Among striking developments in history writing towards the end of the twentieth century were the moves to the spatial and the visual in the re-construction of historical consciousness. ‘Global history’, accelerated through American hype on ‘globalization’, and ‘visual culture studies’ propelled by society’s increasing reliance on visual communications, became fashionable projects. ‘Global history,’ grounded in contemporary economics and pitched in part in reaction to Western parochialism, came seriously to challenge nationalistic and structuralist approaches to history. At the same time, the ‘pictorial turn’, with its epistemological claim for vision as the prime sense in knowledge production, came to defy not only conventional history of art, but the status and value of the discipline of history itself. Wrestling with these turns proved enormously productive. In the history of medicine it led to foregrounding disease in its global dimension, revivifying, at the same time as challenging, older narratives on the ‘world wide’ spread of disease. In the history of science it led to heightened attention to visual representations in struggles over the production of scientific knowledge and authority. Both turnings did more than merely provide historians with exciting new conceptual frameworks for comprehending the past. As illustrated through the contemporaneous growth of a literature on the history of material objects in all their global distribution, they also helped broaden the range of objects deemed worthy of historical attention.

This paper [which we can only abstract here] draws on these moves in relation to one particular material object both ‘global’ and visual: the Aids poster. The worldwide production of these objects from the mid-1980s hugely reinvigorated the whole genre of the health poster. Indeed, according to one expert, Aids posters restored the poster genre as a whole to its original function as a communications medium.

Certainly, as never before was so much money, aesthetic effort, and psychological marketing put into this particular media on the part of voluntary bodies, national governments, and international health agencies. Our concern, however, is with the wider conceptual frameworks that were mobilized to make these objects meaningful. In the 1980s and 1990s, as we have outlined elsewhere [Medizinhistorisches Journal, 42, 2007], a cohort of Western intellectuals concerned themselves with them along with other representations of Aids in order to talk about the politics of identity. Those concerns, in turn, were linked to broader ones emerging at the time over the rights of citizens to equal access to health care, the privatization of medicine, and the role of the international pharmaceutical industry in the commercialization of health care. In this paper we focus on another aspect of these ephemeral mass-produced objects: not their ‘active life’ on the streets and in the corridors of learning, but their ‘afterlife’ when they were turned into items to be collected, exchanged, and stored in museums and archives. It is well known that the social life of material objects in such places is not the same as that of their initial culture of production, circulation, and consumption.

Museums and archives, like other depositories for images and artifacts, have particular collecting agendas and particular institutional and intellectual traditions into which new acquisitions are fitted. They also inhabit the present, embracing wider conceptual contexts that serve further to shape the organization and meaning of their artifacts.

Here, we explore one such ‘afterlife’ for Aids posters: an exhibition entitled ‘Against Aids: Posters from Around the World’, which was held at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg (hereafter MKG-H) between February and April 2006 – a museum hosting one of Germany’s largest and most prestigious poster collections. We do not seek to make causal claims for the ‘importance’ or ‘impact’ of the exhibition; our interest in it is, rather, as an illustration of the more general trend towards the ‘global’ rearrangement of material in museums by the twenty-first century. The MKG-H was founded in 1877 by Justus Brinkmann in a spirit of aesthetic modernism and German nationalism. It was intended as a place to celebrate ‘the people’s’ arts and crafts, much like the South Kensington Museum in London, which was established in 1852 and renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899 at the height of British jingoism. As at the MKG-H, so at the Victoria and Albert Museum over the past few decades, objects have been reorganized for exhibitions accenting ‘the global’.

The representation of Aids posters at the Hamburg exhibition provides us with a means to discuss the politics of such ‘global assemblages.’ On the one hand, it permits us to draw out the inherent contradictions and tensions that can be involved in any such institutional mobilization of the concept of ‘the unity of the globe’. On the other, it allows us to underline important continuities hidden under the more apparent or insisted upon ‘discontinuities’ between national and global discourses, and between modern and postmodern politics of aesthetics – continuities rooted, we argue, in shared aesthetics values. As important, the example permits us to reflect on how the discourse of the global affects the work of historians using material objects in their constructions of historical consciousness. As these aims and objectives should suggest, we are not concerned here with how viewers might have responded to the images or to the exhibition as a whole (an almost impossible task in any case given the uniqueness of individual psychology and experience). Nor are we interested in providing a walk-through critique of the exhibition; our main interest is in the historical context of the Museum and how this bears on the politics of aesthetics implicated in its exhibition of Aids posters.

