Class Notes 11.15.12 (Jennifer)

Class Notes

November 15, 2012

Readings: Andrea Witcomb, “The Materiality of Virtual Technologies” and Peter Walsh, “Rise and Fall of the Post-Photographic Museum”

Ellen: This is one of any number of exhibits we could look at as a way of discussing the articles we read and Kirschenblatt-Gimblett’s article. This exhibit represents the painting of KG’s father, who learned to paint when he was 70 so that he could depict his Polish childhood before the Holocaust  - he had a recognition that his history would die with him if he didn’t preserve it. It became a visual history, something similar to the AV book we saw in Indianapolis. It’s a virtual tour of a site that is now entirely virtual. Brings up some of the questions we discussed last time – this turn in museology toward experience + preservation and how that deviates from the historical process of collecting and preserving facts and objects (such as walking through Jordan and looking the exhibits in jars).

Upcoming Blog

Amy: During the week after Thanksgiving break, we have a blog “The Review that gets it Wrong.” We’re going to post several reviews of Black Watch and Equivocation and what we’re hoping is that you will use them as a way to talk about what it means to get it wrong – to have been there versus those who read a report. If you didn’t experience either of those two, you should find several reviews on a performance you have seen and perform the assignment.

Ellen: This is a way of turning the assignment inside out. We hope your criteria for getting it wrong will be rich, more than “that’s not what I saw.” Rather, what were some of the underlying messages/ideas that could have led someone astray? How generous should you be to understanding this alternate viewpoint?

Amy: Also, to restate – the point of getting it wrong isn’t to contradict preferences but to me more thoughtful about what it means to get it right/wrong, what are the perspectives this person is bringing, what is his/her critical lens? I invite you to do a rich critique of the review you feel does it wrong on a theoretical, perspectival basis.

Ellen: Consider the issue of expertise as well.

Amy: Or to think about it historically. Taking a historical, theoretical remove rather than preferences.

The Readings

Amy: We hope to use these readings to come at our recent experiences from another angle. Could you all articulate some thoughts on what we mean by the traditional object of the museum? What was a performance, object, etc. based on our shared museum experience? What constitutes a traditional museum object/knowledge making exhibit versus what is a virtual versus what is neither?

Whitney: The Historical Society was odd because only the photo was pulled from the collection, but if you take into account the objects of the room, those could also be part of their collection, but it’s a gray area because it’s purchased only for the performance.

Ellen: That’s a strange situation since they do have an object collection.

Amy: Having the experience of talking to the actors allowed us to see explicitly the meaning-making they were engaged in – choosing the things, getting it right, slipping to inauthenticity.

Jenna: That’s why I asked them how they got their objects, because I couldn’t see the line between artifact and prop, and I’m not sure if the difference was important in that setting. I agree with Whitney that the only object would be the photograph and everything else was an interpretation of the object, as Witcomb says.

Derek: Walsh mentions the museums that used replicas (Victoria&Albert) and casts and molds and that was acceptable. If we can’t tell the difference between the real and the replica then I would suggest that it’s okay if some purpose is being served, such as educating the visitor.

Jenna: I agree with you.

Derek: Does that delegitimize the object as a museum object?

Jenna: For me, yes.

Amy: What about the items in the Prohibition exhibit, some of which we were asked not to touch, or the KKK flyer that was stolen often (which meant this was a copy)? A question of authenticity.

Dorothy: It would be a bad idea preservation-wise to put any kind of fragile object in hands-reach. A copy of a paper good, for example, should be seen as of equivalently valuable as an original.

Ellen: Good point, Jenna – such as the prototype of the EKG machine – it doesn’t work. If it did work, could you resist putting it on yourself? The ‘you are there” quality would shift to a medical check up, which would be inappropriate. The farther you push the question of authenticity, the more you risk deviating from the design of the undertaking. Not driven by the EKG machine, the revelation is about the personages constellated around the machine. It was an unspoken understanding that we wouldn’t put these people through their medical paces. I do think that having the artifact itself means that it’s not a usable artifact and that delimits how the exhibition can be used.

