The Conundrum of Ephemerality: Time, Memory, and Museums

A Companion to Museum Studies Edited by Sharon MacDonald Copyright © 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd CHAPTER SEVEN The Conundrum of Ephemerality: Time, Memory, and Museums Susan A. Crane The history of museums is the history of a conundrum: how is what is always the same also always different? A modern museum’s mandate is to collect, preserve, and present objects for the public to appreciate. But preservation and conservation never completely “fix” the contents of the collections and or their presentation for all time. Constantly changing needs and interests – economic and political, as well as scholarly – shape the museum and its contents. For all the solidity of a museum’s magnificent façades or secured basements, it is a malleable and ever-changing institution. But in the most ordinary or common-sense way, members of the public generally feel that they know what a museum is, and that it is in fact solid (not to say stolid) and permanent. For many, museums perform the externalized function of their own brains: it remembers, for them, what is most valuable and essential in culture and science. And yet generations of curators and visitors have inhabited the institution, actively shaping (and necessarily changing) those memories over time. In addition, scholars of museums regard the institutions, collections, curators, and visitors with the eyes of distanced but interested observers. With all these simultaneous layers of temporal experience shaping the museum, we need some tools to help us understand how experience over time creates an institution at once essentially familiar and yet capable of challenging and changing both memory and expectations. This chapter will provide an overview of how interested observers of museums have responded to its conundrum of “fixed ephemerality” in two key conceptual formations: the narrative role of “timelessness” and “progress,” and the nature of collective memory as it shapes historical consciousness. Any discussion of time and memory in a museum must acknowledge that no single account can “cover” intensively or extensively the infinite variety of even apparently similar experiences. What wealth of subjective impressions, past and present experiences formed through memories, does any individual bring to the organized efforts of scholars or curators who present an exhibition – at any point in time? How does the memory of previous museum experiences, and the knowledge of what the museum as institution represents, affect understandings of the museum and its purpose? And how, above all, Time, Memory, and Museums is this infinite mass of impressions to be understood by those who care about the museum as an institution, and who will shape its status and future? Collective memory theory, first developed by Maurice Halbwachs in the early twentieth century and expanded upon considerably since the 1970s, offers insight into how subjectivities align along common experiences, such as museum visits, or encounters with particular objects, to create expressions of collective meaning – familial, communal, national, and more (Halbwachs 1980). Numerous examples of the application of collective memory theory to historical museum experiences can be drawn from the 1990s, when many exhibitions commemorating World War II and the Holocaust occurred around the world. This chapter will present these international case studies in the context of the questions raised above. Individual and public memories of World War II, memories of museums, and public interaction with scholarly interpretations of the history of the war will be addressed as interwoven aspects of controversial exhibits. Progress and Timelessness For much of the modern era, societies have labored within a consciousness of progress that makes us highly sensitive to the phenomenon of change. The value of change is under constant revision, and the topic itself remains vital to societies’ selfunderstanding. Change happens over time, within the duration of time, as the finde-siècle philosopher Henri Bergson insisted; and museum publics exist within the flow of transition. Bergson wrote in the era that responded most sensitively to the throes of modernity, when progress was perceived as a violent and destructive force whose speed and volatility were never predicted by the more optimistic Enlightenment thinkers. The philosophes believed progress to be beneficial and essential. The first European museums were built in the Enlightenment mode, drawing on Renaissance curiosity about the inexhaustible variety of nature and man’s divinely directed talents. Early modern museums, creating a tradition that reached well into the nineteenth century, represented the breadth of scientific knowledge, an accumulation of as many original and facsimile historical objects as possible, and the finest art that could be commissioned. The world of the early modern museum was plentiful and potentially boundless; only the physical confines of the museum itself construed the limits to natural plenitude and its visible diversity. Museums came to represent a stable reference point of cultural heritage and a measure of man’s wisdom. But museums also became, ironically, the institutions most clearly committed to representing the mechanisms of change. The irony lies in the fact that preservation is the antithesis of progress. Change occurs as a phenomenal aspect of the immutability of time, within which progress occurs. But collected or conserved objects are frozen in the moment of their most emblematic value – of singularity, of implementation, or representativeness – and denied their