Dissolving objects: Museums, atmosphere and the creation of presence

Emotion, Space and Society xxx (2014) 1e8

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Dissolving objects: Museums, atmosphere and the creation of presence Peter Bjerregaard Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Postbox 6762, St. Olavs Plass, 0130 Oslo, Norway

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 23 May 2013 Received in revised form 4 April 2014 Accepted 2 May 2014

This article takes its point of departure in the current attention to the materiality of objects in museum display. Recent literature (Classen and Howes, 2006; Dudley, 2010, 2012; Pye, 2007) has stressed the need for museums to focus more explicitly on objects and their capacity to create experiences. While appreciating this approach the article argues that in order to understand the perspectives opened by such experiences, we need to go beyond a focus on objects as such. On basis of analyses of two ethnographic exhibitions it is argued that rather than the objects per se, what is at the root of museum experience is atmosphere e the in-betweenness of objects and subjects. Rather than making the absent (past or distant) present, atmosphere creates a presence as such, an affective space which disturbs our everyday concepts of the world. This perspective makes it possible to consider the museum not as a storehouse of the past, but as a bridgehead (Runia, 2006) to the future, allowing us for a short while to imagine futures that go beyond our present conception of the world. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Atmosphere Museums Exhibitions Material culture Ecstasies of things Presence

1. Introduction The recent decades’ orientation towards materiality and the agency of objects has spurred a renewed interest in ethnographic museums and exhibitions as objects for research. While the critical Museology of the 1980s and 90s (Ames, 1992; Clifford, 1996[1988], 1997; Shelton, 2001; Vergo, 1989) primarily focused on the political environments of ethnographic collections in Western museums, the re-invigoration of material culture in anthropology has turned the museum into a site for research on concrete, material practices (Bouquet, 2001; Bjerregaard, 2009a; Henare, 2005; Hetherington, 2003). In terms of exhibitions the material turn has opened for a reconsideration of the role of objects as effective means in and of themselves rather than mute carriers of information or ‘worldviews’ (Gell, 1992, 1998; Henare et al., 2007). If objects have the capacity to cause effect this effect should not be obliterated by textual exegesis and academic meaning making. Thus, several authors have argued how a close encounter with objects may create a more intimate and empathic relation to the past or the distant (Dudley, 2010: 4; Wehner and Sear, 2010: 153). In this sense, the exhibition is turned into a sensate, even emotional encounter, rather than a didactic or critical exercise.

E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected].

This concern with the concrete qualities of objects in museums is most welcome as it opens up for a layer of museum experience that has often been suppressed by arguments on relevance and meaning. However, while the attention to object agency (Gell, 1998), the tactile qualities of objects (Classen and Howes, 2006; Pye, 2007), and arguments of the capacity of objects to be concepts in themselves (Henare et al., 2007) have helped us to acknowledge the importance of the concrete qualities of objects rather than placing them within systems of meaningful communication, I will question what I consider an overemphasis of the power of the individual object. Objects are obviously essential to museums, but the question is whether the objects, and the stories they carry, are the main media of museum experience. I will argue that in all our concern with objects we have to a certain degree neglected the role of space as a focal point for understanding museum experience. Attending to space we are led to consider the power of atmosphere and accordingly the status of the museum object changes from a concern with what the object may tell us or what it may express to a concern with how the object may fill a space. To make this argument I will draw on Böhme’s distinction between Realität and Wirklichkeit (Böhme, 2001: 56e8), and argue that exhibiting may, in fact, be about dissolving objects. That is, rather than appearing to us as a recognizable entity, which we may isolate and define, the object is turned into physical extension, tincturing a space. This dissolution can only take place through

