A ‘No Manifesto’ for Cultural Interpretation with Care
The CARE SYLLABUS co-directors present this essay, still in progress, in a spirit of inquiry that seeks the joyous and transformative connections that arise for our institutions when care and critique are foregrounded together. We offer special thanks to the conveners and audiences at the “Institutions and the Crisis of Care” panel at CAA’s 2021 conference, as well as the University of York’s 2021 “Forms of Care” Symposium, who have given us generative feedback.
March 2022.
Over the past few years, many of us who work with museums have commiserated about the hypocritical actions of our most venerated institutions, feeling caught in the clash between the values that museums espouse on their walls and museums’ failure to embody or translate those values in even the most immediate of contexts: like fair treatment of museum staff, and basic care for local communities. Upon further reflection, we’d like to suggest that this condition is not adequately characterized as hypocrisy. It’s not that we take issue with the frustration and disapproval conveyed by this judgment — it’s rather that ‘hypocrisy’ steers us away from thinking about the ways that crises of interpretation have helped found, and help perpetuate, these current predicaments. In other words, we’re interested in the notion that calling museums hypocritical lets their “good values” go unchecked and lets their interpretive philosophies off the hook.
Rather than framing the gap between a museum’s professed values and actual practices as empty virtue signaling — confirming, without complication, a handful of ready-made understandings about our art institutions as fundamentally market-driven entities and/or austerity-stricken shells of their former glory and/or culture wars casualties further hindered by the generational clashes within their walls — what if we were to problematize the professed values, and more specifically, the interpretive orientations that produce them, as a major crux of the problem? What if we saw museum interpretation as establishing, rather than a gap, a crucial through-line of defensive posturing that works in utterly complementary ways across, within, and beyond the institution to shut down, rather than open up, the things and people for which museums promise to care?
There are specific interpretive failures that we are targeting here: failures to prioritize the development of a language for engaging art that seeks connections between the interrelated civic, economic, and formal meanings of representation; failures to make space for the messiness and contingency in the act of interpretation itself; and most of all, a failure to narrate, and sit with, histories of institutional failure.
To join others in challenging these patterns, we’re taking inspiration from artist Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto (1965) — which shook up the definitional contours and social uses of dance; which used gestures of refusal to inspire a different paradigm for art’s uses and interpretations; and which, decades after being canonized, was annotated by Rainer, underscoring how our firmest and boldest claims are also subject to revision. We’re used to thinking of the nay-sayer as the pessimist, but there are rich traditions of refusal as an optimistic form, of what Jan Verwoert, in his essay on the “I Can’t,” calls “existential exuberance” (See Verwoert’s essay, “Exhuastion and Exuberance”, p. 94). Saying no, for Verwoert, can be
“a way of always giving too much of what is not presently requested. It is a way of giving what you do not have to others who may not want it. It is a way of transcending your capacities by embracing your incapacities and therefore a way to interrupt the brute assertiveness of the I Can through the performance of an I Can’t performed in the key of the I Can. It is a way of insisting that, even if we can’t get it now, we can get it, in some other way at some other point in time.”
We need to practice saying no to our current interpretive paradigms because they are so pervasive, and because saying no — especially in the context of an understaffed museum, especially to an advisor or a stakeholder which hasn’t respected our boundaries because they feel that their own boundaries have been disrespected— feels more like a dream than a reality. But let’s dream, and insist, that it can and will be different. Let’s build a richer understanding of what we can do through the power of the I Can’t. And with that, here is
a “No Manifesto” for cultural interpretation with care.
Note to Reader: Please Revise.
No to “best practices.”
At their best, best practices are doublespeak for the least that we can do. Think about the newly accepted best practices in museums to diversify collections and boards, to name histories of slavery and colonialism in wall labels, to expand access campaigns to communities that have been historically excluded, to grow DEAI initiatives that address representational and material imbalances, abuses of labor, and toxic cultures amongst their staff. These important initiatives are the least that’s required of cultural institutions in this moment. When they are presented in a heroic framing, as “righting of wrongs,” or “the filling of gaps,” what they do is locate violence in history, and redress in the present, effectively splitting history and the present from one another. Curator Ryan Rice offers one alternative to gap filling:
“I would argue that collections should represent the moment they realized their biases or shortfalls ... They should preserve these absences to demonstrate their active participation in periods of cultural rejection.” (See Rice’s recent conversation about decolonization with Janet Dees, p. 33).
We’d like to follow Rice, in foregrounding a model for museum change in which the histories of active participation in rejection actively shape the articulation and imagination of structural and cultural reforms going forward.
