Standard

January 23, 2012 by jeremy

Posthuman Museum Rant

Based on:

Brown, Michael F. (2009) Exhibiting Indigenous Heritage in the Age of Cultural Property. In Whose Culture? The Promise  of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities. J. Cuno, ed. Pp. 145-164. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ok, admittedly, this is quite the over-the-top Utopian rant but I figure Brown’s article gave me the perfect opportunity to go off the handle a bit and raise some ideas for (optional) discussion…

Here we go (this opinion is subject to change)…

Brown discusses the etymological conflation of the loaded words “property” and “heritage” within the context of the Museum that has morphed from an encyclopedic Enlightenment-era venture to being a “site of conflict” (145). In contemporary times, this conflict-site perpetually deals with the competing forces of “controversial provenance” (145). Consequently, Brown discusses how the authority is diluted when collecting intangible heritage as if it was property (145).

Brown also reminds us that proprietary culture is not unique to Westerners/Europeans as protecting sacred knowledge happens in all cultures. In Western culture for example, there was once a living tradition that dealt with the occult and we had even once shared oral traditions similar to that of indigenous people. Having said this, in our own regions of ancestry, we (i.e. the culture of the blog-author) were once indigenous people.
Brown is essentially asking what the role of proprietary culture/property/sacredness is in the age of public social media (146). Social media as it currently stands, extends its narrative meme-space beyond cultural community boundaries.

Brown suggests that in a Postcolonial-era, such stewardship should be left to the artefact creators their descendants…
If this is going to be the Museum collection-negotiation paradigm from now on, then I am guessing that it will not be until the advent of embodied virtualizion of our own bodies and minds (body-schemas) through technological means when Westernized museum bureaucracies will finally become sympathetic towards the Post-colonial discourse.  I am claiming that we must merge with our surrounding artifacts in order to transcend them as commodity-fetishes. For example, when we eventually live-out our artifacts both as “property” and “heritage”, we become post-virtual beings (Bainbridge calls these “cy-clones”) – each totally unique yet entirely conservable and publically remediated/emulated/propagated – that can finally embrace ritual as “living art” – without the need to distinguish the two. At this point in history, we might understand that our interest in residual artefacts goes beyond a mere collection-fetish and see them as an integral part to our identity as individuals belonging to a completely networked community.

If this happens, we will jettison the revenue imperative to guide visitors to the gift-shop (158) and share our own artifact/mentefact stories with members of indigenous communities and work post-buraucratically together towards forging something more than a garage-sale of metaphysically charged ritual artifacts.

The post-museum could transcend beyond being an observation and regularatory space (148) and become a space of participation and embodied story-telling. Of course, my vision here is utopian…We must start somewhere if we are to get past this increasing cultural alienation with other cultures. Having said this, such a post-virtual, post-internet, post-commodity culture would be open to all communities and not limited to Westeners.

According to Brown’s testimony, our conventional museum paradigm seems to have caused spiritual harm to others and we should no longer contribute to this harm (152). It is foolish to harness the “Aura” (152) of others. We can better understand this aura by making our own from scratch and then we can better understand how to share it with others in an open a manner as Facebook or Second Life. Perhaps then we can finally be worthy of entering into dialogue with First Nations communities, for example.
Only if we continue to turn the living and “supernatural” aura into a residual artefact stored in a dusty basement will we still compel others to tell us “more and more about less and less”  (159) of the artifact we ignorantly extracted from them. If we really wish to see ourselves as the arbiters of taste and feel genuinely enlightened, we really need to experience this type of “magical” phenomenon for ourselves so we can be in direct communion with this “aesthetic genius” (148) we so revere as a novelty obsessed culture inspired by second-hand fetishes.

Standard

January 23, 2012 by jeremy

21st Century Nationhood and the Museum…

This response is based on:

Benedict Anderson.
Introduction In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso. 1991); Census, Map, Museum In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso. 1991), pp. 163-85.

Suitable for a document made from the end-times of Communism’s original Empire, Anderson points out that the Internationalist ideal of Marxism did not translate neatly into the peculiar regional politics of each nation-state. Certainly, Anderson also notes that the Nationalist ideal once again reigns supreme. He then goes on to say that Nation-hood itself is somewhat imaginary…perhaps even a kind of meme-space that unities community members across geopolitical or ideological lines.

I am guessing that the class discussion will begin to address repatriation challenges with First Nations communities since their own nationhood crosses the colonial border-lines of our current nation-states (i.e. Canada and the USA). As such, the “collections” of each First Nations Community, has their own very narrativized concept of “provenance”.

I am hoping our class discussion will be expanded to included similar repatriation challenges to virtual nations such as: Ladonia and The Kingdom of Elga-Land Vargland as well Second Life’s Odyssey Island.  In those virtual communities: remediation is just as important as repatriation for the continuation of their “nationhood”. Such nations go beyond continental boundaries and envelop global citizenship. Also, narrativized rituals are a big component of a “national” identity for these communities. Finally, the proprietary aspects of the internet further complicate the nature of this remediation and repatriation. Perhaps virtual communities are unique in that open-ness (open source, open sharing and public secrets) becomes a virtue and explicit publicizing of their most private narratives is imperative and desirable for their communities to survive over time.

