Art/artefact/commodity: Installation design and the exhibition of Oceanic things at two New York museums in the 1940s

Abstract

This article documents some of the experimentation in museum installation designs for the exhibition of non-Western objects during the 1930s and 1940s. This is a period in which ethnographic artefacts were being displayed as artworks in natural history museums and in which the exhibition of such objects in art museums drew on techniques characteristic of not only natural history museums, but also commercial urban window displays (which were themselves enjoying a period of dazzling exuberance). The article focuses on one collection of Pacific Islands objects now housed at the Buffalo Museum of Science and on the installation designs of René d'Harnoncourt and Trevor Thomas. It responds to the provocation of Alfred Gell's influential writings on art and agency, specifically, his conception of art as entrapment and enchantment-his claim that artworks captivate, and thus exert a kind of (secondary) agency on people (patients). © 2012 Australian Anthropological Society.