natural, or intended, decadent lifespan. In museum collecting, active selection intervenes in passive eternity (“the passing of time”). As Octavio Paz pointed out long ago, this often means that objects that were never intended to last very long have their life trajectories interrupted. The natural decay of natural 99 Susan A. Crane historical objects is likewise prevented by their preservation, whereas other objects, such as industrial or toxic waste, remain despite anyone’s desire to keep them. Paz wrote: “The obscene indestructibility of trash is no less pathetic than the false eternity of the museum” (Paz 1974: 24). Time is frozen in museums to the extent that its objects are preserved, their natural decay intentionally prevented. While much has been written about how museums came into historical being, I want to emphasize how museums have been created to capture a moment of creativity or cultural significance. This may seem a rather limited notion of the museum’s purpose, but it is a useful way to think about how a fundamental conundrum has been established. Much has been written about forgetting, about the loss of social memory that is the catastrophic result of violence and the decline of civilizations, which museums are supposed to counteract. But we might suggest as well that forgetting is a naturally occurring process which museums disturb. We would then need to write a history of interventions against the flow of time. Preservation deliberately interrupts time’s natural order. Within the scope of modernity, both evolutionary theory and Enlightenment conceptions of progress developed similarly as attempts to account for perfectability over time: improvement was a sign of nature’s or God’s will expressed in concrete terms. Accordingly, change was not only good, it was supposed to happen. Western thinkers from the Greeks to the moderns articulated a sense of time’s inevitable movement, but modernity excelled in expressing that movement as positive and forward-inclined. To interrupt the natural order of things, including time, was to deny the benevolence of progress, and its duration. Decay and extinction, as Charles Darwin among others pointed out, occurred naturally and necessarily, as part of this process. Darwin framed his evolutionary thought in terms of competitive survival. The contents of museums, one might suggest, represent the traces of evolutionary stages, examples of what did not survive but yet, paradoxically, transcended into the present. It is no accident that fossils, those material traces of previous evolutionary stages, are to be found in natural history museums: in the natural order of things, the existence of the living came to an end; while the remains – the traces, the randomly fossilized artifacts which transgress time by becoming mired in the primordial muck – transcended their previous form to acquire new significance as relics. Preservation intervened twice: once in nature, once in the museum. For me, this brings back fond memories of childhood visits to the La Brea Tar Pits, now part of a museum in Los Angeles, where the primordial muck still bubbles. As Michel Foucault influentially suggested, the natural historians of early modernity redefined time: The ever more complete preservation of what was written, the establishment of archives, then of filing systems for them, the reorganization of libraries, the drawing up of catalogues, indexes and inventories, all these things represent, at the end of the Classical age, not so much a new sensitivity to time, to its past, to the density of history, as a way of introducing into the language already imprinted on things, and into the traces it has left, an order of the same type as that which was being established between living creatures. And it is in this classified time, in this squared and spatialized development, that the historians of the nineteenth century were to undertake the creation of a history that could at last be “true” – in other words, liberated from Classical ratio- 100 Time, Memory, and Museums nality, from its ordering and theodicy: a history restored to the irruptive violence of time. (Foucault 1973: 132) History exists within “the irruptive violence of time” and its epochs and eras are merely markers. Classification manages time. This fundamental shift in attitudes toward time occurred during what Reinhart Koselleck refers to as the Sattelzeit or “saddle period” between the ancien régime and modernity (Koselleck 2002). The nineteenth century’s contribution to reorganizing time was its creation of the modern disciplines of history, and anthropology, and of museums. This “saddle period” endured revolution and, in its Romantic rhetoric, perceived a rupture between old orders and new chaos, which was visualized in the form of ruins. The Romantic fascination with ruins is a corollary of the new historical consciousness that became a hallmark of modernity. Ruins were both longstanding architectural features of the landscape and newly created reminders of war and secularization. In the nineteenth-century fervor for preservation, all ruins were seen as objects in need of defense, conservation, and preservation. Not only portable artifacts, but ruins in general became collectible objects within the realm of newly historicized preservation. According to Romantics then and now, posterity demands preservation against the ravages of time. Once “time” became manageable and the posterity of the archive or collection was (presumed to be) assured, its representation in the museum became linked to objects. But the meaning of “the past” was to be distinguished from the meaning of the object itself. The ruin or relic does not