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manipulating the space in-between objects and in-between objects and audiences, i.e. through staging atmosphere. This distinction between Realität and Wirklichkeit has hardly been discussed in terms of contemporary museums of cultural history. However, I will argue that this distinction is at the crux of curatorial practice. Curating is, basically, a practice based in the idea of montage (Empson, 2013; Schüssler and Mes, 2013; Bjerregaard, 2013). The curator selects and installs works that for one or the other reason are capable of generating something (an idea, a concept, a reality) that transcends the individual works. To look at how this transcendence may occur Hall of Northwest Coast Peoples at American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Villa Sovietica, which was on display at Musée d’ethnographie de Génève in 2009e10, will be used as cases.1 In conclusion, I will argue that attention to atmospheres and presence as the object of exhibitions will stress the potential for exhibitions not only to represent the past, but work as ‘bridgeheads’ (Runia, 2006) towards the future; destabilizing experiences that allow us to imagine a world beyond the present. 2. The radical challenge of atmosphere to museums Atmosphere is not a new term in the world of museums. The theatrical staging of public displays was a concern already in the early years of modern museums (Crawley, 2012: 14), and atmospheric terms as ‘cold’ or ‘warm’, ‘welcoming’ and ‘exclusive’, ‘clear’ and ‘opaque’ often turn up when museum staff discuss sketches or mountings in exhibitions. In this sense we may think of atmosphere as the excess of the real (Böhme, 1995: 21) that may not be transported by the museum object per se and which cannot be confined to the information that may be referred to the object. To the archaeologist this could be the experience of ‘the spirit of the place’ when the object appears from the ground, placed in the larger frame of the landscape. To the ethnographer, it may be related to the fragrances, temperature or intensity of activities to which the object is related in its place of origin, but which often seems unavoidably lost when the object is put on display in the museum. But atmosphere is not only a concern to the curator trying to convey an idea or a sense of a place. In fact, one may wonder whether audiences are more affected by the atmospheres in the museum than by what they are supposed to learn. Think, for instance, of James Fenton’s poem on Pitt Rivers Museum, famously quoted by Clifford (1996: 216e7), where even museum labels leave their purpose of conveying information, adding instead to the baroque anguish and attraction of the exotic space: Entering You will find yourself in a climate of nut castanets A musical whip From the Torres Strait, from Mirzapur a sistrum Called Jumka, ’used by aboriginal Tribes to attract small game On dark nights’, a mute violin, Whistling arrows, coolie cigarettes

1 I will emphasize that these two exhibitions will not be applied as regular ethnographic cases, following the intentions and internal political struggles of exhibition making. They will simply be used to give some substance to what it may mean to ‘dissolve objects’ and create ‘presence’ in museum displays.

And a mask of Saagga, the Devil Doctor, The eyelids worked by strings (Fenton, 2004: 307) Likewise, Danish author Klaus Rifbjerg, has reflected on the eeriness of museum visiting (Rifbjerg, 1998) based in his childhood memories of visiting the National Museum in Copenhagen: I have probably been anxious, probably I had been told about what I would see and why it was important to visit the museum. But for good reasons the anticipations were vague and the shock when you entered the collection of ancient history up the stairs on your left hand was correspondingly terrifying and aweinspiring. It must have been by the end of the 1930s, when not only the objects on display but the entire museum smelled of old age and the lighting seemed so dim adding to the eeriness, which the rows of bones and skulls in showcases evoked in the child. (Rifbjerg, 1998: 97, my translation) What these two accounts of exhibition experiences point to is the capacity of the museum to generate a kind of embracing experience, wrapping the visitor in an atmosphere, which seems to have a much more lasting effect than the information accounted for. Somehow, this atmosphere also seems to dissolve the individual objects at display allowing them to become part of the general experience of space. Still, while recognized as a central issue to exhibition making and visiting, I think it is fair to say that atmosphere has generally been considered only as the icing on the content cake e a somewhat additive layer on top of the scientific information or the political message the museum is supposed to deliver. In a recent article Sandra Dudley makes a most welcome critique of the tendency of museums to overload exhibitions with text and meaning rather than facilitate for intimate encounters between audiences and objects. She describes in detail her encounter with a Chinese bronze horse in an art gallery: I was utterly spellbound by its majestic form, its power, and, as I began to look at it closely, its material details: its greenish colour, its textured surface, the small areas of damage. [.]I still knew nothing at all about this artefact, other than that it clearly represented a horse and that I guessed it was made of bronze; nonetheless, its threedimensionality, tactility and sheer power had literally moved me to tears. (Dudley, 2012: 1) This experience clearly makes an argument for a powerful potential of engagements with objects in exhibitions, which goes beyond any objective of transferring meaningful information. While such an emotional encounter amplifies the museum experience, one may ask what the aim of such an emotional encounter would be. Towards the end of the article, Dudley argues for this intimacy as a way of reducing the distance between museum visitor and the world from which the object originates: Active, two-way engagements between people and things that are as full, material, and sensory as feasible [.] are rich with possibility. Partly, this is because they will enrich the ways in which visitors are able to connect with the people, stories and emotions of the past. More radically [.], the experiential possibilities of objects are important in themselves. (Dudley, 2012: 10-1)