The Hamburg Exhibition
‘Against Aids: Posters from Around the World’ was a modest, low-budget affair. Primarily, it was staged in order to exploit the Museum’s recent acquisition of over 1000 Aids posters from a private dealer, a purchase that enabled it to join the club of institutions harboring such collections. […] It was through the display of these posters in particular that the exhibition sought to exemplify regional variety and similarities in aesthetic styles. […] How people interacted with Aids posters during the images’ ‘active life’ on the streets (on buses, billboards, underground trains, and so on), and how the power and fear of Aids operated in relation to identity were not a part of the Hamburg show. Through the literal framing of the posters, their hanging according to the conventions of art galleries, their arrangement, and the choice of them in terms of the quality of their visual language (Bildersprache), the organizers denuded them of the local contexts in which they were created and in which they were engaged with politically, intellectually, and emotionally. […] At local, national, and transnational levels ‘Against Aids: Posters from Around the World’ can be seen to have effaced the individual history of the objects on display through a particular universalizing and seemingly neutral kind of aestheticization. At a closer look, however, it both appropriated them into an old script (a local and fondly-held modernist epistemology of viewing and aesthetics) and a new one — globalization. By collapsing two decades of national histories into a singular and would-be unified world fight against Aids, the history of Aids was visually construed in terms of this new global subjectivity. Not only were particular constructions of the recent past left out (the local struggles around these objects) but, so too, the construction of the present (the global media industry’s selling of itself through the attack on Aids as a ‘global problem’). Thereby, ‘globalization’ was not only made ‘real’ or made ‘true’ through aesthetic representation of an ostensibly international struggle against Aids, but by this same conceit was both medically re-appropriated and humanized – no matter that over the meaning of ‘globalization’ there has been little agreement, let alone consensus on it as a ‘good thing.’ […]

Conclusion
Our concern in this paper has been with a particular moment in the history of Aids posters: not that of their initial ‘public’ life on the streets, or in pubs and gay clubs, doctors offices, and so on, but their ‘afterlife’ in places where they might be displayed or stored. Through the analysis of an exhibition at one such afterlife location our intention has not been that of negative dismissal, nor critique for the sake of it. Nor has it been merely to expose how these often strikingly visual objects aimed at protecting individual health had their meaning changed through appropriation into a conceptual framework different from that of their initial contexts of production and consumption. More interesting to us are the intrinsic and unremitting links between these visual objects and wider politics, or how the visual is inherently a part of the latter.

While it might have been supposed that Aids posters came to political rest once they were retired, categorized, catalogued and stored according to the principles of collecting institutions, the Hamburg exhibition proves otherwise. In fact, as collector’s items they entered a space that was no less political than when they were on the streets in the 1980s and 1990s, and when they were appropriated to Western discourses on postmodern identity and on the role of the visual in the cultural negotiation of the self. It could hardly be otherwise, for simply by entering such a ‘retirement home’ they necessarily became a part of the institutional agenda of the MKG-H. In effect, here, as elsewhere, they were ‘framed’ in agenda-serving classificatory narratives embedded in bricks and mortar. Indeed, from the moment such objects become collectors’ items and are stored and/or displayed as artifacts they become epistemologically loaded through the very process of objectification.

The MKG-H demonstrates that these collecting agendas and the accompanying aesthetic guidelines often have deep historical roots. But what the analysis of its 2006 exhibition of Aids posters also shows is that old and seemingly apolitical agendas (invented to express specific national political interests) are neither lost nor rendered innocuous in the contemporary world. Rather, they come to serve new political frameworks linked to the world of today’s visitors – a world in which aesthetics is the dominant means to a politics constituted on little more than the idea that ‘if it looks good go with it’ (an outlook now as pervasive in the practice of science as in the arts of government and museum display). Crucially, this new politics is sustained through, and for, the absenting of critique; not today the critical outlook entertained by Susan Sontag and other pre-postmodern intellectuals, that visual representations (and popular posters in particular) covered-up or cloaked lurking ideologies. Postmodernists, unconcerned with that view for the most part, in effect opened the space for the new politics of aesthetics that cloaks something different: the idea of aesthetics as void of political intention. The Hamburg exhibition of Aids posters was in fact an early example of the coming-to-reign of these politics, with the visual alone being the vehicle for understanding and creating a (‘global’) community without distinction. Whereas for Brinkmann in the nineteenth century, aesthetics (in art) could be consciously used for the political purpose of populist democracy, with aesthetics and politics in clearly separate spheres, for the inheritors of his institution in Hamburg aesthetics (unbeknownst to them) became the politics, not simple a means to it. Ironically, their arrival at these politics – their unknowing performance of them through the exhibition — was via adherence to Brinkmann’s legacy. Through that, Brinkman’s original political agenda was emptied of its original political purpose. Installed in its place were the politics of the appearance of political un-intention. Thus did an aesthetic concept born in the nineteenth century to serve nationalistic purposes come to operate for the political work of educating national citizens to global citizenship.

