April 09, 2006
I wrote this last week and forgot to post
So if you want to read about architecture and "sense of place", go right ahead. I don't know how to back date this either, or I would have gotten it out of the way of this week's discussion. And a fair amount of discussion around these points came up at the end of class last week so they may not be so new because you have already thought about them.
The readings for this week have a tendency to treat place as an object. The museum is a place but in concsiously reading it as an object, a tangible physical entity that follows the rules of physics and “pushes back”, Barbara gives us a way to see the museum as a site of control and power made manifest. In this case, the museum isn’t read as an architectural object in the style of architectural criticism which posits the building as a more- or less- well reified artistic endeavor (and recent critics have decried certain museum projects as being too artistic, over shadowing or at least tempering in a particular way the reading of the art inside), but rather as an object that is an institution and a set of institutional practices made physical. Thinking across the institution as practice to the institution as built environment opens up a new way to think about how physical space comes to be the way it is and can then influence it’s own reception. From the macro level decisions, like where to park the edifice in the first place, down to the creation of the labels that accompany the displayed objects, BKG reminded me of curiosity of a museum in the first place. What, precisely, are we doing with museums? What intentions do their curators have?
Where is the discussion of architecture in this debate? What about the decision to build a Frank Gehry instead of something more like the columned and marbled Met? From the macro decision about where to plant the museum in the first place we skipped a step and are not preceisly sure how the architectural choices interact with the actual site and with the objects for study on view inside. Certainly in terms of what can be exhibited and how, the decisions about where and how (or whether) to introduce natural light are greatly meaningful. Certainly casees can be made with UV blocking glass and plexi glass so that natural light will not be allowed to deteriorate the object. But do we want to look at a painting beneath plexi glass? If letting in natural light is supposed to make our pereptual experience more realistic, what does it mean to see the thing through a layer of something else? For viewers, seeing the actual paint strokes is part of embodying the artist, seeing the remains of the physical act of brush touching canvas, the trails of the artist’s thought, the evidence of paint being actively committed to a particular shape, is a way for the viewer to consume the work of art viscerally. With respect to the kind of historical and folkloric museum projects that BKG was most interested in, the visceral way of knowing seems even more important than it does when we are thinking about a painting. To some degree painting is understood as an intellectual project (as opposed to the project of self-consciously making an object). A paiting is an object that grudgingly acquieses to representing an idea. If that idea could be telepathically beamed from artist to audience, it might be preferred. Less, then, would be left up to the viewer and auteurship would be retained more completely.
Posted by Laura Noren at 08:57 AM | Comments (1)
April 04, 2006
Real Objects
In answer to the question of how mass-produced objects are individualized, I thought about the example of children with toys and in particular with stuffed animals who become “special friends,” are given names and are “loved” to pieces. Thinking about this object usage reminded me of the book The Velveteen Rabbit, sub-titled “How Toys Become Real,” by Marjory Williams. The complete text of the book is online: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/williams/rabbit/rabbit.html
In the book toys become real by being loved. As explained to the Rabbit: "It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." The story subverts the idea of the object being “used up” and then thrown away, the more typical model of consumption, by making toy objects that have been consumed by children with love become Real, transcending their representational or artificial state. I wonder about the role that adults play in encouraging children to engage in the imagining of toys as characters – are they thereby educating children to be consumers or to desire additional objects?
I also keep thinking about media and the discussion we keep touching upon as to whether media materials are “objects.” Two examples came to mind. The first is the way in which the Smithsonian collects artifacts from the mass media as a type of “Americana.” The first object that came to mind is Archie Bunker’s chair, I think because hearing about that item on the news is what first caused me to think about this. I believe that they have Dorothy’s ruby slippers as well. What happens to these objects when they are re-contexualized in the collection of the national museum? My second example is MySpace and personal Web sites. Could not these sites be described as curated exhibitions of the self using a virtual display of objects/artifacts and signage?
