Museum Theatre

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
bkg@nyu.edu

Department of Performance Studies / Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
721 Broadway, 6th fl. Tel: 212-998-1620 / Fax: 212-254-7885

Museum Theatre focuses on the agency of display and the museum as a distinctive medium. Our goal is to develop a performance theory of museums. In that spirit, we will build a theoretical foundation based on artistic, curatorial, installation, architec tural, and other practices, both historical and contemporary. We will seek out instances of "performed theory" and explore situations where that which is on display is complicit with (or subversive of) the conditions of its display. We will tease out how the historical avant-garde, postwar experimental performance, and contemporary performance and installation art have dealt with the performativity and the theatricality of spaces of showing, "substance with strong presence," and the notion that a thing is a slow event.

The term museum is used here to refer to museums and galleries, public and private, as architecture and as institutions that exceed the boundaries of their physical plant. Drawing on the work itself, artists' statements, and critical debate they have e ngendered (including Michael Fried, among others), we will attempt to theorize exhibition practice in a variety of settings and in relation to such figures as Fred Wilson, Ilya Kabakov, Christian Boltanski, Joseph Kosuth, Hans Haacke, David Wilson, Robert Wilson, Peter Greenaway, Adrian Piper, Alicia Rios, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, among others. We will consider historical as well as such recent exhibitions, artists' museums, and experimental curatorial practices as the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Mini ng the Museum, The Play of the Unmentionable, Art/Artifact, Salon de Fleurus, Te Maori, All Roads Are Good, and the Museum as Muse (MoMA, spring 1999).

9/10 Introduction
9/17 and 9/24 History and Historiography of Museums I
10/1 History and Historiography of Museums II
10/8 Disaster, Memory, Museum

Towards a Performance Theory of Museums
10/15 Spaces I
10/22 Spaces II
10/29 Bodies
11/5 Things / Stories
11/12-12/10 Oral Presentation

Site Visits
Some site visits will be assigned for the class. Try to visit at least three others, independently or with other members of the class, and keep a journal of your observations.

Research Project
The research project will identify a particular theoretical issue, develop this issue in a way that draws and bears on performance theory, and explore it in a particular site, while excavating the site itself for theoretical possibilities. The site may be historical, using primary sources, or contemporary. It may deal with normative or experimental practice. It may focus on a particular exhibition, institution, curator, artist, or event. Final papers are due: December 14. Those presenting on December 3 and 10 can turn their papers in on December 17.

Readings
Books ordered for the course may be found at the NYU Book Center and on reserve at Bobst. When possible, readings will be online and accessible through the electronic syllabus.There will also be a course pack. A goal of the weekly readings is to identify concepts, arguments, and cases useful for building a performance theory of museums. The weekly reading assignment includes a 1-2 page written response to the reading that identifies such theoretical poss ibilities. This assignment is to be posted on the course website before class. Please bring a copy to class.

You will be expected to read intensively, based on a resource bibliography from which to develop a reading list specifically for your project. Everyone is expected to be familiar with the following basic texts, if not prior to the course, by the end of the semester:

Bennett, Tony. 1995. The birth of the museum. London: Routledge.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Danto, Arthur et al. 1989. Art/artifact : African art in anthropology collections. 2nd ed. New York: Center for African Art. Duncan, Carol. 1995. Civilizing rituals: inside public art museums. London: Routledge.
Elsner, John, and Roger Cardinal, eds. 1994. The cultures of collecting. London: Reaktion Books.
Fisher, Philip. 1991. Making and effacing art: modern American art in a culture of museums. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Greenburg, Reesa, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds. 1996. Thinking about exhibitions. London: Routledge.
Karp, Ivan, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine, eds. 1992. Museums and communities : the politics of public culture. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Karp, Ivan, and Steven D. Lavine, eds. 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rubin, William, ed. 1984. "Primitivism" in modern art: affinities of the tribal and the modern. New York: MoMA.
Sherman, Daniel J., and Irit Rogoff, eds. 1994. Museum culture: history, discourses, spectacles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Vergo, Peter, ed. 1989. The new museology. London: Reaktion.

