Miscast: The place of the museum in negotiating the Bushman past and present

Abstract

THERE ARE TWO museums in South Africa competing for representation and commentary on `who are the Bushmen?'. The South African Museum and the South African National Gallery, situated across from each other in Cape Town's Company Gardens, combine efforts to concretise a debate regarding how the indigenous categories, `Bushman' and `Khoisan' (1), can be publicly represented. The two museums draw together different and changing historical relationships to these categories as well as the practice of museum display and exhibition. On the one hand, the SA Museum (a natural history museum), with its turn-of-the-century-built dioramas of Bushmen frozen in primordial time, reminds us of the colonial era ethnologist whose vocation it was to preserve the promise of a more authentic relationship between man and nature. While, on the other hand, the National Gallery, an art museum, offers a critique of the exibitionary enterprise which made museum representations and practices, such as those found in the SA Museum, a naturalised source and display of information. Patricia Davison, the Assistant Director of the SA Museum, says, It is hoped that the present exhibition [at the National Gallery] will set up a dialogue, as it were, with the diorama [at the SA Museum]. Together, these exhibits have inspired heated dialogue and debate around a multitude of issues facing contemporary South Africans, and testify to the important role of public culture in actively shaping both ethnic and national boundaries. This paper will focus primarily on one exhibit, namely the Miscast exhibit that opened in Cape Town's National Gallery on April 12, 1996. By documenting the negotiation process now unfolding in the spaces between and within the National Gallery and the SA Museum, this paper will look at how public culture and the museum (i.e., the National Gallery) contribute to the crafting of national and ethnic boundaries. More specifically, we examine the limitations and ambiguities of cultural critique deployed in the interrogation of museum and representational practices. The primary obstacle to the Miscast curator's vision of a break with the past is the fact that in South Africa the colonial past rests too heavily on its present. As a result of this continuity, many of the visitors to this exhibit at the National Gallery (2) found themselves unable to extricate and distance themselves from the discomfort emanating from their identification with the representations of Bushmen subjects drawn on for this exhibit. South Africa's rapidly changing political climate has drawn the Museum into efforts to dismantle the icons, lexicons, and artifacts of apartheid through the installation of exhibits and displays which interrogate the past with a strategically critical eye. The exhibit analyzed here is one that has drawn historically silenced and marginalised groups into the legitimated and powerful domain of the state Museum, enabling them to participate in their own public cultural representations. The exhibitionary politics brought into being by the debates between these two Museums and their constituent publics invites the language of racial-ethnic difference, the nation's need to heal, reclaim, and revise its past, as well as the impulse to propel contemporary social boundaries into interaction with a newly forged democratic public sphere. Circulating between the two museums are a whole host of publics bringing diverse local readings to bear on a debate which has been unfolding among academics for many years (3). The natural history museum (SA Museum), as a continuous, legitimated, and even celebrated space of representation, has been central to the codification of scientific visual and textual meaning. The National Gallery, by the same token has contributed to the codification of the nation through artistic representation. The opening and democratising of the public sphere of these museums provide a lens through which we can observe individuals coming together as active brokers of the boundaries of the public and dominant cultural frameworks. …