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I am completely in line with the call for “active two-way engagements between people and things”. Still, I will question whether we are really dealing with engagements with things e or what status the ‘thing’ actually occupies in this relation. For one thing, I question the capability of objects to make us able to connect with ‘people’ or ‘emotions’ of the past. The possibility of engaging in the stories and emotions of other times is, however, a vast question which is beyond the aims of this paper. What I am really concerned with here is the notion of the object in itself as the primary experience of exhibitions, and the point about experiential possibilities of objects being “important in themselves”. In his suggestion for a new aesthetics Gernot Böhme (1993, 1995) argues for an aesthetics, which is not focused on the work of art but on experience. While experience is clearly fundamental to Dudley as well, Böhme is not concerned with the singular object or ‘work’, but with atmosphere. Atmospheres become central to this aesthetic due to their unclear state; they belong neither to a human subject nor to a material object. Rather, they point to “[t]he relation between environmental qualities and human states” (Böhme, 1993: 114).2 In terms of the status of the object this means that while we conventionally have focused on the object as an enclosure, a finished entity to be interpreted as a complete work, an attention to atmosphere should point our focus to the object as a physical extension in space. The object is, thus, not characterized by what it ‘contains’, but by the way it radiates into space, by its ecstasies (Böhme, 1993: 120e2). This perspective has ramifications not only to our understanding of the object but also to our understanding of the subject: Conceived in this fashion, atmospheres are neither something objective, that is, qualities possessed by things, and yet they are something thinglike, belonging to the thing in that things articulate their presence through qualities e conceived as ecstasies. Nor are atmospheres something subjective, for example, determinations of a psychic state. And yet, they are subjectlike, belong to subjects in that they are sensed in bodily presence by human beings and this sensing is at the same time a bodily state of being of subjects in space. (Böhme, 1993: 122) So, rather than distinct entities, atmosphere characterizes a state of being where humans and objects, perceiver and perceived, occupy “a common reality” (Böhme, 1993: 122). The object is not present due to what it holds within it, but through the way its physical constitution radiates into space, and the human perceiver is not present through his or her mental capacities, but through attention to the particular bodily state in which they are present. In other words, atmosphere appears where the limits of entities dissolve into space. And this is the radical challenge atmosphere poses to museums. Acting from the perspective of atmosphere we face a situation where the very status of the most sacred, the museum object, is utterly unclear. What we know of these objects and are capable of communicating about them seems to be of no use. Instead, we are

2 Indeed a central argument for Böhme’s rethinking of aesthetics is a critique of the concern with the work of art as such. Böhme claims that aesthetics has ended up in an evaluation of singular objects e the judgement of whether a particular object is really a ‘work of art’ e rather than a concern with a particular kind of experience (Böhme, 1993: 115e6).

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asked to consider the particular ways in which objects are present and we are present with them. Thus, what both Fenton’s and Rifbjerg’s experiences point to is that exhibitions may not, in fact, be about mirroring the world or connecting to some specific, lost place or time. Exhibiting is not even about what the particular object may tell us. While the use of atmospheric elements (sound, smell, visual backdrops) in exhibitions often aim to increase the experience of ‘being there’ (at the African Market, in the trenches of WWI), I will hold that we may as well think of atmosphere as the generation of an intensified ‘being here’, a sense of presence (Gumbrecht, 2004). 3. The two realities of the object The critical Museology that erupted in the 1980s and 90s basically questioned the truth value of museum displays. Ethnographic museums did not tell the truth about the exotic objects in their collections. Western museum were reluctant to tell about the often problematic stories of how the objects had ended up in the museum and furthermore they maintained a presentation of non-Western worlds as isolated and ahistorical, which was increasingly at odds with the experience of a still larger degree of global interdependence (Ames, 1992; Clifford, 1996; Shelton, 2001). Another question was which kinds of truths museums e and their objects e were capable of speaking about at all. Could they still tell about the world around us, based in new collections and the collaboration with source communities (Ames, 1992; Karp et al., 1992)? Or was the world these objects could speak about of a more surreal kind? e (Clifford, 1996: 117e51). The powerful statement of this critique was of course that objects could not be treated as scientific documents. Museums had vested their status in the authenticity and scientific value of object collections, but this status was shown to rely not on objective facts, but on the way museums appropriated and displayed these objects. Objects were parts of the language games through which the images of the relation between ourselves and others were constructed. Over the recent couple of decades we have witnessed a reemergence for a concern with the object in its own right. From Alfred Gell’s powerful theory on the agency of objects (Gell, 1998; Henare, 2005) to more recent attention to the tactile qualities of objects (Classen and Howes, 2006; Dudley, 2010; Pye, 2007) objects have been re-appreciated for their concrete qualities. In other words, objects are ‘real’ in themselves rather than mere expressions of a basically textualised, mental world, and this material reality can be put in use in museums through hands-on activities, attention to objects as expressive art works etc. (see for instance Empson, 2013 or Dudley, 2010). Thus, the material turn has convincingly argued against the constant contextualization through which objects only become meaningful by being placed in their proper, cultural context. But it still seems as if we need a further step to really come to come terms with what may take over from meaning and context. While ‘experience’ may be stressed as an objective of museums visiting in itself, the question still remains what ‘experience’ may do and what the role of the object is in terms of experience. This is where I find the quotes from Fenton and Rifbjerg interesting. While these two accounts are obviously not representative of the wide variety of experiences and motivations at play in museum visiting, they point to a part of museum experience, which is not oriented towards the object as such, but towards the environment generated by the museum as space.

