108 109 In Stefan Oláh’s photographs, things are in order – at any rate, we may assume so, since they have landed in the museum depot in order to be preserved (cf. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 1970). This means that they have made their way from everyday life, from a studio, a home or a cinema, from the street or the sea, into the museum; they have been catalogued and are now stored and stacked. But this order of things doesn’t really look tidied; it’s as though the objects in the depot were somehow in the way. For things are material; they stand and lie around, even when they’ve been labelled and categorised, despite the cupboards, shelves and boxes specially constructed for storing them. Something seems not quite to work out, in the system governing museum depots. In her book Tabu Depot (2013), Martina Griesser-Stermscheg refers to a historical document: the frontispiece of the catalogue of the Museum Wormianum, which depicts the cabinet of curiosities collected by Ole Worm (1588–1654). She draws our attention to a small crate in the background of the picture – not in the centre, but to one side; easily overlooked, it has nevertheless great significance for the logic of order. It is labelled “VARIA”. Here Martina Griesser-Stermscheg identifies a category which represents a cardinal point in the theory of the relationship between systems and objects, words and things, because it is not the focal point. The VARIA crate embodies the material dimension of the fact that every order produces a remainder. Thus there is no categorising without the dubious category of “diverse”, comprising everything that doesn’t quite seem to fit into the logic of order. One might say, then, that this inconspicuous crate represents in some way the material resistance inherent in every systematisation – a guarantee that order is not total. In this book, Griesser-Stermscheg describes it thus: “In every collection there are also remainders. Remainders that are too large or too small, or that cannot be subsumed in a system because its classification has not yet been confirmed by research, or its (cultural) historical significance is still disputed.” This sounds fascinating; it raises questions as to what might be lurking in such an obscure yet significant crate – and as soon as our curiosity is aroused, it becomes evident that this Doesn’t quite fit. The unspectacular resistance of material Nora Sternfeld crate is a miniature version of the museum depot. In recent years, museum visitors have shown increasing interest in penetrating behind the locked doors of the depot, to enter the guts of the museum. This may have something to do with the wish to encounter objects that are not exhibited through the filter of high-profile reporting, didactic narrative and spectacular presentations. Possibly things accumulated allow more scope for personal association and narration. Or it might be that the Midas logic of neoliberal museum management discourse – which renders exploitable everything it touches – has found its way into the innermost realms of the museum, so that even the dustiest recess can be dragged into the limelight of PR work and made into a crowd-puller. But back to the crate. Perhaps my thought-experiment was a trifle contrived, since actually it is obvious that things in a crate labelled VARIA will not necessarily be particularly interesting, but presumably just as insignificant as the inscription promises. Also, they probably have very little in common apart from the fact that they all tell us something about the order into which they cannot be readily integrated. So before we open the crate, I would suggest that we try to understand the relationship between these things that don’t quite belong and the order which both excludes and contains them. After all, the VARIA have found their way into the museum depot; they were worth inclusion in the storage system. In this respect, I would say, they belong to the museum’s memory. This distinguishes them from the stories of which all trace has vanished from the depot – the hidden stories which would indicate some prerogative beyond the interpretational privilege of the collections, and which resist their exclusion. If these stories were addressed in important approaches to post-structural, post-colonial and feminist museum theory, it is a question of repressed knowledge, of the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges”, and of the thunder-roll of battle, of which Foucault speaks – the warlike sound of a massive underlying resistance accompanying the repression of knowledges (cf. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 1997). In so far as the VARIA are not actually repressed, they are intractable in a different way: even if they have sometimes landed more or less by chance in the depot, they are nevertheless part of the system. But they create a hitch in the order – they belong to it, but they don’t fit anywhere. So what do we expect to find in the crate? If order tells us something about the categories into which the world is divided, then what do those things tell, that refuse to be pressed into its categories, that run athwart the logic of classification? I maintain that we will find things that repudiate order (in contrast to things that repress it). If we still regard the museum as an “identity factory”, then what is repudiated might possibly be described as that part which also belongs to “us”, but which “we” do not really wish to contemplate and accordingly do not choose to display. Now we may be even more curious. What can this repudiated content be? The renewed interest in depots, and perhaps also in our VARIA crate, reminds me of Fritz Lang’s film Secret Beyond the Door (1948), an adaptation of the Bluebeard tale in which Bluebeard says to his wife: “I have to go on a long journey. Here are all the keys to the castle. You may open all the rooms and look at everything – but I forbid you to open the closet where this little gold key belongs; if you open it, you forfeit your life.” She took the keys and promised to obey him. When he had left, she opened the doors one by one, and saw so many riches and wonderful things that she thought they must have come from all over the world. Now the only room left was the forbidden closet; since the key was of gold, she thought that perhaps the most costly things of all would be locked up here. Tormented by curiosity, she would rather not have seen all the rest, if she could only find out what was in there. For a time she resisted, but in the end her curiosity got the better of her; she took the key and went to the closet. “Who will see if I open it”, she said to herself. “I’m only going to take one look.” She unlocked the door, and when it opened, blood streamed towards her, and she saw dead women hanging round the walls, some of them already skeletons. She was so horrified that she quickly closed the door again, but the key fell out and landed in the blood. (Brothers Grimm, Fairy Tales, Berlin 1812) I don’t want to spoil the suspense by revealing what happens next. But now that we’ve spent long enough in the role of the curious wife, I would like to suggest a far less bloody continuation to the story. What if we discovered that behind the locked door there was nothing more spectacular than a vacuum cleaner? The resistance I want to talk about in connection with the museum depot corresponds exactly to this scenario. The museum depot is a realm of possibility – not because of the thrill we feel at the idea of what’s happening behind the door, but because it’s astonishingly unspectacular. What if the crate we’re so curious about contains nothing more than SOME THINGS which neither tell us much nor seem particularly interesting? The things that are stored there are obviously not useful, and they don’t fit. We see here – as in the whole depot – SOME THINGS, many of which are certainly painfully bloody, and others certainly important or innovative, but most will seem meaningless or banal. This is what makes the depot so relevant: unspectacular, superfluous or almost embarrassing as the various things in storage may be, these are the very things that create the conditions under which the museum can be understood as a place where transformation and shifts of meaning take place. In her book Cultural Memory and Western Civilization (2011), Aleida Assmann talks of a latent “reservoir of unused possibilities, alternatives, contradictions, criticisms, and unremembered incidents” (p 130). Therefore I would maintain that it is precisely this unspectacular character that forms the background when Martina Griesser- Stermscheg extends Gottfried Korff’s concept of the museum and highlights the depot as a “tireless generator of meaning”. So the moment when we encounter the various things is, as we would expect, just as uneventful as its resistance to a world of innovation which admits no niches and in which everything becomes superficial. And who knows what we may expect from the place behind the door, where there’s only a vacuum cleaner... Nora Sternfeld is an art educator, exhibition theorist and curator. She is professor for Curating and Mediating Art at Aalto University in Helsinki. Since 1999 she has been part of the Vienna office trafo. K, which works in the fields of research and educational projects at the interface of culture, art and critical knowledge production. She is also co-director of /ecm – educating / curating / managing – post-graduate programme for exhibition theory and practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and board member of schnittpunkt (www.schnitt.org). She publishes on education theory, exhibition theory and practice, contemporary art, politics of history and anti-racism. SOME OBJECTS OF DESIRE + SOME OBJECTS OF NECESSITY + SOME OBJECTS OF NO CONCERN – THOSE THINGS THAT ESCAPE NOTICE ÷ A FORCE MAJEURE = SOME THINGS (Lawrence Weiner)