Amy: What about the photograph on the mist? How would our authors approach that?

Jennifer: I found it uncomfortable. I don’t like things coming down on me.

Iris: I found it entertaining, Disney-style.

Derek: I found it part of the transport.

Amy: Would Witcomb think of this an object, performance, multimedia, virtual?

Whitney: Multimedia-as-exhibit, because it seemed as an important element that was affective. By doing the work of transporting, it seems to contribute to the affective experience.

Dorothy: You can’t see the photo as well in the mist, so I wonder about its placement as multimedia. It seems rather intangible for the experience.

Derek: I thought it was like an invitation – knowing that you could walk through it felt like it was preparing me to enter a space where I would interacting with people. I was leaving behind the rest of the museum and entering a space where there’s going to be interaction with real people that will elicit an emotional experience. I had the strongest emotional response to the Temperance woman, but I think the idea of walking through the photograph helps you separate the textual interpretation versus the affective experience.

Andrea: You could look at it as how Witcomb describes the extension of labeling the exhibit. It does set you up as “You are there” in the photo. It reinforces the label on the exhibit.

Ellen: Was there any connection to it between the logic of the exhibits and the gallery of aboriginal faces described in Witcomb?

Iris: Just like you wouldn’t turn your back on someone speaking to you, this exhibit meant that you had to interact and be invested.

Justin: The aboriginal one is safer – you don’t have to come up with questions.      

Jess: We didn’t want to put the actors on the spot, press them since we knew they were actors. I almost got us in trouble by asking how much the moonshine was selling for.

Derek: Bottom of 39 in Witcomb, there’s a label that she mentions, and she talks on p. 40 about the fact that the label tells us that what we’re going to see needs to be treated in a specific way. The foggy photograph positions you as the visitor; you’re going to enter this other space “as a civil person.” You can’t literally step into a picture, but the fog helps make the metaphor material.

Dorothy: For me, the labeling in the Witcomb is about guilt-tripping the people that enter, “to be ethical people” knowing that the people you’re going to see have suffered and we need to listen. “They speak with dignity, we ask you to listen to these voices” are not neutral museum-words.

Ellen: Do you find that forcing you in an unfortunate way?

Dorothy: I don’t think it’s necessarily negative, but I find it annoying.

Whitney: It closes off a certain set of interpretations. If a museum exhibit is supposed to do a certain something to change our unknowing to knowing, then it should come from a place of our own interpretation, not commanded.

Dorothy: That’s something museums do on purpose; they don’t want you to leave thinking, “Aboriginals are dumb,” they want you to leave respecting them.

Sara: I used to volunteer at the Indiana State Museum at an exhibit where you made and then broadcast animal calls. I had a “stop” button, but they wanted the children to interact however they wanted. I can only imagine that if they had scripted these faces to talk at you, a level of mimicry is pre-thought response. That script can help us get over that hump that makes us (reflecting to David Sedaris story) react initially. Script closes doors but helps us overcome our initial mimicry. I wish the fog would be clear. I can see how its materiality would be effective to help us move into the photograph. It can help us to feel that we’re touching another time in a material way, but then when you get to the other side, it should be what happened. Reflects back on Hodgdon’s argument in a reverse sort of way.

Ellen: What about the epistemic shift that photography precipitates? How does that relate to the history center?

Amy: What is he talking about a posed photographic museum? What is the impact on the museum? What is the argument he’s making about photography and truth, the original, historiography?

Andrea: One of the main points I took away was that the photograph changed how the visitors look at the objects in the museum and the purpose they are supposed to preserve. Pre-photographic the point was the objects and how rare they were. In the post-photographic museum, you could have representations and so the purpose was more educational. You can look at a copy and learn the same thing.