define its own fixed or guaranteed place within the collection. It can be put to many purposes that are stringently and multiply constrained by historical context. For instance, Susanne Koestering and Donna Haraway have vividly demonstrated how apparently “natural” groupings of flora and fauna in late nineteenth-century German and American natural history museums were shaped by provincial or national identities and bourgeois morality rather than by any “timeless” naturalness of nature (Haraway 2004; Koestering 2005). In her influential essay, “Objects of Ethnography,” Barbara KirshenblattGimblett discussed how one era’s curiosities were another’s scientific or ethnographic relics, many of which were simply translated from the earlier era’s cabinets to the later era’s museums (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). Nineteenth-century museums contemporaneously exhibited natural history and history – separately. Museums of ethnography depicted “primitive” (although contemporary) cultures as timeless entities, while museums of history established trajectories of modernization and industrialization that depicted the inevitable progress of Western civilization (Karp and Lavine 1991). The Smithsonian’s original museum complex included a museum of history and technology and a separate museum for natural history. The distinction between “peoples with histories” and “peoples without” separated Native Americans from Europeans, as early anthropology and ethnography developed the idea of “primitive” peoples, those whose lifeways had altered only through contact with modernizing Westerners. Timeless, essentialized “primitives” and natives were classified within the natural history of man’s development, rather than within the civilizing order of history. At the end of the twentieth century, a new Museum of Native American Indians re-visioned the place of those peoples within history, insisting on their place in the irruptive violence that 101 Susan A. Crane had removed their traditions and artifacts from an historical existence. Objects removed from a natural history to a new historical museum altered in their temporal significance. Timelessness is rendered visible in another way at heritage and “living history” museums. Visitors hope to feel as if they have “stepped back in time,” attempting the experience of living in the past. We know that this is impossible, but our encounters with period-costumed, arcanely voiced guides and re-enactors provide a frisson of verisimilitude that we find compelling. Such encounters appeal to the imagination and draw on memories of school lessons and history museums, public television specials, and period films. We have a range of sources to draw upon, as do the reenactors. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) notes that we all watch to see whether the Pilgrims, or Vikings, or whomever we are “visiting,” will be able to stay in character. Our awareness of the discrepancy between the past and the present never entirely disappears, but we enjoy the illusion of timelessness – the ability to share the past as if it had never passed – even as we are drawn to that past because of its differences from our present. Preservation is predicated on posterity sharing the desires of the present, although, as we have seen, those desires can never be taken for granted and do in fact change with time. Museum collections are built so that future generations will have the benefit of the knowledge and meanings accumulated in the museum – on the implicit assumption that progress has been made, and that future generations will value the results and continue to do so. In speaking of the museum as an agent, and assigning motivational interest to an impersonal future collectivity, I am highlighting the way in which museums themselves are regarded – are seen, experienced, described, written about – as manipulable, so that the temporality of their mission is seamlessly projected from the present to the future. The future must care, else the project is doomed. The goal of all preservation is to intervene in the natural history of destruction (with apologies to W. G. Sebald, who contemplated writing such a history and whose essay on the subject appeared in a posthumously published volume entitled The Natural History of Destruction [2003]). Remembering and Forgetting: World War II and Collective Memory in Museums Museums organize the significance of what we already knew – the archives we carry in our minds, the ineffable as well as the rigorously conscious memories that comprise our knowledge. In the course of time, memories shift from front to back in our minds, sometimes resonant, other times filed away in addresses which, like semiconducted codes no longer in use, we can no longer access. Externalizing the mental function of remembering, museums of history, natural history, and culture select some memories to retain in the perpetual present. Preserved and conserved objects are organized in a meaningful narrative that is offered continuously and accessibly. With these foregrounded significances embedded in art, historical objects, or exempla of natural phenomena, we are reassured that meaning will not be lost in the synapses of our brains but collectively represented in the tableaux of exhibitions. 