Resources
Readings: Full text online
Resource bibliography 1999 / Resource Bibliography 2001
Links 1999 / Links 2 1999

READ:
Bennett, Tony. 1995.The Birth of the Museum . London: Routledge, 1995.

RECOMMENDED:
Histories of museums in France, Germany, Spain, United States, Kenya, and elsewhere may be found in Resource Bibliography 2001.
Altick, Richard D. 1978. The shows of London. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bennett, Tony. 1998. Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes, and Popular Instruction: On Sensory Regimes and Museum Didactics. Configurations   6, 3: 345-71.
Noordegraaf, Julia. 2000. From civilising instruments to service guides: travelguides as intermediaries between the Boyjans Museum and its audience, 1849-1935. Boijmans Bulletin 1, no. 1.
Preziosi, Donald. 1996. Collecting/museums. Critical terms for art history. eds. Robert S. Nelson, and Richard Schiff, 281-92. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bann, Stephen. 1984. The clothing of Clio : a study of the representation of history in nineteenth-century Britain and France . New York: Cambridge University Press.
Yanni, Carla. 1999. Nature's museums Victorian science and the architecture of display.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Coombes, Annie E. 1994. Reinventing Africa: museums, material culture, and popular imagination in late Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Prakash, Gyan. 1992. Science "Gone Native" in Colonial India. Representations  40: 153-78.
Mathur, Saloni. 2000. Living ethnological exhibits: the case of 1886. Cultural Anthropology  15, no. 4: 492-524. Access through OCLC WilsonSelect.
Lindfors, Bernth. 1999. Africans on stage: studies in ethnological show business. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Harris, Neil. 1973. Humbug: the art of P. T. Barnum. Boston: Little, Brown.
Dennett, Andrea Stulman. 1997. Weird and wonderful : the dime museum in America . New York: New York University Press.
Betts, John Rickards. 1959. P. T. Barnum and the Popularization of Natural History. Journal of the History of Ideas  20, no. 3: 353-68.
Sandeen, Eric J. 1995. Picturing an exhibition : the family of man and 1950s America . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 1992. Census, map, museum. Imagined Communities. rev. ed., 163-85. New York: Verso.

RECOMMENDED VISIT:
The American Dime Museum (Web site)
Coney Island USA (Web site)
Sale of NY Dime Museum (archival recording, 1895-1896)
Ripley's Believe It or Not (Web site

GUEST: Michael Fehr, Director, Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum (Hagen, Germany)

READ:
Findlen, Paula. 1989. The museum: its classical etymology and Renaissance genealogy. Journal of the History of Collections 1, 1: 59-78.
Bernheimer, Richard. 1956. Theatrum mundi. Art Bulletin 38, December: 225-47.
Weschler, Lawrence. 1995. Mr. Wilson's cabinet of wonders. New York: Pantheon.

DUE: One-page draft of project ideas. Schedule meeting with BKG to discuss project ideas.

VISIT: website for Museum of Jurassic Technology and especially The World is Bound With Secret Knots: The Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher.

