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Spaces of Defamiliarisation 1: Chile’s Museo Histórico Nacional

Under the stewardship of a new director, the historian Sofía Correa Sutil, from the mid-1990s Chile’s Museo Histórico Nacional (National Historical Museum) in the capital Santiago began to revise its presentation of national history. As a result of these critical efforts, Joanna Crow appraised the museum's gallery concerning ‘Chile’s First Inhabitants’ as a more inclusive contact zone.[1] However,  Crow remarked,  the labels there continued to use the past tense, and in the museum’s own reflection  a few years later  on Correa Sutil's modernisation project, one contributor averred that ‘the tiniest room is for the indigenous world, which is not shown in all its diversity and complexity’.[2a] Yet another observed: ‘ The history [the museum] represents did not seem to me to be the history of Chile; it is rather the history of Santiago and its institutional milestones. It is not the history of a people or of its indigenous minorities, or its regions or its place in the continen
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Theory and the Museum

Roxanne L. Euben’s   Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge  changed how I read and taught.[1] Drawing on the etymology of ‘theory’, which relates to contemplation, speculation ( theōria ) and ultimately spectatorship ( theōros ), another semantic parallel between Arabic and Greek struck me, since the Arabic,   naẓariyya , likewise connects with notions of looking and speculation. That we often read and speak of theories as ‘lenses’ is appropriate, then, and here I’d like to reflect on the place of theory in museological practices and the ways that the metaphor of theory-as-seeing could be recast. How far do theories inform how curators stage exhibitions and what place do they have for visitors? Considering the catalogues for the National Gallery’s  Michelangelo and Sebastiano , the Tate Modern’s  Agnes Martin  and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s  Cy Twombly:  Fifty Days at Iliam , they present and build upon theoretical bases.[2] Carlos
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Continuous Bodies

Nathaniel Stern's Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance operates like a museum in a book. So numerous and carefully juxtaposed are artworks within a network of subtly argued ideas, the reader cannot help but feel stimulated to imagine and temporarily live with the works he describes. This presence of the works that I'm highlighting is hardly surprising. Stern wishes to show how 'matter matters, however mediated' [1], and this aspiration manifests in the palpability to which his analyses give rise. The centrality of matter in interactive art, Stern argues, stems partially but importantly from the need he perceives to elaborate upon poststructuralist and later critical attitudes concerning the body's irreducibly linguistic constitution.[2] Some body art is explicit, unfolding and explicating social and economic inscriptions, but there is an equally important type of implicit body art, which aims to 'unpattern habitual actions'.[3]
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