102 Time, Memory, and Museums These representations, foregrounded and (it is hoped) permanently shelved (fixed or presented) in an easily accessible location (even if you do not go, you know it is there; it is reassuring), form the basis of our cultural identities. Memory ensures meaning and reassures or reaffirms identities repeatedly, despite the fact that the remembering never recurs in exactly the same way. As Daniel Dennett and others have shown, individuals never re-experience memory as pure, perfect repetition of the past. Each act of remembering is discrete, and although connected to past memories, is not a duplication of them (Westbury and Dennett 2000). Museums are no different; contact with their contents renews remembered connections. Each time we visit a museum (for the first time, on a repeat visit, alone, with others), we experience the preserved perpetual present anew. We bring to the exhibitions those accumulated life experiences and maturity, those constantly changing iterations of the personal which construct our daily identities. We possess knowledge, which we deploy in the midst of the museum, equally as much as we gain knowledge and experience from the information and objects presented. Even total ignorance of a museum’s contents or mission does not preclude visitors from bringing expectations (Crane 1997). Imagine, then, the consternation of an American World War II veteran who learns that the famous National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington, DC intends to exhibit the Enola Gay, the B-29 which dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The museum is the most popular of Washington’s many public museums, and its location on the Mall, adjacent to the halls of government, reinforces public perception of its mission: to honor technological progress, and America’s role in supporting its development. From the Wright Brothers’ plane to a NASA space capsule, NASM’s collections illustrate a celebratory narrative of technological achievement. The Enola Gay could have been displayed as an exemplar of advances made in air power during the 1940s, and the veteran could have visited the museum happily, assured that his understanding of the war and this object’s place in it would reaffirm his expectations. Controversy erupted over the proposed exhibition in 1994, as the nation approached the fiftieth anniversary of both the bomb and the end of the war. For veterans, the bomb’s role was incontestable: it had brought a swift end to a bloody conflict and saved at least a million American lives, serving as appropriate retribution for the devastating and shocking attack on Pearl Harbor and the brutality of the ensuing war in the Pacific. However, NASM’s curators, in consultation with veterans’ groups, American military representatives, and historians, created an exhibit which focused not on the B-29 as such, but on the Enola Gay and its mission: as bearer of the bomb, destroyer of innocent lives, initiator of the Cold War and the atomic age of fear (fig. 7.1). As NASM’s exhibit plans became public, reactions were immediate and hostile. Most people who had lived through the war did not want to challenge their lived experience and memories of how the war ended, which had served as a stable point of reference (Crane 1997; Hein and Selden 1997; chapter 30 of this volume). Collective memory theory helps us to understand why some perceptions or beliefs remain intransigent, while others are more flexible. It is not simply a matter of “time passing.” The most influential theorist of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs, 103 Susan A. Crane Figure 7.1 The revised Enola Gay exhibit featured the plane’s fuselage but very little about its non-aeronautic historic significance. National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC. Photograph by Bill Bezzant, Saipan. discussed how memories form among people who share a common experience, belief, or idea (Halbwachs 1980). Halbwachs argued that individuals experience time not only as duration but also as multiplicity. So long as there are others for whom memories lie in common, an individual can recall experiences as shared. Each recall reshapes that memory for the individual and in turn affects the memories of others. Over time, some memories are retained because they continue to be shared; other memories fade away or find another repository, such as a museum. Modern memory theory relies on the notion that memories are never entirely subjective, or relying completely on a single person’s solitary brain. Collective memory, then, is the basis for all memories, and each individual participates in many collectives that vary over time, waxing and waning in significance, or, to borrow the computer analogy again, sometimes the memory addresses are on the screen, and sometimes they are buried in the hardware. Collectives may be as large as a nation or humanity, or as small as 104 Time, Memory, and Museums the two people who shared an experience, and all individuals participate in a changing plurality of collectives throughout their sentient lives. As the study of collective memory intensified in the 1980s–1990s, scholars and critics emphasized different aspects of its influence and developed a larger critical vocabulary. Some, such as Mieke Bal, use the term “cultural memory” to refer to “memory that can be understood as a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual or social one” (Bal et al. 1999: vii). “Social memory” tends to be preferred among anthropologists, “cultural memory” within cultural studies, and “collective memory” by historians. Arguably, the terminological differences are primarily semantic, signaling disciplinary boundaries, but they signify a range of scholarly viewpoints on the ways to understand memories that appear to belong to more than one individual. Marita Sturken suggests that “memory that is shared outside the avenues of formal historical discourse yet is entangled with cultural products and imbued with cultural meaning” marks the subject of cultural memory