This "showing" of the objects in the museum, seen as a "magical, enchanting operation," was meant to incite the visitor's "sight," the true sight that goes beyond "the physical limitation of the exposed object." Through this, says Bernea, "the visitor is compelled to seize, at a subliminal level, profound truths to which we normally don't have access" (idem: 13). Truths which the authors of the exhibit do not stage or enlighten (maybe because even they do not know them), but which they let transgress. The visitor is therefore invited to be part of the museographic work, also participating, according to his wishes and possibilities, at the process of testifying the sense of the exhibit. He doesn't keep the external relation of a mere spectator (Althabe, op. cit.:16).

This permanent game of museographs "showing" exhibits and of visitors "seeing them" has a power to mesmerize both actors alike. For the first ones it may mean, among others, the everyday practice of the romantic myth of genius - while running the risk of the sorcerer's apprentice. For the other ones, it may (also) mean the rare pleasure of their own freedom of interpretation and understanding - even at the risk of being a snob. The refusal to take over or to create formulas, to stage and formulate serious truths, the staging of the "experiment that is in a state of eternal beginning" has the way of charming us all.

The Romanian Peasant Museum's "open" and systematically non-apodictic feature led to (relatively) numerous instances when it was placed in the context of post modernity.  Some have even seen analogies with Vattimo's "weak thought."  Many more others saw in the halls of the Romanian Peasant Museum an equal number of "outfits."  Jean Cuisenier, for instance, who has good knowledge of both Romania and the museum, would recently praise the post modernity of the outfits proposed by Horia Bernea and his collaborators, during an international colloquium. But Bernea is utterly explicit in this matter: "The things we did and intend to do in the future at the Romanian Peasant Museum have nothing to do with a void game, with certain borderline phenomena from the contemporary world, as the ?outfits,? for example. (...) That which totally differentiates them is the given element, the patrimony which is in action, but which we tame" (Bernea, 1996: 14).[3]In his vision, the museum refuses the "recipe, but not the style" (idem: 8); moreover, it "follows the ranging, not the order." (idem: 7, my underlined words). The refusal of any "recipe" and of "order" is not the "void game" of post modernity, even though it is based upon an unfounded character of the game. Of a game which must be played, though, within the "given" limits of a profound vision on the world, of a vision of "traditional man," of what in Romanian is called "ranging." A game in the indefinite search of the given sense, not one of freely assigning significances. The experiment promoted by Bernea as a museographic strategy proves thus to be a free one only within the limits of an original given situation: Andrei Pleşu is perfectly right when he says this is also a situation where something old is being experimented!

Between a museum of a community and an art museum or on the ambiguity of Traditional Man

[3]  In a dialogue with Irina Nicolau, published in the third number of Martor magazine, 1998, Bernea gives a nuance to his unwillingness to use "outfits": "I cannot but admit that the outfit, as a genre, produced very interesting works. I think it may have a future in the world of museums (p. 225). A few pages further on, Bernea states that "these must not become a temptation, (...), it must not break the dams towards a random subjectivity". (p. 228).