Between Object(ive) and Subject(ive): Museum Narratives with Donald Preziosi

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Art in Translation ISSN: (Print) 1756-1310

Subject(ive): Museum Narratives with Donald

Özlü (2017) Between Object(ive) and Preziosi,

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1 Art in Translation ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: Between Object(ive) and Subject(ive): Museum Narratives with Donald Preziosi Nilay Özlü To cite this article: Nilay Özlü (2017) Between Object(ive) and Subject(ive): Museum Narratives with Donald Preziosi, Art in Translation, 9:sup1, 59-68, DOI: / To link to this article: Published online: 07 Apr Submit your article to this journal Article views: 666 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

2 Art in Translation, 2017 Volume 9, Issue S1, pp , Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Nilay Özlü (Boğaziçi Üniversitesi) Between Object(ive) and Subject(ive): Museum Narratives with Donald Preziosi Abstract Inspired by a museum visit made together with Donald Preziosi, in which he came across one of the Orientalist paintings of his great-grandfather Amadeo Preziosi, this paper scrutinizes the questions of object-subject relation, meaning, and identity. These museological questions led to a deeper discussion related to my dissertation topic: the museumification of the Topkapı Palace. The gradual museumification of this imperial complex during the nineteenth century, reached to a conclusion during the Republican Era, and eventually Topkapı Palace became the second most visited museum in Turkey today. The museum itself, however, still

3 60 Nilay Özlü conveys multiple narratives and contradicting discourses to its visitors. While establishing a connection with the national heritage and Ottoman patrimony, the Topkapı Palace Museum also underlines the rupture, the rift between the imperial past and the Republican present, between the premodern and postmodern realities, between the sacred and the secular, and between the object and the subject. KEYWORDS: Istanbul, Donald Preziosi, Amadeo Preziosi, Pera Museum, Topkapı Museum At the heart of that two-century-old practice of the modern self we call art, the science of which we call art history or museology, and the theory of which we call aesthetics, is a series of knots and conundrums, the denial of which we call the relationship between subjects and objects. 1 Donald Preziosi was the first scholar to visit Boğaziçi University in Istanbul within the framework of the Connecting Art Histories initiative. Apart from attending his lectures and conferences on theories of art, art history, representation, and museology, I had the chance to visit a number of museums and sites in Istanbul with him, thanks to my position as the program assistant. Among several museum visits, which included Santral Istanbul, Topkapı Palace, and Istanbul Modern, I particularly remember accompanying him to an exhibition opening at the Pera Museum, which is a private museum notable for its collection of Orientalist paintings. Exploring a museum together with Preziosi, a leading figure in critical museum theory, was an inspiring and informative experience in itself. It was most striking, however, to witness Professor Preziosi inspecting the paintings of his great-grandfather, Amadeo Preziosi, at the Pera Museum (Fig. 1). This Maltese painter, who lived in Constantinople during the nineteenth century, depicted the city and its daily life in his watercolor paintings and engravings. I wondered how Preziosi related to the objects on display, as a museum visitor, as an art historian, and as the great-grandson of the painter. Did he take off his art historian s hat and establish a more personal or sentimental connection with those paintings and with the museum? Did being in Istanbul change his perception toward the Orientalist paintings? Did the museum and the artifice generate new meanings after this encounter? Did he reestablish a relation between the object and the subject (Fig. 2)? All of these questions of meaning led to reconsiderations of the relation between the museum, the artifact, and the visitor; and opened up new perspectives on the role of the museum in contextualizing history, memory, and identity. This was an opportunity to engage with questions of object subject relation with respect to time and space; and to assess, in a particular instance, the contextual and subject-dependent nature of museum narratives. Because my Ph.D. research focuses on the museumification

Between Object(ive) and Subject(ive): Museum Narratives with Donald Preziosi 61 Figure 1 Amadeo Preziosi, The Silk Bazaar, 1878. Watercolor on paper, 41 x 30 cm.

4 Between Object(ive) and Subject(ive): Museum Narratives with Donald Preziosi 61 Figure 1 Amadeo Preziosi, The Silk Bazaar, Watercolor on paper, 41 x 30 cm. Photo credit: Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Orientalist Paintings Collection, Istanbul. and transformation of the Topkapı Palace, questions of museology are of particular relevance for my research. The Topkapı Museum, accepted as the ultimate representation of Ottoman patrimony, conveys multiple meanings to its audience. Located at the tip of the Historic Peninsula in Istanbul, the Topkapı Palace was the main seat of the Ottoman rulers for more than four centuries. During the course of the nineteenth century, the imperial complex was gradually transformed into a museum, opening its doors first to diplomatic envoys, later to European visitors, and eventually to domestic and foreign tourists. The Topkapı Palace is also significant for housing within its walls the first Museum of the Ottoman Empire, followed by the Museum of Islamic Arts and Military Museum. In 1924, a year after the foundation of the Turkish

62 Nilay Özlü Figure 2 Donald Preziosi inspecting the watercolor painting by Amadeo Preziosi at the Pera Museum, Istanbul, 2010. Photo credit: Nilay Özlü.

