Museums and Memory CULTURAL SITINGS A series edited by Elazar Barkan CULTURAL SITINGS presents focused discussions of major contemporary and historical cultural issues by prominent and promising scholars, with a special emphasis on multidisciplinary and transnational perspectives. By bridging historical and theoretical concerns, CULTURAL SITINGS devel ops and examines narratives that probe the spectrum of experiences that continuously reconfigure contemporary cultures. By rethinking chronology, agency, and especially the siting of historical transformation, the books in this series go beyond disciplinary boundaries and notions of what is marginal and what is central to knowledge. By juxtaposing the analytical, the histori cal, and the visual, the series provides a venue for the development of cul tural studies and for the rewriting of the canon. Museums and Memory EDITED BY Susan A. Crane STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS ~ Stanford, ~ California Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2000 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America CIP data appear at the end of the book Contents List of Contributors IX 1. Introduction: Of Museums and Memory SUSAN A. CRANE PART I. Thinking Through the Museum 2. Arc hi( ve )textures of Museology WOLFGANG ERNST 3· A Museum and Its Memory: The Art of Recovering History 35 MICHAEL FEHR 4- Curious Cabinets and Imaginary Museums 6o SUSAN A. CRANE 5· Geoffrey Sonnabend's "Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter" 81 AN ENCAPSULATION COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY PART I I. Memories in the Museum 6. History and Anti-History: Photography Exhibitions and Japanese National Identity 93 JULIA ADENEY THOMAS 7· Realizing Memory, Transforming History: Euro I American I Indians DIANA DRAKE WILSON 8. Global Culture, Modern Heritage: Re-membering the Chinese Imperial Collections TAMARA HAMLISH VII Contents PART I I I . Collectors and Institutions 9· The Modern Muses: Renaissance Collecting andthe Cult of Remembrance 161 PAULA FINDLEN 10. The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns in the German Museums SUZANNE MARCHAND 11. The Museum's Discourse on Art: The Formation of Curatorial Art History in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin 200 ALEXIS JOACHIMIDES Notes 221 Index Vlll Contributors susAN A. cRANE is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Arizona. Her recent publications include "Writing the Individual back into Collective Memory," American Historical Review (December 1997 ); and "Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum," History and Theory (December 1997). Her book, Collecting and Histori cal Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany, is forthcoming ll1 2000. woLFGANG ERNsT is a media archaeologist. His publications include Historismus im Verzug: Museale Antike(n)rezeption im britischen Neoklas sizismus (und jenseits) (1993); and, most recently, co-editor (with Cornelia Vismann) of a book on Ernst H. Kantorowicz: Geschichtskorper (1998). His teaching and research experience includes the University of Leipzig; the Institute of Cultural Studies at Essen; the University of Kassel; the German Historical Institute in Rome; the Center of Literary Research in Berlin; the Cologne Academy of Media Arts and the Media Departments of the Bauhaus University, Weimar; and the Ruhr University, Bochum. MIcHAEL FE H R has been Director of the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum of the City of Hagen, Germany, since 1987. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor at the Bergische Universitiit Wuppertal, and Deputy Director of the Art Museum of the City of Bochum. His dissertation was written on early medieval art. He has published extensively on contemporary art and the theory of museums. PAuL A FINo LEN teaches in the History Department and Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Stanford University. She is the author of Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1994), and other essays on science and culture in early mod ern Italy. Her contribution to this volume is part of a new book, A Frag mentary Past: Museums and the Renaissance (forthcoming). IX Contributors TAMAR A HAM LIs H is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Asian Studies Program at Beloit College. Her research focuses on rep resentations of cultural identity in contemporary Chinese societies with particular emphasis on art, gender, and museums. Her published work has appeared in the journals Public Culture and Museum Anthropology and in the edited volume Gender Ironies ofNationalism: Sexing the Nation (1999). ALExIs JoAcHIM IDEs is an art historian at Ludwig Maximilian Uni versitat in Munich. He is a co-editor of Museumsinszenierungen: Zur Geschichte der Institution des Kunstmuseums: Die Berliner Museumsland schaft 1830-1990 (1995). His publications have appeared in Kunstchronik. suZANNE MARCHAND is Associate Professor of Modern European Intel lectual History at Louisiana State University. Her recent publications in clude Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (1996), and articles on the history of archaeology, philology, and classical studies in Germany and Austria. JuLIA ADENEY THoMAs is Assistant Professor of History at the Univer sity of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of a forthcoming book on modern Japanese political ideology: Reconfiguring Nature: Japan's Con frontation with Modernity. Her essay in this volume is part of a book-length project provisionally titled Still/mages, Cataracts ofTime: Photography, Temporality, and Nationhood in Japan. DIAN A DRAKE wILsoN is Assistant Research Ethnographer at the Univer sity of California, Los Angeles, and has recently authored the discussions of cultural affiliation for UCLA's Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Inventory as well as a report for the National Park Service entitled "We Are All Related: Life Experiences of Native American Indian People Living in Communities Surrounding the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area." She holds a three-year fellowship funded by the National Institute of Mental Health for a project entitled "Communication and Experience in Navajo Healing." She also works as a curator at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. X