Crown Fossils

Extractive Museums, Authorized Narratives, Institutional Critique, and the Artist-as-Museologist

Abstract

This article explores how artists, by adopting the posture of an artist-museologist, can propose new understandings between museums, their collections, broader perceptions of knowledge, and the power of choosing what constitutes the museum through a critical-historical account of the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s historical and ongoing relationship to resource extraction and Indigenous land dispossession. We define the term artist-as-museologist as an artist who is concerned with borrowing, addressing, infiltrating, or operating through museum collections, their scenography, or dissemination activities. Applying institutional critique to the museum, we show how artistic practice can help to excavate buried power relations that condition the extractive museum, like the Royal Tyrrell, named after geologist, Joseph Burr Tyrrell, who discovered the Albertasaurus during an expedition of the Geological Survey of Canada.

The artist, we argue, has the potential to do such excavation by surfacing stories and relations that have slipped between cracks or have been written out altogether. We look specifically at Bigras-Burrogano’s  current projects that explore the tensions between the Canadian settler-colonial state’s use of natural imagery to constitute national identity and its extractivist economy.

By providing a critical history of the Royal Tyrrell Museum’s imbrication with extractive enterprise and the settler-colonial state while reflecting on two art pieces that directly respond to these conditions, this article ultimately proposes that the artist-as-museologist has an integral role to play in creating conditions for non-extractive museological and curatorial practices.