Objects as Ambassadors

The Object as Ambassador: Exhibitions in Contemporary History

a Representations special forum

with an introduction by Alice Goff

The [essays here address] the exhibition as an instrument of German Cold War politics during the 1970s. This was a decade of transformation in both the museological and the cultural political fields. Beginning in the late 1960s, museums addressed a widely understood global crisis of relevance by rethinking the technologies of exhibiting with social engagement, popular entertainment, and commercial success in mind. In 1972 the Basic Treaty, and three years later the Helsinki Accords, established cultural exchange as an explicit priority of détente both between East and West Germany and on an international scale. In an environment of heightened attention to the power of the museum in contemporary life, the international traveling exhibition became a newly valuable opportunity through which state and nonstate actors could stage foreign political priorities, establish economic relationships, demonstrate diplomatic goodwill, and communicate ideological commitments to broad publics. The core premise of these exhibitions’ cultural diplomatic missions was that the objects within them would serve as ambassadors, embodiments of political identities, on one hand, and bridges across these entrenchments, on the other. In this way, the museum exerted itself as an institutional broker of foreign relations through, but ultimately beyond, its particular cultural purview. Continue reading …

MANUELA BAUCHE

Cuban Corals in East Berlin‘s Natural History Museum, 1967–74: A History of Nondiplomacy

ALICE GOFF

The Splendor of Dresden in the United States, 1978–79

MARIO SCHULZE

Tutankhamun in West Germany, 1980–81

ANKE TE HEESEN

On the History of the Exhibition

New Issue, Representations 141

NOW AVAILABLE

Number 141, Winter 2018

Featuring the special forum: The Object as Ambassador: Exhibitions in Contemporary History

ALICE GOFF
Introduction: The Object as Ambassador

MANUELA BAUCHE
Cuban Corals in East Berlin’s Natural History Museum, 1967–74: A History of Nondiplomacy

ALICE GOFF
The Splendor of Dresden in the United States, 1978–79

MARIO SCHULZE
Tutankhamun in West Germany, 1980–81

ANKE te HEESEN
On the History of the Exhibition

Plus:

GAURI VISWANATHAN
In Search of Madame Blavatsky: Reading the Exoteric, Retrieving the Esoteric

AMY KNIGHT POWELL
A Short History of the Picture as Box

Upcoming in Representations 142: Aglaya Glebova on Rodchenko’s photographs from the White-Sea Baltic Canal; Esther Yu on the “tender conscience” in Milton; Theodore Martin on anxieties of contemporaneity in recent novels; Jeffrey Knapp on Selma and historical films; and Sebastian Lecourt on the Victorian Jesus novel. (Coming in May.)