Amy: What is the argument that is made about the original then? (28-29) This is mind-blowing to me – imagine going from a world where you’ve seen a tiny amount of art to suddenly being able to see the art that’s in Florence. Leads to a huge development in museums because it could travel worldwide. The impact of photography on knowledge creation was incredible. Then he makes an argument about the relationship of photography and the original. Can anyone articulate that for me?

Justin: End of 29- end of reproduction is to confer status on the original. The original becomes increasingly important.

Sara: Such as the Mona Lisa.

Ming: The idea that it’s not a great work if it’s not being translated.

Ellen: There’s also a depletion that happens when it’s reproduced. We roll our ideas at the idea of the Mona Lisa. It seems that there’s a price to pay in reproduction that Benjamin isn’t wrong about, but certainly the mechanized reproduction brings the value of the original into common perception.

Amy: How then can we understand the knowledge creation of the photograph on the mist? What is the meaning making that’s happening here? What experience are we being asked to have?

Ellen: The Center is both pre- and post-photographic.

Dorothy: Sara’s idea about the melding of your moment and the photographed moment seems to be what they wanted visitors to experience. You don’t forget that you’re existing on both planes of time.

Amy: So what becomes then the stable event/truth – that you are both in Indiana? This happened here.

Whitney: When we were in the Prohibition exhibit, the Temperance woman asked if we knew where specific places were and she described particular things that were on that space. And the fact that the space was the same and the time was different was so weird.

Dorothy: That’s kind of the goal. That’s why they purposefully bring up those spaces.

Sara: It’s a particularly good example if you’re from Indiana because Indiana Ave. went through an urban renewal very recently, so there was more shared knowledge, too.

Dorothy: But she ignored a great deal of the history as well. She made weird choices about what to say and what not to say.

Amy: So what did you make of this idea of the knowledge creation that is so central to the museums? Going from unknowing to knowing? How was that generated in these exhibits?

Kelly: Didn’t it come from the questions you ask the actors? You’re in charge of what you find out. Because we have knowledge about the difference between then and now, we can seek specific information.

Justin: We came in with a group of school children, and they lead the children explicitly.

Jess: And that was more effective than having us come in and ask us to take charge.

Ellen: This gets us back to the haptics and how coerced we feel, but it also makes me think of this pre/post photographic shift, esp. the notion of representationality. Photos brings into being the idea, “Hey, these are my dudars; make of them what you will.” Now when we enter a museum, we expect to see a core sample, thick description, etc. The first time I went to the History Center, I didn’t know it was interactive, so I thought I would look at all the thing, that’s the invisible cue. Instead of being able to do that, a person started talking to me in an outfit and I sort of thought, “Who are you? Oh, maybe there’s a school group behind me?” I was called onto the carpet. It was totally horrifying. It was a difficult adjustment to go from ruminator to active improviser, which isn’t conducive to the kind of collected understanding you make. You’re playing to an invisible audience. It seems to me a point of clash between the post-photographic museum and post-Internet museum. Do we think this is successful? We weren’t the ideal visitors, of course.

Dorothy: For a different audience, they are probably very successful, especially with children. There’s a lot of narrative building in museum work, and this was a great way to encourage that – they put you in a play. The reproducibility of museums also came into question. People will still have big arguments in museums about the keeping of objects – especially after the case of a rogue ethnographer who wouldn’t return the objects to the tribe for their use. This relates to why museums exist – if they exist for education, use copies. If they are preserving for our nation, then perhaps that should be more important than allowing people to engage with them.

Whitney: For us, moving through the museum, modeled our current research methods. You don’t wander through the stacks and just browse anymore; generally, you do a focused search. These exhibits were asking us to come in and ask a really thoughtful question so they could give us the answers they were prepared to give. When I left the exhibit I had questions because I wasn’t ready to ask the questions.

Justin: Right, I skipped past the interpretive rooms and went right to the performance, which was off putting.

Dorothy: I don’t think they wanted adults there.