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In order to interrogate this part of museum experience I will turn to Böhme’s conception on the reality of objects. Böhme operates with two different terms, which both translate into ‘reality’ in the English, but have interesting distinctions in German, namely Realität and Wirklichkeit. Realität is ‘the factual fact’, the physical reality of the object, its thing-like qualities, while Wirklichkeit is the ‘actual fact’, the experience of the object in a particular setting and in a particular relation to subjects (Böhme, 1995: 31e5; 2001, 56e 7). In Böhme’s call for a new aesthetics, the primary focus is on atmospheres and Wirklichkeit. Wirklichkeit is what we sense when we enter a space. It is the sense of presence of something which we cannot really decipher, but simply recognize as the presence of something. Realität is the material fact which we may point to, describe in terms of colours, materials, age etc. Realität is the material fact, but we do not recognize it as such in aesthetic experience, which is based on Wirklichkeit. This opens the ground for reconsidering the status of the museum object. Most often in working with exhibitions we start out from a selection of objects that are representative for a case or should somehow be able to substantiate a narrative throughout the exhibition. From a concern with the atmosphere, however, what we look for in the object would not be what we know of it but what we may make out of it. We may even go as far as saying that what we are really looking for are ways in which objects can be manipulated into spatial extension. One may object that in the case of ethnographic or cultural historical museum, which this paper is concerned with, aesthetics as such cannot be the measure for effect. In museums of cultural history we are not simply aiming for aesthetic experience, but aiming to convey some kind of epistemologically based message as well. Still, it seems that the many calls for further engagement or intimate relations with objects are basically calls for presence, and this presence cannot go hand in hand with meaning making. Presence denotes a relation to things that go before their interpretation in culturally meaningful way. In a sense, we cannot have both Wirklichkeit and Realität. As soon as we start to search for the source of atmosphere and contemplate our own reaction to it, we enter a mode of meaning making that excludes the presence of Wirklichkeit (Böhme, 1993: 122; Gumbrecht, 2004: 68e71). Therefore, while presence and atmosphere may not be all there is to exhibition making, we need at least to think of it seriously as part of the dynamics of museum experience. And while we easily may legitimate the meaning making of museum display, we still need to account for the role played by presence effects. 4. Ecstasies, space and exhibitions as the presence of potentiality So, while the Realität of the object will always be there, Wirklichkeit relies not only on the object itself, but on the manipulation of the space in which the object appears. Searching for Wirklichkeit from the potential offered by the Realität of the object we are faced with a near endless amount of choices concerning how to let the object go forth from itself by use of lighting, the organization of the space around the object, the way audiences may approach the object etc. This is exactly why museums and exhibitions are such good cases for exploring atmosphere. While museums do their utmost to keep the Realität of objects they constantly create different Wirklichkeits by exploring different efficacies from the same material object. The most obvious example is of course the use of the same object in various exhibitions. But

even the way the object is processed through museum registration and preservation could be a case for such an analysis.3 I will now present two different exhibitions that will allow to us explore atmosphere on very different terms. One is a classical ethnographic display, while the other is a contemporary ethnographic exhibition, which holds some similarities with contemporary conceptual art. Furthermore, my own access to these two exhibitions is very different. In the first case, I have seen the exhibition once and otherwise I have had to rely on historical data on the making of the exhibition. In the other case, I followed the making of the exhibition through a number of e-mail exchanges and phone conversations with the curator. Still, I think that the differences between these two exhibitions will help us to think further on the relevance of thinking of exhibitions in terms of atmosphere.

