Reading the artifact: From inquiry to interpretation

20 November 2013 – RASI 2012

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2.

A Nash Motor Home, one of the artifacts “read” in the RASI class.  Photo credit: Canada Science and Technology Museum, Nash Motor Car Company, 1983.0258, 2012

On the final day of Reading Artifacts Summer Institute (RASI), each group was required to present its artifact to an audience of other participants, museum staff, and volunteers. Throughout the morning, artifacts that had initially seemed ambiguous and daunting at the start of the week were slowly separated into layers of meaning and their hidden histories were recounted. A small piano was revealed to be a portable ecclesiastical device used in religious sermons; a Gestetner printing press was exposed as a post-war business venture for a Japanese immigrant; a cannon-shaped lens viewer proved to be one of the first novelty cameras; a radiography device turned out to be one of the earliest home service x-ray machines; and a Nash Motor Home was an intact summer retreat, complete with additions such as a wooden arm that came down to signal a turn.

In our presentations, we were challenged to consider various methods suitable for presenting research on artifacts, from traditional slide show presentations to performances. The importance of artifact interpretation, presentation, and display was illustrated in a talk given at the beginning of the week by Allison Marsh and Bryan Dewalt. Their presentations centered on their own experiences with objects and the complexities of ownership, design, and display. Their approaches acted as a model for us in organizing our own presentation and artifact analysis.

Our presentation centered on the ambiance of a domestic setting and incorporated household appliances from the era. With one of the presenters dressed in a 1920s housewife costume, accompanied by jazz music in the background, the group acted out a typical period apartment scene. The trade literature surrounding the object and the lyrical poem associated with it inspired us to introduce our piece as if we were making a radio advertisement directed toward the prospective buyer, the Canadian housewife. Based on the original Rangette advertisements, the radio ad emphasized the stove’s attractive qualities, including its economical use of power, safety, cleanliness, useful medium-sized oven, and fashionable design features. The student portraying the housewife demonstrated throughout how this object was used, further referencing the stove’s target audience and the prevalence of gendered roles during this period. Imagery in the background showed a contemporary Montreal cityscape, thus emphasizing the period’s technological, economical, social, and cultural transformations.

Our creation of a period setting clearly showed that objects are not produced in isolation but alongside a whole host of commodities of various styles, designs, and competing interests. Through our narrative display we tried to demonstrate how new technologies created an array of appliances that were all intertwined by threads of social and cultural associations with our domestic stove. This form of in situ artifact presentation draws on similar narrative displays that have become a common feature in many museums and historic homes worldwide. The objects presented alongside the Rangette gave an invaluable glimpse into an era when mass production, consumer demand, and a multiplicity of novel goods were shifting a horse-drawn carriage and coal-dependent world into an electrified and increasingly petroleum-powered age.

Throughout the presentations, what became apparent was the importance and relevance of having the artifact itself at hand. Each group chose, during its presentation, to engage with the artifact by dismantling, scrutinizing, and using the artifact to greater demonstrate its intricacies. The use of these objects during the presentations calls to attention the importance of the experience of materiality and the ability to handle objects in order to firmly comprehend the meanings that are ascribed to them. It is without doubt that understanding the physicality of objects is the central lesson of the RASI course. The inclusion of talks on conservation management and practical workshops in soldering and casting served only to encourage the participants to identify with every aspect of an artifact’s life, from production and usage to preservation. The course’s ethos and focus on an “object-centered” analysis is one that is readily used by a number of museums and public outreach programs. However, the Canadian Science and Technology Museum (CSTM) and its approach to the RASI course offered researchers a unique opportunity beyond the normal scope of a museum’s remit. The participants’ access to artifacts in storage and the expertise from the museum’s curatorial, conservation, and research staff provided academics with tremendous potential for understanding materiality and discovering alternative historical perspectives.

Storage area for transportation artifacts.  Photo credit: Canada Science and Technology Museum, 2012

And so the question must be asked, should museums aim to share this experience of literal “hands-on” exploration more widely with visitors? While some museums and collections are opening their back rooms more fully to visitors, there is also an increasing movement towards the digitization of artifacts, where researchers can access photographic images and object descriptions online without ever leaving their homes.  The benefit of this is certainly one of convenience – the ability to access artifacts from around the world is enticing to be sure. For example, Yale University became one of the first institutions to do this in May 2011 when it introduced a no-holds-barred open access policy of the digital representations of its objects and images, numbering in the tens of millions spread across 18 libraries and museums.

But how likely is it that most people outside of the academic or museum environment will engage with this material, no matter how excellent the quality of photography or the importance of the object represented? And can one-dimensional photographs truly do justice to the objects they try to represent? Or, in a digital age where more and more museums are trying to appeal to a “generation of digital natives who bring a huge appetite – and aptitude – for the digital world,”^[1] are opportunities for building intimate relationships with physical artifacts feasible and even necessary for museum goers?

These are not easy questions to answer; indeed, the debate about the necessity of physical objects versus the accessibility of digitized images is still lively. But if our experience with the little Canadian Beauty Rangette showed us anything, it is that “hands-on” exploration, including the use of sight, touch, and smell, is invaluable when trying to comprehend the stories of objects from our past.

~ Laura A. Macaluso is a doctoral candidate in the humanities program at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, United States.  Jodey Nurse is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and co-coordinator of the Rural History Roundtable Speakers Series at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.   Emma O’Toole is a Government of Ireland for the Humanities and Social Sciences Doctoral Scholar at the Faculty of Visual Culture, National College of Art & Design, Dublin, Ireland.  Alex Souchen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada.

The authors would like to thank the volunteers, conservators, curators, archivists, librarians, and all the staff at the CSTM for putting together a comprehensive and stimulating program (and for helping us put this blog series together afterwards). Financial support for travel was generously provided to graduate students by the Situating Science Cluster, which in turn receives its funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Strategic Knowledge Cluster grant.  The agenda of these clusters is to examine “science in human contexts,” and the opportunity to do this work with an international group is one of the strengths of the RASI program (our group consisted of scholars from Canada, Ireland, and the United States).  In this moment of recession and austerity, opportunities for museum-based gatherings are becoming rarer, thus making programs like RASI all the more essential.  We encourage independent researchers, museum professionals, academics, and students to participate in RASI, contributing to the life and development of the study of material culture and its constructs.