ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three proposals for the reconfiguration of the national museums in London dating from the 1850s and considers some of the issues they raise in relation to the study of the history and theory of museums and disciplinarity. The purpose of this is to focus on the importance of the museum as a forum for the development of the disciplinary practices of art history in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. This chapter argues that the curatorial act of representing art history in museum display – situating collected objects three dimensionally, in relation to the transit and forms of engagement of imagined visitors – was actually constitutive of certain intellectual approaches and practices of art history as a discipline. This chapter also argues that the project of art museum display brought with it certain unique ways of thinking about, and configuring, art history, and these have been important for the intellectual and professional legacies of disciplinarity of which art historians are possessed, which guide and delimit practices and which govern where we site, and how we view, objects and history in or through objects. In this sense, this chapter is one attempt to analyse some of the complexities of the interrelationships between the art museum and the discipline of art history as recently hinted at by Preziosi (2005: 50-1):
Never entirely distinct institutionally, professionally, or personally, their similarities and differences are not easily articulated: art history is not satisfactorily reduced to being the ‘theory’ to the museum’s ‘practice,’ nor the ghost in the museum’s machinery. Nor is the museum simply – if at all – the exemplification or application of art history, or merely the staging or stagecraft of the dramaturgies of art historical analysis and synthesis. If anything, their relations are anamorphic – each transforming the other – rather than direct or transitive.