 

Standard

January 23, 2012 by claude

The Human Fish : the history of exotic displays…

Clifford (1997) mentions “the long history of ‘exotic’ displays in the West. This history provides a context of enduring power imbalance within and against which the contact work of travel, exhibition, and interpretation occurs. An ongoing ideological matrix governs the understanding of ‘primitive’ people in ‘civilized’ places.” (p. 197). He then describes the famous pseudo-exotic performances by CoCo Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

When I was collecting data for my M.A. thesis, I found the following newspapers clipping which serve as evidence that the “long history of ‘exotic’ displays in the West” has been part and parcel of everyday life and popular culture too. Not only high-art or museum discourse. I have posted the two 1897 newspaper clippings but since they are a bit hard to read, I also transcribed them below. Enjoy.

Published in the Vancouver Daily World, July 20, 1897, p. 8:

THE HUMAN FISH

The Strange Amphibian From the Southern Coast Reaches Town.

The remarkable amphibian so fully described in recent press dispatches, has reached town. Capt / Robt. Beasley, its custodian, is en route to the east with his strange charge, which is attracting the curious wherever exhibited.  In formation it strikingly resembles the analomy of a female human in the working in the upper half of its anatomy. From the waist downward the extremity is that of an ordinary fish. Showing the scales, dorsal and candal fans. It was captured alive in the Gulf of California by native fisherman and is now attracting crowds of visitors to the Boulder block, on Cordova street, where it is being exhibited.

Published in the Vancouver Daily World, August 2, 1897, p. 8:

The human fish, which was on exhibition here, was taken a few days ago to Steveston. It was not too well patronized there and the spieler made some remarks about the deadness of the town. Just to show that they were alive a couple of Stevestonites carried off the human fish and it cost the owner $20 to get it back again.

Standard

January 23, 2012 by kate

Week 3: Digital Return

I just came home from an excellent workshop at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History called “After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge“. In our seminar this week I will be talking about some of the themes and debates that emerged as we explored a spectrum of digital projects that have, at their core, a deep social and technological interest in using digital media to “return” heritage to originating communities. Some of these include:

  • the status and significance of the “digital” heritage object: replicas, reproductions, copies, and control
  • ownership of cultural heritage in the digital age, and Indigenous claims for intellectual property and copyright
  • the role of intangible cultural heritage in the museum and its representation with digital technologies in real and virtual/cyber museum environments
  • cultural protocols and Indigenous ontologies, and their translations into digital databases
  • opportunities for re-mediation of cultural heritage facilitated by digitization
  • participatory research methodologies and research ethics
  • the shifting role of the museum as a public institution

I will talk about some of the projects that were presented in the course of the workshop; in advance of the class you may want to look at a few of them–all listed on the Digital Return Website. I will talk in particular about the Reciprocal Research Network, and you will be reading Rowley et. al’s 2010 paper about the RRN (I encourage you to sign up for an account at http://www.rrnpilot.org). Our discussions will be undercut with our attempt to understand Anderson’s notion of the “imagined community” and the role of museum (along with the census, and the map) as an instrument through which “the colonial state imagined its dominion––the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry” (Anderson 1991:243). Building on last week’s discussion of shifting curatorial authority in the museum and public expectations of access to cultural knowledge, I’ll suggest that projects like those featured in the Digital Return workshop provide us with insight into cultural, political, and institutional contexts where national ideologies (including First Nations, Aboriginal and Tribal nationalisms) and relations of power are being contested and reinscribed.

Gallery

January 22, 2012 by kate

Seminar and Tour at Museum of Vancouver

This gallery contains 12 photos.

For our second seminar of the semester, we visited the Museum of Vancouver for a discussion and tour of the Neon Vancouver | Ugly Vancouver exhibit, with Curator Joan Seidl, and Curator of Public Engagement and Dialogue, Hanna Cho, who is leading the production of the museum’s virtual exhibit and mobile walking tour ‘The Visible City: […]

Standard

January 21, 2012 by claude

MOMA in The Colbert Report

I just finished reading “Museum as Contact Zones” and later watched The Colbert Report  in which Carrie Rebora Barratt, the Associate Director for Collections and Administration at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, discusses historical American art.

What she shows, discusses and says seems to me directly related to the issues in Clifford’s article. Notice that she explains how the painting they are looking at was painted in Germany and then brought back to America (interesting detail that perhaps would have been left out before the 1990s). I find it ironic that scholars such as Clifford expose the rhetoric in the tradition of critical realism, and suggest that this will help start a dialogue to slowly make things change and then fifteen years later, this is what we here the Associate Director for Collections at the MOMA say…

CLICK THIS LINK FOR:  Carrie Rebora Barratt interview

To me, the more things change, the more they stay the same…or maybe you disagree with me??? Please disagree with me…

 

Standard

January 18, 2012 by kristin

BBC Article Regarding Findings in Museum Storage

After our visit to the Museum of Vancouver’s Neon Vancouver | Ugly Vancouver exhibit and walk through of the museum’s storage, I ran across this article on my commute home:

“Fossils Discovered in Museum Storage including Some of Charles Darwin’s Plant Specimens”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16578330

I can now understand why so many resources are needed to manage these vast museum collections, and how some objects could be overlooked. However it would be really exciting to find that some of the overlooked objects are so famous!