I was also musing on the downfall of the department store. While it is true that the classic model, such as the stores that lined Ladies’ Mile, has diminished in popularity, other types of display showcase stores have been popularized. Sarah already described IKEA wonderfully. I thought of ABC Carpet and Home, with its environmental displays that take the mimicking of home arrangements to a new level and the café where the furniture is for sale. There is also Anthropologie, which takes an explicit “scholarly” approach to collecting its display materials and wares. If these stores re-imagine the art of display, there is also a type of store which dispenses with such display in favor of making the inventory directly accessible to the consumer. Bed, Bath and Beyond and Sephora are both examples of this latter model, with the store staff serving as helpmeets rather than gatekeepers or intermediaries. I find this particularly fascinating in terms of perfume: at Sephora shoppers can peruse at will and try as many fragrances as they would like (scent strips and, occasionally, coffee beans are provided. Coffee beans serve as a nasal “palate cleanser.”) This experience is very different from the “classic” model of the perfume counter with attendant saleslady.
While thinking about the intersection between department stores and museums I also wanted to note that museums, although they are “cultural” and not “commercial” institutions, do engage in commercial activity in their own in-house shops. Museums typically own not just the objects in their collections but the images of those objects and the rights to reproduce them in an ever-widening variety of forms. This is especially note-worthy in the case of artworks. Are these reproductions cultural or commercial in nature? Are they the authentic object, a reproduction, or something else altogether? The MOMA Design Store is one of the more interesting examples of the museum shop – its name alone, with the addition of the term “design,” indicates something different. In the shop items are displayed as they might be in a museum exhibition – set off on shelves with special lighting, the better to study the design features of the objects for sale, some of which are copies of or related to items within the museum’s collection. How far are the museum shop objects from the experience of trying on the King’s bloody glove?
I am also still puzzling over the sense of recreation of historical (or fantastical) events and the use of bodies to do so: mannequins or live actors or “authentic” representatives of a people. In the same line we have groups that engage in historic re-enactments for leisure purposes – I am thinking of the Society for Creative Anachronism and Renaissance Fairs as two different kinds of examples. In these cases the sense of spectacle, of not just viewing but becoming part of the display or tableau, is significant.
Posted by Leah Strigler at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)
April 03, 2006
Hybrid exhibition tradition: the wax museum
Reading Barbara’s chapter on objects of ethnography and exhibition of humans, I kept thinking of my recent visit to Paris’ famous wax museum, the Musée Grévin. If the exhibition of artifacts are also exhibitions of the people who make them, what does this long tradition of entertainment is revealing (the Museum is functioning since the late 19th century.) Wax museums like Grévin are creating and exhibiting supposedly exact scale replicas of actual stars and historical characters, and also 3-dimensional tableaux of important moments in history (for example people watching the first steps on the moon on TV, or a teacher being arrested by a German officer during WW2.) The main objects of the museum are those person’s replicas, but also some objects carried through history, for example, Marat’s assassination tableau is said to use the real bathtub in which he was murdered.
Yet, this exhibition tradition reveals a weird fetishization of the material body of popular figures. What the museum mostly invites us to do (which cannot necessarily be said of when it opened in the 19th century) is to take plenty of photographs with those characters and show them to friends, pretending that we actually met with those famous individuals. The museum also emphasizes the special experience to feel like we are actually in front of those stars. In brief, they offer to experience what most of us won’t be able to do in our lifetime, to “encounter” Céline Dion, George W. Bush, or Arnold Schwarzanager, etc. The other logic of the museum is to preserve something from those people after their lifetime, in a way that would be more accurate, more authentic, more real, than photographs or painting. The purpose of the exhibition then becomes paradoxical: why would we need to keep a record of what people will actually never experience from these individuals, i.e. a close encounter? In fact, what we know about those people is through media images and sound, so isn’t the exhibition of those artifacts more accurate to what people experienced of the famous people?
