Miniature dissonance and the museum space: reconsidering communication through miniaturisation

Abstract

There are millions of decontextualized objects from diverse societies in classically designed museums, spaces largely developed and structured along Enlightenment academic principles. These institutions, as a core function, seriate the material culture of the peoples of the world and represent it in consumable packages to a broad audience. As institutions, they were often deliberately conceived as venues of "scientific" propaganda by which European dominion over other peoples of the world could be justified and promulgated (e.g. Errington, 1998; Davies 2000; Brown 2009). Efforts to decolonise museums, to recognise their harmful histories and develop a more ethical approach to curation are ongoing; they operate in conjunction with social movements which recognise that imposed legal and political systems are often weighted against colonised peoples and seek to redress this balance by acknowledging that the systems in place are fundamentally flawed, based on historical mutual misapprehensions of custom, law, economy and tradition (e.g. Pearce 1992; Sola 1997; Clerici 2002; Geismar 2013). One of the most significant theoretical constructs to have contributed to this movement is the concept of the contact zone. First posited by Mary Louise Pratt, a contact zone occurs when there is a clash or collaboration between distinct cultures struggling with 'asymmetrical relations of power' (1991, 34). The term was adapted explicitly for the museum space by James Clifford, and has led to a paradigmatic shift in the ways in which museums collaborate with indigenous viewpoints (Boast 2011). Clifford's examples were with Native American communities from the Northwest Coast, and he found that for community members visiting the museum space 'the collected objects are not primarily "art"', but rather 'aide-mémoires, occasions for the telling of stories and the singing of songs' (Clifford, 1999 [1997], 435-437). This has at times been considered a 'site of conflict' (Brown 2009, 145), in which indigenous priorities confront curatorial preoccupations in which 'collections. .. are for research or they are surely for nothing' (Keene 2005, 45), conditions in which noncurators can often feel overwhelmed; Haida artist Robert Davidson once recalled that 'When I first came to Vancouver, I met an incredible barrage of anthropologists. I regarded them as people who held the knowledge, and so I was afraid to say anything in front of them for fear of saying the wrong thing. I was intimidated' (Harris, 1992 [1966],

The “Idiot Sticks”: Kwakwaka'wakw Carving and Cultural Resistance in Commercial Art Production on the Northwest Coast

“…Among this cultural material, the miniature canoes claim attention as transportable objects clearly made as valuable gifts for potential trading partners, created and gifted to cement relationships and elevate the givers above their rivals. 26 Although they are sometimes dismissed as crude approximations of the canoe form, these canoes are, in fact, "allegorical autoethnographies"-objects made to evoke the importance of the giver and to associate him in the mind of his trading partner with a particular heritage, crests, and practices. 27 Sinuous formline killer whales decorate the hulls, which are truncated to give the crest art greater prominence, evidence of Native Northwest Coast carvers engaging with the ways in which the traders would best recall the gifter.…”