Cultures reside in formal institutions designed for their preservation. Whether those are newspapers or universities or secondary schools or church congregations or seminaries or legal systems, they are all self conscious about the need to protect the past by finding ways in which it relates to the present. The United States Supreme Court defends and protects the Constitution of the United States by giving it often quite controversial interpretations, just as English professors defend and protect the canon of great literature by finding new interpretations for old texts, by understanding how the texts fit into their own time and place, and by making room for new texts, so that American literature anthologies now include a number of African American writers.
The idea just propounded is contrary to the idea that culture lives in the spirit of individuals or in the spirit of a community. That may be true of anthropological, pre-literate societies where custom seems never to have arisen but to always have been there, which means that there is a permanent historical amnesia in such societies in that whatever becomes the norm is seen as always having been the norm even if it is only a few generation old, like the use of iron pots sold to the Indians by white traders. That preeminence of norms is not true of societies in which culture has become sufficiently differentiated from other institutions in the society so that it has a life of its own and therefore acts as both a preserver of tradition and the critique of whatever constitutes, for that moment, the culture.
A current institution that does much of the work of preserving regional cultures is the museum. It reminds a region that it has a past and is not just part of the overall culture of American (or some other) society. Artifacts and art are objects teleported from the past into the present to provide something much more valuable than an historical account of the past, the way that can be gleaned from a history book. Rather, they provide artifacts and art in its pre-interpreted state, however short that moment is before a visitor looks at a card to find out what the object is or remembers that there is a theme which controlled which objects in the museum’s holdings were to be put or kept on display.
New York’s Museum of Natural History, by way of contrast, is not a museum about New York or even world history but of the world from now back to the creation of the planet, and even before that, if you include its Planetarium. The expanse of its imagination is stupendous. I am so glad, for that reason, that it maintains its dioramas. They allows people to see manatees and elands, bears and lions, close up; they also allow the dioramas to have become works of art in themselves, the artifacts and art of a period in which the accuracy of the natural setting evoked the dangers of living by the law of the survival of the fittest, that theme so prominent at the time the museum created itself as a place to both praise and preserve the idea of the wild. The dioramas give that view some historicity and so make that vision less raw. Theodore Roosevelt deserves to have his statue in front of the museum because his conservationism was devoted to the starkness and inhumanity of wild nature and also to the fragility of nature when mankind approached it. It was a generation or two later that social anthropology came to overshadow Darwinism. Margaret Mead and other sages made their impact on the museum by glorifying the distinctiveness and naturalness of primitive cultures.
During that earlier time, the museum decorated walls with images of pterodactyls, which made the hall of dinosaurs a very scary place. It depicted a time you might want to visit, if it were even possible for humans to breathe the air of seventy million years ago, but from which you would want to return so you could sleep in your own familiar bed, not too far from protective parents. It was a few generations later that the biology of cells replaced the exhibits devoted to the way people had transformed the familiar territory of upstate New York, first plowing it over for farmland, and then only later, after the Civil War, allowing second growth to develop when farmers moved elsewhere. I didn’t know that before I saw the exhibit when I was ten years old. So I too am an artifact of what the museum was and how it changed, though I am less easy to preserve than are dinosaur bones.
Art museums are not immune from this playing with time, though they are more devoted to playing with geographical area, what it was then and what it is now even though it is the same “place”, so long as one understands that the sameness cannot be defined spatially in that even the planet Earth doesn’t really return to the same spot every year, given the movement of the Sun through the Milky Way. Rather, there are geographical constraints that make it somewhat the same place, giving rise to weather patterns and enough water or not for crops, and mineral resources, and isolation from strangers. That will not work either, though. The Mormons thought they were far away from Americans until the Gold Rush made them suppliers to wagon trains. It is very different, and it took only a hundred years, to move Denver from being a way to get to the mines to being a way to get to the ski slopes to being a place to get to for its own sake as a commercial and intellectual hub for a region. You can’t get around the fact that regions are only peripherally places; they are most of all the cultures that they propagate to take account of what is happening, at least for a while, in those places.
So look at regional museums as fulfilling a purpose far different from that of New York or Boston or London museums whose purpose is nothing less than attending to the entire grandeur of all world cultures, where now you dip a toe in the Italian Renaissance before moving on to Flemish Painting and beyond that to Chinese drawings, all of this like an Alexandrian library to which nothing is foreign, everything there to be grasped, at least intellectually, if only barely. That, at least, is the way a cosmopolitan people understand their museums, and why it made sense for Elgin to bring his marbles home. Everything is relevant and a part of the cosmopolitan mind even if somewhat deluded Marxists insist that all that is important is that those who made the art, as a people, are the ones who own it as a people, no matter its universality, because ownership is finally the only category they care about, everything an object alienated or only potentially alienable, rather than a symbol or thing in itself, and therefore, to the Marxist, inevitably subject to the process of Imperialist exploitation.