From a related perspective, best practices can be thought of as textbook examples of what Eve Sedgwick’s has called the “always historicize” fallacy: treating the past like a body of knowledge that can be studied to identify wrongdoings which can then be corrected (See Sedgwick’s essay on paranoid and reparative reading, p. 125). History doesn’t work on us this simply, and so dismantling and redressing structural oppressions should not be understood as merely or possibly “corrective” work.
No to omniscient perspective and objective institutional voice.
Expertise is powerful, and it becomes more powerful, more usable, and more meaningful, when it is firmly situated in the embodied experience, political and social commitments, and necessarily limited perspectives of the person or group that presents it. There is no such thing as objective or apolitical cultural interpretation, and certainly no such thing as an objective institutional voice. Maybe we can think of institutional voice generally as a set of disciplinary operations meant to make cultural interpreters into invisible narrators, meant to erase the tangible trace of perspective that makes artists and their art so important to us in the first place: as a means to experience, interrogate, and articulate our histories, our values, our sense of creativity, our sense of belonging, our sense of sense…
No to history without histories.
A singular history creates a present governed by the fallacies of omniscient perspective, objectivity, “righting of wrongs” and “filling of gaps.” A history that is built with care requires histories, plural, that are usable for different ends, by different people and different communities.
What if, following Sedgwick, we traced histories in order to “unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller.” These practices are a crucial, minoritarian ethic: a way for people to sustain themselves in “a culture whose avowed desire has been to not sustain them” (See Sedgwick, p. 124, pp. 150-51).
No to art without histories.
The histories of art and culture are not only histories of production, medium, materials, markets, receptions, institutions, and aesthetics; they are also histories of power asymmetries, expropriation, and theft; and funkier histories of counterpublics, of minor spaces, of unexpected connections, of sex and violence, of magic and madness, of dreaming and failure. Art plays an indispensable role in carrying through these beautiful histories of creativity.
No to representation as an end.
When discourses of representation, in the context of museum collections and cultural programming, do not address the disproportionate value given to museums as sources of recognition, they overestimate the value of adding more perspectives and more histories to any given docket. At stake here is:
1) the reproduction of the failed multicultural promises of a generation prior, in which every person finds their reflection within an unchanged institution (see Iman Issa’s recent conversation about decolonization with Renée Green, p. 59);
2) ‘symbolic’ representation in place of ‘material’ forms of representation; and, as a result, the continued misunderstanding and misuse of art as firmly on side of the ‘symbolic’;
3) the affirmation that the museum should remain an arbiter of meaningfulness because it has been in the past.
The current obsession with representation as a vehicle of care in museums might instead reflect a need to divest from the museum as a primary mediator of cultural value; to not confuse what means so much to the institution with anything but that.
No to the institution as an end.
In her 2020 treatise about transforming museums into more caring spaces, in which she explores how many Western museums are failing to reckon with the colonizing subjectivity that they were founded to protect, curator Yosumi Omulu writes about the limits of best practices and quick fixes. She asks us to embrace, instead, the
“decision to view our cultural institutions through a different lens — one that compels museums to relinquish their claims to a authority and objectivity, and to extend a hand of care to their publics as well artists and objects.”
Publics, artists, objects: three ends (which here, for us, are in their proper hierarchy) that are more important than the institution — that the institution might prioritize if it wishes to thrive. We want to amplify Umolo’s contention that one of our key tasks is
“commit[ing] to practices of knowing and care that critically interrogate the fraught history of museums and their contemporary form, uprooting weak foundations and rebuilding upon new, healthy ones.”
And we’d also like to offer a parallel strategy that involves reconceptualizing what’s currently happening in so many of these weak foundations: an incredible kind of flourishing within the cracks.
A beloved former colleague once gave the advice that, at museums, “the best work happens inside the cracks.” Though this might conjure a romantic image of a solitary someone planting a handful of seeds in some deteriorating old cement (and against the odds, making some flowers bloom), this colleague was pointing to the friendships between colleagues that blossom in the overlooked and less-surveilled spaces of the programming process. Developing friendships within the workplace that welcome critique, give oxygen to new ideas, and that are full of love for the work while maintaining a sense of humor about it make it possible to care more fully for a museum’s communities and its histories. The messiness and strength of friendships helps make more cracks — and leads us towards a welcome crumbling of some of the oldest and most intransigent of the museum’s unjust foundations. Friendship is among our most crucial forms of resistance to institutionalization in general, and to the museum’s institutionalization for its own sake.
We hope you’ll say with us:
No to “best practices.”
No to omniscient perspective and objective institutional voice.
No to history without histories.
No to art without histories.
No to representation as an end.
No to the institution as an end.