What does this mean for historians working with material objects stored in global-tending museums and archives and who are themselves now operating within a global framework? Since material objects have no meaning without a framework, and are framed in being collected, the simple answer is that historians have to take into account the afterlives of such objects as much as the object’s original lives. Would that it were quite that simple, though. Harder is the problem of the historian’s own place in ‘the global framework’, which in many respects is not unlike that of the material object in the global-aspiring museum (and very much like that of the curators of such exhibitions). Whether avowed explicitly in ‘global history’, or embraced implicitly in the practice of history writing in contemporary culture, ‘the global’ operates politically and epistemologically. Just as global history’s predecessor ‘world history’ is now perceived by some of its originators as having been a product of, and agent for, its Cold War moment, so for our own times dominated as they are by multi-national corporations and abiding politicians, the take up of global themes in history writing is widely recognized as providing, at the very least, legitimacy to a globalization discourse, even if, as is often the case, the historian’s immediate object is the far from reactionary one of provincializing the West and critiquing its hegemony. Of course, for some historians ‘the global’ does politically more, overtly serving as a rhetorical strategy for the re-coherence of the discipline of history itself after its pummeling by poststructuralists, deconstructionists, and other fragmenting postmodern forces over the past thirty years or more. To this end, what could serve better as a re-unifying device than the holizing connective metaphor of the globe? Thus the global provides a new grand narrative — a universalizing tool — with which to put the meta-narrative of history back together again. Although seemingly mindless of one of postmodernism’s cautions, that totalizing worldviews can lead to totalitarianism, these historians seek more-or-less intentionally what the curators of the MKG-H performed innocently through their exhibition of Aids posters. In doing so, these historians also share company with certain art historians anxious to revive older agendas – a means (as bluntly put by one of them) to counter the ‘deconstructive criticism of historical culture’ proposed by ‘self-serving postmodern academics’ who treat the past as ‘a sour land over which to exercise present concerns and anxieties’. Yet neither global history nor visual culture studies need necessarily lead in this direction. To see the global as a discourse tied politically to institutionally specific agendas (such as the aesthetics entertained at the MKG-H in 2006) offers the possibility to take an alternative political position, or at least to liberate its historical study from such agendas.

Nevertheless, in terms of the less-visible shaping of historical knowledge production, the global framework can never be other than ‘world-making’ as opposed to being simply historically descriptive. No matter how hard we try to stick to the recovery of some truth of how the world came to be globally conceived (past or present), our knowledge productions implicitly reproduce and foster the unifying construct. Just as with material objects (or words or images) there is no meaning to historical events outside the conceptual frameworks we wittingly or unwittingly apply to them. In short, there exists no resting place for history writing; it is always already fashioned and fashioning. Like creating a museum exhibition of posters to aestheticize the ‘global’ nature of Aids, the business of contributing to a global history of anything entails, by that very act, the politics of constructing a necessarily partial representation of the past’. History writing, too, in other words, as a product of its time, cannot avoid making up historical consciousness.

This paper cannot escape the charge that it too contributes to this process merely by discussing an event that was conceptualized in ‘global’ terms. It might even be seen to compound the problem by drawing attention to spaces where, a priori, the historian is already politically and epistemologically implicated: the museum and the archive. However, in doing so it has sought to move the discussion beyond the tired call for attending to historical contexts, especially of material objects globally attributed. Our purpose has been to encourage historians to an awareness of their own immediate entanglements in history’s constructedness — the constructedness of the present mediated in history writing as much as through aesthetic assemblages of ‘the global.’ The historian Aruf Dirlik, critically inquiring into the point of writing world history, has observed that ‘an awareness of the variety of world histories that have been constructed at different times and in different places … [must cause] any world historian worthy of the name [to ] … be uncommonly aware of the constructedness of the past.’ Similarly, we submit, all historians need be reflective on their contributions to the present — to a culture given to re-enchantment through ‘the global’. Quite how we should historicize material objects of the sort discussed in this paper may be open to debate; what is not is the necessity to historicize our own historical projects. Otherwise we move perilously close to becoming blind participants in the historically-fashioned spaces where memory is increasingly naturalized and neutralized through universalized and universalizing concepts mediated aesthetically. We end up, as it were, naïve viewers of the exhibition at Hamburg: as blind to the nature of the new post- postmodern politics of aesthetics, as to the modernist would-be universal humanity that ‘the global’ unwittingly espouses through those politics.

In our 8 minutes we want to talk about the consequences of what we have done– the consequences for the historian. What do we gain by knowing something of the difficulties involved in screening and analyzing a museum exhibition such as this? What is the purpose of history here? Is the job of the historian simply to reveal the different value systems and epistemic virtues involved? Where does the value system of the historian come in? These are the kinds of questions we want to raise in self-reflection on our paper.

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