Ok, so this last week was tough when it came to this class. I got about half of the reading done and started one blog post, but due to a handful of really hard assignments for other classes, and some family/personal stuff to work through, last week was just rough for Museum Studies. But here I am at my computer, in my living room at home over Fall Break, makin' an effort to catch up.
The articles I'll be writing over from this past week are #28, #29, and #30, to finish out Part III. Next week I'll focus on the articles in Part V, thinking a little more about museum relationships.
Each of the articles for this week speaks to some aspect of museum identity... what do a museum's characteristics say about itself?
I started with #30 and went backwards for whatever reason, I think it's because I wanted to start with the shortest of the three articles, assuming I'd have more time later in the week. I have now read all three of the articles and could blog about them all in conglomeration, but I figured I'd just do what I normally do. I began with Architecture and the Scene of Evidence by Catharine Ingraham.
You mentioned at a previous meeting, Dr. K, that I don't necessarily need to write lengthy responses to each article -- just show that I am learning. I'm still trying to get a hold of this, and perhaps now is a good time to implement that, since I am trying to catch up a bit. Haha.
Ingraham speaks to "the whole problem of 'bringing things to life' that have been, and still are, dead." She discusses the notion of evidence; how everything in a museum is evidence of a culture or a life, even the architecture of the building -- "the building and inhabitant caught together in a subject/object exchange of identity and location."
Building vs inhabitant -- this is something we often don't think about. Ingraham says, "Buildings, both civic and religious buildings in particular both house and give identity to cultures..." Later she continues to bring up the most interesting point from the whole article, which is the notion that buildings have a certain effect on their inhabitants as well as vice versa. "Living or working in a building is not a simple act. Buildings are also living in, and working on, their occupants. Among other things, architecture is a spatial organization extruded from our bodies." This idea is especially interesting to me, since through a lot of high school I was dead-set on being an interior designer. My thing was that I understood the effect living space had on attitude and outlook, and I wanted to influence people's lives for the better by creating beautiful, mood-lifting spaces for them to live in. I even wrote papers on this very topic, so when I was reading about how artifacts and their stories, architecture and its nature, influence the viewers and inhabitants, this made a lot of sense to me.
Well, I think I will sort of combine the Coombes article and the Macdonald article. Both have similar topics, but the Macdonald one was much more interesting to me. The Coombes article really didn't have much that I wanted to sink my teeth into, so I'll cover the interesting parts of Museums, National, Postnational, and Transcultural Identities.
Museums and their identities. Sharon Macdonald brings up many points during the beginning of the article that all point to one thing: museums are FANTASTIC places to explore cultural, even personal, identity. Their nature lends itself to this exploration, since objects themselves tend to speak to us, just because we're human and we experience the natural world through objects. The concern of this article is the museum's ability to articulate accurate identities. As the museum has the ability to be didactic, it also has the ability to sway its patron's views of the world, which is powerful and also frightening. Macdonald discusses - perhaps we should just let the objects speak for themselves? The museum is such a connecting part of culture, since culture itself needs a place to come and live. It is this cultural distinction and identity, shared experience, that makes a nation or state worth dying for, she argues. So we cannot throw away the museum itself, but rather we should be more careful about how it articulates identities. She proposes at the end that we should start with the objects themselves, and go from there in trying to tell the stories of history.
A cool thing she said that I've never thought about before, is that identity is how one "experiences oneself." That's an interesting notion... we all "experience ourselves," and this is controlled almost as often by external forces as it is by internal forces. We can experience ourselves in relation to other pieces of a culture -- other people's art. Their experience vs our experience. And we are validated somehow.
The Coombes article speaks to cultural identity in the nation and politics of early-twentieth century Britain, which was really hard for me to even begin. I kind of skimmed it, but the notions in the Macdonald article were really much more interesting to me. I can say that the article dealt with Imperialism, which is something we still sort of deal with, what with "the 99%" and such.
Overall the idea of identity of the culture being housed in the museum is the most important thing to pick up here -- that museums are a powerful, almost understated part of our culture, and it's important that museum staff are good stewards of the representation of cultural identity they hold in their hands.
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