Iris: I wanted to be guided more.

Jess: I didn’t learn much; I was too worried about helping them to do their job the way they were trained to do it. I wanted either more guidance or less. We weren’t the target audience.

Dorothy: I decided to be very involved because I wanted to see how it would react with adults, and I got pushback from everyone but the Temperance woman. They all clearly thought, “You’re an adult; you know this isn’t real.”

Whitney: Right, and that made me feel rather ridiculous. I shut down because of it.

Ellen: True, but we’re coming in with questions that are outside of their purview and therefore are unaskable. Upstairs everyone was so chock-full of narrative and wanted to share, but couldn’t share downstairs because of the constraint of the performance. I wonder if they would work better if they had someone who could field it in the room. The exhibits are perhaps not so successful for our kind of audience.

Dorothy: It’s probably also difficult to communicate with a group rather than an individual, as the conversation I had with the Temperance woman.

Amy: Going back to Witcomb, she articulates some pretty high stakes for her argument (quotes 36). She talks about them as knowledge- builders/creators through experience and the way that’s important in politics: meaning making or releasers of memory to change the sense of self through touch. How could we employ either of these to the exhibit and in which ways do they not function? Was there a release of memory or change of your sense of self?

Dorothy: When I looked at things that were not part of the interpretive process but were more about the setting of the scene – that brought me back to the fact that they don’t know everything that’s going on. A lot of adults come out thinking they didn’t learn enough because learning what it feels like doesn’t feel like learning.

Ming: Is there anything that isn’t part of the interpretive process?

Dorothy: No – just object that aren’t the focus at the time.

Whitney: “Releases of memory” seems to work against the knowledge building. Were the people who came to visit the grocery store probably didn’t learn anything they probably knew.

Jennifer: I felt that the woman actually angered me so much that I couldn’t engaged in the learning environment.

Iris: I understand. The way the woman was located was disruptive and threatening.

Jess: The space wasn’t arranged in a way that enabled us to experience it – I felt trapped because of the lack of exits and retreats.

Dorothy: Regarding the memories – I wonder if there’s a way that you can experience memories that you’ve read about but haven’t experienced.

Jenna: I thought the links between the Indy 500 poster past and present, helped me understand the tenor or why this might have been an issue in the time.

Dorothy: My dad runs a museum and he makes people to put on slave chains because they are really heavy. He wants to make the physicality real. It releases knowledge you have an helps you associate it with the visceral experience.

Amy: So how does this relate to democracy building? What’s the importance here?

Ellen: Come on.

Jennifer: It helps you appreciate others's perspective; therefore it promotes democratic equality. 

Dorothy: Critiques imperialism – because you’re not coming from the point of view of the oppressor.

Kelly: I was wondering what would be the future exhibit: marijuana laws? Perhaps that’s part of it – to make you reflect on your present-day values?

Ellen: Certainly – it makes you think about bad legislation.

Amy: A nation-builder – the polio.

Dorothy: But it’s not a neutral ground – that woman “seemed crazy” –but this was sponsored by the Beverage Association.

Ellen: It may be true that the corporate sponsorship has influenced her performance, but you could engage with her on issues.

Dorothy: She has a different tenor though.

Jenna: She was constructed to be that way, though, before you walked in.

Ellen: The old cop offended me – there were a variety of possible responses. I think Prohibition is one area in which you can be relatively politically complex and show that. But kids don’t go through that for whatever reasons.

            I want to draw your attention to the stakes of performance. The most engageable phenomenon at the center was the fantastic choice to virtual the photograph and then brings you into an entirely live encounter with the actors. The same fantasy persists everywhere – you go in the machine and you will have live interaction. This fantasy is pervasive through the way technology is touted as educational. To be astute about this question will be very profitable for all of us. There is no question that the hierarchy between the labeling form of activity and the democracy-building form of interactivity is amazing. The virtual leads us back to the educational value of performance.