People are people
Lighting up the plinth in 2009
A number of discussions and events recently have started me thinking about people as objects. Essentially, in museums, we try to put people in the past on display through the objects that they used and made. We also commemorate important, and unimportant, figures in portraits and display these as representations of people in the past. A contemporary issue for museums is likewise over the retention and display of human remains. While these can be invaluable for showing past attitudes to the body, they are also the remains of real people and therefore carry a wealth of cultural, religious and political complexity.
But, what of living people? How do we collect contemporary life and practice in museums, make people aware of the contemporary life and practice of museums, and how do we put either of these on display? The Natural History Museum’s Darwin Centre is one answer. They have attempted to put their practice as scientists within the museum on display to the public, by creating the cocoon from which visitors can watch staff at work. The idea is to see the staff in their ‘natural habitat’ just like the displays and interpretation of specimens. The problem is, of course, that this puts pressure on staff to ‘perform’ whether merely through being aware of an audience while they work, or through the more controlled interaction with visitors in the miked working area. The British Museum tried a similar experiment with its ‘Conservation in Focus’ display in 2008 (interestingly in a room dedicated to objects in focus), when it put members of the conservation team on display working on objects. This put the staff in a more obviously performative environment, but for a short concentrated period of time.
An analogous, and hugely popular, example in the art world has been Anthony Gormley’s One and Other project for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2009. This allowed 2,400 people to each spend an hour on the plinth for 100 days. The Wellcome Trust also conducted an oral history project around the participants. I was lucky enough to take part, and you can see me as an object on a plinth above. Gormley’s work revolves almost exclusively around his own body as an object, so this was a new departure for him in putting other people’s bodies on display as art, and under their own control. The idea to create a portrait of the nation on the Plinth, and also insert an observer of the nation as it flows through Trafalgar Square was an interesting one. But, I felt this again ran into the problem of performance. As I understood it, Gormley’s idea was that participants would just ‘be themselves’ on the Plinth for an hour, but it rapidly became a space for performance, from which people protested, sang, taught dance classes, painted, preached and so on. I once heard an observer of someone who was ‘just’ sitting on the Plinth tell them to ‘Get on and do something.’ So, Gormley essentially created a stage.
This, I think, is the problem with displaying living people as objects in museums, that we are expecting them to perform. But then we also expect our objects to perform do we not?