4.1. Hall of Northwest Coast Indians One of the classical ethnographic exhibitions still to be visited today is the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians at American Museum of Natural History in New York. This is the exhibition on which Claude Lévi-Strauss quotes his own diary in the opening passages of The Way of the Masks: ‘There is in New York’, I wrote in 1943, ‘a magic place where the dreams of childhood hold a rendezvous, where century-old tree trunks sing and speak, where indefinable objects watch out for the visitor, with the anxious stare of human faces [.] This place, on which outmoded but singularly effective museographic methods have conferred the additional allurements of the chiaroscuro of caves and the tottering heap of lost treasures may be seen daily from ten to five o’clock at the American Museum of Natural History.’ (Lévi-Strauss 1983: 3) This exhibition is based on collections from the Morris Jessup expedition and it was originally developed in the early years of the 20th century by Franz Boas, but has been modified over the years (Freed, 2011: 386e95; Jacknis, 2004). Therefore, even if parts of the original outline of the hall have been kept, the exhibition experienced by the contemporary museum guest is the result of changes that have occurred up to the 1980s (Jacknis, 2004: 228e36). Boas famously fought against the museum management’s wishes for structuring all exhibitions on basis of evolution (Jacknis, 1985). Also, Boas prioritized research to exhibitions and created a condensed space with loads of objects, and planned the publication of a series of handbooks to supplement the exhibition (Jacknis, 2004: 225; Goddard, 1924: 5). What remains of Boas’ intentions is the division of the exhibition along cultural context. The exhibition is organized according to cultural groups so that the viewer moves from the southernmost tribes towards the northern tribes. What strikes one when entering the room is, however, not cultural context but the dimmed light and the totem poles (the ‘tree trunks’ in Lévi-Strauss’ description). While a few models and

3 During my work and fieldwork in museums, I have heard conservators explaining how objects seem to come alive when they work on them, curators retreating to the museum storage in times of distress to touch particular objects, and I have watched how students, who reacted with only little enthusiasm to museum displays become immediately excited when they are taken on tours in the museum storage. I will not elaborate on such cases here, but the potential for studying the relations between the factual and the actual facts of museum objects is not merely related to the exhibition halls but to the entire processing of objects in the museum.

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‘lifegroups’ may be seen as efforts to “transport the visitor into foreign surroundings” (Boas quoted in Jacknis, 1985: 101), one does not get the impression that the space aims at reconstructing any ‘real’ world outside the museum. The exhibition is organized according to the concrete room in which it is placed. The symmetrical division of the space is accentuated by totem poles placed at the pillars that divide the space while other large objects are distributed evenly among the walls next to a number of murals depicting (stereo-)typical social events among American Indians.4 In this way the scale of objects generates (at least) two layers of experience. In the showcases, relatively small objects are organized according to object types and cultural origin. Here you may stand in front of a showcase and have an overview of say Tlingit masks or Kwakiutl basketry or, indeed, dwell upon a single object. In contrast the large scale objects at the pillars and walls step out of these contexts texturing the space as such. Partly due to their size, partly due to the chiaroscuro-effect mentioned by Lévi-Strauss, which came about with the blocking of windows in the late 1920s (Jacknis, 2004: 231), it is almost impossible to see these objects in their totality. Thus walking around the space one will experience, at a distance, the full size of the totem poles, but approaching them their proportions are revealed as you have to lean back in order to see the top of each. So while this is indeed a space for exploring amazing singular objects all these objects become part of a powerful overall atmosphere, an experience that cannot be isolated to the objects themselves, but relies on the way these objects are allowed to step out of themselves. In a sense the space as such as well as the singular objects play on the relation between hiding and unconcealment, which Gumbrecht (with reference to Heidegger) places centrally at the experience of presence (Gumbrecht, 2004: 64e78). At times you may sense yourself as subject deciding for which objects to dwell upon, but moving only a few steps, you suddenly feel yourself wrapped in the texture of the exhibit as space again. The sense of presence in this exhibition undoubtedly has to do with proportions; the size and structure of the hall, and the proportions and design of the totem poles, which to a large degree dominate the space. But one may also speculate, whether, in this case, the object material has particular atmospheric effects. Thus, even the singular objects seem to highlight the dynamics between unconcealment and hiding; masks open from one appearance into the next (e.g. a human face hidden behind a raven face), patterns on cloth contain singular parts that fall out of focus as you try to contemplate the entire object, and the totem poles show transitions between different human and non-human creatures. As Lévi-Strauss (1999, 7e8) observed the Northwest coast material seems to play on the mythological, subconscious layers of human commonality e indeed the commonalities between beings as such e that seem also to be a central point both to Gumbrecht’s conception of presence and Böhme’s conception of atmosphere. The atmosphere generated at the Hall of Northwest Coast Peoples clearly also relies on the layering of time in a way that was not necessarily thought of when the exhibition was constructed. To some extend this space appears as the essence of the museum itself, blending powerful ‘century-old’ objects with classical 19th century museum architecture as well as a historiography of display techniques. In a sense, this kind of layering seems to eradicate any kind of human intentionality presenting the exhibition as a result of the ‘museum’ as such.

