Perception of an object costs
Precise the Object's loss -
Perception in itself a Gain
Replying to its Price -The Object Absolute - is nought -
Perception sets it fair
And then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so far -Emily Dickinson (n.d./1955)
The VRA Data Standards Committee (2002) defines a work as "a physical entity that exists, has existed at some time in the past, or that could exist in the future" and an image as a visual representation of a work." As I worked on various schemes for classifying the objects in the Drexel Digital Museum, it was easy for me to mix up the image and the work. I was often confused about whether a particular metadata element was describing a physical object or an electronic file based on that object. Likewise, I think that it's easy for those working intensively on digital museums to forget the works behind the images.
This may be one of the things Walter Benjamin foresees when he talks about the loss of a work's aura. According to Benjamin, a reproduction (an image) leaves its work and journeys far, "to meet the beholder in his own particular situation." There, it "reactivates" its original. However, the travails of the journey blight the original and cause part of it to "wither" (1936/1968, pp. 220-222). As I read Benjamin, this withering is an essential part of human liberation. The diminishment of the work pulls it loose from the structure of tradition. Thus even where the intent of the reproducer was to carry tradition to a beholder, in fact only a weakened tradition can be delivered. Whether this is good or bad I haven't decided.
Digital museums exist to give computer users a kind of access to inaccessible museum collections. As Benjamin notes, "it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. . . . The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art . . ." (pp. 220-221). This meeting halfway is potentially a great leveler, allowing people without money or academic credentials access to objects otherwise requiring admission fees, travel expenses, or social connections. According to Goodrum & Martin (1999), the Drexel Historic Costume Collection is inaccessible because there is no place to display it publicly nor is there funding to mount a display, and further, much of the collection is very fragile. Students and faculty in Drexel's fashion design program have limited access to the physical objects, but most museum "visitors" can see only digital representations of the objects.
Despite the temptation to do so, I don't want to forget that an image in a digital museum is just a surrogate, and we're doing the viewer a disservice if we pretend that the surrogate can satisfy. A poem by Emily Dickinson remains a poem by Dickinson whether in a manuscript book, a printed book, a computer file, or the epigraph above. A painting by Vermeer appearing in a book, though, is no longer that painting but a stand-in for the painting. The written word is peculiarly suited to networked computers-infinitely reproducible yet always itself. Even a concrete poem which depends on a greater degree of physical form for its meaning remains itself when reproduced. Josie Appleton pointed out at the Beyond the Museum conference that "collections [of objects] form the heart of a museum. The essential experience that museums can offer is confrontation with the real thing, and the essential insight they can offer is knowledge about these real things" (Appleton, 2001). Technology can trick us into believing that we're offering more, when actually we're having visitors push a button for the sake of "interactivity" or placing flashy computers in galleries for the sake of "getting hip." Appleton calls this "a rejection of knowledge" and warns that educational institutions really can never compete in this arena. She says, "Museums will always be a second-rate Nintendo."
Museum display is itself a form of surrogation, as Callery & Thibadeau (2000) point out. The selected objects on display summarize and "index" the much larger collections in the museum storerooms and in this sense do not exist fully in their own right. Objects as documents have severe limitations. It's very difficult to quote or summarize an object as one would a text. Even when the object is paper-based, this kind of linking is difficult. In the early twentieth century, Edwin Bolles at Tufts University "hyperlinked" his copy of the six-volume history Old and New London with his collection of maps, pamphlets, and books. He did this by underlining passages in the London books, often with blue pencil, and coding the blue underscores to illustrations in his own collection (Crane, 2000, especially http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july00/crane/Bollespage.jpg.html). Likewise, Walter Benjamin in the 1930s (n.d./1999) set up an elaborate system of color-coded symbols to link the far-flung segments of his research. These were clever yet clumsy responses to the technical limitations of indexing and surrogation at the time.
For conservation, some objects must be viewed in surrogate form. For instance, the David in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence is a copy of Michelangelo's original (now in the Galleria dell'Accademia), the cave paintings on view at Lascaux are a meticulous re-creation of the original cave (now sealed for its own protection), and certain old photographs are so light-sensitive that they can hardly be viewed at all. Nonetheless, people go to museums to encounter original objects.
