Five elk-skin drums attached to a wall, splattered with various amounts of black ink make up the work “This Song Is A Museum” by Peter Morin. It isn’t a work that immediately evokes an emotional response, like many of the other works in the Museum of Anthropology. But this work takes a different approach to the traditional artwork found in the Multiversity Gallery.
Morin himself is a member of the Crow Clan of the Tahltan First Nation in Northwest British Columbia, and usually creates works on the collide of indigenous and western knowledge systems. For “This Song Is A Museum,” in 2011 Morin called in Coast Salish singer Hwieumten (Fred Roland) to make a visual record of one of his songs. With a drumstick dipped in black paint, Hwieumeten inscribed each song with the “act of singing”, creating a way for people to “see” his song. Morin said in the curatorial documentation that he created this work in order to capture singing in a museum, something that he said is rarely showcased. Additionally, he wrote that the drums and the songs are “fluid structures, [that] like museums are strong enough to carry ideas.”
In the Multiversity Gallery, many of the works showcase artifacts from indigenous life, or depict the negative impacts of colonialism throughout their history. This piece is fairly different from that, as it is a physical manifestation of the idea of a museum, using indigenous materials to create. It’s a comment on the museum as a whole, providing some perspective to the idea of the museum and the role it plays in communicating knowledge and ideas. Placing this right next to works about indigenous land claims and residential schools provides another, differing example of figurative repatriation.
I found this piece to be very powerful, although it is essential to read the curatorial documentation to fully understand the piece. The title itself, “This Song Is A Museum” is a fairly abstract concept, definitely not one that I was able to understand on its own. The only thing that this work really presumes is that you are viewing the work in a museum, and you have a good understanding of what a museum is and what it does. Beyond that, this work is intended to make you reconsider the idea of a museum and explore alternative ways that culture and knowledge can be transmitted, like through music, or visual representations of music.