9 - You Shall Know Them by Their Objects: Material Culture and Its Impact in Museum Displays about National Socialism

Summary

IMPACT” IS NOT A TERM WITH PARTICULAR CURRENCY in museum theory and criticism, though there are signs that in order to justify the continued receipt of public funding, UK museum practitioners are under much the same pressure as UK arts faculties to demonstrate “impact”; for example, the author of a 2009 article on the alleged culture of “managerialism” in UK museums lists “social impact” as one of his keywords. Back in 1994 it was possible to use the term more optimistically. In a volume of essays on gender and museums in the United States, “impact” forms a thread that runs explicitly through the section titles (“The Impact of Women and Museum Work,” “The Impact of Gender Perspectives: Museums as Educational Institutions,” and so on) and implicitly through the contributions: women have been “influential,” “instrumental,” “prime movers,” “a force to be reckoned with,” have “made a difference,” “made substantial contributions.” Here, “impact” acts as a rallying cry: the mark that women have already made on museums and their visitors is cause for celebration; but there are forces that resist this impact, and much remains to be done.

The following chapter proposes a rather different approach, one that shifts the focus from the after-effects of museum work (its social and professional “impacts”) toward the origins or foundations of museum display: the material remains of the past. These can be shown to have an impact on the meanings of exhibitions even before those exhibitions have an impact on the visiting public. In this respect the chapter complements other contributions to this volume by Ben Morgan and David Barnett, both of whom are interested in the ways in which the meanings of cultural products (films and plays, respectively) may be predetermined, rather than being consequent on the release of a product into the public sphere as common usage of the term “impact” in cultural contexts implies (statements such as “the film made little impact” refer to the afterlife or reception of a work). However, where Morgan’s interest lies in the “day-to-day human interactions” with cultural products that circumscribe their meanings, I attempt to locate the predetermination at a point before such interaction, in the material basis of objects themselves.