 

Standard

January 17, 2012 by tyler

Fostering Dialogue and Discussion

Peter Walsh’s “The Web and the Unassailable Voice” presents an interesting forward-looking view of the web, considering it was written close to 15 years ago.  Walsh describes a plan to encourage discussion about a newly acquired Ashanti seat for the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College across the campus network. “Through the network, students, scholars, and curators will discuss the meaning of the object and the extent to which it was shaped or reinterpreted by European imperialism in Africa” (234). The discussion would then result in a web page detailing the discussion as well as “how best to display the work and explain its meaning” (ibid). Walsh explains that the discussion was in some way inspired by the initial reaction of the African American student community when the Davis Museum was built. The African collection was placed in a smaller gallery, which the students interpreted as a “judgement on the importance of African art relative to Western art….another racially based narrative of exclusion and implied inferiority…a message the museum never intended to communicate” (ibid). Here is the crux of the museum’s problem, in Walsh’s view, that the “unassailable voice” of the museum—typified by the text we encounter on the wall next to an object or artwork—too often misses the mark, and the web offers new ways for the museum to move away from this disembodied voice.

Such a move is, I believe, in accord with Fiona Cameron’s call for better integration of post-structuralist/modernist approaches in museum interpretation. In “Museum Collections, Documentation and Shifting Knowledge Paradigms”, Cameron notes that technology can play a role in presenting multiple interpretations of an object, even though there is still a need, and desire, for interpretation based on “scholarly research” (85). She suggest that a mind map is one way to present different interpretations of an object, allowing for both a scholarly and indigenous description of an object, for instance. I find this compelling, as Cameron notes that most visitors “do not want to take full responsibility for the interpretive process” (85).  That a museum representative would call for polysemic interpretations even when many of her patrons don’t necessarily desire such a move is commendable, but it also presents a challenge. It’s the same challenge Walsh begins with in the opening of his essay. How can the museum move away from the “Unassailable Voice”? Supposedly, in 1997, Walsh was on the way to implement a new use of the web in opening up the interpretive process of cultural objects, by bringing together both scholars and community members to discuss the importance of an object.

A brief search on the Davis Museum’s website and www.archive.org did not turn up any artifacts of such a discussion, which is unfortunate, as I am rather curious to see how sit worked out. With the explosion of social media over recent years and a plethora of media outlets capitalizing on “user generated content” it is sometimes difficult to remind ourselves how novel such an approach was, and still is.  I could not find much community engagement on the Davis Museum’s current website, except for the obligatory Facebook link. Following this, I found mostly announcements about openings and individual pieces of art, as opposed to attempts at fostering dialogue and discussion.

So, in some ways, I think we are still back in 1997. Not technologically, for sure, as it is much easier to integrate discussions across the web due to recent technological transformations. However, I am not so certain that, we, the public, have learned to really engage with museum objects as a site of meaning making—a place where we can all weigh in on an object’s significance alongside of experts and cultural representatives. This is not a technological role, but a cultural role, which as Walsh and Cameron point out, must in some way begin at the museum.

Standard

January 17, 2012 by diana

(In)finite possibilities of polysemy in the digital age . . .

“The larger task is to bridge the gap between documentation practices and information needs that require the inclusion of a modernist, post-structural, and postmodernist paradigms, and the particular social and cultural ideas posited by a diverse community of users. They need to provide authoritative information but also acknowledge the fragmentary, arbitrary, and plural nature of object interpretation” (Cameron 2005).

All three of this week’s readings from the collection Museums in a Digital Age (Parry 2011) made mention of tensions between modernist and postmodernist paradigms—polysemy and curatorial intent, fluidity and fixity, chaos and structure. Marc Pachter’s (2002) article, for instance, argues that the structure and fixity of physical spaces and objects have become an antidote to an increasingly fluid, chaotic and virtual world. In a similar vein, Peter Walsh’s (1997) article shows that the Unassailable Voice (while appearing to be a unitary didactic voice) is a compromise among experts between fixed, simple explanation and complex accounts of ever-changing reality. Likewise the overall comparison Walsh makes between the Unassailable Voice and the chaotic, fluid, open access nature of the Web echoes this dualism. Fiona Cameron’s article also notes the importance of a balance between openness of meaning and establishing frameworks for understanding; while it is important to allow for a multiplicity of meanings (or “polysemic interpretive models”), some knowable contexts or systems are necessary to avoid complete misreadings. Curators, by acting as “knowledge brokers”, rather than all-knowing disseminators of knowledge, might usefully create effective avenues for allowing fluid meanings within understandable contexts.

In Pachter’s case, I found the argument a bit paranoiac about the state of the contemporary world (the age of artifice and bastardization!). In each of these cases, though, what I found interesting was the way that the seemingly unlimited and fluid possibilities inherent in digital technologies confronted structural or practical limitations.

← Older posts
Newer posts →