The tableaux with all their objects are also a weird mix of creation and preservation. A scene presents Brigitte Bardot in a 1960s kitchen with “real” appliances for the time. Tableaux like this mixes the ethnographic object and the duplicate (the wax persona) and blend the exhibition of the spectacular and the quotidian. But that actually is in line with the whole experience of the museum: it offers at the same time documentation and entertainment. The famous people’s replicas stand in as documents of the past and creations made for leisure. For now, I can only wonder about how this weird form of exhibition was carried through time, and what is its future.
Posted by Etienne Meunier at 11:27 AM | Comments (2)
April 02, 2006
Slippage
Style magnate Elsie de Wolfe sums up my argument: “I believe most firmly in the magic power of inanimate objects!” (Halttunen, 188) This has come up in our class before – why an ensemble of fashion worn on Monday cannot possess the same power or work in the same way on Thursday. Why? And why is it that the only item I covet from my maternal family (which is in the possession of my deceased Grandmother’s 95 year-old twin in unincorporated Birmingham, Alabama) is a flour sack slip sewn my by great-Grandmother, Carrie Pauline Crowder. I always describe this slip in the same way, by including the name of the woman who made it; and though I only saw it once, it exists as powerfully in my imagination as it does lying in a chest in my Aunt’s basement.
This slip could as easily exist as a museum object. The fact that printed fabrics were not available for purchase in the nineteen-teens, made the cotton flour sack one of the few fabrics available with color and design. Dixie Lily becomes something to wear (or underwear). It is the fact of genealogy that makes this item important to me; it is the potential of a “strong emotional response based upon ancestral experiences, settings and circumstances.” (Tapsell, 32) I desire the same intangible affect as Hari Semmens: “I walked straight up to her and put her on.
People got upset, but they didn’t understand, this was my kuia! The cloak felt right, she was warm and fitted exactly.” (Tapsell, 340) I desire the warmth of that perfect fit or that “spiritual ‘alchemy’” of taonga. (Tapsell, 358) And does it add to the description of the slip to describe this countrywoman, Carrie Pauline Crowder, as a rural suffragette, a midwife, or as my Mother despises, a witch? I suspect that the slip could tell me something about a person, place and time that only exist as stories handed to me by my Mother and Grandmother.
The slip is not really an intangible but it leads me to something like ethnography, which is a story about a people who no longer exist. Just like the Wal-Mart built on the bottomland of my family farm (I’ll admit it was my Grandmother’s twin who sold off the portion), the activity of these rural peddlers has been replaced by another type of marketplace. Jean Baudrillard describes forms of ethnographic representation as simulation: “In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being ‘discovered’ and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.” (from Simulacra and Simulation, 7). This is similar to what BKG writes when she describes heritage as turning the past into a foreign country. (150) Once the slip is ensconced in the museum it becomes a representation of a rural Alabama that no longer exists, but does it lose its magic?
This perplexity is not an uncommon problem for archivists like Marvin Taylor, curator of the Fales Archive at NYU. How should Fales represent David Wojnarowicz’s Magic Box? The box is really a wooden orange crate from Florida (a reason I love it so, see below) filled with fetish or totem objects used by Wojnarowicz in his films, paintings and drawings. The problem is that Wojnarowicz purposefully selected these items for their energetic potential and placed them together for storage. Distributing the items individually into archival containers will prevent their decomposition, as the wooden box is off gassing, but dividing them removes their potential power, or at least the power Wojnarowicz felt they had. The issue of their magic is not a question for Taylor or for me, having felt that power the moment Taylor opened the lid. Or maybe it was something about my nostalgia for Florida…
“Happiness is 10,000 New Yorkers leaving Florida, with a Canadian tucked under each arm.” If a bumper sticker could express the enthusiasm for my home state, this one does. I grew up in a tourist space and place. For fun, my little brother and I would dress up as tourists (cameras, white socks, and slow doddering walk) and drive thirty miles south to St. Augustine, FL (the oldest city in North America). We visited (again and again) attractions like the Nation’s Oldest Schoolhouse, The Old Jail (replete with cells and a dazzling display of metal torture devices), Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth and Ripley’s Believe it or Not. On display were curiosities (BKG’s mirabilia), artifacts of Native and Colonial life, and folklife representation (or misrepresentation) in the form of college students dressed in authentic period costume. But St. Augustine is “Distory” even with its plaques and long labels that gesture towards the Native American genocides and diseases that wiped out Huguenots, Jews and Christians alike. (BKG, 175) It is history for sale, Disneyfied, commoditized, and objectified. And it was our ‘escape’ from an otherwise mundane summer vacation in suburban Jacksonville.