In fact, the cheapness and ubiquity of images (reproductions) has given original works a new allure. John Berger asks, "More and more people go to museums to look at paintings and do not come away disappointed. What fascinates them? . . . In art museums we come upon the visible of other periods and it offers us company. We feel less alone in face of what we ourselves see each day appearing and disappearing" (2001, p. 21). Berger, I think, is exploring a certain timelessness of museums, a respite from the forward rush of time in our daily life. This out-of-time-ness is pretty much the opposite of a digital museum, in which the planning is for speed of loading and quickness of movement from site to site. Berger also emphasizes that viewers are not looking for copies-though his definition of copy is much more subtle than photograph of daub of paint vs. actual daub of paint. In his view, the importance of a work is its relation with physical objects or living things; even an original painting can be a copy if it is not the result of a dialog with real things. As he puts it, "when the painted image is not a copy but the result of a dialogue, the painted thing speaks if we listen" (p. 21). In Berger's opinion a copy has nothing to say.
Benjamin and Adorno, on the other hand, seem to celebrate the detachment of works of art from exchanges of thought and feeling among objects and persons. Adorno calls it "the disenchantment of art" (1936/1977, p. 120). I'm not convinced that this withering of the "aura" is liberatory. Part of the problem with Benjamin and Adorno's thought is that they sometimes equate rationality with freedom. For instance, though Adorno recognizes that a work "within itself . . . juxtaposes the magical and the mark of freedom" (p. 121), he fails to apply his own dialectical methods fully to the tension between rationality and irrationality. He sets up a false dialectic between reason and enslavement, and he emphasizes the dialectics between superstition and science or between myth and history while ignoring the very important dialectic between control and freedom. Thus he can say things like "The goal of the revolution is the abolition of fear" (p. 125).
While Berger sees the museum as a place of conversation, where we have a space to listen to objects, Benjamin sees the museum, or at least the collection, as a place to silence the object, "to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object's mere presence" (n.d./1999, pp. 204-205). Benjamin sees classification itself as an attempt at controlling this irrational presence, so that in the museum the object is diminished, collecting is a kind of neutralization of the "aura." Like the ichthyologist killing fish and soaking them in formaldehyde, the collector must kill the object to bring it into the museum. Benjamin says that "a last shudder runs through it (the shudder of being acquired), [and] it turns to stone" (p. 205). This may be part of the objection many "native" peoples have to museums collecting objects from their cultures. This may also be a small part of what Dickinson means when she says that "Perception of an object costs / Precise the Object's loss - " (n.d./1955).
I would like to resist viewers' or visitors' desire for more and more and more and their desire to be easily sated. We want to educate and enlighten, and we don't want to throw up roadblocks, but we need to think deeply about what we are doing to objects and what it means for us to make objects available in a museum.
It's beyond the scope of this paper to explore whether garments and textiles are "art" or "documents" or "tools" or some odd combination of all. Outerwear can be seen in the street, on passing strangers. Main garments can be seen at work, at home, in formal ceremonial events, or at informal social gatherings. Underwear, in general, can be seen in intimate quarters. Garments can be meant to be contemplated or merely seen in passing. Clothing can be the expression of a seamstress, of a designer, of the wearer, or of advertisers. It can be a status symbol, a political statement, or a mere covering. What is revealed in clothes is a reality beyond that of the cloth or the person clothed.
Can one system represent a Joseph Beuys felt suit, a mass-produced T-shirt, a vintage designer gown, shoes found in an eighteenth-century privy, and George Washington's breeches? What about a 1960s paper dress, a crocheted beer-can hat bought at a flea market, Barbie clothes, a Dorothea Tanning textile sculpture, Andy Warhol's wigs, a rope found round the neck of a corpse in a peat bog, and a sweaty towel used by a famous athlete ("Hey, kid…")? A classification system for these objects would need to consider not only their provenance and their physical form and condition, but their meaning in the time and culture that produced them as well as their meaning in our own. Panofsky (1939, pp. 3-17) offers a useful system for representing the meanings of paintings:
- Pre-iconographical description. This is the "primary or natural subject matter," for example, This painting depicts a seated woman with a landscape behind her.
- Iconographical analysis. This is the "secondary or conventional subject matter," for example, This painting depicts Lisa di Antonio Maria Gherardini of sixteenth-century Florence.
- Iconographical interpretation. This is the "intrinsic meaning or content," for example, The composition and background echo previous paintings of the Virgin Mary with St. Anne, and includes all the thousands of pages of criticism and analysis of this painting (the Mona Lisa).
