Output details

Ivory towers: Obscuring obsolescence in the revolutionary museum

Contribution and context: Taws’ article appeared in Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, a journal bringing together, in an anthropological perspective, contributions by philosophers, art historians, archaeologists, critics, linguists, architects, artists, and others. It was selected for publication in a special issue on ‘Absconding’, edited by Jonathan Hay, Wu Hung and Francesco Pellizzi, which examined the ritual and aesthetic significance of themes of secrecy, invisibility, displacement, concealment and collection across diverse objects and images, from a particularly broad range of art historical and anthropological perspectives (contributors included, among others, art historians Thomas Crow, Boris Groys and Rebecca Zorach).

Research imperatives and process: This article is the first substantial analysis of the work of late eighteenth-century decorative wood turner François Barreau. It focuses on the anomalous display of Barreau’s work at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, Paris, a scientific museum founded in 1794 at the height of the revolutionary Terror. Re-evaluating these 'curiosity objects' in the light of both historical and contemporary approaches to materiality, politics and collecting, Taws argues that the presence of Barreau’s works in this location disrupts straightforward ideas of what a ‘revolutionary’ or an ‘ancien régime’ visual culture might be, and complicates our understanding of the ordering of disciplinary knowledge. Interpreting Barreau’s tours excentriques against architectural cross-sections, the rise of amateur craft manuals, machine and tool design and revolutionary anxieties about the legibility of signs, Taws suggests that Barreau’s works negotiate a problem of obsolescence that was shared by the Museum itself.