5 62 Nilay Özlü Figure 2 Donald Preziosi inspecting the watercolor painting by Amadeo Preziosi at the Pera Museum, Istanbul, Photo credit: Nilay Özlü. Republic, the imperial complex was declared a national museum, and it is still the second most visited museum in Turkey after Hagia Sophia (Fig. 3). Focusing on the connections among history, memory, and identity, the Connecting Art Histories Initiative program opened new visions for my research and my investigations of the meanings produced through both objects and space. The seminars by Preziosi, who devoted the later part of his career to critical and theoretical study of art history, museum studies, as well as museography, had a particular impact on my dissertation and introduced new dimensions on the theory of art history and museology. 2 During our interview with Preziosi for Tarih: Graduate History Journal, he underlined the role of the museum in producing identities: Well, you find yourself you find your place in the museum. You find your identity in the museum reflected in exhibitions or in aspects of exhibitions. [ ] And so in the course of that dialogue you create

Between Object(ive) and Subject(ive): Museum Narratives with Donald Preziosi 63 Figure 3 School children visiting the Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, 2009. Photo credit: Nilay Özlü.

a kind of relational identity; a relative identity in terms of what the museum presents.

6 Between Object(ive) and Subject(ive): Museum Narratives with Donald Preziosi 63 Figure 3 School children visiting the Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, Photo credit: Nilay Özlü. Figure 4 Military Museum in the former Church of Saint Irene in Topkapı Palace, Istanbul. Photo credit: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. a kind of relational identity; a relative identity in terms of what the museum presents. It s as if the museum gives you a vocabulary to think about yourself, and then you either adopt it, or don t adopt it, or adopt something else as a result of the engagement or interaction with it: you create a kind of third space. 3 The questions of identity and identification could be discussed on various levels: either on the universal level of art history and aesthetics; or on the social level, where museums take part in creating national or communal identities; and also on a personal level, where a particular museum,

64 Nilay Özlü Figure 5 Ceremonial throne and other precious items displayed at the Imperial Treasury, Abdullah Frères, Istanbul. Photo credit: Library of Congress.

7 64 Nilay Özlü Figure 5 Ceremonial throne and other precious items displayed at the Imperial Treasury, Abdullah Frères, Istanbul. Photo credit: Library of Congress. collection, exhibition, or a single artwork could make an impact on the self and transform the self. More often than not, these impacts occur simultaneously, as in the case of Preziosi. When I asked Preziosi about his encounter with the paintings of his great-grandfather in Istanbul, he said he had a similar experience before in Washington, DC: The experience was similar to one I had about a decade earlier, in Washington, visiting the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, when I came across a photo of my father from 1937 he was in a large public protest in New York against Hitler; a photo taken from a window in a nearly large building. I know it was my father a young man at the time because he was standing next to his twin brother. The photo was part of a documentary exhibition of pubic street protests in the various US cities in the 1930s against the Nazis. So my relationship to that museum also became more personal and less objective than it might have been otherwise. I was somehow invested in the institution s life and its history and future. In his book Brain of the Earth s Body, Preziosi devotes a chapter to the photograph of his father and also to a lithograph drawn by his great-grandfather. In the chapter Romulus, Rebus, and the Gaze of Victoria, he scrutinizes the relation between memory and museum. Here, he tells the story

Between Object(ive) and Subject(ive): Museum Narratives with Donald Preziosi 65 Figure 6 Baghdad Kiosk positioned as an architectural masterpiece, Abdullah Frères, Istanbul.

8 Between Object(ive) and Subject(ive): Museum Narratives with Donald Preziosi 65 Figure 6 Baghdad Kiosk positioned as an architectural masterpiece, Abdullah Frères, Istanbul. Photo credit: Library of Congress. Figure 7 The neoclassical building of the Ottoman Imperial Museum. Architect: Alexandre Vallaury, Istanbul. Photo credit: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. of how he encountered the photograph of his father in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and offers an in-depth analysis of the lithograph by Amadeo Preziosi from the Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens, depicting a scene in the Jewish cemetery in Kasım Pasha, dated Apparently these incidents had an impact on him, because he defines these

