yo I'm alive

Wow, what a whirlwind of a two weeks it has been. I've read bits and pieces of articles, getting through only a few of them completely. The semester is definitely rolling along, and I'm trying my best to keep up. I'll write another article about identity and combine some of the things I am getting from articles in this sections, but I really want to take a day to bullet my Dream Museum characteristics, and also do a ranking of the articles I liked/disliked. So I'll be doing that next. I am about to leave my apartment to go to our meeting right now, however, so this post was just a heads-up for what's been going on with this course. Time to sit and read is really no where to be seen lately! Life of a student, right?

Until... soon.
J

Aboriginal Art and Artist Voice

#39 - Museums and the Native Voice by Gerald McMaster

Using the vehicle of distinct aboriginal art, McMaster tells the story of aboriginal artists who want to be seen as current artists rather than art that only goes into ethnographic galleries. I totally understand where the artists are coming from with this issue -- I can see that museums in general have control over what art is seen in what category, and what if the artist didn't envision his art in that category? The article considered negotiation over meaning, critique of authority, power in authority, and visuality/display. These are all such important things in the grand sceme of museums. If museum people aren't sensitive to working closely with artists, it will be easier to accidentally misrepresent the artist and his art. Which, of course, begs the question, how important is it that the artist's work is represented accurately? It is important to the artist, but if other people interpret the work differently, isn't that part of the identity of the art? The fact that it has multiple interpretations?

As an artist myself, I would say that I really do care how people interpret my art, but it's also my job to decide how clear or vague I want to be. If my work isn't taken exactly how I want it to be taken, it's still out in the world and impacting people in a specific way. So regardless of whether it had the desired effect, it still did something. That said, it is nice when your art is presented in a way that tells the story you wanted to tell.

So that's my rant in response to the article, and here's a picture of Luna's performance art!

Indigenous culture vs Western industrialism culture

Article #38:

Indigenous Models of Museums in Oceania by Sidney Moko Mead 

Wow, so it was really interesting to read about "museum" type institutions or customs that are non-Western. And really, the notion of the custom house really makes so much sense when you get down to it. Really giving honor to the art by contemplating it for extended periods of time, and even sleeping over in the building so you can continue to digest the work late into the night and even the next day.
However, I do think our culture has too short of an attention span for this. The author is right in saying that in the west, "people are happy to be anonymous and prefer to look in their own particular way without fuss." The type of museum that we are familiar with really does suit our culture, and the many urbanized areas we have. But the author is also right in saying that the average museum institution requires extreme specificity and a large amount of highly trained people on board, rather than in the indigenous custom houses where they just let the objects be. Literally, because within a decade when the objects are falling apart or rotted, they just replace them with more current objects and move on with life. Really, really interesting to observe the huge difference between the cultures.

Do I love Western culture? This is a question I've been wrestling with since I worked with Latino students this past summer. The way Mead describes the indigenous people in the article sounds a lot like Mexican culture. They take their time, finishing one thing before moving on to the next. We in Western culture are always on a time schedule, always multitasking, but we're also always moving forward. We don't always enjoy life, but is that really the point? This is rhetorical, it really could be the point. We find ourselves going places we never dreamed of going, because of hard work. Not that other cultures don't work hard, it's just often geared in a different direction. We complicate things, and many other cultures keep things simple. I enjoy being around other cultures and taking things slow sometimes. Both times I have been to Mexico, I enjoyed this aspect of their culture. But could I live in it? Something interesting to think about.

Anyways, in conclusion it's cool to see how different aspects of culture, such as perception of time, really affect museum culture as well. Everything in society affects museums, it would seem!

Part IV and House Museums

New section!

Part IV - Histories and Identities in the Museum

So here we go.. 2 weeks, 6 articles.

Today's was the one I found most interesting just as I flipped through from the beginning of the section.
#34: Reality as Illusion, the Historic Houses that Become Museums by Mónica Risnicoff de Gorgas 

The article was interesting, talking much about striving towards authenticity, in the house museum especially. It's sort of like what we were discussing during our meeting on Thursday... the striving towards authenticity and integrity in representing the history well helps create a more accurate experience for the patrons. Also this article was a great example of what I was talking about also during the discussion, about using certain institutions to drive certain points about musems. House museums specifically have a different sort of responsibility to objects than the gallery or art museum do. This is great to know in the grand scheme of Museum World.