Posted by Pilou Miller at 07:18 PM | Comments (1)
historic sites and taonga
These readings get at the role objects play in situating oneself in the world. Arendt’s description (p. 16 in Csikszentmihalyi) of the importance of creating and interacting with the material world as a way of retrieving one’s identity out of pure subjectivity was especially helpful both in approaching the other readings, as well as for a way of looking at the role of historic districts (one of my interests). These readings focused on the importance of context for providing meaning, whether in taonga, the manner of display in a museum, or the manner of home layout.
The historic districts and parks described in Barbara’s book remind me of Heritage Hill State Park in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The park was created in the late 1970s as a repository of historic buildings from the community. Although the buildings are loosely sited according to date of construction, this is a very different entity than something like Williamsburg or Plimoth Plantation, which are constituted as coherent wholes. Instead, the visitor approaches the park as a linear progression of civilization – one starts at the bottom of the hill with a reproduction of a French Jesuit chapel, continues to a fur trader’s cabin from about 1800, and then walks up the park’s hill through a generally-temporally arranged narrative. The top of the hill is crowned by an 1840s Greek Revival mansion (moved to its present location in 1938), a parking lot, and a water tower.
Although there is some narrative here, it is a jumbled one. For instance, the building representing the early territorial courthouse (which was originally located on the present site) is a stand-in from a neighboring county. Some buildings are considered historic in their own right: Tank Cottage was the house of an early local entrepreneur (built in 1803 and moved by barge to its current – and third – site), the oldest standing church in the area, and military hospital buildings from the 1830s. Other buildings, while historic (read: older than 100 years), are merely representational of a type: the courthouse mentioned above, and many of the farming buildings (some having been shipped from 50 miles away or more), for instance. Still other buildings are reconstructions, providing further context for the visitor.
These kinds of environments allow me to take a step back and focus on their actual construction as a specific cultural moment. In the case of Heritage Hill, it shows that while the historical importance of these buildings was recognized, their location within the urban or rural fabric of the area was deemed less important. I am reminded of other examples: the Natural History Museum in Dublin, which is conceivably visited today less for the actual stuffed animals on display and more for the fact that it represents a Victorian ideal of what a natural history museum should be; or the giant Greek Revival temple encasing Abraham Lincoln’s childhood home dating from a period which equated neo-classical design as the ultimate in good taste.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is just how central context is to these displays. And even though the actual object (or space) may be ‘out of fashion’, the dissonance itself plays a role in a deeper understanding of the object and its cultural context. Abraham Lincoln’s Greek Temple is often cited by preservationists as a mistake because it destroys any sort of contextual relationship with the site, but in its own way it forces the visitor to recognize and grapple and situate that discontinuity. In this way, I want to nudge this form of understanding to link it with the concept of taonga and the multiple layers of comprehension this entails.
Posted by Mark Treskon at 04:15 PM | Comments (1)
The Eastern German experience
A bit of research on the Internet relieved my anxieties: the theme park on East Germany which BKG mentioned on p. 151 has not yet been realized. However, there have been several attempts in making out of Eastern German culture a museum experience, mainly in order to attract tourists. The “museum effect“, as BKG puts it, has already taken over Eastern German history.
