ABSTRACT
Most museums are fundamentally artificial constructions: objects inside them are held outside time and space, suspended within a specific perspective. However, when museums offer visitors the opportunity to encounter objects in situ, the mediation changes and opportunities for visitor understanding and connection are enhanced. Imagine what could happen on a small scale if museums returned individual objects to their original locations, sprinkling them throughout a community. Museums mediate visitor-object interactions with labels and lectures and vitrines and velvet ropes because, on some significant level, museums don't trust their visitors. Instead of establishing the meanings of objects through cataloguing and labeling, museums could invite artists to reimagine and reinvent objects as something else. In 1995, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei released Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, a photographic triptych of himself holding, releasing, and shattering an ancient ceramic vase. The alternative futures for unloved objects imagined here are strongly informed by the present situations of many museums.