4 Both the totem poles and the murals were installed in the late 1920s, i.e. more than 20 years after Boas resigned from the museum (Jacknis, 2004: 231).

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Fig. 1. Furniture from the Soviet collections at Musée d’ethnographie de Genève. Photo by Willem Mes.

Such kind of layering is hard if not impossible to achieve when making new exhibitions in a contemporary museum setting. The question is therefore, whether one may actually intentionally strive for generating atmospheres with objects that do not immediately seem to have particular atmospheric qualities and in a contemporary ethnographic exhibition. 4.2. «Villa Sovietica» One contemporary exhibition focussing directly on the staging of atmospheres is Villa Sovietica, which was on display at Musée d’ethnographie de Genève in 2009. I followed the making of Villa Sovietica at a distance as the curator, Alexandra Schüssler, invited me to throw an outsider’s gaze on the process through regular phone conversations and e-mail exchanges (Bjerregaard, 2009b). My account of this exhibition is therefore partly based on these conversations, partly on my experience of the exhibition itself. The exhibition was based on a collection of Soviet everyday objects (see Fig. 1) that was apparently intended for a naturalistic kind of display (Schüssler, 2009). For instance, the collection comprised objects that allowed for the reconstruction of a fully furnished living room. But the curatorial take opposed this intention. The exhibition design was based in a concern with keeping a certain dignity for these objects. Simply putting such kinds of objects on display for a Western audience, acquainted with a world of consumer goods quite different from what was available to the Soviet citizen, would basically make a mockery of Soviet consumers (Schüssler, 2009: 5). The curator states in the catalogue: If someone had asked me where this forlorn material culture did belong I could not have said. Should these remnants be sold for a dime on a flea market? Should they be returned to the people who had discarded them for nicer looking items appropriate to the winds of change? Or thrown on the garbage heap? Or kept for eternity in the depot of some ethnographic museum? I had no answer for these questions, but I was convinced that the pots and pans, toys and clothes, stools and sofas should not be exposed to a Western gaze. I did not want these objects to be displayed in front of an audience who would compare them with familiar items from another epoch of their own cultural horizon. (Schüssler, 2009: 5) Therefore, Villa Sovietica continuously played on audiences’ expectations of what a museum experience entails, welcoming the