Shortly after reunification, when everybody realized that communism in its experienced form is over, nostalgia infiltrated the consciousness of the citizens of the Ex-GDR. Experiencing all new forms of capitalistic consumption, it was not until the late 1990s when people started to think about East Germany as something which shaped in their identity and which made them somehow different from citizens of West Germany. At the same time, films conceptualized an image of the everyday life in East Germany, which made Eastern German a popular and fashionable term. Young and hip folks are now wearing T-shirts with the GDR-ensign with the same historical ignorance like I can see German army jackets on the streets of New York as fashion clothes. A museum of East German Design of Everyday Life (which will open this summer in Berlin) is in this regard a reduced formula of a life-history theme park and another victory of heritage over critical consciousness.
I was thinking about an active participation in conceiving this museum, but judged the whole idea at the end as mismatching on how I want to deal with parts of my past. I understood my parents better who disliked east nostalgic films like “Sonnenallee“ or “Goodbye, Lenin“ because they concentrated on funny aspects of the GDR by disregarding contradictions and differences within East German society. Who will visit the museum the most? Tourists. Like the films, which raised on the one hand awareness about an almost forgotten part of German history, they had on the other hand its most success amongst Non-Eastern-Germans. In displaying the everyday life, the museum as well as the movies seem to be in the tradition of museum history, which exhibit the normal, what is perceived as typical GDR. For the tourist who knows little about GDR culture, it is the ultimate experience of the other, the exotic, which can be found here.
BKG points out that a neutral exhibition of objects is not possible. Therefore, the objects placed in the museum have a certain value and carry only that much knowledge or meaning as the in context approach (label, description) allows them to have. The objects satisfy the desires of the visitors who want to catch a glimpse of GDR-culture and don’t want to understand cultural tensions and backgrounds. It is the panoptic mode of viewing, the seeing without being visible. In a way, the museum would function as an extension of the open-air experience, West-Berliners could have on East Berlin by whether visiting the “other“ part of the city or simply having a look from one of the viewpoints which were installed along the west side of the wall.
I can go with the BKG’s concept of a heritage that “is produced through a process that forecloses what is shown”. It means that this kind of exhibition creates a heritage but do not strengthen East German identity. Under the constraint of making exhibitions to events and authentic experiences, the possibility of resistance –similar to “battle” of inhabitants of Bath, UK against mass tourism- against “common” museum practices seems to be out of sight. Exotism/ foreignness as a quality of objects do not creates Benjaminian aura nor an equivalent to the maori taonga. There are not any rituals superposing the object, enhancing the symbolic meaning of it. The symbolic meaning of the banana is not grasped by simply displaying the fruit. The exposure of Germans to their history, especially during the Cold War, can be explored the best by visiting a museum like the one I mentioned above. Since the focus is put on the object, the visitor will not be disturbed with in-context-information, but he/she can admire a line of “purged” objects in an adequate surrounding. She/ he gets to know the essential of what it has been/ is to live in East Germany by looking at the interior of an authentic East German apartment. There is no museum of East German History so far, only collections which want to attract but which do not want to be critical conscious.
Posted by Teresa Reiber at 03:49 PM | Comments (1)
objects won't let you push them around
Barbara says in her book that ethnographic objects are made, which I understood that there are no inherent meanings to objects. Their meaning always exists in a network of relationships between humans and objects. It makes perfect sense but it also poses a question what is so special about objects and how are they different than symbols. The only thing that I can think of know is that they are more durable, obstinate, and exert themselves more forcefully on humans than symbols do.
