As we know some museum objects are becoming over-burdened by lengthy captions that divert us away from viewing them in actuality. Freedom from labels and other contextual support allows for a more aesthetic visual presentation, but most museum visitors find that certain objects cannot really speak for themselves and take little interest in their more abstract and didactic potential. People tend to think that artefacts, like art, cannot communicate anything unless we have some explanation or practice in comprehending them. While we still need to enhance exhibits to provide given associations, there is great potential for these to be simultaneously visually and 'informationally' thrilling, to harmonise with rather than detract from the objects.

Museum labels offer a context within which the object can be read. This context is limited, selective and manipulative as it generally invites visitors to perceive in a particular way. So, despite appearances, once objects are acquired by a museum they do not enter neutral ground and museums have the privileged opportunity to shift and adjust their meaning, maintaining an almost patronising belief in knowing what is 'right' for the public. By their very nature, museums suggest that objects can benefit from being removed from their original context of ownership and use. Their re-display in a different context can be even more meaningful. Museum objects include very personal things as well as art objects which are both religiously charged and utilitarian. Away from their original settings, rituals and use, explained in this rather impersonal, apparently impartial manner, they have a tendency to become 'dehumanised'. Viewed as fragments of other times and other cultures, they can become like curiosities made by unknown people who are difficult to relate to because they are presented as being so distant and different from us. This is often accentuated when artefacts are systematically organised and segregated to demonstrate aspects of cultural difference and change rather than using the opportunity for comparative study to illustrate similarities.

In order to study collections of objects, they need to classified according to a given system rather than arbitrarily arranged. Museums have their roots in taxonomic object classification which works on a botanical model. Traditionally descriptive metaphors might refer to the birth, flowering, maturity, fading or death of a culture. This is often quite inappropriate and perhaps a system of metaphors drawn from physical science might be better suited. Museums also tend to adopt a linear rather than a cyclical notion of time avoiding the illustration of parallel or repeated cultural phenomena. Any artefact is actually an emanation of past time, however fragmentary its condition. Historians are engaged on a portrayal of time; rather like astronomers, they collect ancient signals and develop them into ideas.

Museums attempt to represent history and facilitate people to imagine, visualise and even learn from the past. Attempts to interpret the past via objects tend to project onto the visual world of the past the visual world of the present. Few people acknowledge that vision is not passive but active, a transaction between human beings and their environment in which both participate to actively structure their visual world. There is a continuing quest to bring the past 'alive' via museum objects by enhancing them with multi-media, sound and even smell. However, it is important to remember that we are forever excluded from the full experience of the many sensory worlds of our ancestors. Our present day picture of their world, like the partially reconstructed museum artefact, will always be incomplete and only an approximation of the original.

Many museum visitors can be observed wasting the opportunity of viewing the 'real' object directly with their own eyes. Instead there is a tendency to spend more time viewing and recording a secondary image of a real object via a camera or miniaturised video monitor. While this represents tourists' documentation of personal proximity to a celebrated object, it also displays our continuing familiarity and dependence on the virtual image. As we are aware, virtual is having the effect but not the form of the original. While the internet liberates the historic object from the protective custody of the museum, it can never effectively replace the quality of the real thing. The museum has the potential to stimulate the same childlike excitement of being able to see in a real physical space an object from the far distant past. Objects are physical links between us and ancient cultures and, even as a child, you can grasp at them in the knowledge that they are real and not 'fantasy', tangible proof of your human inheritance. In a cultural sense, they offer physical proof of a past existence only mentioned in a book or seen on a television or a computer screen. Nevertheless, viewing museum objects via the internet can offer a unique opportunity to share, compare, contrast and to juxtapose new and old; simultaneously in real time, it may also facilitate a more complete, less narrow approach to scholarship. It can also provide easy, 'comfortable' access for people who work during museum opening hours or live in more remote areas, bringing culture down to a personally 'controllable' and less daunting level. Like browsing around a museum, surfing the internet offers the possibilities for thought-provoking revelations from unexpected discoveries.

It is a vital role of a museum to paint the larger picture, to reveal the life behind the artefact, to present the interpretation imaginatively and to provoke the visitor's thought rather than simply instruct. One of the most enjoyable features of a museum is the opportunity to browse and explore its unknown territory which offers ample opportunity for accidental, spontaneous discovery and enlightenment. It is widely assumed that the opportunity to gain knowledge is a primary justification for displaying museum objects, yet enlightenment has quite a different quality from learning. Objects have the power to generate a stream of thoughts, ideas and images that go way beyond their initial beginnings. Therefore this particular quality of 'knowledge' that museums facilitate is linked to fantasy because it is only possible through a certain degree of imagination.

Every aspect of an artefact's incorporation into a collection needs considering which includes various ideological, aesthetic and political elements. By striving so hard to be impartial, museum curators tend to exclude the rich possibilities of alternative methods of interpretation. We need to recover some of the spirit of endeavour and innovation that accompanied the pioneering days of museums where there were perhaps more possibilities for cross-disciplinary interpretations. Within the confines of many established systems of collection and study, the museum object represents enormous unreleased potential, yet the situation may change with the evolving re-evaluation of the museum's role in society. Even through a most cursory glance, an artefact can represent the most private act of communion between ourselves and an object that can lead to a unique means of cultivating our inquisitiveness, providing that now rare space for other-worldly reflection and refreshment.

James Putnam
Department of Egyptology
The British Museum