RECOMMENDED:
Yates, Frances Amelia. 1999. The art of memory. New York: Routledge.
"The uses of spatiality: mnemonic uses of space." ( Web page)
Grieve, Josophia. [1998]. Welcome to Memorymoo. Mediamatic Magazine  8, 1. On Bruno Giordano's memory palace.
Ernst, Wolfgang. [1998]. Arsenals of Memory: The Archi(ve)texture of the Museum. Mediamatic Magazine  8, 1.
Fabianksi, Marcin. 1990. Iconography of the architecture of the ideal musea in the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Journal of the History of Collections 2, no. 2: 95-134.
Raggio, Olga, and Antoine M Wilmering. 1999.The Gubbio studiolo and its conservation. New York : Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Solomon, Deborah. 6 June 1996. A room with illusions of grandeur. Wall Street Journal, sec. A, p. 12. About the Gubbio Studiolo at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mullaney, Steven. 1983. Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance. Representations  3, summer: 40-67
Impey, Oliver, and Arthur G. McGregor, eds. 1985. The origins of museums: the cabinet of curiosities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MacGregor, Arthur, and Ashmolean Museum. 1983. Tradescant's rarities: essays on the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, 1683, with a catalogue of the surviving early collections. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pomian, Krzysztof. 1990. Collectors and curiosities : Paris and Venice 1500-1800,. trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Findlen, Paula. 1994. Possessing nature: museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. 1998. Wonders and the order of nature, 1150-1750. New York: Zone Books.
Evans, C. 2000. Megalithic Follies: Soane's 'Druidic Remains' and the Display of Monuments. Journal of Material Culture 5, no. 3: 347-66.
Furjan, Helen. The Specular Spectacle of the House of the Collector. Assemblage 34 (1998): 56-91. About the Sir John Soane Museum.
Stafford, Barbara Maria. 1993. Voyeur or observer? Enlightenment thoughts on the dilemmas of display. Configurations 1, 1: 95-128.
Lynch, Deidre. 1990. "Beating the Track of the Alphabet": Samuel Johnson, Tourism, and the ABCs of Modern Authority.ELH 57, no. 2: 357-405.
Lin, Serena. 1995. Metaphors, architectures, and cyberspaces: an introduction--Architectural interfaces to abstract ideas.
Schaffner, Ingrid, Matthias Winzen, Geoffrey Batchen, Hubertus Gassner, Siemens Kulturprogramm, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, and Henry Art Gallery, eds. 1998. Deep storage:collecting, storing, and archiving in art.. Munich, New York: Prestel.

RECOMMENDED VISIT:
Gubbio Studiolo,at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

READ:
Adorno, Theodor W. Valéry Proust Museum. Prisms. Cambridge: MIT Press. 175-185.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1986. The writing of the disaster. trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press. 1-63.
Bergman-Carton, Janis. 2001. Christian Boltanski's Dernières Années: The History of Violence and the Violence of History. History and Memory 13, no. 1: 3-18.
Kakutani, Michiko. 23 September 2001. The trappings of everyday life now take on tragic significance. New York Times, B10
Segger, Martin. 1998. Introduction to "Toward a Museology of Reconciliation" (Web page)
Fehr, Michael. 1995. Art as 'Awareness of History': Sigrid Sigurdsson's "In Face of The Silence" ( Web page)
Sigurdsson, Sigrid. Germany - a memorial - a research task 1996 to... (Web page)

VISIT WEB SITES
Novak, Lorie. Collected Visions and related sites.
Difficult Matters 
Gun Sculpture

RECOMMENDED:
Dennett, Andrea Stulman, and Nina Warnke. 1990. Disaster spectacles at the turn of the century. Film History  4: 101-11.
Boon, James. 1991. Why museums make me sad. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. eds. Ivan Karp, and Steven D. Lavine, 255-77. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between memory and history: Les lieux de memoires. Representations 26: 7-24.
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1992. Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York : Routledge.
Huyssen, Andreas. 2000. Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia. Public Culture 12, no. 1: 21-38.
Matsuda, Matt K. 1996. The memory of the modern. New York: Oxford University Press.
Roth, Michael S. 1989. Remembering Forgetting: Maladies de la Memoire in Nineteenth-Century France. Representations 26, no. spring: 49-68.
Déotte, Jean-Louis, Diller + Scofidio, and Fonds régional d'art contemporain de Basse-Normandie. 1994. Visite aux armées: tourismes de guerre = Back to the front : tourisms of war. Caen? : New York, N.Y. : F.R.A.C. Basse-Normandie ; Distributed by Princeton Architectural Press.
Brower, Benjamin C. 1999. The Preserving Machine: The "New" Museum and Working through Trauma--The Musée Mémorial pour la Paix of Caen. History and Memory 11, no. 1: 77-103.
Kavanaugh, Gaynor. 1994. Museums and the First World War: a social history. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
Kruger, Loren. 2000. Robben Island Museum. Public Culture 12, no. 3: 787-91.
Ralph Rugoff. "The Nintendo Holocaust and the Strength of the Pathetic." 1996.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 2000. Performing knowledge. Folklore, Heritage Politics, and Ethnic Diversity: Festschrift for Barbro Klein. eds Pertti J. Anttonen, Anna-Leeena Siikala, Stein R. Mathisen, and Leif Magnusson, 125-39. Botkyrka: Mångkulturellt centrum.
Young, James E. 1993. The texture of memory: Holocaust memorials and meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Young, James E. 2000. Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin: The Uncanny Arts of Memorial Architecture. Jewish Social Studies  6, 2: 1-23.
Hamburg Institute for Social Research, ed. 1999. The German army and genocide :crimes against war prisoners, Jews and other civilians in the East, 1939-1944/. New York :New Press.
Shandler, Jeffrey. 1999. Heritage and Holocaust on display--New York City's Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. The Public Historian  21, 1: 73-86.
Yoneyama, Lisa. 1999. Hiroshima traces: time, space, and the dialectics of memory.  Berkeley and Los Angeles. University of California Press.
Meade, Teresa. 2001. Holding the Junta Accountable: Chile's "Sitios de Memoria" and the History of Torture, Disappearance, and Death. Radical History Review 79, no. winter: 123-39.
Rev, Istvan. 1995. Parallel autopsies. Representations 49, winter: 15-39.