studies (Sturken 1997: 3). History and memory appear to be at odds (although not entirely separated) in this rendering, much as Pierre Nora influentially argued. Nora, directing a collaborative project on French collective memory, urged attention to the “sites of memory” around which collective memories aggregated (Nora 1996). “Sites of memory” persist even when direct connection to the past appears to have been lost, and allow for the recovery of memories without necessarily involving traditional historical study. Collective memory thus compensates for loss. Viewed from a different slant, loss of memory can be recognized at times to have been willfully achieved, as James Young (1993) noted in his perceptive account of Holocaust memorials. Young drew attention to the “counter-memories” that contest official or national narratives of the past and challenge society to recall what they have not wished to pay attention to, such as participation in the Holocaust. “Countermemorials” thus defy conventional expectations of celebratory monuments to past glories, by insisting on representing loss, trauma, and failure to come to terms with the past. When war is the basis of collective memories, their multiplicity renders difficult any attempt to educate a public, recall a particular version of the past, or create a new narrative of its meaning. This phenomenon is not limited to Western museums’ attempts to remember World War II. The year 1995 was a watershed for memorial and commemoration of the war, and not only because the fiftieth anniversary was particularly significant. Ten years after the war (and, not coincidentally, shortly after the withdrawal of American occupation), Japan’s first museums of atomic power opened: the Hiroshima Peace Museum and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. They emphasized local experience, as the true “ground zero” of a new and terrible era. Honoring the dead, and decrying the use of atomic weapons ever again, these museums served a powerful moral and didactic purpose. As museums of the war, however, they represented only its end. The Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, the emperor’s role in supporting militarism and imperialism, the subjugation of conquered Asian peoples – all were missing from the museums dedicated to peace. Japan’s role in the war was marginalized, even though attention to its recent past and acceptance of its memory could have contributed to the message of peace. 105 Susan A. Crane Local experiences, so horribly and uniquely traumatic, dominated the institutions created in their memory. The Japanese public was largely kept in ignorance of its wartime history. American occupation forces and the new Japanese government colluded in looking forward, rather than back, in order to stabilize the fledgling democracy. As a result, most Japanese learned nothing about Japan’s wartime atrocities. Their collective memories were forged around a national identity based on victimhood. This identity was challenged in the late 1980s and 1990s, as the other victims began to speak out after a long silence – of wartime biological experiments in China, of sexual slavery as so-called “comfort women” from Korea in particular. Collective memory among comfort women first found its voice only after Korean feminists encouraged these “grandmas” to come forward and demand recognition. The Japanese public and its government responded with incredulity, based on their own lack of collective memory of the comfort women’s exploitation. Veterans and former patrons of the comfort stations had been encouraged to see it as a legal system of prostitution. Cultural mores and shame had kept the Korean victims silent but the memories alive. No museums had included these memories or any other that challenged the official national narrative of victimhood and peace advocacy. Time had been allowed to follow its natural, destructive flow. The uncanny ability of photography to render the past visible has made this medium one of the most attractive for museums wishing to narrate modernity. Photographs and film of World War II provide us with ample evidence of atrocity and barbarity, but they also offer us insight into how we experience time, memory, and the past in museums. In the 1990s, a controversial exhibit of Holocaust atrocity images called Crimes of the Wehrmacht toured Germany and Austria. The Nazified German army was indicted through the exhibit’s documentation of active participation in the mass shootings of Jews on the Eastern Front. Although some photographs were mislabeled and misidentified, the bulk of the exhibition’s accuracy caused painful self-reflection and denial among its German viewers. Postwar German speakers had largely accepted the Wehrmacht as a Nazi army, but believed that individual soldiers were not culpable for the crimes of the regime. Viewers were forced to reconsider their own relatives’ potential involvement in genocide. As Ruth Beckerman demonstrates in her 1996 documentary of the exhibit in Vienna, East of War, veterans disagreed with each other in front of the very photographs that documented the crimes; children of soldiers refused to believe that their beloved parents had been involved in genocide; and still others voiced sentiments eerily reminiscent of their 1930s’ life experiences. Photographs may “freeze” their subjects, but they do not freeze time. In Japan, the mid-1990s brought photography exhibits about World War II to its art museums. The exhibit location implicitly raises controversy about the photograph as document: is it an historical artifact or “merely a picture?” Julia Thomas (1998) explored these ambiguities at the Yokohama