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In the Oceanic Art Gallery, de Young Museum, San Francisco.

Image courtesy of James Clifford.

The Times of the Curator

D
James Clifford

History of Consciousness, University of California-Santa Cruz

"The Times of the Curator". . . My title evokes two senses of temporality:

1 . "The Times" as in the historical moment or context: "the life and times of x:'
2. "Times" plural: a sense of the curator's task as enmeshed in multiple, over­
lapping, sometimes conflicting times.

I'll be speaking of both. My concern is the discrepant temporalities (sometimes I

want to say "histories;' or even "futures") that are integral to the task of the curator
today.
Collections: A journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, Volume 7, Number 4,
Fall 2011, pp. 399-404. Copyright © 2011 AltaMira Press.All rights reserved. 399
400 THE TIMES OF THE CURATOR &

"The task of the curator:' I like the conference title chosen by Lucian Gomoll
and Lissette Olivares because of its invocation of Walter Benjamin and the prob­
lematic of translation, which in his famous essay, "The Task of the Translator:' is
fundamentally a temporal and open-ended process. For Benjamin, of course, the
discordant times of the past would be activated and "made new" by a critical-mate­
rialist form of historicizing that could challenge and open up closed narratives, the
inevitable realisms of the victors.
I believe that what's going on today in museums has the potential to make this
kind of critical intervention. For the museum is an inventive, globally, and locally
translated form, no longer anchored to its modern origins in Europe. Contempo­
rary curatorial work, in the excessive times of decolonization and globalization, by
engaging with discrepant temporalities-not resisting, or homogenizing, their ines­
capable friction-has the potential to open up common-sense, "given'' histories. It
does so under serious constraints, a push and pull of material forces and ideological
legacies it cannot evade.
Museum curating in 1 9th century Europe was inseparable from the gather­
ing, valuing, and preservation of heritage-art and culture-in the context of bour­
geois, national projects. Museums, as they became established, were purveyors of
normative models of citizenship, taste, education, progress, etc. (this is detailed in
the well-known work of scholars like Carol Duncan, Tony Bennett, and others).
I might add, given my theme today, that although the times of the curator in the
1 9th century were normatively lined up in a singular, developmental history, this
history was less and less anchored by the teleologies of either Christian salvation
or Enlightenment Reason. What might be called Darwinian time-developmen­
tal, materially adaptive, and without any guaranteed destination-interjected a new,
and troubling, ontological "ground" -or lack of ground. This unmanageable serial­
ity may account for the anxiety as well as the desire associated with collecting and
preserving in the new museums, and perhaps for the remarkable productivity and
dissemination of the museum form in the 20th century.
Since the 1 8th century, Western curating has been associated with the cre­
ation and management of colonial collections. These collections were built on con­
quest (the Napoleonic expeditions, the Benin Bronzes . . . ) and on assumptions of
"salvage"-the necessity and the right (guaranteed by a linear, progressive History)
to collect vanishing or endangered artifacts, as well as written and oral records. Co­
lonial collecting, which reached something like a fever pitch in the late 1 9th century,
conceived of museums and archives as ultimate resting places, repositories for a
precious legacy, kept in trust for science, for the nation, for Civilization, or for Hu­
manity. Museums were treasure houses, and curators were their knowledgeable and
loving guardians. The times of the curator were aligned in evolutionary sequences
which (unlike Darwin's time) assumed a vantage point at the end or cutting edge
of development, and a place at the center of a world-system, a stable hierarchy of
places and times.
I don't need to dwell on this map/history, this "worlding:' The fact that we see
& JAMES CLIFFORD 40 1