9 66 Nilay Özlü encounters as traumatic rifts. In these instances the photograph of his father and the lithograph done by his great-grandfather turn out to be more than artifacts, but rather became part of his personal past, family history, and memory. Believing that there is much more to museums than the documenting, monumentalizing, or theme-parking of identity, history, heritage, 5 Preziosi states that a museum as an institution and museology as a practice were conceived of as a mode of representation that deploys and disseminates knowledge. 6 Preziosi s experiences in the Holocaust Museum and in the Jewish Museum of Greece, however, seem to differ from his conventional museum visits, and in fact resulted in what he defined as traumatic rifts. Perhaps the rift was between his professional and personal identities, as, in these particular cases, the meanings were not confirmed by the museum through recontextualization but rather the constructed meanings were deconstructed and stripped from the museal discourse, becoming more subjective and personal. We can include his visit to the Pera Museum in Istanbul as another rift, presenting the duality between Preziosi s personal and academic approaches. When I asked him how his visit to Pera Museum was different from that of a conventional museum visit, he answered: My visit to Pera Museum was a strange mixture of personal and professional, suggesting that these two categories are porous leaking into each other all the time; sometimes the one is more dominant, sometimes the other meaning that each category is impermanent and relative to the circumstances of a particular situation. My viewing of the museum started as mostly professional and distanced, but when I saw the Amadeo on the wall, everything changed; I became more personally involved in the museum; it became more like visiting family, so the museum itself became more like a home. Also, whenever I went to visit the museum again, the place was no longer anonymous but had a personality I could directly appreciate and relate to. I felt more confident exploring everything about the place; I was less of an objective observer, but a family member of the museum. What does it mean to be a family member of a museum? Does one need actual family ties, or is it sufficient to feel connected to the museum or the objects in display? Museums impose a certain ideology and identity, claiming to represent our past and create or rather construct a certain identification with the objects being presented. In other words, museums are in fact reestablishing, inventing, or mimicking this very personal link between the object and the subject. Museums transform foreign objects into representatives of our own family or nation s collective past and transform objective observers into family members. Declared a state museum in 1924, directly after the foundation of the Republic, Topkapı Museum conveys different meanings to various

10 Between Object(ive) and Subject(ive): Museum Narratives with Donald Preziosi 67 audiences. The museum complex simultaneously delivers universal, national, historic, religious, secular, scientific, and patriarchic messages. First of all, the palace itself is a manifestation of Ottoman grandeur and magnificence, and represents Ottoman imperial traditions and rituals. It is treated as a historical document in its own right. While the architectural and decorative aspects of the palatial complex are also of particular interest, many objects and precious collections from the Ottoman dynastic past such as weapons, Chinese porcelains, textiles, clothes, sultanic portraits are also on display in the museum. The section displaying the Ottoman treasury epitomizes the glorification of the past via precious jewelry, gifts, and artifacts (Figs. 4 and 5). On the one hand, while the rooms in which the imperial treasury is displayed are significant in terms of their architectural history (constructed by Mehmed the Conqueror during the fifteenth century), their architectural significance was diminished when the chambers were transformed into white boxes with domes. On the other hand, some other buildings within the Topkapı Palace, such as the Baghdad Kiosk or the Revan Kiosk, are regarded as architectural masterpieces (Fig. 6). Quite controversially, the sacred relics collection, containing objects traditionally attributed to the Prophet such as the holy mantle, banner, and sword, attracts a different audience and conveys a religious and holy message, also exposing the rupture between modern secular Turkey and the Islamic Ottoman Empire beholder and protector of the caliphate. The nostalgic and religious narrative produced by the sacred relics collection is, I believe, the polar opposite of the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, which was founded within the Topkapı gardens during the late nineteenth century under the name Ottoman Imperial Museum (Fig. 7). At that time, the museum, its collection, and its renowned director Osman Hamdi Bey epitomized Ottoman modernization and Westernization. The Archaeological Museum itself, with its neoclassical building and its collection of antiquities (which were not considered as a part of the Ottoman heritage up until the nineteenth century) were manifestations of Ottoman modernity. 7 The meaning produced by the museum for the late Ottoman individual, or today for the postmodern visitor, is still debatable, and is related to the question of Ottoman and Turkish identification with Western culture. Today, the Topkapı Palace Museum and the Istanbul Archaeological Museums are separate institutional entities, even though both are located side by side within the same palace complex. The multiple meanings produced by the Topkapı Palace Museum represent well the ambiguity among universal, collective, national, and personal pasts. Objects, collections, or sections within the palace museum convey divergent discourses on history, memory, and identity. Does the Topkapı Palace transform its visitors into family members, members of a common past, a shared memory? Or, does it produce rifts rather than collective imagery? The Topkapı Museum, while establishing a connection with the national heritage and Ottoman patrimony, also underlines the rupture, the rift, between the imperial past and the Republican present, between the premodern and postmodern realities, between the sacred and

11 68 Nilay Özlü the secular, and between the object and the subject. Museums, rather than generating homogeneous and flattening narratives, convey discourses of duality and establish alternative notions of memory and identity. As stated by Donald Preziosi, Objects pursue us in our pursuit of objects to sustain and focus our pursuit of ourselves. 8 Notes 1. Donald Preziosi, Brain of the Earth's Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), Preziosi s major works on critical art historical theory are Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Donald Preziosi, Museology and Museography, The Art Bulletin, 77, no. 1 (1995): Nilay Özlu and Gizem Tongo, Interview with Prof. Donald Preziosi, Tarih: Graduate History Journal 2 (2011): ryjournal.boun.edu.tr/papers/issue identity/2.nilayozlu. GizemTongo.Interview.DONALD.PREZIOSI.pdf. 4. Preziosi, Brain of the Earth's Body, Donald Preziosi and Claire J. Farago, Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), Preziosi and Farago, Grasping the World, For an in-depth discussion on the role of museums on Ottoman modernization, see Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem, Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, (Istanbul: SALT, 2011); Wendy M. K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Ali Artun and Renan Akman, Tarih sahneleri Sanat müzeleri (Iṡtanbul: I letis im, 2006). 8. Preziosi, Brain of the Earth's Body, 1.

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