RECOMMENDED WEB SITES:
Robben Island Museum, Capetown
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington
Jewish Museum, Berlin
Musée Mémorial pour la Paix of Caen, France
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
Tuol Sleng, Cambodia
Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh

10/15 Spaces I

READ:
Duncan, Carol, and Alan Wallach. 1980. The universal survey museum. Art History  3, 4: 448-69.
Fried, Michael. 1967. "Art and Objecthood," Artforum, (June) and in Fried, Michael. 1998. Art and objecthood: Essays and reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
O'Doherty, Brian. 1986. Inside the white cube: the ideology of the gallery space. Santa Monica: Lapis Press.

VISIT: Salon de Fleurus, 41 Spring Street, between Mott and Mulberry Street. Hours: Wed - Sat, 8PM - 10PM. Best to come in groups of 3-5 people.

RECOMMENDED:
Preziosi, Donald. 1996. Collecting/museums. Critical terms for art history. eds. Robert S. Nelson, and Richard Schiff, 281-92. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Donald Preziosi, 1988. The Art of Art History. The Art of Art History: a Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi, 507-25. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Lorente, J. Pedro. 1998. Cathedrals of urban modernity: the first museums of contemporary art 1800-1930. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Altshuler, Bruce. 1997. The avant-garde in exhibition: new art in the 19th century. University of California Press: Berkeley.
Wallis, Brian. 1986. Hans Haacke, Unfinished Business. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Staniszewski, Mary Anne. The Power of Display: a History of Exhibition :Installations at the Museum of Modern Art  (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
Crimp, Douglas. 1993. On the museum's ruins. Cambridge: MIT Press.

READ:

Kabakov, Ilya. On the "Total" Installation,  trans. Gabriele Leupold, and Cindy Martin (Ostfildern, Germany: Cantz, 1995).
Muñoz, Juan. 1990. Segment., trans. Beatriz Crespo Radjy. Chicago: Renaissance Society.
Carter, Paul. 1992. Performing history: Hyde Park Barracks. Transition (Melbourne) 36/37: 8-19.

DUE: Proposal for project--3 pages, including preliminary bibliography.

