The virus and the vaccine: curatorship and the disciplinary outsider

Liebenberg, Nina

The virus and the vaccine: curatorship and the disciplinary outsider

Doctoral Thesis

2022

Abstract

In the various departments of a university, researchers, lecturers and students exercise limitations on the objects or subjects they study through the disciplinary categorisations and processes they apply. These methods, taught in the curricula of their undergraduate programmes, promote a particular way of looking and of understanding that privileges certain characteristics over others. As students become assimilated into their respective academic communities, they become naturalised to the resulting biases, habits, norms and conventions and, subsequently, are unaware of lurking blind spots. This process limits the kinds of knowledge these disciplinary ‘insiders' are exposed to, and I argue that it can lead to the occlusion of ethical considerations, hinder discovery and perpetuate negative aspects of the hegemonic Western foundations of many of these disciplines. To support these claims, I focus on an object housed in the University of Cape Town (UCT) library, a Tabloid medicine chest. This chest has been rendered invisible in the library because it exhibits characteristics that fall outside of those privileged by the library's categorisation systems and its search engines. By conducting an object-study that delivers a wide range of findings – most quite separate from the chest's original intended use – the object becomes a prompt and a provocation to examine where else in the institution knowledge has been rendered invisible by insiders and their methods. I survey objects and collections resident in the departments of the university and discuss two collections in detail: the M.R. Drennan anatomical collection, actively used in science curricula, and the Kirby collection of indigenous instruments, almost invisible in its host department. These case studies illustrate how limits imposed by their respective insiders curtail the explanatory power of objects, limiting an understanding of the social and political pressures brought to bear on a discipline and that shape its practice. The case studies, particularly of the Drennan collection, also illustrate that outsider perspectives can help expose disciplinary limitations. The next part of this enquiry considers the outsider perspective as championed by a particular form of curatorship and artmaking introduced by lecturers at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT in the 1990s. The exhibition making format and curatorial strategies introduced by these individuals are shown to be effective in revealing limitations placed on objects, in surfacing blind spots within the university and its affiliated museums and in opening up collections and their disciplines to outside perspectives. The effects of such exhibitions are traced as they reverberate in the university and culminate in the introduction of an interdisciplinary initiative focused on examining the university's knowledge archives, the instatement of an honours programme in curatorship and various departmental installations. Lastly, to elucidate what is at stake when an object is limited by the constraints of its host department and to showcase the potential of artmaking and curatorship in combating these limitations, the invisible chest in the library is subjected to a range of my own artmaking and curatorial strategies. This process is conceptualised as a shift from object-as-virus to object-as-vaccine. The methods I employ celebrate a much wider resonance of the object and extend the results revealed by the object-study at the start of this thesis.

Keywords

Fine Art

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

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