Exhibiting Art

Objects and Contexts

Nod to Carol Duncan’s thesis Framing the questions with web travels to art museums Framing the questions with Karp and Vogel “In and Out of Africa” Discussion

Structure

Carol Duncan’s take on art museums and the “ritual of citizenship”

“Museums can be powerful identity-defining machines. To control a museum means precisely to control the representation of a community and some of its highest, most authoritative truths. It also means the power to define and rank people, to declare some as having a greater share than others in the community’s common heritage – in its very identity…those who best understand how to use art in the museum environment are also those on whom the museum ritual confers this greater and better identity.” (p.101-102)

How do museums create context for the objects in their collections?

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: http://www.getty.edu/museum

New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY: http://www.newmuseum.org/

Brooklyn Museum of Art: http://www.brooklynart.org/

The Rijks Museum http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/

The Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmusuem.org/

What happens to that construction of context when exhibiting art of the “other” or ethnographic art?

How do you contextualize X-rated Peruvian Pots?

What messages get sent if the context is absent or confused?

Ivan Karp and “The Other”

A “generalized artifact of the colonial and imperial encounter”– “We” = rationality, symbolic animal sacrifice, orderly,

bourgeois attitude toward the conduct of everyday life– “They” = lacking the qualities of the dominant (usually

colonial) groups, savages, controlled by emotions, unable to calculate rationally

What are the implications?

Can a museum present objects from a non-dominant culture in a way that does not perpetuate the colonial/imperialist exercise?

“How do we legitimately understand or appreciate art from a culture we do not thoroughly know?” (Vogel, p.194)

Jackson Beardy

Ivan Karp,“The Other” & Museums

Exhibits use organizing principles of difference and similarity to produce the imagery of “the other”– “Exoticizing” = difference predominates, often inverting

the familiar– “Assimilating” = highlights similarities

Examples from your experience?

T.C. Cannon

Example

MOMA “Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern”– “content…intentionality…production…use

[history] are all omitted…cultural and historical differences are obliterated from the exhibiting record.”

Primitivism: •A belief that it is best to live simply and in a natural environment. •A belief that the acquisitions of civilization are evil or that the earliest period of human history was the best.

Nadia Myre (Algonquin)History in Two Parts, 2001

Birch bark, cedar, ash, spruce root & gum, aluminum

Eitlejorg Museum

Vogel’s exhibit:ART/Artifact: what did they do and why?

“Western culture has appropriated African art and attributed to it meanings that are overwhelmingly Western” (p.192)

“I have come to feel that the museum dealing with…non-Western art cannot adopt the authoritative voice commonly heard in museums of Western art and science. We are too far from the voices of the original owners and makers, too locked into the perspectives of our own culture… we can be faithful only in the fashion of our own time.” (p.193)

Viewing “In and Out of Africa”

Viewing questions

What makes these objects meaningful? 

Where do you think “authenticity” and meaning reside for these artifacts and who are/should be the arbiter of that significance?

What is worthy of being in museums? 

Are “museum quality” and “meaningful” the same thing?