The United States copyright law (Title 17 of the the making of copies of copyrighted material. A person m: Rene iar nce ies nanos ee eee nS ete ear ee Recast Meee nse Sees Ee a ets sec MUS E UM Ress DURHAM AND LONGON 2006 Public Cultures/ Global Transformations Edited by Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, with Gustavo Buntinx, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblete, and Ciraj Rassool a FRICTIONS | ! |Tactical Museologies GUSTAVO BUNTINX AND IVAN KARP. Maat do an elternative museum of the contemporary arts that exhibits on a traveling minibus in Lima, Perv, an exhibition space and publishing in Phnom Penb, 2 South African museum for a community dispersed thiety years previously by forced removals, and a union of commu- aispersad throughout Oars have in common? Al were developed to take advantage of the symbolic capital associated ‘dea ofthe museum, but abo to present an alternative to the claims fo present a universal poimt of view (claims of the sort anticulated im ion on Universal Museums,” included inthis section 95 a Docy_ ‘and Gictional celationship either to established museums broader social order. The museum frictions exhibited in ths sec and parce of the guerrilla war often conducted among musesmns irutions of public eulture, They share tactics with all museumsand institutions of public culture, but these tactics shift and change according to the pattern of development and standing of the museum. ‘The cases presented here exemplify the waysand means through which mu- seums and the associated processes of displaying and collecting are utilized for, by, and even against communities, whether these be local communities, com- ‘munities of artists, dispersed communities, or imagined communities. Ourde- cision tocall the section “Tactical Museologis” refers to processes whereby the ‘museum idea is utilized, invoked, and even contested in the process of com- ‘munity formation. But this book situates museums in the context of global ‘processes, and the most fundamental global process that makes the concept of ‘the museum available as tactical resource is that museums themselves travel Inthe course of moving from one vontext © another and from one geographic space to another, they become “contact zones.” as James Clifford (Following Mary Louise Pratt calls them, in which diverse and sometimes conflicting r¢- lations are enacted. That museums travel isnot the product of new global process but associated with older forms cf globalization such as colonial ex- ‘pansion and domination and imperil rule, These long-standing global pro- cesses are often layered into museum collections and exhibitions? Older global processes do not just fade away. The results of institutional transir associated ‘with colonial rule and the like are incorporated in local orders and interpreted in new ways, which are themselves associated with global proceses All ofthe essays in this section describe “new” museums, including the Document on the Museo Salinas. Almost all ofthese museums are less than orm of community organizing, but the processes of exhibiting and collect- 1 decade old, and all of them can fairly be described as simultaneously draw- ng testimony and abjecis that can be said to be fragments and traces of the ing on global processes to jastify their existence and, asa result, owing theit existence, in part, to global processes. Ye: they all define themselves as com- ‘munity museums and address a local or national subject in content and audi- ence, sometimes simultaneously. These subjects range in scale froma displaced ‘community (in the case of the District Six Museurn) to the people of a 1e- gion (in Oaxaca) and the problem of national art and patrimony (addcessed in Phnom Penh and Lima). The first question we should ask, then, is what are the global processes that enable the tactics of newly established museuras? ‘The firs, we have already sais hat oC aveling institutions, he paths and processes by which the museum idea, the forms and practices associated with ‘museums, and the museum effet have become embedded in postcolonial soc- ‘ties ranging from Peru and South Aftica to postcolonial situations such as that related to immigration and ethnicity in the urban United States. Taken together, the essays show how the travelirg institution of the museum and all that it implies provides cultural capital, aset of resources, a series of models means of community mobilization, and e social field in which identity and | commupity are asserted and contested ‘The'bnly firm conclusion that can be drawn about traveling institutions 5.0 global process is that how they travel and ate reproduced from context to context is both conjunctural and dependent on local structures and condi- tions, Cape Town, South Aftica, and Lima, Peru, provide vividly contrasting examples of localities where the configuration of cultural institutions affects _ the institutional tactics carried out in diferent contexts, as insightflly ana- lyzed in essays by Cia) Rassool and Gustavo Buntinx, The District Six Mu eum in Cape Town has become, frst, a museum of memory and conscience and, second, an institution that seeks to give voice to and shape the identity of the community that wll return to occupy the district. But embodied in its displays and manifested in the internal debates of the museum is an exquisite sense that what is being produced isnot a museum that exhibits essentalized "identities along lines consolidated in apartheid’ rouseurns and other cultural “insttutions? The tactics ofthe District Six Museum thus have to take account ofthe local history of museums in South Africa, which themselves illustrate anearlier history of traveling institutions. In Lima, the Micromuseum, in the form and content of its displays, self-consciously works against what Gustavo “Bunting terms the condition of “marginal occidentality,” a state of aping but _ never fully acquiring the cultural status and institutions ofthe West. In South estion from apartheid to democratic inclusion and community restoration South Aftica, ‘The second global process exhibited in the esays is one that provides the ‘contexts that enable the tactical museologies that are the theme of this sec- tion. Tis is the increasing worldwide significance of nongovernmental orga~ such a foundations, international organizations such as UNESCO, and even state-based aid organizations for the development and ‘of muscums in multiple local con istrict Six Museum jnded in its formative stages International Development (o1pa)s the different Cambodian museums and display organizations described by Ingrid Muan all survive through external support. The Oaxacan