The Various Takes of Wes Anderson + Juman Malouf 's “Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures,”
I want to start this by stating that I am not a museum anthropologist: I am rather, the friend of many of those, a museum lover, and a Wes Anderson fan. In fact, I have written about Wes Anderson’s amorphous time and aesthetics in his films before— in an ethnography of Icelandic coffee shops during my undergrad. Basically, I found this exhibit, the ideas behind it, the arguments for and against (none super strongly against, thank goodness) to be interesting. So I have compiled some articles about it— to address the various thoughts and to state why fail or success I think this type of collaboration and work is hugely important across museums + anthropology + academic spaces in general.
Phew. Long introduction. First, the list of articles. Second, the thoughts brought up. Third, my argument.
The most common arguments brought up across the board + my reaction :
lack of significance or narrative : this is derived both from the fact that historical objects inherently have meaning and stories and that in his films and her novels, Wes and Juman control the “objects” (NYT) and the mood. The argument here is that the attempt to strip these objects from context and place them in a purely aesthetic manner wound up feeling meaningless (NYT, Art Net). Meaningless, how? Well— first that it was an impossible task? Second came the expectation of “feeling’ when entering a Wes Anderson scene. The example in the NYT was the Instagram account Accidental Wes Anderson which is home to photographs of spaces that align with the Wes Anderson (symmetrical, whimsy, etc) aesthetic but have completely different contexts and no ~mood~
In fact, the author of the NYT piece went so far as to call some of the displays “pointless”— earlier in the article, this author quoted Anderson who said he hoped to show a new way or angle of looking at antiquity. Define how a display of mismatched oddities with a theme (color, size, etc) is pointless in this new and undefined way? It was new methodological approach. I find the term pointless to be harsh and a cheap way of saying that the author a. did not understand or b. is so bound by traditional museuology practices that anything new is threatening. Take your pick.
Exhibition view. © KHM-Museumsverband.
I find this to be a cheap argument. In my paper on Icelandic Coffee Shops I defined Wes Anderson’s work as amorphous. I think that was the point. That you could view all these objects, many ignored in storage for years, next to other objects that have nothing to do with it beyond color or subject matter— and view them as whatever you as the viewer want to view them as. Is this traditional, heck no! Is this power in the hands of the museum audience important? I think yes. Why? It allows the museum goer to have the control. It also strips the museum goer from expectation. An example. When I was at the Louvre I was so excited to see the Mona Lisa— what a privilege to view such a renowned work of art, one we all learn about. But when I got to the hall she is housed in, I was so disappointed. You couldn’t see her through the crowd, she’s behind glass which creates a glare, and you have to wait in a line to even get near her. I understand the reasons for all of this— but she’s a tiny painting and (dare I say) certainly not the best of her contemporaries. But it is the lore, the expectation, the signs around the Louvre that point you to her that makes museum goers care so deeply. Is this inherently bad? no. But is there not something fresh about having no context save for what the object itself has to say? I find that incredibly meaningful. I also find that totally in line with the so called mood of a Wes Anderson film. It is nostalgia, melancholy— it is a search for meaning with nothing but its beauty in a crowd of other things and the wholeness of that crowd.
In the end, I agree with what Kate Brown from Artnet wrote:
True to his auteur style, it’s a totally quirky presentation of affectionate misfits.
And that’s all that I think it was ever meant to be. Meaning is so often changed to mean importance. But what if we just let it be quirky and beautiful and cared less about its lack of or inability to control “meaning”?
Juman Malouf and Wes Anderson at the Kunsthistorisches Museum © Rafaela Proell
Juman and Wes aren’t curators.
“Unexpected challenges quickly sprung up. Things a non-curator would understandably never think about, like the humidity requirements for displaying certain works, or what materials must be used for displays, became stymieing factors. A project that was meant to take two and a half weeks took closer to two and a half years, Mr. Sharp said. “This was an incredible headache for them,” he added.” NYT
There are many little antecedents about the challenges of two non-museum folks putting on an exhibit and dealing with archives. Here’s a few more:
“Perhaps the duo’s penchant for the collection’s oddball items also stems from their own awareness of being outside'rs in a prestigious establishment replete with trained art historians, curators, and conservators.” - ArtNet
“One senior curator said that some of museum staff were skeptical of the project at first. “We would get an email from Wes asking, ‘Do you have a list of green objects? Could you send us a list of everything you have that is yellow?’ Our data system does not have these categories.” ArtNet
“Because of this, the curators and conservators had to manually search their storage, an often painstaking process due climate controls and the condition checks needed, neither of which Anderson or Malouf were aware of. The extra labor required was taxing, but the duo’s alternative criteria had a welcome side effect: It leveled the usual hierarchies. Several staff members said it resulted in new revelations. They just had to “learn to unlearn” their ways of working” -ArtNet
Its that final part of that last quote I want to hone in on. The museum staff had to “unlearn” there ways. How good and how fresh? I think as any type of scholar there is nothing more valuable that growing, than learning a new approach, than collaborating and seeing how someone else might view a topic. Obviously, the technical training (such as where to find categories of objects and making sure the climate was appropriate) could be hard to facilitate as a staff— but the fresh ideas? Won’t that impact the intentionality and creativity of this staff far beyond this exhibit? Don’t they want to be in touch with what their viewers may think about things in a new way? It seems that in this case, they do— because Anderson’s exhibit is the first of man collaborations planned. Maybe part of the job of the museologist is to know how to make the museum’s knowledge accessible to collaborators?
In general, academics are finding that they have to step outside the ivory towers of their institute. Even for someone like me— with goals of being firmly rooted in academia— I am thinking more and more about how collaborative art practices and experimental dissemination can make my work more meaningful to a wider audience. In the end, it sounds like both the curators and the collaborators learned a great deal—- which is after all, the point of a collaboration.
Anderson acknowledges some of the institutional skepticism in his cheeky opening statement: “One of the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s most senior curators […] at first failed to detect some of the, we thought, more blatant connections; and, even after we pointed out most of them, still question their curatorial validity.”
What I find most valuable about this project is the challenge of the museum staff and the guest to look at historical objects in a new way. Anderson and Malouf tried a new technique. Sure, a critic can complain that it lacks meaning— but they weren’t listening to the point of this. The point was not to create a movie— but a new way of viewing objects. And sure a critic can say that it took longer than planned because they were so so unprepared— but they learned with the help of a staff open to their ideas and in the end, they did it. This entire group of people put together an exhibit in a way that had not been done before and they broke down the barriers that are produced between artists of various methods and academic institutions. They showed the world that it can and it should be done. Growth is never without hiccups or challenge— but if patient enough, it is usually quite beautiful.
-EM
