Reports and Accounts

Research premises

 

Over the past two or three decades, the museum has become a focus of university study through the proliferation and diversification of museology, or museum studies, programs. At the same time, it has become increasingly common to see museums organize their programming around considerations that bring certain aspects of their individual histories into view. In other words, the university no longer has a monopoly on self-reflection. In such a context, the two institutions that construct and embody the discipline of art history, these two institutional “heads” whose relationships have often been far from harmonious (Haxthausen: 2002 and Lamoureux: 2007), are now more permeable than they have ever been. Most museums were originally formed around a collection or, more frequently, around a collection of collections (Lacroix: 2008). Exhibitions, being temporary events, were more often held in other venues and, despite their successes, did not significantly impact the day-to-day practices of museums. This situation changed over the course of the 19th century. For the people of that time (as Flaubert remarked in his Dictionary of Received Ideas), the exhibition was a “sujet de délire” (Hamon: 1989). One thinks of the period’s fondness for universal expositions (Mainardi: 1987) and of the growing success of the Salons and their decisive role in the creation of a “public” (Crow: 1985). The confirmation of this state of affairs over the past four decades, a process given added impetus by the blockbuster formula, has led to a profound shift in the priorities of museums, which are often more concerned with the attractiveness of their programming than they are with the development of their collections through new acquisitions, or with research on their collections. Their financial health depends on the number of visitors they can draw, and the number of visitors depends, in turn, on media exposure whose conditions are subject to the logic of what we will call the event imperative [l’impératif évènementiel]. Developing ideas for exhibitions, arranging for them to be held, holding them and securing sufficient media exposure—these tasks are now taking up more and more of the institution’s professional resources, and are doing so in a difficult economic climate. Exhibitions do, of course, generate revenue but organizing them is very expensive. They increasingly require partnerships between museums, as well as fairly prestigious collections to serve as a medium of exchange; and this situation is detrimental to most Canadian and Québec institutions, whose collections (in whole or in part) often spark little interest beyond our own borders.

 

The manner in which the concept of the event is now primarily understood in the triumphalist context of our culture industries and social networks becomes paradoxical as soon as one notices that, far from exemplifying the logic of a rupture in time, of the unpredictability of what lies ahead, it henceforth appears to be the product of programming. Our e-calendars and our posts on social media attest quite clearly to this state of affairs, insofar as events appear there as discrete units of temporal measurement, regulating and shaping the time of our activities, much in the manner of minutes and hours. With these considerations in mind, CIÉCO intends to contribute—above and beyond the anticipated production of new knowledge relating to the current uses of collections—to the advancement of learning in museum studies and the social sciences. The latest publications on the notion of the event (Dosse: 2012) do not appear to take account of its most recent epistemological migration from the field of history to that of communications, and they continue to view the event as if history and philosophy alone still determined its primary meaning. Museums, on the other hand, have certainly noticed this shift, whose epistemological consequences and impact on collections require greater theoretical development.

 

This reflection on the concept of the event is intended to trace the epistemological migration of the concept across the fields of history (Braudel: 1969 and Dosse: 2012); political thought (Arendt: 1989); philosophy (Deleuze: 1969/1990, Derrida: 1972/10982, Derrida: 2001, Foucault: 1966/1991, and Ricœur: 1983-1985), anthropology (Augé: 1984 and Olazabal: 2006), museum studies (Tobelem: 2010) and communications studies (Davallon: 1992). One of the issues here will involve measuring the extent to which this migration has been in-and-out-of-sync with contemporary definitions of the event.

 

Bibliographic References:

 

ARENDT, Hannah (1989). Penser l’événement : recueil d’articles politiques, Paris: Belin.

AUGÉ, Marc (1984). “Ordre biologique et ordre social : la maladie, forme élémentaire de l’événement”, AUGÉ, Marc, Claudine, HERZLICH (ed.). Le Sens du mal : Anthropologie, histoire, sociologie de la maladie, Paris: Éditions des Archives contemporaines, p. 35-92.

BRAUDEL, Fernand (1969). “Histoire et sciences sociales : La longue durée”, Écrits sur l’histoire, Paris: Flammarion, p. 41-83.

CROW, Thomas (1985). Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-century Paris, New Haven
(Ct.): Yale University Press.

DAVALLON, Jean (1992). “Le musée est-il vraiment un média?”, Public et musées, 2, December, p. 99- 123.

DELEUZE, Gilles (1969/1990). The logic of sense, New York: Columbia Press.

DERRIDA, Jacques (1972/1982). “Signature, event, context”. Margins of Philosophy, Brington (UK): The Harvest Press, p. 307-330.

DERRIDA, Jacques, Alexis, NOUSS, Gad, SOUSSANA (2001). Dire l’événement, est-ce possible ?, Paris: L’Harmattan.

DOSSE, François (2012). Renaissance de l’événement: un défi pour l’historien, entre Sphynx et Phénix, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

FOUCAULT, Michel (1966/1973). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences, New York: Vintage Book.

HAMON, Philippe (1989). Expositions, littérature et architecture au XIXe siècle, Paris: J. Corti.

HAXTHAUSEN, Charles (2002). The Two Art Histories: the Museum and the University, Williamstown (Mass.): Sterling and Francis Clark Art Institute.

LACROIX, Laurier (2008). “La collection comme temps de la Nation : les premières acquisitions du Musée de la province de Québec en 1920”. Les Cahiers des dix, n° 62, p. 123- 151. Online source [http://www.werudit.org/apropos/utilisation.html].

LAMOUREUX, Johanne (2007). Profession, historienne de l’art, Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal.

MAINARDI, Patricia (1987). Art and politics of the Second Empire: the Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867, New Haven (Ct.): Yale University Press.

OLAZABAL, Jean-Ignace, Joseph J. LÉVY (Dir.) (2006). L’événement en anthropologie, concepts et terrains, Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval.

RICOEUR, Paul (1983-1985/1984-1988). Time and Narrative, Volumes 1-3, Chicago and London: University of Press.

TOBELEM, Jean-Michel (2010). Le nouvel âge des musées : les institutions culturelles au défi de la gestion, Paris: Armand Colin.