Leseprobe

22 IVAN GASKELL Display Displayed 1 1 Introduction In discussing display, I wish tomake twomain points. First, nothing shown to us, nothing humans view, is isolated. Humans never look at single things oblivious to those other things that surround them. Second, in questions of display, art is not everything—the entirety of the world is—though art itself can remind us of this state of affairs. Because this is a volume addressing questions of agency, I alsowish tomake a third point as a coda, though without going into any detail regarding recent notions derived from the work of Bruno Latour and Alfred Gell (in their different ways), and others. 2 This point is that at least some appeals to agency are hampered by philosophical naiveté. First, though, let us remind ourselves that display is not an exclusively human phe- nomenon. Many living creatures engage in display, notably for courtship and conflict. Humans act similarly, and for a wide range of purposes. They enact displays of aggression, as in a Ma¯ori haka , performed by warriors to intimidate their foes. Humans arrange com- mercialized displays of sexual competition, as in the annual MissWorld contest. They also show off hierarchy and status, as Cambridge University demonstrates each year at its Congregation ceremony to confer honorary degrees. Clad in academic robes, the partic- ipants process through the streets, displaying themselves. These are all displays as forms of performance, but display can also be a contrivance to show things off statically. Such 1  I am grateful to Caroline van Eck and her colleagues for the invitation to give the introductory address at the symposium Collections, Displays, and the Agency of Objects at the University of Cambridge in September, 2017. My revision of the text preserves aspects of its origin as a lecture, although in published form it cannot be as generously illustrated as when delivered. I was able to undertake research and writing thanks to my permanent fellowship at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg (Advanced Study Institute in the Social Sciences and Humanities) at the Georg-August University, Göttingen. I should like to acknowledge the stimulation provided by the director, Martin van Gelderen, his colleagues, and the other fellows at the Kolleg. Jane Whitehead was my companion in just about all the explorations that inform my thoughts here expressed. She is also my most consistently stringent critic. This essay is for her.  2  For Latour, see, among other publications, his Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-