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audience but over and over again telling them that ‘you will never get what you expect’. Indeed, all the displays played on a multitude of possible meanings that would never be assembled into a concentrated statement. In an e-mail correspondence I had with the curator during the planning of the exhibition I asked her what kind of effect she wanted to get out of the exhibition, to which she answered: I have no clue! Well, something about subjecteobject relations. Could there be subjects that have a very different relation to the world around them, and could we apply this to Western consumption? Is there not a beyond? (Bjerregaard, 2009b: 221). The subject Schüssler talks about here is not a particular ‘Soviet’ subject as contrasted to a Western. Rather, it is a much more general question of subjects and objects. So, while not entirely specific the exhibition aimed at establishing a relation to objects that transgressed the values generated by the market or specific cultural values. The curatorial approach took the fact that the exhibition was staged in a 3-tiered bourgeois villa with a basement into effect, dividing the exhibition into four parts. In the basement objects of the Soviet collection were scattered between other objects from other collections and objects bought at local flea markets. This part of the exhibition stressed the sheer materiality which the Soviet objects share with other objects from other places. Thus, objects were all around the visitors: on the walls in every little corner, under the floor. On the first floor different kinds of collections e pins, razor machines, teddy bears e were displayed. To some extend this part pointed to the fact that all kinds of materiality may be turned into objects of attachment. More than a scientific practice, collecting is thus a particular mode of subjecteobject relations that go far beyond the museum and the market as well. The third floor dealt with representations, which I will return to in some detail below, and, finally, the attic was turned into an atelier where artists and audiences were invited to produce new works. Here I will only consider two of the installations on the third floor, dealing with ‘representation’. As mentioned one of the aims of Villa Sovietica was to suggest other relations to objects than the value of the commodity. The approach taken on the third floor aimed quite explicitly at the ecstasies of the object. One installation was placed by the end of a corridor. Walking through the corridor, the spectator ends up at a door with a round glass placed in it. Looking through the glass, it turns out that this is in fact a magnifying glass and through it you see a magnified toy car turning around on a small podium (see Fig. 2). In another installation the living room furniture was displayed behind white cloths and lit from inside so that only the shadows of the furniture, scrambled on top of each other, would be visible through the linen (Fig. 3). It was possible, though, to get a direct view at the furniture, but only through mounting one of two ladders placed in each end of the installation. Thus, apart from tearing down the context of the collection, the thingness of the object is demolished and released into pure radiation. By perceiving the toy car through a looking glass we are introduced not only to a relativity of value (the Lada that might seem less attractive to the Western consumer is turned into the ultimate good, awaited for months by the Soviet citizen), but also to the medium of perception, light and air, which is broken through the magnifying glass, literally turning the toy car into something larger than life. The Realität of the car is turned into a Wirklichkeit which dissolves into pure air and light rays.

Fig. 2. Corridor leading towards door with magnifying glass. «Villa Sovietica», Musée d’ethnographie de Genève. Photo by Willem Mes.

Fig. 3. Display of furniture. “Villa Sovietica”, Musée d’ethnographie de Genève. Photo by Willem Mes.

Likewise, the living room furniture is turned into pure ecstasies dissolving into shadows on the linen. What characterizes both these installations e as, indeed, the entire exhibition e is that the object-perspective is never simply there for grabs but only available through the movement of the perceiving body. In contrast to the way in which museums often aim to make things most easily accessible and visible, these installations stress what Böhme placed so centrally in his definition of atmosphere, namely that we are here as subjects in the sense of having a particular bodily presence (Böhme, 1993: 120e2). So, space and the body are both accentuated as the media of perception. In this sense, we can never just ‘look at an object’. We always do so through a particular presence of the physical qualities of the object and in a particular bodily state.

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So, what «Villa Sovietica», to my eyes, ultimately aimed at was to dissolve the status of these Soviet objects as exactly that, ‘Soviet objects’, accentuating instead a relation to the material world that does not rely on our particular subjectivity (a ‘Soviet citizen’ immediately understanding the value of these objects, or a ‘Swiss museum goer’ trying to relate to what life must have been like to a ‘Soviet citizen’). In this way, rather than representing these objects as something the visitor needed to understand in order to relate to, the relation was created through a presence that was not tied any particular representational framework. 5. Space, presence and experience The account of the exhibitions above points to the role of space rather than the ‘object’ as such as the medium for museum display. To some readers, the effects drawn out of the two exhibitions may seem unnecessary ‘arty’ and unscientific. Why should museums of cultural history not simply rely on disseminating in an eloquent language the results of their research, but venture into exhibition approaches that might as well be found in a contemporary art gallery? In the history of ethnographic exhibitions space has primarily been related to as a medium of representation (Böhme, 2003), a topography through which objects could be organized in such a way that even the most exotic could be rendered meaningful and comprehensible to audiences (Whitehead, 2011). Rows of objects showing the evolution of human cultures, functional division of objects, naturalistic reconstructions of milieus may all be seen as ways of re-presenting objects in ways that could be apprehended visually. However, the two exhibitions I have described above both avoid this kind of meaningful organization of objects (at least in most parts of each exhibition). I will suggest that what exhibitions like these two do is, rather than pointing to the display as a kind of modelling of a reality external to the exhibition, to point to the exhibition as such as a plane of reality. In this sense, they stress the experience of presence. What is interesting is, however, that this kind of presence does not simply come about by presenting the object in the most unmediated way possible. Instead, the creation of presence relies on a manipulation of the space in-between objects and in-between objects and subjects. As observed by Gumbrecht (2004: 114e5), presence seems to rely on a certain kind of violence, an imposition of power, by occupying space: [A]ccording to the observation that epiphany always implies the emergence of a substance and, more specifically, the emergence of a substance that seems to come out of nothing, we may indeed postulate that there can be no epiphany and, as a consequence, no real aesthetic experience without a moment of violence. (Gumbrecht, 2004) But what are the effects of presence that make aesthetic experience an important element not only to art museums but also museums of cultural history? Gumbrecht has argued that we live in an historical era of Cartesian rationalization and severe mobilization of information which creates an urge for “moments of concentration on ‘the things of the world’” (Gumbrecht, 2004: 138). This point may be quite true, and might even underlie some of the current orientations towards the power of touch (Classen and Howes, 2006; Pye, 2007). In the present context, I will however like to focus on another point about presence. Eelco Runia (2006) has defined presence as