it clearly now, as if from a distance, suggests that a shift has occurred, or better, is
occurring. Call it a decentering of the West-perhaps the principal achievement of
the last half of the 20th Century. Two driving forces of this shift can be named, in
shorthand: decolonization and globalization. Proceeding at economic, social, po­
litical, and cultural levels, these processes are uneven and sometimes contradictory.
Decolonization and globalization are linked, but distinct, historical dynamics.
This is painting with a broom. But it will have to suffice, for now, to charac­
terize the changing times of the curator in a new Millenium. Times of confusion,
of intersecting, crossing historical vectors, of alternative pasts and futures. I hasten
to add that displacing the West (a dominant but always negotiated cultural location
and economic power) does not mean leaving behind, getting free of, the legacies
of colonization or the capitalist world system. Far from it. It does mean that other
big, or big enough, historical stories now need to be taken seriously alongside the
former "realistic" narratives of Westernization, Modernization, Progress, Develop­
ment, etc.
-Have you been following the opening of what seems to be a new Crystal Palace
Exhibition-not in London, but the Shanghai World Expo? It's been a while since
London was the center of the world . . .
-Or in Bolivia, Evo Morales recently hosting an alternate global climate change
convention, in counterpoint to the failed Copenhagen summit.
-Or Emmanuel Wallerstein, in a string of publications since 2000 (see the latest
New Left Review), essentially closing down the 500-year Modern World System that
he put on the historical map. That system is over, Wallerstein now believes: we are in
a period of transition and radical indeterminacy about what will come next.
These are just a few signs of the de-centering of the West, the branching and cross­
ing of its historical teleologies in emergent, translational practices.
My own awareness of these shifts has been deepened, over the past several
decades, by the emergence of "indigenous" politics, social movements, and cultural
renewals in new public, performative contexts (peoples once thought to be des­
tined for extinction re-appearing rather suddenly, as Marx might have put it, "on
the world stage").
I speak today largely from the perspective ofthis indigenous emergence-the
focus of my recent research. Of course curatorial practices, as conceived in this con­
ference, embrace a very wide variety of social contexts, historical constraints, and
sites of intervention. I'm certainly not privileging the particular experiences of "in­
digenous curating" evoked here. But I do think they shed important, cross-cutting
light on some persistent assumptions about time and history that have organized
the Western institution of the museum, a cultural form that, as I've said, is being
translated throughout the world, in novel and unexpected ways.
My wake-up-call was the Mashpee tribal recognition trial of 1 977 which I at­
tended in Boston as a graduate student, and wrote about later in The Predicament of
402 THE TIMES OF THE CURATOR &

Culture ( 1 988). A living Indian tribe in Cape Cod simply wasn't on my map of his­
torical reality. All of my categories of cultural form, social, and temporal continuity
were shaken up. And in a way, I've been grappling with the questions posed by the
Mashpee ever since. They led me to an interest in the ways tribal people were re­
membering, telling, performing their histories-deep pasts inseparable from specif­
ic places, and violent colonial histories of rupture, loss, and inventive survival. Tribal
museums and cultural centers would become a research focus for me, places where I
could see in action the gathering and transmission-the curating-of heritage, pro­
cesses of preservation and valuing, but not in a classic "museological" sense. Instead
I had to recognize old and ongoing social processes of articulation, performance,
and translation, across generations, and across fraught borders of culture and place.
It was a time when we were coming to see the borders of identity as dynamic,
continually transgressed and re-made, in specific historical relations of power-of­
ten unequal, but never static or uni-directional. Mary Pratt's concept of the "contact
zone:' drawn from colonial situations of dominance and transculturation, gave me a
way of re-conceiving the hierarchical, authoritative spaces of the Western museum.
Some of you may recall the essay, "Museums as Contact Zones:' which appeared in
my book Routes ( 1 997). It begins with Tlingit Elders in the basement of an Art Mu­
seum in Portland, telling (singing) unexpected stories inspired by objects of their
heritage, reopening (re-membering) histories and powers associated with museum
artifacts no longer collected "once and for all:'
For me, the contact zone idea was a way to think about constitutive trans­
lations, opening up closed spaces (like Museum basements, more crowded places
now. . . ) . At that time I saw the work of the curator-whether aesthetic, ethnograph­
ic, or historical-as essentially conservative (in French it's unambiguous: conserva­
teur) . Museums were collections of valuable things, and the job of the curator was
to keep them safe-carefully displayed for public edification, or preserved in storage
for research purposes.
I always felt uncomfortable in museum basements: all those un-displayed ob­
jects, silenced drums, powerful presences wrapped in plastic . . . The sheer, histori­
cal injustice of massive collections held in Western capitals while few old examples
of African, Torres Straits, Alaskan art and culture could be seen in their places of
origin . . . made me want to open everything up, disperse the collections, bring out­
siders into the museums to make new meanings (let a thousand Fred Wilsons set
off explosions-carefully arranged explosions, as is his way-inside these spaces!).
There were movements in the air that pointed in this direction. A leading
influence for me, and many others: the UBC Museum of Anthropology moving
decisively toward collaboration under the directorship of Michael Ames, and un­
der the pressure of Northwest Coast Indian artists and tribes. And we might recall
the subversive work of Susan Vogel and Mary Nooter Roberts at The Museum for
African Art in NYC, shaking up what a museum could be. They sponsored, for ex­
ample, Robert Farris Thompson's pioneering exhibition of "living" altars, Face of the
Gods ( 1 993), from African descended religions in the Americas. These were altars
'& JAMES CL IFFORD 403

