I want to talk about this follow-up article by Steve Paikin about how people responded to his initial post. Paikin loves to play both sides, and in this case puts the artist responsible, Gordon Shadrach, on the defensive. It also doesn't bring in a voice from the museum, so, yet again, as is often the case, the media presents a lone Black voice defending their creativity and work from incensed white people. I bet few, if any, of the voices of detractors belong to someone who has actually been to see the exhibit. And Paikin, in trying to defend the reimagining (at least I think he's trying to defend), does a disservice to the museum, Shadrach, and courageous attempts to retell and contest dominant histories.
Dis/Mantel is an art intervention, in a way, in an otherwise typical historic house. It bends and plays with history and truth, but truth is subjective. Spadina House is itself a subjective telling of 19th century Toronto. What folks don't realise is that in most cases, historic houses are already bolstered by "fictions" of the families that lived there, of the normalization of what is almost always upper-middle or upper class values, even the objects within them. Most historic homes are furnished, at least in part, with stand-ins that are period appropriate, but didn't belong to the owners. The Austins didn't live in an 19th century time capsule. A decision was made to portray a period and the house has been staged to look as it did in a particular time. This reimagining is just bringing that to the fore in a jarring way. Jarring for typical museum audiences, anyway. Most typical museum-goers are educated and white, and we (I am obviously one of them) are used to seeing history presented from our perspective.
A more traditional means to do a show like this would be to highlight Louisa the family's Black laundress, and her role within the house. That would have been a solid interpretation 30 or 40 years ago, but no less problematic than excluding her altogether. Why? It situates and reinforces the narrative of Black servitude to whites. What this reimagining does is unsettle societal biases built in systemic racism and white privileges. It's not trying to show you objective truth, rather, it is asking you to confront how history is constructed and interpreted. Even if the exhibit is considered a failure, which is yet to be seen, I applaud Spadina House for making it possible and giving space to Shadrach to invert the traditional narrative and allowing visitors to confront their own biases.
https://www.tvo.org/article/when-is-a-museum-not-a-museum
