THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF MEMORY ACTIVISM Edited by Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wiistenberg With Irit Dekel, Kaitlin M. Murphy, Benjamin Nienass, Joanna Wawrzyniak, and Kerry Whigham | Routledge 3 Taylor Franc Group ‘Bean Bilis Libre Arkansas State UniversityCover image: In the wake of the 2017 earthquakes in Mexico, memory activists paint a ‘message in protest against the Mexico City Government's imposition of a memorial, demanding the prioritization of reconstruction, disaster preparedness, and a transparent and democratic process for memory processes. Photograph: Sergio Beltrin Garcia. First published 2023, by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wiistenberg; individual chapters, the contributors ‘The right of Yifit Gutman and Jenny Wiistenberg to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapters 1 and 47, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapters 1 and 47 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataleguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publiation Data Names: Gutman, Yifit, 1977-editor. | Wiistenberg, Jenny, editor. | Dekel, Init, editor. | Murphy, Kaitlin M., editor. | Nienais, Benjamin, editor. | Wawrzyniak, Joanna, 1975-editor. | Whigham, Kerry, editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of memory activism / edited by Yifat Gutman and Jenny ‘Wiistenberg ; with Irit Dekel, Kaitlin Murphy, Benjamin Nienass, Joanna Wawrzyniak and Kerry Whigham. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: The Routledge history handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022012564 (print) | LECN 2022012565 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367650391 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367650414 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003127550 (ebook) | ISBN 9781000646177 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781000646290 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Collective memory. | Memory--Social aspects. | Social movements. Classification: LCC HM1033 .R679 2023 (print) | LCC HM1033 (ebook) | DDC 303.48/4--de23/eng/20220509 LC record available at https://Iccn.loc.gov/2022012564 LC ebook record available at https://Iccn.loc.gov/2022012565 ISBN: 978-0-367-65039-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-65041-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12755-0 (ebk) DOK: 10.4324/9781003127550 Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun60 MUSEUMS AND “CURATORIAL ACTIVISM” Erica Lehrer Twoje muzeum ny i bs Figure 60.1 “Shedding Light on the Museum,” a time-based, critical projection on the facade of the Seweryn Uddzicla Ethnographic Museum. Curators: Erica Lehrer and Magda Rubenfeld Koralewska, Krak6w, Poland, December 2019, Photo: Klaudyna Schubert Museums are fundamentally institutions of memory. In both physical and intangible terms, they collect, preserve, classify, and form a social space to perform for the public some version of what ~ on their widely accepted authority — is considered “our/their heritage,” whether historical, cultural, artistic, natural, or otherwise. Museums established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have thus been highly successful tools for nation-building, or what might be DOI: 0.4324/9781003127550-72 373Erica Lehrer viewed as hegemonic memory activism. Subaltern communities have historically lacked access to these elite institutions’ approaches to knowledge production. In recent decades, linked to broader struggles for human rights, decolonization, democracy, civil rights, and feminism, establishment museums have been increasingly called to account for and redress their deep implication in power-knowledge systems underpinning global inequality, violence, and exclusion that have privileged white, Christian Europe and exoticized and deni- grated the rest of humanity. Museums have been condemned as tools of imperialism and colo- nialism, as strongholds of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia, and accused of both elitism and commercialism. To many Indigenous peoples in particular, Western-style museums are associated with cultural repression, social erasure, loss of heritage, and cultural genocide. The legacies of these museum structures, practices, and values endure in everything from the content of current exhibitions to accessibility, museum governance, architecture, donor funding, and more. Critical museology The development of a “critical” museology (distinguished from the more traditional, “operational” practice (Shelton, 2013)), which accompanied the more general postmodernist and post-colonial turns in the academy, is a crucial part of the context in which curatorial activism — or the attempt to use (and at times amend) museums’ own tools to critically interrogate and re-form them — has found fertile ground.’ The field launched debate about the role of museums in society, brought ideas about power and the political into scholarly discussions about museums, and pushed for new theoretical approaches to the study of material culture, criticizing museums’ isolation from important critical cultural theory that had developed since the 1960s in the academy. This work has reflected on institutional authority, collecting practice, and display style (Clifford, 1988; Pearce, 1989; Vergo, 1989; Shelton, 1990; Karp and Lavine, 1991; Ames, 1992; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998; Bennett, 2004; Duncan, 1995; Welsh, 2005; Karp et al., 2006; Gable, 2008; Butler, 2015), while discussions about “museums and communities” testify to awareness of the need for community consultation, sharing authority, broad public relevance, engagement, and accessibility (Karp et al., 1992; ‘Watson, 2007; Rassool et al., 2008; Murray and Witz, 2014). Further attention has been paid to the agency of visitors in museum critique (Lindauer, 2005; Gable, 2008). If memory activism is “the strategic commemoration of a contested past outside state channels to influence public debate and policy,” then museums have been an increasingly important site of such activism in recent decades, with a range of actors reclaiming and activating elided historical and social memory in the museum (Gutman, 2017, pp. 1-2). Alongside critique in traditional discursive forms like scholarship and policy debates — which remains crucial, especially to recent successes around the core issue of object restitution (Cassan, 2019) — a range of creative, embodied practices have emerged in and in relation to museums. Functioning in tandem and in dialogue with discourse, such curatorial activism constitutes an important diversification of the pathways for museum critique, and has vastly increased, enhanced, and sped the process of the discussion itself. Many individuals and groups use these institutions in creative ways — thinking and acting through, rather than only against, the museum, and thereby both tapping into and appropriating its particular “cur- atorial” power, authority, and legitimacy. This more visible and visceral set of critical tools has helped expand both the language of and the expectations for transformation, chipping away at these vaunted institutions’ elitism, authority, and impermeability, and broadening their memorial capacities. 