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.