As I say, regional museums are different because there the spirit that differentiates a region is preserved however difficult that may seem to be if you just go outside the museum and see all the things going on in the present: commerce and taxis and hotels and suburban homes maybe just a little bit different from the ones seen elsewhere on the continent, however mildly different is the weather or the scenery. And yet what you bring from the museum is a revisualization of how this place was made at one time by its weather and its scenery and its historical travails. So refreshed, it is possible to bring the eye of history onto the images one gathers on the streets, noting how history itself weighs lightly or not on the present. A trivial example: the eye of history allows a discernment of how the streets are the same and different from the ones that were here back then when there were rules of precedence for which people could walk in front of others that is much better than would be supplied by a roadmap of how streets were renamed or how they were repaved with the ballast carried by ships which had brought crops North, as was the case in Charleston, South Carolina in the Eighteenth Century.
The Gibbes Museum, which is in Charleston, South Carolina, is an excellent representative of a regional museum. It contains portraits of aristocrats from the Revolutionary War and the ante-Bellum South and so provides a sense of the history of this city and its surrounding areas. There is a striking painting of Mrs. Robert Gully by Thomas Sully from 1823. She wears a colored bandana head dress in a presumably oriental style, as would have been fashionable among sophisticated women of her time. The painting is very colorful, with a nice contrast between her green overdress and the white dress beneath. She has a pale, pretty face. The museum also contains a painting from even further back: Benjamin West’s “Thomas Middleton of the Oaks”, from 1770. That attest to the fact that Charleston culture was tied to the general American colonial culture rather than isolated from it, a fact that persisted in that the collection also includes a rather good and also colorful Childe Hassan, “April (The Green Gown)”, from 1920. The green against the yellow; the expressive face that takes up so small a part of the picture; the relaxed pose of someone who doesn’t look like a very relaxed person; all these make it an interesting picture. The museum’s holdings move on to portraits and paintings from what is referred to as the period of “The Charleston Renaissance'', which covers the 1920’s (the era of De Bose Hayward’s Catfish Row). Washed out colors and angular lines make its portraits of low down as well as well born life both reminiscent and different from the art of the period that takes place in other places. There is also a picture from 1920 by Alfred Hutty that presents in pastel colors the Magnolia Gardens, apparently already a tourist attraction on what had once been a plantation just outside of Charleston.
You stretch your mind to fit all of this art in as a variation on a theme, how this art is part of the sweep of American art, while at the same time providing you with a sense of the particular history of this place and region. And so the museum fulfills its function as a regional museum, telling more about the place than you learn from walking its streets, though that too is informative, what with houses with long porches so that people can have their privacy from street observation, and a downtown residential section still noteworthy for such regal houses so close to the harbor,
And then there is at the Gibbes Museum the present day colorful, stylized primitivism of Gullah art, as if an answer to the centuries of the oppression of black people that began in the very early days of the settlement when, according to an exhibit at the Charleston Museum, Charleston was dominated by rice that was grown by slaves before it became dominated by cotton that was grown by slaves. Jonathan Green is perhaps the most renowned of these present day artists, portraying very black women in big hats and brightly colored dresses and stately poses against brightly green grass and brightly blue skies. Green’s assemblages of color are so close to decoration that they are a kind of tourist art, in that people pick up cheap reproductions to hang in their homes as emblems of their association with a black culture that is receding even now and so already has to be restored as a cultural heritage. Green may not be high art in that it is not long on ideas, but it is worthwhile art because it is a window into what art can do for a people now a few generations removed from Jim Crow oppression and understandably not yet having come to terms with it.
The same is true of the white population. I met two tour guides on a visit to Charleston some years ago. A guide at at Magnolia Plantation and Garden, now still promoted for its formal gardens, was embarrassed when someone (my wife) asked how many slaves it took to run the plantation, stammering out “not many”, perhaps as a sign of lingering guilt or, more likely, at being shifted out of the mental frame she had set for herself to understand this place as beautiful (which it is) and as welcoming (which it is not, at least not to this Northerner who thought staring too long at the sloping lawn in front of the house which provided the imposing entrance way to the plantation for boats coming up the river would rot the brain, as might be suspected from the fact that many young aristocrats left the area to get their education in England. I also noticed that the books in the library were not ante-Bellum. They were Jefferson Davis’ “History of the Confederacy” and the like. This family did not get itself Reconstructed. On the other hand, a young woman leading a tour of the beautiful downtown area that provides legends of pirate battles that took place long before the Civil War reminded her auditors that slaves had been an import crop rather than an export crop. That, I think, was the right way to handle it. Deal with the facts of history, even if with a touch of irony in your voice.
It will be awhile before we can get away from Southern history so that it becomes part of the history of the entire nation and not just of a region. White people, whenever they came here, will have to see that the South is their nation too, just as African Americans will have to see that Black history doesn’t belong to them either. That also will be a while in coming. For the moment, Charleston seems so caught in its past because it is its past that it proclaims, however uncomfortably, that one worries that it will go the way of New Orleans without the need of a flood: striving to be a theme park rather than a city. One might hope that the revival of art in Downtown Charleston as well as Charleston as the site of a medical center and that magnificent bridge across the Ashley River will allow it to come to understand its past as a past rather than as its future. That is what Tony Blair did for London and what neither George Bush nor its mayor at the time, Ray Nagin, did for New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.