374Museums and “Curatorial Activism” Direct protest Museums have been implicated in social movements and political action in multiple ways, as both sites and sources of protest, some of which use the museum not so much as a methodology (ie., through curating) but as a platform and a symbol. Kylie Message (2014) has explored the relationship of protest demonstrations on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to shifts in curatorial activities and priorities in US National Museums during the 1960s and 1970s. And as Kirsty Robertson describes, museums’ own proliferation and heightened visibility (due to their “starchitecture”-driven transformations of entire cityscapes) have increased these institutions’ utility as targets for activism, especially for leftist anti-globalist activists who use them as touchstones for much larger sets of issues and social movements (Robertson, 2019). Direct action protests by groups such as Occupy Museums and Decolonize This Place have begun gathering in and around major museums in New York City and beyond to open pre- viously taboo conversations regarding the economic realities of the art market, addressing local issues such as workers’ rights, staff racial diversity and inclusion, worker compensation, and the role of museums in gentrification. They also use museums as platforms for disruptive actions that point to the intersections of multiple global struggles for the rights of migrants and Indigenous, Black, and Palestinian peoples; one of their recent achievements was forcing Whitney Museum board member Warren Kanders to resign due to his business manufacturing tear gas used against asylum-seekers at the US southern border (Pogrebin and Harris, 2019). The most recent wave and style of activism catalyzed by the Black Lives Matter movement {and particularly major museums’ pro-BLM statements in response to the murder of George Floyd in May 2020) has increased attention to and pressure on museums to give evidence of meaningful structural change instead of simply declaring solidarity. Online groups such as @ChangeTheMuseum and @CMHRstoplying (referring to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights) have been using social media to amplify stories of racism within museums and demand that museums take meaningfil action to address them. They have engaged with museums’ pasts and presents to work towards different futures. \ Calling out and moving in In a parallel, but often quieter fashion, the evolving post-World War II discourse of human rights and the subsequent wave of decolonization has slowly empowered members of “source communities” to engage critically with museums from a standpoint of growing moral authority. These often Indigenous people have called institutions both to account for and correct the unjust use of their objects and misrepresentation of their cultures ~ a kind of memory distortion and manipulation — and have begun work to reshape museums to reflect the needs and interests of their own communities. This “dialogic paradigm” (Phillips, 2011) developing since the early 1990s, particularly in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, has emerged out of long-term negotiations between museums and communities and paved the way for such communities to redefine the nature and purpose of museums — to “Indigenize” them and make them their own, or at least to mitigate their harm (Igloliorte and Taunton, 2023). There have been highly visible, watershed moments in this process. They include the Lubicon Cree protest in response to both the display of sacred objects in and Shell Oil’s sponsorship of the exhibit The Spirit Sings at Calgary's Glenbow museum during the Olympic Games in 1988, and the major Black Canadian community upheaval sparked by the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto's 1989 show Into the Heart of Africa (Butler, 2007). The latter exhibit was itself a misguided attempt by a curator to design an ironically self-critical show 375Erica Lehrer about “the” Canadian experience of empire, which largely overlooked Black perspectives. Such activism has helped lead to incremental improvements in the domain of object restitution, culturally-appropriate preservation, storage, and display. The massive social protests of 2020 have made clear that museums must take immediate action to broaden the circle of minority groups and representatives that are socially sanctioned to criticize establishment institutions and expect to receive a respectful and engaged response. For museums to more fully expand their mnemonic capacities, activists call on them to address the unwelcoming workplace environments experienced by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and LGBTQ+ individuals not only via cosmetic changes to their hiring and governance practices but by more a fundamental redistribution of their power among these communities (Heller, 2017; Maranda, 2017; McCambridge, 2017; D'Souza, 2018; Message, 2018; Pogrebin, 2017, 2018; Canadian Museum for Human Rights, 2020; Perla, 2020; Haigney, 2020; O'Neill, 2020). An important, parallel process has been the development of community museums (e.g. Washington, DC’s Anacostia Neighborhood Museum est. 1967; the New York Chinatown History Project est. 1980, and Cape Town’s District Six Museum est. 1994), and memorial museums (see Sodaro this volume), including civil and human rights museums like Holocaust and other genocide history museums and a range of global “site museums of conscience” established soon after World War II in Europe and Asia, and beginning in the 1990s in the United States (Wei Tchen, 1992; Rassool, 2006a; Williams, 2007; Sodaro, 2018). More re- cently, major national museums on specific Indigenous and minority experiences and memories have been established (or retrofitted), including Te Papa in New Zealand, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, both