RECOMMENDED:
Bal, Mieke. 2001. Memory acts: performing subjectivity. Boijmans Bulletin 1, no. 2.
Wall, Jeff. 2001. Arts imitates cinematography: how our perception of stillness has changed . Boijmans Bulletin 1, no. 2.
Jakovljevic, Branislav. 1996. Picturing the screen: the American Museum of the Moving Image. Museum Management and Curatorship 15, no. 4: 351-69.
Lepecki, Andre T. Stillness and the microsopy of perception.
Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of perception: attention, spectacle, and modern culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Wonders, Karen. Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History, Figura Nova Series, 25 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1993), first chapters.
Oetterman, Stephan. 1997. The panorama: history of a mass medium. trans. Deborah Lucas-Schneider. New York: Zone Books.
Kabakov, Ilya. 1996. Der Lesesaal=The reading room, trans. Annelore Nitschke, and Cynthia L. Martin. Hamburg: Deichtorhallen.
Kuspit, Donald. 4/9/1997. The life of flies: Ilya Kabakov. artnet.com
Bronson, A. A., and Peggy Gale. 1983. Museums by artists. Toronto: Art Metropole.
McShine, Kynaston. 1999. The museum as muse: artists reflect. New York: N. H. Abrams.
Cooke, Lynne, and Peter Wollen, eds. 1995. Visual display. Seattle: Bay Press.
Wilson, Fred. 1994. Mining the museum : an installation. ed. Lisa G. Corrin. New York: The New Press.
Wilson, Fred. 1994. The silent message of the museum. In Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts. ed Jean Fisher. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, Kala Press.
Schneider, Arnd. 1993. The art diviners. Anthropology Today 9, no. 2: 3-9.

RECOMMENDED VISITS AND WEB SITES:
Ilya Kabakov's Palace of Projects (Web site)
American Museum of Natural History. Focus on at least one of the following: Hall of Planet Earth; Hall of Biodiversity; Rose Center for Earth and Space; Genomic Revolution; Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion; Hall of Northwest Coast Indians; and Akeley Hall of African Mammals.
Panoramas: The Palace and Gardens of Versailles, 1818-1819 by John Vanderlyn (1775-1852) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum of Art.

10/29 Bodies

READ:
Dijck, José van. 2001."Bodyworlds: The Art of Plastinated Cadavers."Configurations  9, no. 1: 99-126.
Messbarger, Rebecca. 2001. Waxing Poetic: Anna Morandi Manzolini's Anatomical Sculptures. Configurations  9, no. 1: 65-97.
Douglas, Lawrence. 1998. The shrunken head of Buchenwald: icons of atrocity at Nuremberg. Representations  63: 39-64.
"Bushman Diorama": Questions and answers and Debating the diorama.
Sibum, Heinz Otto. "Working Experiments: a History of Gestural Knowledge," Cambridge Review  116, no. 2325 (1995): 25-37.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1993. The materiality of informatics. Configurations 1, 1: 147-70.

RECOMMENDED
Wilson, Luke. 1987. William Harvey's Prelectiones: The Performance of the Body in the Renaissance Theater of Anatomy. Representations  17, winter: 62-95.
Legassick, Martin, and Ciraj Rassool. 2000. Skeletons in the cupboard :South African museums and the trade in human remains, 1907-1917. Cape Town: Kimberley : South African Museum ; McGregor Museum.
Skotnes, Pippa, and South African National Gallery. 1996. Miscast: negotiating the presence of the Bushmen. Cape Town, South Africa : University of Cape Town Press. Debating this controversial exhibition.
Davidson, Patricia. 1993. Human subjects as museum objects: A project to make life-casts of "Bushmen" and "Hottentots," 1907-1924. Annals of the South African Museum 102, 5.
Bukatman, Scott. "There's Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience," October  57 (1991): 55-78.
Stiles, Kristine. Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions. InOut of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979, ed. Paul et al Schimmel, 227-329 (Los Angeles and New York: Museum of Contemporary Art and Thames and H udson, 1998).
Beard, Mary, and John Henderson. 1997. The play of desire: casting Euripedes' Hippolytus. Arion  4, no. 3: 80-130.
Cole, Catherine. 1993. Sex and dealth on display: women, reproduction, and fetuses at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. TDR The Drama Review 37, no. 1: 43-61.
Harper, Kenn. 2000. Give me my father's body :the life of Minik, the New York Eskimo.. South Royalton, Vt: Steerforth Press.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How we became posthuman : virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago, Ill. : University of Chicago Press.
Jackson, Shannon. 1996. Civic Play-Housekeeping: Gender, Theatre, and American Reform. Theatre Journal 48, no. 3: 337-61.
Jackson, Shannon. 2000. Lines of activity performance, historiography, Hull-House domesticity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Moser, Mary Anne, and Douglas MacLeod, eds. 1996. Immersed in technology : art and virtual environments. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Schneider, Sara K. 1995. Vital mummies : performance design for the show-window mannequin. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sekula, Allan. 1986. The body and the archive. October  39: 3-64.
Stafford, Barbara Maria. 1991. Body criticism: imaging the unseen in Enlightenment art and medicine. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Brandstetter, Gabriele, Hortensia Völckers, Bruce Mau, and André Lepecki, eds. 2000. ReMembering the body. English ed. trans Andrea Scrima, and Rainer Emig. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz.

