Georges Rouault’s book arrived in the mail yesterday. I found it at my door upon my return from a funeral mass for one of the city’s much loved clowns, a seafair clown. Everyone at the mass wore this green button. I was still wearing it when I turned the book over and found Rouault’s clown.

Is the museum an accessible storage room for old curiosities? Is it a set of educational toys spaced evenly down long halls with which to simultaneously teach kids and get them tired with all the walking? Ought it be a mall of fun for dates and dull days? Do they exist solely for the cultured elite and the faithful? Are museums part of a grand project? What role does the museum play in mediating self-understanding? What are the questions that people ask about museums?

In a lecture at the ROM, Adam Gopnik outlined the three phases in the history of the modern museum that helped me form some of these questions. His three phases are:

1. The museum as mausoleum – a place where objects with certain associated rituals or meanings are positioned in an accessible space for new aesthetic encounters with the past.
2. The museum as machine – a tool for the education and the enrichment of human understanding.
3. Two potentialities:
   1. the museum as mall – where the smell of the restaurant travels down the halls; where museums in form and content appeal to our baser tastes or where one school of thought dominates the selection of works.
   2. the mindful museum – a place that has a sense of itself, where the better elements of museum as mausoleum and machine are refined to an end of potential aesthetic unity and not a certain aesthetic unity. Practically speaking this means emphasizing (or balancing) chronology over themes, because themes mean someone is mediating one’s encounter of history where chronologies are easier for people to understand and open up people to their own potential interpretations. It also means realizing the diversity rather than unity of social functions that the museum serves, for some it is a place to go on a date, for another it may be a place for meditative instruction on a subject.

Interspersed in his discussion on these three phases of the museum was some focus on the silence of museums. Although one can talk at a museum, prolonged conversation is unwelcomed socially and by the structure. Gopnik suspects that silence is major drawing point of the museum and that it may even have an erotic, mysterious quality to it.

Added to this was a discussion of the museum as a social metaphor – the museum and its parts are a representation of ourselves, presumably of our life together. Unto this idea of the museum as a social metaphor and as a location of silence among the signifiers to our collective memory, I start to wonder what a massive gathering of individuals to the museum would add. I’ve experienced the alarming numbers that roam single-mindedly down the winding halls of the Vatican museum toward the Sistine Chapel. It was brutal and oppressive. A ritual akin to that inhumanely filing cattle through chutes and on to trucks.

Considering that the objects in a museum were previously part of some work place or social ritual, or that the works of art in a gallery were an expression born of a particular context, ought not the new context of these artifices also be rituals bearing new memories and meanings? To some degree this is done – exhibition openings, lectures at museums, field trips in primary school – but these are the rituals of the few and generally not considered rituals. To borrow a comparison from Gopnik, museums are our cathedrals. As our cathedrals, they impose their belonging to all of us and not the few.

On the comparison of cathedrals to museums, the comparison is instructive. A cathedral is a place for national ceremony, such as coronations and funerals, but on the more local level, of say a church, the rituals that remain, maintaining the place of that institution in society, are christenings, weddings, and funerals. Rituals of naming.

Can the museum be a place of naming? A place where we come to know – standing against history, our short life juxtaposed with the era or deep time, who we are? A place poised on the silence of great halls, that by the objects of memory seduces our thirst for knowledge, desire for higher aesthetic pleasures, our confessions, and our struggle for certainty. That to me would be the mindful museum, the museum that truly is a social metaphor.

Two practical suggestions unto this end, and in the exploration of an end, include:

1. Figure computer mediated relationships into the equation that defines a museum. Cyberspace, as an actively computer mediated domain of human interaction, is on the whole disembodied. Museums, as a silent reflection of human interactions, is embodied in bricks and mortar. Projects such as … are a way to back up the sovereignty of the museum to the benefit of as many as possible in their own or collective quests for self-understanding. It is a way to step out of the noisy divide of cyberspace and meatspace into the silent message of it all that through the museum can resonate the present image of the person in our world.
2. Pursue museum literacy. This can be facilitated by fostering and experimenting with different rituals that through the objects, silence, and spaces extant in the museum could invoke new meaning.

These are not the words of a widow turned pacifist. Her lament will have war. And look who’s pronouns got the capitals in her letter.

Has Europe come to terms with the First World War? Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker argue that they have not. My observations of Italy in a recent trip confirm to me their thesis.

Over a period of ten days I did not come across one World War Two memorial, but many for the victims of World War One. I say victims, because the men depicted (many of the memorials have stylized B/W photos on them) are clean and beautiful often in close proximity to an image of a clean and beautiful, self-sacrificing Christ.

Concerning these heroes of the monuments, Audoin-Rouzeaus and Becker write:

The foundation of this myth according for Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker is in a denial of the hatred and violence, less engineered by the powers that be in any society, but that came from below – from those who sit now sanitized on monuments.

Why did men not stop fighting when their fellow combatants, often the men fighting right next to them would be physically torn apart by the enemy’s weapons into unidentifiable pieces of flesh or when the teeth and broken bones of their neighbours were the common debris to be dug out from their own flesh?

Stories of fraternizing with the enemy, exchanging gifts and playing soccer gained curious readings today that glosses over the barbarity of the common soldier, transfering blame up the chain of command when those soccer games obscures a picture of the whole – suggestings that combatants were victims wanting to play football and not “to get good at beating Germans” as Rupert Brooke put it, a combatant who found a sense of purpose in the war.

- Blaise Cendrars, a combatant in WW1.

All this puts a new spin for me on that classic Great War poster. What are you really thinking there, daddy?