Artefacts, objects, and things - Re-authoring in California

My trip to California did not just involve falling into Claude paintings, I was also being serious and sensible at a workshop at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. This was the first in a pair of events linked to the 'Things' seminars which I run in Cambridge, in which we collaborated with the Material Cultures of Knowledge group at UCR. It was a stimulating four days, mixing papers and discussion sessions with more hands-on experiences of extra-illustrated books and on a tour of the (aptly named and beautifully staged) Brilliant Science exhibition.

One of the words that struck me during these sessions was 're-authoring', taken from the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas' book Entangled Objects. He uses it to discuss the ways in which colonial object exchange between European and Pacific societies involved an appropriation and re-allocation of meaning to each culture's material objects by the other. It might usefully be expanded, I think, to all objects within museum and gallery collections. The idea is often discussed that museum objects have been 'frozen' in the process of removing them from circulation, from the context in which they have meaning, but we might think of this as a process of 're-authoring.' Objects' meanings are gathered and re-articulated in a museum by a new set of curatorial 'authors.'

The Californian context made this seem particularly apt to me. The Huntington complex houses spectacular botanical gardens and a world class art collection as well as a library. Wandering around, we stood in rooms furnished with 18th century furniture as perfect as any National Trust house; I stopped and smiled at Gainsborough's Blue Boy and Reynolds' Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse like old friends. But, both I and my companion pondered, is it odd that these North American museums are filled with so much canonical European art? Why travel half way round the world to see something which has made that same journey? Perhaps because of that journey, because of the different meanings which we bring to, say, a Turner landscape, after experiencing the utter awesomeness (in the traditional sense of the word) of Yosemite National Park. This art has been 're-authored' by its new context and both it, and we, are the richer for this.