She gave examples of three different house museums, so I thought I would find pictures of each. I was curious to what these looked like in contrast to Albert Barnes' house, because his was certainly not a history museum, although they used the space for educational purposes.

Museo de la Inconfidencia

Virrey Liniers house museum 

Unfortunately, I couldn't really find pictures of the inside of either of these museums (the museo de la inconfidencia seemed to only have one), and could find no pictures of El Paraiso, the summerhouse of Maniel Mijica. So, I didn't get to see a whole lot, but from the top picture it seems that the "house museum" is not a whole lot different than others I have seen! 

Thoughts? 

Til tomorrow, 

J

Museum Relationships

Article #57 -- Partnerships in Museums: A Tribal Maori Response to Repatriation by Paul Tapsell

This article honestly made me think more about the stucture of this class more than the actual relationships of museums with the public. The article made a good point - know your audience, know what is going to be important to them. In the case of these indigenous tribes, they really wanted to know that their objects, traditions, and histories were being respected. So an up-close-and-personal partnership with the indigenous people is something that is important, especially for this museum.

The Auckland Museum was a good example in itself to use and articulate this point.  So that got me thinking... and I think it would make sense to go museum by museum, using different institutions as examples to drive a certain point or explore a certain topic as you go through this course (I'm thinking for future classes, of course). These articles in Museum Studies do that somewhat, but I had the thought that it would be cool and engaging to go museum by museum. For example one museum could have a history of being extremely pedagogical in their approach. Discuss - is this good? when is it good, when is it bad? talk about curators who don't have good stewardship over the history they are displaying/representing, and other curators that do. Another could be a good example of a museum that has a very specific acquisition policy, and follow their specific process of bringing in new works. We sort of talked about that last time we met.. you gave examples of how things happened in museums you have worked in. That helped me a lot to bring some of these principles to life.

For example the Auckland Museum had a specific and unique set of characteristics that made it useful for driving the point of needing to establish connection between the museum and the society it represents. Going through the semester, highlighting the most important things to know about museums in general.

An example of engaging the class in their own research: "Next week we're going to be learning about the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Your homework is to go on the website and find as many distinctive characteristics of this particular museum as possible. Bring them into class on Monday, and we'll see what trends you identify." They can try and guess what you are going to highlight by researching the museum and identifying what is does well, or what it does poorly, or what it does because of its unique society. Then as the teacher on Monday you could reveal what type of museum or characteristics the IMA is a good example of, and give the students more information than they could have found just on the website. Throughout the semester you could, as a class, visit one or two museums that you have learned about in class.

I'm sure that my theory has holes, but it just came to me that going institution by institution would be more exciting for me than reading museum peoples' theories (often they seem to be theories), and trying to read between the lines about what this means for museums in general.

Would love to hear your thoughts tomorrow when we meet. :)
Til then!
J

Week 3 of 4: Identities.

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.

Some Thoughts

Article #31 - Some Thoughts about National Museums at the End of the Century by Roger G. Kennedy

This dude's writing style was much clearer than yesterday's :)

He speaks to the issues of nationalism and the role of the museum in representing diversity. A few favorite or insightful lines:

"We strove to convert a storage facility with visitorship into a place where significant stories are told by the arrangement of objects."

"My own response has been a refutation of the notion expressed by some senators that the objects in history museums -- perhaps in all museums -- 'speak for themselves.'"

"Objects stand mute, except that their message may be imparted to people who live with them all the time and have learned their silent language. It may be wonderful to feel such a connoisseur, but no national museum would last long is it relied only on this group. [...] Objects speak most powerfully in intentional juxtaposition."

"Museums are still places in which people think."

He then goes on to talk about different museum prototypes in order to understand their strengths.

He also talks about acknowledging the diversity here in America.. not assuming that "national" means a conglomeration of different cultures into one, but a representaion of each. He frames resisting homogenization in a positive light, which I think is wise, although we should never cease to listen to one another's viewpoints and take all things into consideration.

Overall good article. Done with yet another week of talking about museum politics and relationships. These articles have been intellectually stimulating and interesting. I'm makin my way through! Have a good weekend!