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“being in touch”, “[it] is having a whisper of life breathed into what has become routine and clichéd e it is fully realizing things instead of just taking them for granted” (Runia, 2006: 5). So, while making meaning is a way of appropriating the world (history, in Runia’s case) through our known concepts, presence is about being transformed through gaps that you have to imagine how to fill. “When man does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them” (Runia, 2006: 21). In this way presence opens to us through its discontinuity, which we have to engage in understanding beyond the conceptual means through which we normally may approach the world as taken for granted. So, presence is a transformative point, since it lays the world as we know it in ruins and demands us to “create new contexts” (Runia, 2006). We may understand these transformative points as ‘micro shocks’ (Massumi and McKim, 2009: 4e 7) that for a short while drag us out of a subjective state and into a world of affects through which we will start to re-assemble the world anew. I believe, in fact, that this was basically the point Sandra Dudley wanted to make out of her experience with the Chinese horse. Somehow, the fact that this object had not been explained to her and the capturing materiality of the object, allowed a temporal hole to emerge, which she had to fill out herself. However, this is not a hole that will lead the spectator 2000 years back to the Han dynasty. If anything, it might be a hole that allow us to “share the things of the world” across temporal and geographical divides (Gumbrecht, 2004: 116e8). Or may be, it is a hole that takes you out of ordinary subjectified existence, a kind of death wish (Gumbrecht, 2004: 136), which take us into another experience of ‘life’ which threatens our current constitution of the world. So, instead of leading us back to the origin of the object, what this presence does is, in fact, to throw us into a new conception of the world. 6. Conclusion: exhibitions as bridgeheads Throughout this article I have been debating the role of objects in exhibitions. While a recent tendency in museological literature suggests that audiences should be allowed to approach objects with the least possible intervention e pointing our attention towards the object itself e I have argued that what we should be concerned with is actually the staging of atmospheres and the gaps established in-between objects and in-between objects and subjects. In analytical terms this implies attention to the dissolution of objects, the way in which objects stop being stable and isolated entities storing value and meaning, turning instead into ecstacies tincturing space. While arguing for attention to the dissolution of objects may appear a deconstructive approach lacking regard and humility towards the potential of the objects in our museum collections, my contention is that this is far from the case. Dissolution and presence are productive in their own sense. A concern with the capacity of the museum to create presence will turn the museum into what Eelco (2006, 21) has called “a bridgehead to the Unknown”, a space where new contextualizations start to take form. So, rather than a storehouse of the past, one may speculate whether the true potential of the museum is, in fact, to work as a “technology of the imagination” (Sneath et al., 2009), which allows us to imagine potential futures outside the reality of the common-sense. Acknowledgements I wish to thank Mikkel Bille and Tim Flohr Sørensen for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. I am also grateful to the

Please cite this article in press as: Bjerregaard, P., Dissolving objects: Museums, atmosphere and the creation of presence, Emotion, Space and Society (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.05.002

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Please cite this article in press as: Bjerregaard, P., Dissolving objects: Museums, atmosphere and the creation of presence, Emotion, Space and Society (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2014.05.002