The Museum in Hiding: Framing Conflict
Taking the work of Lyndell Brown and Charles Green as a case study, and specifically their commissioned work for the Australian War Memorial in 2007, this chapter locates and accounts for the artists’ critical engagement with museological tropes of preservation, taxonomy, memorialization, and archival display. For over two decades, Brown and Green's paintings, installations, and photographs have been carefully interrupting and diverting flows between events, images, memories, and histories. Their works ask how the past figures in the present, and how it might be accessed and remembered. They are about the realization and reconstitution of events. As such, they constitute a deeply political project, and one with direct relevance to museum theory. The chapter consists of two sections in dialogue with each other. The first section, by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, is written from the artists’ first-hand point of view. It addresses their experience of participating in the Australian War Artist scheme, and situates their works in relation to ideas of the “memory effect” and the “museum in hiding.” The second section, by Amelia Barikin, contextualizes this material by focusing on how contemporary artists working within museums have interrogated and theorized museum practices. Both sections engage with a recent art historical understanding that visual history – a history based on the particularity and contingency of images rather than stories – has altered the shape of narrative in contemporary communication networks (including those of museums). In exploiting this shift, Brown and Green's works forge an interzone in which the form of the atlas emerges as a catalyst for the production and consumption of situated visual knowledge. The term “atlas” implies a system of classifications within which the knowledge contained in an archive is presented. An atlas is both an album and an instructional aid. In layering these ideas onto the form of the museum, this chapter begins to theorize museum practice from the inside out – by positioning works of art as potential models for, rather than symptoms of, museological governance and display.