Museum Materialities, Week One

Over the month of September, we read Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations (ed. Sandra Dudley). My apologies for being a little behind--I'm going to break this into two installments to tide us over until we convene again to discuss Csikszentmihalyi and Halton. Here's number one:

September 12: Chapters 1-10

We began with a brief discussion of how this book frames the idea of "materiality," and we concluded that Dudley is largely interested in sensory experiences--particularly those related to touch. Most of the chapters are concerned with physicality of objects as seen through a kind of sensory studies perspective.  Although some authors are practicing artists, the book is largely grounded in theoretical work produced by archaeology, cultural anthropology, and cultural studies. In short, these chapters generally question the how of materiality, rather than the what. 

In response to Witcomb's discussion of artistic representations of Treblinka, Elee commented that ignoring the personal is likely to cost museums their audiences. We all were struck by the idea that abstraction--while perhaps more comfortable for some viewers--is not an appropriate register for talking about trauma with survivors. In the case of something as personal as memory, acknowledging the physicality of an experience is sometimes crucial to representing an event or era in a way that feels "authentic" or "accurate" to those who were actually there.

Image from the Jewish Holocaust Center in Melbourne

Claire pointed out that this idea has broad application, too: often visitors' most powerful connections to artworks are found through interactions, whether with people or objects. We were particularly intrigued by Pheby's chapter on what constitutes the "materials" of contemporary art, largely because most of us have some experience with an artwork by James Turrell, whom she discusses at length. As Claire pointed out, Pheby's chapter is primarily concerned with exploring the boundaries of what constitutes artists' media, but in thinking about the visitor it may be equally important to think about how a body experiences those media. 

The conversation about Turrell reminded me that no human experience lacks embodiment; that is, we do not stop having bodies simply because we experience things (e.g, the internet, or emotional discourse, or philosophical discussion) that may not emphasize physical space or objects. Even in these moments, the relationship between body and mind plays an important role in how we think, especially where memory is concerned. At this point, Elee mentioned the classic example of Proust's madeleines (an episode recounting involuntary memory prompted by bodily experience), and we discussed the idea that materiality exists across boundaries of "mental" and "physical."

Erin referred us to Saunderson, et al as a good chapter for discussing the links between physical and mental experiences, since the authors' work tracks visitors' silent interactions with works of art (and, in some cases, facsimiles of works of art) through eye movements. This prompted an interesting conversation about studying interpretation. While Saunderson, et al were reasonably aware of their participants' backgrounds and expertise and were reasonably certain that participants' eyes moved between an image and its label, it would be impossible to know what, precisely, was happening in each person's head. We found ourselves immediately beset by questions related to hermeneutics, signs, and quantum physics, which is to say it was sort of like this:

Image from The Boca Raton Museum of Art

Or, in other words, "things have to be about multiple things at multiple times" and one cannot separate knowledge from one's own experience. We briefly discussed Bachelard as a useful theorist for thinking about the important links between space and memory. For us, Bachelard's work had direct relevance to Hancock's chapter on Virginia Woolf's home and personal effects. The especially striking moments in the chapter come from the author's encounter with physical remains; Woolf's eyeglasses, in particular, act as both relic and metaphor when one considers their proximity to the human body and their relationship to Woolf's apparent literary anxieties about seeing and being seen. 

We closed the evening with a lighter conversation about our own trips to the City Museum in St. Louis, a space that is very physical yet contains a wealth of cultural references that the visitor must navigate for him or herself. In spaces like these, Elee offered, we are charged with "privileging cultural knowing" and thinking about the human tools for understanding experience--tools that everyone has the capacity to use, even if they probably use them differently.

Beatnik Bob's gallery at the City Museum

For the next discussion, we decided to take on Erin's challenge to "get out of museum people perspectives" for thinking about the second half of the book (as well for thinking more broadly about our own personal practice). Stay tuned for where we went next!

DH

Photographs & History: Emotion and materiality by Elizabeth Edwards

This article breaks down the semiotics of photographs and examines how components could possibly be changed to create responses. Photographs all at once are objects of visual interest, create emotional and intellectual responses, trigger associations with memories or historical time frames and are a physical object. Manipulation of any one component of a photograph for example the subject, the placement of the photograph in a gallery, or its physical condition can create a response in the viewer.

I was talking this week with a photographer about a possible proposal for an up coming project. He specializes in trying to see the human connections. We talked about many of the issues discussed in Edward's article. Specifically the history behind the area, architecture, community, the physical nature of the photographs. The challenge of the piece and many art pieces seems to be is to make that leap from the physical visual artifact to the internal and external discussion of what the the piece is about. How can artifacts better convey the experience of discovery, documentation, and creation that the photographer goes through? And are there any examples?