The whole picture : the colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it Alice Procter
We’ve been led to believe that museums are temples of knowledge. The historical ideal of the European museum has been to improve us morally by educating us about the globe’s myriad different cultures, creative practices, and belief systems. We’re taught that museum spaces are neutral: that they represent the world from an ‘objective’ point of view. But we have been lied to. As art historian Alice Procter shows in this incisive book, Western museums fall devastatingly far from this ideal. They do not merely represent the harms done by colonialist forces; they perpetuate them. Across the world collectives, curators, artists and activists are confronting colonial legacies, white supremacy, racism, unethical sponsorships of these public institutions. Museums remain part of the colonial machinery, facilitating a certain way of looking in the same way they facilitated colonial plunder and theft. The repatriation debates in particular show how power is guarded by institutions and gatekeepers. Since 2017, art historian Alice Procter began taking groups of people on what she called “Uncomfortable Art Tours.” These unofficial tours of British art museums and galleries discuss where items came from and focus on matters often left out of museum labels. That experience led to this book. Procter’s text, with its focus on the colonial history of art, is even more timely now, given the renewed Black Lives Matter protests. One section of the text is dedicated to statues and monuments commemorating racist and/or colonialist figures. Overall, the book reveals many of the hidden histories of museum objects and guides us to think more carefully about them. Typical museum displays use impersonal and abstract language, language which conveniently helps discourage both critical thinking and a personal connection with the object.
“The questions are finally being asked: who has the right to hold objects, and to tell their stories?”
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