in Washington, DC. Still, major institutions that have opened as national gov- ernmental initiatives may represent the final outcomes of decades of grassroots activism. Artists’ interventions: Institutional critique and beyond Artists have developed an esthetic approach to museum criticism that employs their own creative tools in unique ways.” A range of arts practitioners from a variety of communities and traditions has enacted a distinct genre of practice that has sought to strengthen the critical potential of museums by drawing attention to excluded histories and racist and colonialist structures of thought and feeling embedded in these institutions. From unexpected interven- tions in the museum's space to participatory, socially engaged projects, artists have used the museum's structure, framework, and language to make visible — and create cracks in ~ these institutions’ longstanding exclusions, misrepresentations, and the overall “deceit” (Duncan, 1995) by which they claim a mantle of universalism while being deeply partial and political. “Institutional critique” has a long history among avant-garde artists. It stretches from Dada artist Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 submission of a signed urinal in the inaugural exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists in New York, to Andrea Fraser’s late 1980s performances of “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk” (Fraser, 2005) at multiple East coast museums, where she played a docent leading an ironic tour that drew visitors’ attention to the buildings’ toilets, cloakroom, and shop, as well as their own implication in the museum's value-creating inffa- structure, to the Guerrilla Girls’ 30-plus years of employing advertising strategies to deliver sta- tistics and biting humor to expose the lack of gender and ethnic diversity in the art world (Guerrilla Girls, 2020). In September 2020, the activist group Artists for Workers, which uses design skills to “hack” institutions that refuse to support their workers and communities, projected massive slogans on the Guggenheim museum in New York, including “Fair Contract,” “Seeking New Management,” “Open for Racism” (Bishara, 2020). 376Museums and “Curatorial Activism” But a broader critique, undertaken by Indigenous and African-American artists, has spread beyond institutions of avant-garde art, to history, natural history, and anthropology museums. Their “interventions” use curatorial and interpretive display techniques to pose fundamental questions about the very idea of “the museum” and its implication in constructing Eurocentric and white supremacist understandings of race, nation, culture, and history, as well as training visitors into these “ways of seeing” (Alpers, 1990). Such racialized artists have faced not only marginalization by the art world, but erasure from national heritage and even humanity, as their communities often appear in museums alongside birds and dinosaur bones, or nowhere at all. In mnemonic terms, we might say that artists’ critical practice in relation to museums has worked to disrupt accepted environments of memory; remind the public about museums’ problematic histories, including what museums hold in their collections; make space to evoke marginalized, difficult memories and the emotions, including Indigenous people's “unresolved grief” (Lonetree, 2012); and create new, embodied memories for visitors, which may help revise their understandings of their own and other communities. James Luna’s 1987 Artifact Piece was a watershed intervention for Indigenous people be- ginning to articulate their concerns about their lack of agency in how museums represented their cultures (Gonzalez, 2008, pp. 37-42). First staged at the San Diego Museum of Man in 1987, Luna lay unmoving, almost naked, for hours in a museum display case, with personal artifacts in display in nearby glass (including his car keys, Motown record collection, and di- vorce papers) disrupting the common approach that curated Native Americans as frozen in a timeless past. Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s 1992-1993 Couple in the Cage (1995) was a performance marking the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival to the Americas. The artists presented themselves as previously undiscovered “Amerindians” from a fictional country, while they spoke a made-up language and performed exotic rituals in a range of spaces including the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC, and the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. The work drew attention to the forgotten history of the human zoo, and the perpetuation by many museums of this form’s basic premise, with white audiences admiring exotic foreign cultures. African-American artist Fred Wilson’s now-classic 1992 Mining the Museum (Globus, 2011; Stein, 1993) at the Baltimore Historical Society put the idea of “museum intervention” as a creative form on the map in a mainstream way. Framed by an ingenious three-way metaphor- ization of the word “mine” — to excavate, to plant explosives, and to make one’s own — Wilson worked with the museum's collection, and used its own language of display, to tell hidden and often distressing stories about African-American experience. He re-designated what counted as worthy of display, shifting visitors’ gazes to the figures on the margins of classical artworks, jux- taposing objects under a single banner — like delicate silver repousse vessels surrounding wrought- iron slave shackles as two kinds of 1793-1890 metalwork whose existence depended on each other, or turning hand-crafted wooden period chairs to face a whipping post as types of 1820-1860 cabinetmaking — to point to painful pasts and unearth utterly new, provocative meanings. Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’s 2007 Pedal to the Meddle, used a tricksterish perfor- mative approach to animate the museum space with the contemporaneity of Indigenous people, flipping a historical cedar canoe from the collection onto the roof of a repainted Pontiac Firefly in the rotunda of Vancouver's Museum of Anthropology, and at the opening forgoing the traditional wine and cheese to instead serve refreshments off the back of the pickup truck with live music in a tailgate-style party, like they do at home in Haida Gwai, outside on the museum's grounds (Levell, 2013). The gesture simultaneously suggested Indigenous peoples’ cultural persistence, that they might like to come take their things back, and that they also know how to have a good time. 377