Summary for Exhibiting Cultures (Karp & Levine)

This book is a collection of articles about museum exhibition divided into five parts. I will focus here on several of the articles I found particularly interesting/useful.

1. The Museum as a Way of Seeing (Alpers)

The main idea of this article is that by removing artifacts from their environment, by stripping them of their context, we can appreciate the objects themselves. In doing so, we can simultaneously distance ourselves from the artifacts’ creators and find in the objects something that connects us to them and to those that made them.

2. Exhibiting Intentions (Baxandall):

There are three agents inolved: The creator of the artifact, the designer of the exhibit, and the audience. The Exhibition should be a conversation by the maker of the artifact and viewer more than anything. “Exhibitors cannot represent cultures. Exhibitors can be tactful and stimulating impresarios, but exhibition is a social occasion involving at least three active terms. The activity the exhibition exists for is between viewer and maker. If the exhibitor wants to help or influence this activity, it should noe be by discoursing either directly or indirectiy about culture, which is his own construct, but rather by setting up nonmisleading and stimulating conditions between the exhibitor’s own activity (selection and label making) and the maker’s object. The rest is up to the viewer” (p. 41).

3. Resonance and Wonder (Greenblatt):

Greenblatt says there are essentially two models for exhibitions: the resonance model and the wonder model. The resonance model is more of an “intimation of a larger community of voices and skills, an imagined ethnographic thickness” (p. 48), while the wonder model consists of an “intense, indeed enchanted looking” (p. 49). Greenblat believes the best exhibits will incorporate both models and they will work together to create “wonderful resonance and resonant wonder” (45).

4. Locating Authenticity (Crew & Sims)
Current thinking is that artifacts don’t have much meaning on their own, but the exhibition makers help them. Meaning can be created simply by proximity.

“Authenticity is not about factuality or reality. It is about authority. Objects have no authority; people do. It is people on the exhibition team who must make a judgment about how to tell about the past. Authenticity--authority--enforces the social contract between the audience and the museum, a socially agreed-upon reality that exists only as long as confidence in the voice of the exhibition holds” (p. 163).

The rise of social history “history from the bottom up” (p. 163) reshaped not only the work of many historians, but also informed museum exhibition design.

Another way to look at it is to say that the event is primary, and that it is in the “place/time of the event that the audience takes part, becoming cocreators of social meaning. Authenticity is located in the event” (p. 174).

5. Noodling Around with Exhibition Opportunities (Gurian)

Creators of exhibits “impose learning impediments in [their] exhibitions” because they “possess unexamined beliefs about our visitors’ capacity to learn and because we want them to act in a style that reinforces [their] notions of appropriate audience behavior” (p. 186).

She goes on to list some political factors that shape museum exhibition. She says museums fall into one of three political categories:
• Aspiring establishment organizations (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• Self-consciously liberal (New Museum of Contemporary Art)
• Counterculture (El Museo del Barrio)

Additionally, she says that the director of the museum often imposes her/his own political views on the museum. For example, The Exploratorium, in San Francisco was created by Oppenheimer, who was very concerned that the audience was be able to make sense of the exhibit themselves without help or interference from designers. This was an indication of his “power to the people” attitude.

She concludes by saying that an exhibit is like theatre: a collaborative endeavor where the collaborators have highly individualized visions and styles, so compromise is needed. An exhibit must have agreed-upon assumptions about the audience or a “coherent view of the audience as articulated by a single prevailing power source” (p189). However the current way in which decisions are made doesn’t allow for explicit discussions of the creator’s view of the audience/viewers.

6. Always True to the Object, in Our Fasion (Vogel)

Vogel believes curators have an “obligation to let the audience know what part of any exhibition is the making of the artists and what part is the curator’s interpretation” (p. 191). She admits this will not be easy, as some of the curator’s understanding rests on “unquestioned and unexamined cultural--and other--assumptions” (p. 191). “The museum must allow the public to know that it is not a broad frame through which the art and culture of the world can be inspected, but a tightly focused lens that shows the visitor a particular point of view. It could hardly be otherwise” (201).

My thoughts:
This book was a very interesting look at museums and the artifacts they display. Most of the articles dealt far more with artistic or cultural artifacts than the types of artifacts that might be found in a science center or science museum.

I noted that many of the articles were written by practitioners, and it is very interesting to see a field that is so openly critical and reflexive of their own work. I thought it was worth mentioning this, as scientists often are not so reflexive…

Something that I thought quite a bit about was that science museums and science centers are often putting ideas on display rather than objects. I am left to wonder how this body of work translates to those ideas. I think there are rich connections to be made. Situating the knowledge curators seek to impart within the context of their own desire to impart it might be a rich area of discussion. I’m thinking this specifically in terms of some of the large-scale, science based exhibitions at AMNH (Darwin, Einstein, and Genome to name a few): They, themselves are torn between representing what Greetblatt calls resonance: that is the history, the cultural surroundings in which a scientists lived or in which he made his revolutionary discoveries on the one hand, and presenting the ideas, which perhaps are meant to invoke wonder.