomenon”
– Ian Hacking
Object Lessons was designed as an exhibition experiment, a productive process through which we sought also to generate new knowledge. But experiments are also transformative, as Bruno Latour points out – they have the power to remake both the people and the materials involved. With this goal in mind we created experimental and site-specific constellations and dialogues between the specimens collection managers made available to us for the first time for public display; the photographs that Richard Barnes took while working with us; Richard’s installation art; and the documents and photographs we examined in the Bentley Historical Library.
In this regard, this exhibit presented a one-of-a-kind project, which could be realized in this form only with the resources of a large, public institution like the University of Michigan. Object Lessons was designed to teach not only about the university, its history, and its collections, but also about the possibilities for exhibitions as research in the making. With the exhibit, book, and website, we hope to contribute, however modestly, to broadening the sense of the possible, of what constitutes research and knowledge, history and art.