Since this system has little relevance for describing clothing, I would recommend ignoring it and devising a new system--except that Panofsky's categories have become a standard. The AMICO database, for instance, includes the first two as data elements for describing all museum objects: Subject Matter-Pre-Iconographic Description and Subject Matter-Iconography (AMICO Library, 2002). For garments which have iconography, such as printed T-shirts or robes embroidered with mythological scenes, the application is obvious. But I don't think there's an easy answer to this. In some ways, pre-iconographical description for a garment would be a costume by form term, and maybe it's as simple as that. Iconographical analysis for a garment is more difficult. Panofsky defines it as "identification of . . . images, stories and allegories . . . 'subject matter as opposed to form'" (p. 6). I'm at a loss to identify subject matter for a garment, unless to answer questions such as, What kind of person would have worn this garment? In what situations? This area needs further exploration.
All users need some form of surrogate in order to gain access to the collection. Curators need detailed and accurate surrogates in order to know what is owned and to find objects without handling them unnecessarily. Scholars need surrogates as supporting documentation for research. Artists need surrogates as inspiration. All users need surrogates in order to decide whether it's worthwhile to ask for access to the objects themselves.
For searching, I hope that the Drexel Digital Museum will support the needs of a broad range of users with varying search skills and needs. The researchers behind Smart Web Exhibit suggest supplying levels of information to support three levels of interest:
- graphics, for simple curiosity
- standard museum labels, for general interest
- detailed technical records, for researchers (Callery & Thibadeau, 2000).
I would like to see a faceted search interface similar to those the British Museum provides (2000; 2001). I'd like to see content-based search interfaces like those designed by IBM for the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (State Hermitage Museum, 2002). In particular, I'd like to see a content-based search interface using the illustrations accompanying the ICOM vocabulary (ICOM International Committee for the Museums and Collections of Costume, 1982). I imagine this interface including a basic line drawing of a human figure. The user could highlight areas of the figure by mousing and clicking and the computer would retrieve records for garments that cover those areas. In addition, users should have full access to any thesauri, hierarchies of terms, and authority files. Users should also be able to do keyword searches across all data elements or across their choice of data elements.
For social responsibility, I hope that the Drexel Digital Museum always remains free and open to the public. While projects like AMICO Library have great potential, at present they are merely a convenience to university faculty and students, elite groups who already have significant access to museum objects. A significant task of the Drexel Digital Museum should be outreach across the digital divide. This might include programs in the neighborhoods north and west of the Drexel campus. It might include community-based digital costume collections, similar to the Tapori Encyclopedia (Tardieu, 1999).
I remain wary of digital museums. In some ways, a digital museum is like a library that adds scanned book jackets to its OPAC and says, "Now the library's online!" It's a poor substitute. Digital curators might reply that, no, a digital museum is more like a library that scans the book jackets and all the pages of the books and adds those to the OPAC. I'm not convinced. As I noted above, text remains itself regardless of how it's presented. Objects do not.
I am grateful to all those museums that have provided me with surrogates of their collections, whether as books or as websites--as long as those museums do not pretend that by publishing images they no longer have a responsibility to make the objects themselves accessible. As an example: On April 10, 2002, I attended the opening of Objects from the Qing Dynasty: Chinese treasures from the Drexel Historic Costume Collection at the Design Arts Gallery on Drexel's campus. The show was lovely! The thing that surprised me most was how delicate the garments were. I usually think of Chinese robes as heavy, stiff, and padded. Some of these were almost diaphanous. And it was interesting to see their fragility, that some of them apparently had torn under their own weight. These are all qualities that with current technology are not expressed in a digital museum. Nor, at present, do digital museums provide the space of refuge and contemplation a traditional museum does when it's not crowded, nor do they allow for the shared excitement of a museum show when it is crowded, nor do they allow the face-to-face exchanges of knowledge and feeling of a guided tour with a curator or a docent. These are huge weaknesses.
This is one of the paradoxes of my work on this project: I'm not entirely convinced that digital museums are worthwhile, yet the only way to know for sure is to continue working on them. Work seems to create its own meaning as it goes, and perhaps digital museums have unthought-of value as themselves, not merely as surrogates for physical museums. Dickinson states that "The Object Absolute - is nought - " (n.d./1955), and maybe I need to contemplate her assertion that the price of perception is loss, but the perception itself is an equal gain.
It's easy for me to get bogged down in theory and forget about doing something. But the world doesn't wait. The question we ask ourselves as we go about our daily work is, Are we doing harm or help? I believe surrogates can be an affirmation or a negation of their objects. If the vast world of information is a superhighway, we can offer our surrogates as signposts-or we can lead people to believe that they're driving around just to read the signs and go through tollbooths.
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Donny
Smith
May 2002
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