Entering the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls, Oregon, USA, the woman at the front desk excitedly tells visitors about the Museum they have entered. She explains about the origins of the collections, hands over an information sheet, and draws the visitor’s attention to the natural setting of the Museum and how it affected the Klamath tribes who lived here…and then she points out the use of artefacts in the structure.
Looking around at the surrounding walls, the stonework is interlaced with mortars and pestles, petroglyphs, and carved stones. These artefacts, it is explained, were found when excavating the Museum site. Sitting right on the Link River, local tribes would utilise this area as a summer habitation. At the end of the season, they would bury the supplies which were too heavy to carry to their wintering lands. This, she explains, is why they found quite so many tools in this spot on the riverbed.
But I found myself looking at this wall and the tools built into it, and feeling disgusted. Here were some of the few objects in this collection with a complete story to tell – and they have simply become architecture. Their current use seemed to strip them of their historical significance; I worried about visitors who do not receive the introductory talk and would never know their history. All of this caused me to step back from the wall, analyse my surroundings, and think – what makes for an appropriate use of objects?
Meandering through the Gamla Stan neighbourhood of Stockholm, Sweden, I was ecstatic to find a runestone built into the architectural base of a building – so what made this use of artefacts so different?
Museums are places to learn about and to respect our past through the objects that represent it, but museums themselves can also function as artefacts. In a world where museum spaces are built to conform to expectations of visitors, these structures do much more than simply hold historic and artistic objects. When modern art collections are housed in museums which are themselves works of modern art, why then should historical museums not be made of historical objects?
The reason, after stepping back to analyse the situation, comes down to the mission of museums. Summed up well by the Texas Historical Commission, “the primary mission of most history museums is to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret objects of historical significance”, and it is due to that full statement that I cannot accept the use of artefacts as architecture. It is because museums are supposed to collect in order to protect and interpret. The Museum did not utilize these objects as building materials out of necessity and convenience, as in historic Stockholm, but rather they used them to make a statement, and this statement shows that the Museum cares more for the collection and exhibition of objects that it ever will for their preservation and interpretation.
The Favell Museum’s mission statement reads: “The Favell Museum is dedicated to the enhancement and the understanding of the history of the west, preservation of Native American artifacts and culture, and exhibits of notable contemporary western art.” With a collection built on arrowhead collectors’ out of context loot, the Museum has successfully made their building fit their collection, by taking objects out of context and missing the opportunity for their archaeological, rather than architectural, interpretation.
Favell Museum, http://www.favellmuseum.org/
Texas Historical Commission [2013] “Basic Guidelines for the Preservation of Historic Artifacts.” Web.
"Use, Repair and Adaptive Re-use and Discard." People and Things. ScARF. Web.