that needed to be fed, that attracted offerings, dancing, drumming in spaces like the
Berkeley University Art Museum (where I saw it during its traveling phase). It was
at this time, too, that the Oakland Museum began to open up its galleries to amaz­
ing and moving constructions by community-based altaristas during the Autumn
weeks of Dia de los Muertos.
The work of the curator was getting more interesting.
Preparing for this talk I consulted "curator" and "curate" in my dictionaries.
From curare, (no, not an Amazonian poison) curare means to care for something.
In the recent work of my colleague Donna Ha-raway- on inter-species relations, the
idea of caring ceases to be a practice of protecting by enclosing and becomes a pro­
foundly relational activity of crossing and translating. The "care" of curating, in this
perspective, is about preservation (in the sense of thriving) through active relations
of reciprocity and dialogue-not administration or tutelage.
In the activities of indigenous museums and cultural centers, curatorial prac­
tices were being translated and remade. "Salvage" collecting and preservation would
take on new meanings, no longer about gathering up what is doomed, but rather
supporting continuity and renovation.
The Tlingit elders in the Portland museum basement cared deeply for the ma­
terial objects there, but they didn't need them back. Material possession wasn't their
first priority. They wanted the stories embodied in old masks and carved headpieces
to be renewed, and they also wanted to forge relations of alliance and responsibil­
ity with the museum, in the midst of ongoing struggles to thrive as a people in a
complex, dangerous post-modernity. Indigenous curating has made me think again
about the difficult, essential, work of cultural politics: the relational, power-charged,
processes of sustaining difference through relationships: keeping while sharing.
A few current experiments and signs of the changing times:
-The Museum of Anthropology's "Multiversity Gallery" designed in collabora­
tion with First Nations and its digital Reciprocal Research Network linking British
Columbia tribal museums with collections in Ottawa, Washington, Oxford, Cam­
bridge, and more.
-The new Arctic Studies Center in Anchorage, purpose built for circulating collec­
tions from the Smithsonian to Alaska, and for facilitating Native, hands-on access
to their heritage.
-I'll just mention two other digital archives, collaborative in design and sensitive
to Native protocols: Ruth Phillips' Great Lakes Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal
Arts and Cultures, and an experimental alliance between The Cambridge Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Zuni A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heri­
tage Center.
-The Native-run Alutiiq Museum on Kodiak Island, Alaska, and the Chateau Mu-
404 THE TIMES OF THE CURATOR &

see, in provincial France, have been working closely together to return on loan,
iconic masks from Alutiiq heritage, not seen since the 1870s. Two "marginal" muse­
ums bypass the national cultural institutions (Smithsonian, Quai Branly) to create
their own reciprocal network, an alter-globalization from below.
-And lest we think that the insides and outsides of identity are clear, that every­
one agrees on just who they are, or that collaborative curating is somehow simply
a matter of respect and reciprocity, we'll always have Paul Chaat-Smith to keep us
honest-reminding us (with humorous and mordant irony, never cynicism) of the
pitfalls, the mistakes, and misunderstandings, the ways that cultural authority is
shored up and contested in the non-innocent contact zones of inter-tribal life today.
"Curating" -as cultural performance and heritage management, emerges as a newly
complicated and relational task. What do we value and hold on to, what do we let
go? What stories can be told? To whom? When? Which relations do we nourish?
Curating involves complex negotiations, performances, and translations in given
fields offorce: historical, economic, political. . .
I won't try to provide anything like a map or overview of these terrains of
struggle and synergy. Things are too volatile and diverse for that. One thing, at least,
is clear: the 1 9th century museum chronotope of finality and centrality has been
displaced, leaving us the discrepant, difficult, exciting times of the curator.

Consulting Bibliography

Bennett, Tony. 1 995. The Birth of the Museum. New York, NY: Routledge.
Clifford, James. 1 988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clifford, James. 1 997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Corrin, Lisa (ed). 1 994. Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson. New York, NY: The New
Press.
D uncan, Carol. 1 995. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. New York, NY: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press.
Karp, Ivan and Steven Lavine (eds). 1 99 1 . Exhibiting Cultures. Washington DC: Smithsonian.
Roberts, Mary Nooter and Susan Vogel. 1 994. Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art. New York,
NY: The Museum for African Art.
Srinivasan, Ramesh, et.al. 20 1 0 . "Diverse Knowledges and Contact Zones within the Digital Mu­
seum;' i n Science, Technology and Human Values. Vol. 35, No. 5: September: 735-768.
Smith, Paul Chaat. 2009. Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong. Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
Thompson, Robert Farris. 1 993. Face of the Gods: A rt and Altars ofAfrica and the African Americas.
New York, NY: The Museum for African Art.