A postmodern practice? Experimental museography

"The testifying museography" (be it Christian-Orthodox, apophatic, mystical etc...) that we presented above is rather a register of principles, of stating the aesthetic criterion in religion. The "profane" side, so to speak, the "working" aspect of this museographic vision comes as "experimental museography"--an expression used almost to an equal extent by Horia Bernea and by his collaborators, alike. But, as Andrei Pleşu notes in the dialogue of Cotidianul, "experiment is one of the key concepts of modernity, but here it acquires a rather bizarre sense. One usually experiments something new. Here, we experiment the old." The apofatic trait of Christian mystics becomes the horizon of free creation, of a "flickering museography," as Bernea liked to call it, which ceaselessly approximates exposure which is, after all, game. Game, but not play, as we will see.

"This exhibition builds itself through the next move," notes Gerard Althabe, "ethnographic objects are detached from the social and symbolic universe (traditional peasant) in which they were produced and used; the authors do not use them as witnesses of this universe; it releases them of the significance of their origin and it regroups them in aesthetic compositions; this movement turns the exhibit into a ?work of art.? Therefore, we assist to the transmutation of these objects that were drawn from the museum's store." (Althabe, op. cit.:145).

"A museum", claims Bernea in his turn, " may and we think it must be an act of creation that transmits more than a simple sum of exhibits" (Bernea, 1996:12). The museum must be "a space which does not let the object to vegetate," as opposed to the widespread conviction that leaving objects to just exist is "a scientific and correct option" (idem:8). In this sense, interestingly enough, Bernea uses comparisons from music to speak about what he wants his visitors to see: he speaks about "themes which couldn't survive in such a space, if ?sung? by objects hidden in the store." Bernea compares a museum site with a "song" and, of course, he always thought that one needs a good "ear" to hear what the object is saying." Bernea treated objects like they were musical notes, if we were to borrow his comparison, each with its own sound, but which are subject to our creative imagination to make a sym-phony. In other words, just like the sounds of a musical scale can combine in endless and various ways in order to make music, the objects of various museum collections are placed relationally, in order to make an exhibit. Here occurs the main difference which separates modern from "classical" museums:

?Objects exposed in a village museum, whichever in the world, are placed in a real light. It is about reconstructing, placing and relating those objects as close to reality as possible. It is a mimetic act, a diorama (...). And we place it in another context. How can we make this object active again? Not in its original context, as the Village Museum or any other museum tries. So, we are placing the object under "n" instances", we make it say what it wouldn't say otherwise, because it is a dead object, for the time being. So this is the reason for all these trials, the entire set of presentations which may make a study for a museum of the future. (Bernea, Cotidianul)