Southeast Asian Museums : On a Slow Path to Maturity
The museum in the Western sense was formulated in this region during the 18 th century, but because of social, political, and economic situations has not developed consistently. In the West, the definition of museums has gradually changed, moving from the post-museum (Hooper-Greenhill), to contact zone (James Clifford), and civic laboratories (Tony Bennett), each signaling a particular shift in how museums are imagined (Barrett 2011). These define the museum variously as a gathering place, a venue for collaborative action and interaction, and as a part of the community. Recently, there has been more focus and debate on the relationship between museums and the communities they serve. This kind of definition has not been coherently applied to museums in the Southeast Asian context. It is impossible to address the Southeast Asian museum as a whole, because each country in the region has a specific context and these are quasi-incomparable. In the prenation state, museums in this region were introduced and constructed according to the Western concept, whether by the colonial powers or through auto-colonization. From the colonial period to the present, museums in Southeast Asian have only slightly changed in each country according to their economic and socio-political contexts. This means that Southeast Asian Museums: On a Slow Path to Maturity
Orientalism and the Reality Effect: Angkor at the Universal Expositions, 1867–1937
During the period of the French protectorate of Cambodia, the Khmer temples of Angkor were prominently displayed at the French expositions of Paris and Marseille from 1867 to 1937. Survey and casting expeditions, which were part and parcel of material practices of colonial appropriation, fueled those three‐dimensional reconstructions. This essay investigates the visual strategies and material practices of Orientalism at play in these representations and, in particular, the crucial role of architectural plaster casts made on-site in the construction of the image of colonial Cambodia intended for Western audiences. While plaster casts were materially altered and assembled to create fantasized reconstructions of Khmer monuments, they were simultaneously used to authenticate them—by virtue of their alleged faithfulness to their original referent. This authentication process was emphasized from 1906 onward by performances of the royal troupe of Cambodian dancers, until the contradictions of the French civilizing mission broke through at the 1931 Exposition coloniale at Vincennes.
‘On the Formation of a National Museum of Architecture: the Architectural Museum versus the South Kensington Museum
Architectural casts collections — the great majority of which were created in the second half of the nineteenth or the early twentieth centuries — have in recent years met with a variety of fates. While that of the Metropolitan Museum in New York has been dismantled, that of the Musée des Monuments Français in Paris has with great difficulty been rearranged to suit current tastes. Notwithstanding this limited rediscovery of architectural cast collections, they remain part of a past era in the ongoing history of architectural museums. While drawings and models have always been standard media for the representation of architecture — whether or not ever built — architectural casts seem to have become the preferred medium for architectural displays in museums during a period beginning in 1850. Indeed, until the development of photography and the democratization of foreign travel, they were the only way of collecting architectural and sculptural elements while preserving their originals in situ. Admittedly, the three-dimensional experience of full-sized architecture in the form of casts, or even of actual fragments of architecture, played a considerable part in earlier, idiosyncratic attempts to display architecture in museums, indeed as early as the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it was only from the mid-nineteenth century that they became the preferred medium for displaying architecture. The cult of ornament reached its climax in the years 1850–70, embodied, in the field of architecture, in the famous ‘battle of styles’ and in the doctrine of ‘progressive eclecticism’, and, in the applied arts, in attempts at reform, given a fresh impetus by the development of international exhibitions. It is not surprising, then, that the first debate about architectural cast museums should have been generated in the homeland of the Gothic Revival and of the Great Exhibition of 1851. For it was in London that this debate crystallized, specifically between the Architectural Museum founded in 1851 and the South Kensington Museum (now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum) created in 1857.