Museum of Art’s Photography in the 1940s exhibit in 1995. Japanese military involvement in the war was invisible. Instead, Japanese auteurs’ renderings of patriotic homefront women and children were presented alongside contemporary photographs by famous American and other photographers. An essential, national timelessness was suggested in the Japanese 106 Time, Memory, and Museums photographs, which evaded the historical specificity of their composition. Thomas suggests that photographs can operate in multiple time-frames simultaneously. Just as collectives form independent and inter-related memories, so too photographs can depict many separate notions of time. For instance: the time of a nation coming into being or the span of a war; the lifetime of a veteran or survivor or their children; the past during which the photograph was composed; the present of the viewer. The photograph can also appear in a strictly formal sense as a work of art, itself the reason for its being and its meaning, regardless of context. Ironically, photographs epitomize the ways in which artifacts fit into non-simultaneous chronologies simultaneously. Museums’ representations of the past through photography will always be freighted with these multiple temporal frames. A Natural History of Preservation and Destruction Michel Foucault understood that most modern inquiry into memory and historical consciousness emphasized a search for origins. But, he wrote, such inquiries are doomed to frustration: “there is nothing one can do about it: several eternities succeeding one another, a play of fixed images disappearing in turn, do not constitute either movement, time or history” (Foucault 1972: 166). A narrative of progress may be imposed on a chronology, but that imposition will never be able to efface itself or make those meanings “natural.” The meanings that we attempt to attach to objects are dependent on historical context and the multiple collective memories that shape their reception. We can know an object’s provenance, but does that really tell us the “origin” of its significance? Meanings, embedded in narrative, rely on repetition, context, and memory for their posterity. Time endures, but meanings only endure with continual effort. Forgetting attempts what natural time cannot: to remove “the traces of conflict, failure and disaster [which] are never erasable in time” (Sennett 1998: 11). Silencing and forgetting go hand in hand when speech is prevented, but as we have seen with the “comfort women,” silence also shelters memory. For survivors of trauma, what forgetting they are able to achieve against all odds, may count as grace. Though there may be political or moral reasons why we condemn silence or generate narratives of recovery, forgetting is not necessarily anathema. When meanings are forgotten, it is usually because other meanings have been generated in their place, even using the same objects of reference. A hundred or five hundred years from now, the Enola Gay may well be just another B-29. The Smithsonian has chosen to present the plane in a commemorative hangar at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC, along with other planes. By removing the Enola Gay from NASM’s premier venue on the Washington, DC Mall, its curators have attempted to reduce the scope of the plane’s significance. No exhibit which would remind viewers of its mission accompanies the Enola Gay to its new home; no images of children’s lunch boxes or stopped watches will remind the viewer of the plane’s unique mission. It is a plane among planes in an historical narrative of technological progress. But it is also possible that, one hundred or five hundred years from now, the Enola Gay will figure as the primary commemorative tool in a history of peace, as the plane which sparked the atomic age and Japan’s pacifist response, 107 Susan A. Crane whose significance would only be realized after the twentieth century’s violent legacy was understood in a larger context. I offer this scenario as an imaginary optimistic prognosis, but “what if ” history never satisfies anyone completely, and should not. The meanings of this plane, indeed of any preserved object, are not limited to the single instance of their display. The past, like museum and archive collections, is always the lodestone of meaning and understanding. Our knowledge of it is never complete. We rely on preservation to secure the referents of the past, and we attempt to delay or interrupt the natural history of destruction in order to underpin our own fragile memories. Why has this desire become tantamount to modernity? Why are we unwilling to let the past go? The lessons are still there, in other forms; one could argue, for instance, that the original Declaration of Independence, so fragile that curators fear for its life, is itself re-written in the institutions of democratic society. We can also make copies. Other objects, less unique and less central to the notion of “freedom,” may have fewer reasons for continuing to exist. But we preserve, protect, and defend the objects we choose to represent our pasts and our cultures because that choice, that representation, is itself valuable to us. So long as that value remains intact, we will have collections, museums, and the narratives of their meaning. The narratives, however, will change, and that too is a part of the natural history of preservation and destruction. To understand the ramifications of time and memory in the museum, historical consciousness demands accountability. But at the same time, we recognize that “what has been” is the starting-point of meaning, and only that. 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