Care and Curation

In this post I want to go back to the conference on material religion in Durham. It always interests me how the programmes that are put together at such conferences always manage to juxtapose different and sometimes seemingly incompatible ideas, but still manage to spark new thoughts. It is the serendipity of the process that I find so fascinating, and which links through to some of my ideas around post-post modernism (see posting below).

One particular combination of papers at the conference triggered a particular line of thought for me. Both were very different in themselves. The first was by Amy Whitehead and drew on her fieldwork in southern Spain, where she is observing the way in which local people interact with specific shrines and statues of Our Lady. She was interested in the kind of issues related to subjectivity and relationships with non-human others that I looked at in the previous posting in this strand. The second was by Pamela Smart and focussed on the collecting practices of the De Menil family and in particular showed how their religious background and concerns led to a specific approach both to collecting in general and to that which was collected. The main purpose of Pamela's paper as I understood it was to show that Catholicism and modernism were not incompatible, especially when seen through the lens of the De Menil family's collecting. Both were excellent papers but it was one small element of each that particularly caught my attention and led me to reflect on our relationship with material objects in the light of my own interest in Dogon art.

From Amy's paper the element that struck me was the way in which the women associated with the shrine care for the statue. Traditionally these women would have been virgins, but that is no longer possible. What is interesting, however, is that these women are the only ones entitled to care for the statue in an intimate and very personal way when all the other people have been removed from the church. They change the clothes and even they have to hold up a sheet and look away while their leader changes the underwear. This is very intimate care representing very close contact with the statue that treats that statue as a real person, and a very special person, a person who is understood to be a Queen.

In Pamela's paper the point that she made, which particularly struck me, was that the private nature of the collection led to a particular emphasis on curatorial care of the objects within the collection. This involved restoration, stabilisation, and an attention to the needs of the object in terms of environment for storage and display. Pamela argued that such attention to care is not as clear in the case of public collections of different kinds, but was central to the whole ethos of the maintenance and display of the collection for these private collectors, even to the point of dictating the form of the building that holds the display. There is a personal element here, as with the statue from southern Spain, but this is the collector's personal attachment to the objects within the collection.

What I picked up from this particular juxtaposition was the different understandings of care and curation of objects in different settings and contexts. Linked to this is very clearly the idea of ownership. For the private collector it is the fact of personal ownership that leads to the emphasis on care for the object. In the case of the women at the shrine I might suggest that it is actually the ownership of the women by the statue that demands the level of intimate care that is seen in the ritual. But ownership is only one aspect. As with the wider themes of the conference and the questions of personhood and subjectivity, the issues around care and curatorship lead us right into the question of our relationships with the material, especially within the context of religion.

As I work through the material on the Dogon I can see both elements of this juxtaposition at work. For the people themselves there is a caring for the objects, within the shrines as part of the ritual, in their placing these objects within the cliffside caves to preserve them among the dead, and in their reuse of the objects at other times. The layers of sacrificial patina represent a kind of care, as do the addition of nails, jewellery and other additions. Finally there are also elements of repair that are seen on some of the objects that in itself is a sign of care. Repair can also be seen, depending on when it is undertaken, in relation to collectors (although it is often frowned upon as authenticity does not expect the collector to go quite this far in their care of the object). How the museums, galleries and private collectors also 'care' for the objects, and the different ways these different groups do 'care' for the objects is also a fascinating area of study. I am not sure I can offer any conclusions at this stage, but it has raised so many new questions for me about the relations between the human and the object in the case of Dogon art, and in many other contexts.