Memory, Distortion and History in the Museum

After reading Susan Crane’s article and thinking about the “Take Back the Memorial” website the idea of distortion definitley is an issue.
This article from New York Magazines follows the victims families who are against the International Freedom Center http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/sept11/features/15140/index3.html

The previous posts and especially the website “Take Back the Memorial” reminded me about the controversy regarding the The National Museum of the American Indian.
Two sites that are pretty interesting
http://www.si.edu/oahp/nmaidig/
http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/1995/january/heyman_jan95.php

and just in case you missed this… about the resignation of Secretary Small
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/26/AR2007032600643.html

The Arcades Project

As I mentioned in class, the 19th-century Paris passages discussed briefly by Vanessa Schwartz are the subject of an important series of writings by Walter Benjamin. Click here for an article on Benjamin, The Arcades Project, and click here for the book on Amazon.

17th-Century Dutch “Bodies” Exhibition

On Frederik Ruysch’s 17th-century cabinet of curiosity, including dioramas made entirely of preserved body parts, clicker here.

On “Ruysch’s daughter, Rachel Ruysch, who worked on these dioramas and later became a prominent still-life painter, click here.

Panorama Symposium

On March 30th and 31st, the Yale Center for British Art will be sponsoring a sympotisum entitled New Perspectives on the Panorama. As we discussed in class on Thursday, the panorama is another of the visual spectacles that became popular in the 19th century.

One of the symposium moderators has written an excellent book that includes one chapter focusing on a range of visual spectacles popular in 19th-century France (panoramas, phantasmagoria, wax museums, etc.): Maurice Samuels, The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

On the history of panoramas, see: Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Zone Books, 1997).

To see a 360-degree view of the Mesdag Panorama in The Hague (one of the few remaining panoramas, and the one that Kate mentioned in class) click here.

If you are interested more generally in changing conceptions and technology of vision in the 19th century, see the seminal book: Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); as well as Crary’s more recent publication: Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

Memory, History, Distortion

test

bah!

i started a lengthy post two days ago, but didn’t have time to fully realize my ideas so i hit save… where does it go? it’s not here.
rats!
ok, well, i’ll try to remember what i was saying but now i am not entirely certain and there’s not much time…
i thought it was facinating how to each of these exhibits/ attractions there is an aspect of the unseeable made seeable or the interior made exterior. All of a sudden, time/ history or our bodies or the presence of celebrity is split open and rendered totally knowable and beholdable. I wonder, however, how much this revelation adds or substracts to or from the aura of these things that we hold so magical?
However, isn’t interesting that celebrity, history, and the human body are part of the common human experience yet we stand in awe of them when they are falsely recreated (well, the bodies is real…)?
Why is it so important to us that these things be made seeable?
What happens to the value of real memories when we falsely create a type of memory? How or does it change history?

Naming an event

While we definitely make our own decisions about quality, or significance, most of this seems so much like an exercise in semantics. Grevin makes the point of being a museum, Bodies is an exhibition, and Madame Tussaud’s calls itself an attraction. What are the different connotations of each of these terms? Are they labels or does each of these have a distinct meaning? Value? Does your attitude towards an event, or you perspective on each change because of the label?

Objects and Memory Symposium

On March 23rd, Columbia University will be hosting a symposium on “Objects and Memory,” which will include one of the authors we will be reading this semster (Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett) and will address issues including cabinest of curiosity. As far as I can tell, the event is free and open to the public.

Career Day

Career Day Museums, galleries, foundations, etc. will be visiting The New School for a career fair on Wednesday March 28th. Please see attached PDF.

bodies on display

This week, in addition to reading the article by Vanessa Schwartz on the Musee Grevin in 19th-century Paris (available via e-res), please visit the websites of: Bodies: The Exhibition; Madame Tussaud’s wax museum; and the recent Kiki Smith exhibition at the Whitney. You might also want to look at some of the controversy surrounding the Bodies exhibition.

One question to think about might be whether Schwartz’s discussion of the Musee Grevin in relation to both a particularly modern brand of “spectacular commercial culture” and to the concept of a “museum” can help us to think about these contemporary exhibitions? Can we perhaps situate Kiki Smith, Bodies, and Madame Tussaud on a continuum between these two categories?