Ways of Seeing

The New History in an Old Museum, by Richard Handler and Eric Gable, 1997.
Private History in Public, by Tammy S. Gordon, 2010.
“Civic Seeing: Museums and the Organization of Vision,” by Tony Bennett, 2006.
Re-Imagining the Museum (selections), by Andrea Witcomb, 2003.

This week’s readings put me in mind of the grade-school science class where you look at a drop of pond water under a microscope, revealing a world full of minuscule critters, some of whom are bent on ingesting others. There’s a whole lot going on there that isn’t visible to the naked eye!  Similarly, the space, the objects and the visitors that form a museum interact in some not-so-obvious ways, in addition to creating context for the conventional functions of showing, seeing and learning. 


Kandinsky.....



Or bacteria?

Richard Handler and Eric Gable provide a backstage look at the production and consumption of historical memory at Colonial Williamsburg. They conduct an anthropological case study in order to crawl inside the minds of administrators, interpreters and visitors at the  re-created historic site.

Tammy Gordon, in her appreciation of the intimate and sometimes eccentric establishments that are the museum world’s equivalent of outsider art, creates a taxonomy, a useful one, I think, of the various forms of local interest museums. She dwells in some detail on the erstwhile standoff between the American History Association and the American Association of State and Local History over issues of professionalism, image and academic cachet. Her point, ultimately, is that local museums create interactive space for conversations, swirling around things, in which histories are defined, transmitted and appropriated.

Her vision meshes well with Rosenzweig and Thelen’s findings that people are partial to histories of personal significance, and that they trust museums and eyewitnesses as sources of knowledge. No doubt, these community and entrepreneurial museums, and their chatty caretakers, are repositories of trust. But is my local Cracker Barrel restaurant really a vernacular museum?

Tony Bennett and Andrea Witcomb theorize even more thoroughly the dynamics of the postmodern museum, its contents, and its visitors. They maintain that the days of the museum as container of musty artifacts and arbiter and inculcator of dominant social values (i.e., cultural hegemony) are so over. Both imagine today’s museum as a far more democratic and interactive space.

For both, it is sight that has long held sensory primacy as a pathway into the civic culture of the museum. Both understand, albeit somewhat differently, the role of multimedia in complicating the functions of the museum, in expanding its reach, in blurring the divide between curator and visitor, or in turning culture into commodity.

In contrast to Bennett’s picture of the 19^th-century museum as civic center, Witcomb sketches the museum as exotic pleasure palace. Her text also includes a vivid account of the unwashed masses picnicking or nursing babies in the hallowed halls of London’s National Gallery.

 

I’ve been reading about the Barnes Foundation, which started life as a workingman’s art gallery and school in Lower Merion, and is in the process of morphing into a $30 billion museum that will soon occupy a newly built home on Ben Franklin Parkway. It occurs to me that our museums, with increasingly democratized exhibits, still maintain barriers to entry and social controls in the form of fees, security, content and selective marketing.   Perhaps it is our public libraries that are now the truest civic centers and zones of multicultural exchange.   

A Historical Leaf from the Annotated Birnkrant Family Tree

This excerpt from my family history bridges the personal and the analytical.

Why did the family leave Medzilaborice?

They left for economic reasons. I could find no evidence of anti-Semitism in this region nor any mention of pogroms (Jews of Zempplen.doc). Also, in the last quarter of the 19th century, steamship passage recruiters were hired by the steel companies of Pennsylvania to hire laborers for the mills. The recruiters would visit depressed economic areas such as eastern Slovakia to find people.  But networking between America and Europe was strong. Early immigrants kept their families remaining in Austria-Hungary up to date and encouraged relatives to take a chance on economic betterment.

From Birnkrant 1.0, by Jack Heller

Everyone a Historian

The Presence of the Past, by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

True confession: I read this book after returning home from a short stay in Youngstown, Ohio, near where I lived until I was 12. The roots on my dad's side of the family extend back three generations in this economically distressed corner of northeastern Ohio/northwestern Pennsylvania.. (The fourth generation, and most of the third, has decamped for greener or sunnier pastures.)

With a cousin, I spent much of ny visit trekking through the wet grass of four cemeteries in two states, in search of gravesites that would add a finishing touch to the panoramic annotated genealogy he had compiled. Other hours were spend coaxing reminiscences from my elderly aunt's faded memory.

All this by way of preface to say that Rosenzweig and Thelen got it right.  People engage with history in ways that meet their own needs, that help them to make sense of their own lives.

And much of the time, according to the survey findings on which the book is based. they prefer their personalized history straight up, that is, unmediated by professional historians and conventional sources of historical authority. For example, museums and historic sites and personal accounts, which can be experienced directly, are valued more than school courses or books.

The ways in which folks connect with the past also vary according to race, ethnicity, age and gender, with African-Americans and Sioux Indians having a stronger collective sense of historical identity, and  men age 65 and older regarding American history, rather than family, ethnic or community history, as the most important kind of history to know. People are finding new prisms through which to view history, including sexual identity and evangelical faith.

What does this mean to those of us who aspire to do history? This book illustrates some of the tensions between personallized and professionalized history, most notably the lack of conventional analytic tools, like ethnicity, class, region and gender.  

As an antidote to the "history wars" spawned by the turbulent politics of the '60s and '70s, Rosenzweig and Thelen propose a profoundly humanistic solution, entailing the synthesis of the experiential with the contextualization and systemization that can be added by professional historians. The result would be a participatory, multifocal historical culture. that will empower people to shape social change  and create a new standard for civil and civic discourse.

I'd like to believe, but perhaps my historical memory has been addled by too much talk radio.  

Murder Most Erudite

Fundraising the Dead, by Sheila Connolly (New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2010).

If bounty hunter Stephanie Plum[1] had grown up on the Main Line instead of in Trenton, New Jersey, she might have become Nell Pratt, the fundraiser turned amateur detective at the center of Sheila Connolly’s account of murder in the musty stacks of the Philadelphia Antiquarian Society. The whodunit provides an insider account of security, technology, staffing, organizational and financial issues faced by cultural institutions, of institutional politics, and the care and feeding of big donors and board members, who are not necessarily one and the same.  There may be TMI and not enough action for readers disinterested in the arcana of museum operations.

The preface to Connolly’s book attributes its creative inspiration to a crime that took place in a “Center City cultural institution” where she worked for several years, and was successfully detected and prosecuted.  It’s likely that the cultural institution was the Philadelphia Historical Society, and that the crime was the theft of artifacts in 1998. Fast forward to 2011, and the society, and at at least one other major East Coast cultural institution, are currently involved in prosecuting document theft of significant scope.

Fundraising's plot revolves around the female bonding behavior of Pratt and the Philadelphia society matrons who join forces with her to bring to justice the president of the antiquarian society, who uses his amorous conquests to purloin papers and bibelots to fund his scheme to build a world-class historic research center, which he, of course, will run. Pratt, as surrogate for the author, muses on the hardscrabble life at nonprofit cultural institutions, which court the same grant-givers, lack funds to install the security and technology to protect, catalog and make their collections accessible to the public, sometimes store documents in closets, and don’t insure artifacts because they’re invaluable, and there’s no money for insurance, anyway. There’s also a nice subtext, available to close reading, on history and culture, and their tangible manifestations, as consumables in the consumption society.  

The secretary to the president of the antiquarian society did it.

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[1] Stephanie Plum is the heroine of a series of murder mysteries, flamboyantly titled in numerical sequence (e.g., Three to Get Deadly),  written by Janet Evanovich, and avidly read by women of a certain age, among others.