RECOMMENDED VISIT:
Mutter Museum
Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center
Madame Tussaud's

LINKS
Vaxkabinett, Swedish Historical Museum, Stockholm.

RECOMMENDED: THINGS
Haraway, Donna. 1984. Teddy bear patriarchy: taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-36. Social Text  11: 19-64.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The interior structure of the artifact. The body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world.  278-326. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hoskins, Janet. 1998. Biographical objects : how things tell the stories of people's lives. New York: Routledge.
Hanley, Susan B. 1997. Everyday things in premodern Japan : the hidden legacy of material culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Thompson, Robert Farris. 1979. African art in motion: icon and act. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Grasskamp, Walter. 1994. Reviewing the museum--or: the complexity of things. Nordisk Museologi 1: 65-74.
Prochan, Frank. 1983. The semiotic study of puppets, masks, and performing objects. Semiotica  47, no. 1/4: 3-44.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Eugene Rochberg-Halton. 1981. The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Stocking, Jr. George W., ed. 1985. Objects and others : essays on museums and material culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Dias, Nélia. 1997. Cultural objects/natural objects: on the margins of categories and the ways of display. Visual Resources 18: 33-47
Hollier, Denis. 199x. The use-value of the impossible. October 60: 3-39 .
Goldfarb, Brian. "Collecting the present: from dematerialized art objects to digital culture." (Web page)
Michael Fehr, "Dump or Museum: Terminals in Western European Societies," Minerva Conference, Groningen, 1998.
Walter Grasskamp, Reviewing the Museum--or: the Complexity of Things," Nordisk Museologi 1 (1994): 65-74.
Barthes, Roland. 1982. The World as Object. A Barthes reader. ed Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang.
Sayre, Henry. 1992. Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 1992. The image of objectivity. Representations  40.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. The thing. Poetry, language, thought., 163-86. New York: Harper & Row .
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Geismar H. 2001. What's in a price?: An Ethnography of Tribal Art at Auction. Journal of Material Culture 6, no. 1: 25-47.
Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled objects: exchange, material culture, and colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Armstrong, Robert Plant. 1971. The affecting presence: an essay in humanistic anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
West, W. Richard, ed. 1994. All roads are good: native voices on life and culture. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Freedberg, David. 1991. The power of images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and agency. Oxford: Oxford University Place.

RECOMMENDED: STORIES
Lynch, Michael. Representation Is Overrated: Some Critical Remarks About the Use of the Concept of Representation in Science Studies, Configurations 2, 1 (1994): 137- 49.
Bann, Stephen. 1998. Face-to-Face with History. New Literary History 29, 2: 235-46.
Phillips, Mark Salber. 1996. Reconsiderations on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain. Journal of the History of Ideas  57, 2: 297-316.
Yanow, Dvora. 1998. Space stories: Studying museum buildings as organizational spaces while reflecting on interpretive methods and their narration. Journal of Management Inquiry  7, 3: 215-39.
Slyomovics, Susan. 1998. The object of memory : Arab and Jew narrate the Palestinian village. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Katriel, Tamar. 1994. Sites of Memory: Discourses of the Past in Israeli Pioneering Settlement Museums. Quarterly Journal of Speech  80, 1: 1-20.
Katriel, Tamar. 1997. Performing the past: a study of Israeli settlement museums. Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Pearson, Mike, and Michael Shanks. 2001.Theatre/archaeology disciplinary dialogues. London, New York: Routledge.

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Updated 10 October 2001
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett