Sustaining place and community through the felt lives of objects: vibrant materialism in small cultural institutions

The slides for the powerpoint presentation Tamsin gave at the conference can be found here

The poet Rumi says everything drawn from its source longs to go back. How might we reanimate objects using their source? Their place of making, of association, of use, of collection, and of desire offers the object both a material and cultural sense of identity. Objects need more than the keeping places of museums or galleries to become animate, engaging, and vibrant. They need to be returned to their places of origin, the places in which they lived their active lives, so as to both engage and become engaged. Perhaps they travel an object trail returning to nearby small museums, perhaps they visit local festivals reconnecting with community, perhaps they are remade and recreated by descendents of the original makers, like the possum skin cloaks of southern Australia found in the National Museum. Or perhaps they live on in their original place, still in use, like the revived school desks full of student graffiti that Nest architects have built into a new canteen. Or perhaps the making of new objects invokes old memories and rituals: like the lake firings of cone shaped kilns over the waters of Lake Cootharaba that have become part of the environmental art festival of Floating Land; or the former Cobb&Co trading route in southwest New South Wales that brings together artists, museums, heritage and landscape with sculptures and artworks; or Murray Arts, who select an object and re-engage it and the community through making a three minute video. In all these cases, the object needs more than story; it needs place.

Even precious or too fragile objects can link back to their geographic communities. The NSW art gallery makes a virtual space available with records of every object so that everyone can become a curator, developing their own exhibitions. The Goolarabooloo and Lurujarri Heritage Trail, although remote for most people, has a very active social networking site on Facebook, linking it to the community’s political concerns over development along its Kimberley Coast. We have the online technology to make objects accessible through a virtual process that also begins to enliven them. Books too continue to serve this purpose. Catalogues and reviews from exhibitions such as the Indigenous art history of the Canning Stock Route bring objects to wider audiences and tell their place stories in other spaces.

However, if objects were our children, we wouldn’t keep them locked up. We might physically take them home, repatriate them, as John Danalis does with an Indigenous skull in his book, Riding the Black Cockatoo. We might use all our senses to enliven objects’ materiality; signs would read “Please DO Touch” as we tickle stone, wood, metal, paper, clay into the living world (meanwhile our skin teaches us a visceral bodily connection to these materials). We would certainly borrow from collective ceremony to celebrate the place of things, to dress ourselves up using objects from the regional wardrobe. We would take objects on outings, to festivals and rituals, to travelling exhibitions, local shrines, and ecoregional keeping places. Rather than dead objects lying upon dusty shelves, we would see them as critical components in the animate matter that makes up our place in this world.

There is a public good in small museums and galleries that cannot be justified in economic terms. Having large audiences or visitors is not their aim, and should not be the measuring stick used to determine their (so-called) sustainability. Rather they are the cultural keeping places of our creative imagination that unite story, object, and place to keep all three alive within a thick hearsay of past, present, and future. Three reasons why small cultural institutions, already intrinsically connected with the micro-place of memories, are sustainable:

1. Objects are local to place, rather than removed and distant, and local knowledge strengthens their vibrancy.

2. Small museums, galleries, and heritage trails can piggyback onto local festivals and community concerns to increase engagement and maintain relevancy.

3. Small museums and community businesses are careful of resources: they live in the local, reduce, reuse, recycle, mend and make-do, scrimp and save.

Sustainability’s next challenge lies in demonstrating the vibrancy of matter. A material object has its own animate voice: ‘itstory’. Feminism may have suggested herstory rather than history; now, vibrant materialism foregrounds ‘itstory’. How museums listen, interpret, and tell ‘itstory’ will determine not only their sustainability, but the sustainability for us all. This is what the small cultural institution and its country might teach us: to live with the other nations of this place – those of stone, wood, metal, clay, of land and water, of animal and plant. To see the vibrancy of matter, the agency of landscape. To live a little more reconciled to a non-human time and place, to see our participation in this more-than-human world as contribution rather than competition. To value the cultural richness of the world without aspiring to more narrow human wealth. To be still enough to listen to the many vibrant stories found in the materiality of objects.

In animating things, we animate our world. We might transform the deadweight consumption of too much stuff to a love and respect for objects by imagining the lightness of vibrant matter in its place. Many authors are now discussing the idea of vibrant materialism as a way to re-engage with the environment as well as a way to pay respect to non-human things. Vibrant materialism recognises non-human agency, embeds us in active place, and connects us to this more-than-human world. If we understand that emotions and life resides in all the ecology of this earth, then we reconnect with the world as embedded participants. We become woven into our ecology of water and weeds, stones and stories.

We connect to this non-human through creativity and imagination. Not only might we imagine the separate lives of objects, but we might also ask how they talk among themselves. Paddy Roe, a highly respected Indigenous elder and law man from the Kimberleys, powerfully inhabited this notion of vibrant matter. In a 1990 pamphlet image (uncovered in September 2010 by the Goolarabooloo and Lurujarri Heritage Trail) Paddy Roe holds his traditional shield and his Order of Australia. His words under the photo say: “This is my gulbinna (shield). The Government gave me this medal. This gulbinna is asking this medal - 'you going to break up this country or keep it the same since Bugarre garre (dreamtime)??” Professor Stephen Muecke worked closely with Paddy Roe in the 1980s and wrote Roe’s stories down in Gularabulu; Deborah Vincent is the Trail’s online administrator. On the Facebook site, they comment on Roe’s strong understanding of how conversations between objects contribute to long term sustainability:

Stephen Muecke: That's fantastic, I love the idea that he has these two objects talking to each other! I never saw that before, thanks.

Stephen Muecke: and that the medal is much smaller!

Goolarabooloo and Lurujarri Heritage Trail: Steve, so amazing, not just that he had these two objects talking to each other, but that he can still speak to us, all these years later, clear as a clapstick. A neighbour of Ron's threw the old pamphlet out and Ron saw it and picked it up. My hair stood on end when he told me how he got it and then I read the words Lulu is saying again - so timely and pertinent.

Here is an animating question for all small cultural institutions: How do your objects converse and with who or what? While curators often ask how to make objects tell a story, this extension - asking how disparate objects might talk to and inform each other - further engages us in their vital non-human world.

Objects hold an important collaborative ceremonial place expanding collective memory beyond our short human lifetimes. In embracing the lives of objects, we tell their story and link to their place, stepping outside our purely human concerns for at least a moment. Cultural objects offer us a path to a more sustainable way of being in our environment; objects speak of an animated land and a vibrant materialism. May we always have room for them.