Object has an agency and meaning only in relation to specific somebody who ‘reads’ it. So for different people it might be different things, the same way that in Gell retention and protention depend on the time-point from which we look at things. However, Gell also says that meanings and icons are not arbitrarily related like linguistic semiotics would have it: object resembles the meaning, what people have in their mind, what memories of stuff and images people have. This means that as long as Barbara’s ‘performances’ and ‘heritages’ use the same objects as the ‘indigenous’ people did then we will see the images that they had in their consciousness even though the folklore, museum, tourism, and other industries are de- or re–contextualizing them. When the ‘original’ objects start being redesigned and modified and reach the point beyond which recognition of originals is not possible than indigenous culture is lost.
Posted by Miodrag Stojnic at 03:06 PM | Comments (1)
Leveling a neutral space
I was thinking often of Paul Carter’s “The Lie if the Land” while reading for this week. In it, he discusses the dance studio and notes that it’s very creation is to enable the dancer to move – “if the man dancing can enjoy a certain ‘state of mind’, an absorption in his own movement, it is because of the prior activities of the explorer and the surveyor. After all, without their labors in discovering or creating a clearing, leveling its irregularities and removing its obstacles, the figures of the dancer could hardly be performed.” Carter takes a post-colonialist look at the studio and likens the leveling of its ground and the emptying of its space to the colonialist practice of wiping a land clear of indigenous life and culture, rendering it flat and stable for movement and growth. The plight of modernity perseveres in this space – it is a place where newness is possible, where experimentation is allowed and mobility produces a constant supply of all things “original.”
The dance studio seems to me to be synonymous with the museum in this context. The museum is regarded as a neutral place, where one goes to see objects that are presented to inform and educate in a space separate from and different than their place of origin. The museum is an architectural tabula rasa – a space where one does not have to concern themselves with the context of an object, either in relation to other similar types of objects or the cultures/environments that the objects are related to. Like the performance venue and gallery, the museum offers a space for viewing objects where the viewer is not distracted by the “real world” – it is a confined space where one can control not only what is presented but how it is looked at.
If the dance studio provides a space for modernity to prosper and newness to be constantly redefining itself, the museum can be a space that identifies objects in such a way as to let the viewer know what modernity is by showing what it is not. By presenting objects, performances, people, etc. in this kind of space, the viewer knows that he is not like the subject – that what he is looking at is of another time or place, encouraging the idea that what is new, original, moving and changing is actually the viewer himself. While the viewer may not have cleared, leveled or created this kind of space in which to purport his own growth, the participation and exchange with this kind of space signifies a precarious relationship between a viewer, what he is looking at, and why, when and how he looks.
Posted by Kimberly Brandt at 02:39 PM | Comments (1)
Objects as Survivors
When I was younger, for awhile, I was tickled by the possibility that something of mine that I left behind could later become an object of study or fascination. I think it was during the 4th or 5th grade when our class project was to create a time capsule. I remember regarding my decision of what I could include solemnly and with great care. I can’t remember what I actually submitted to the large canister that was then ceremoniously buried behind the schoolyard with the help of a janitor. I shudder to think that it may have been a cassette single of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby” (which definitely was an option). All I know was that for years afterwards anytime I entered a museum I tried to envision something of mine as part of a future exhibit.
Barbara’s subtle analysis shows how objects, particularly ethnographic objects are transformed and used in display to speak for the group from which it came. She notes both the limitations and problems in the transformation of an object into an object of ethnography, tracing different historical approaches in making the object visually “speak” in museums. Her book got me to thinking about the various life courses of objects that lead from an existence and immersion in a present to eventually become a symbol and a curiosity of the past. This journey in many cases is one fraught with accidents and arbitrariness. If history is written by the winners, museum displays are populated by survivors. These historical accidents become illuminated under the display lights of museums and consequently take on a different significance than they had in the past. The objects “living” meaning is remolded in order to explain something that is no longer there. The accidents that led to these changes therefore cast long shadows when institutionalized in museums, influencing how we understand the past and often taking on significance disproportionate to what they had when living.
As anyone who regularly delves into historical archives will acknowledge, it is a fact that some things just get lost to history. A fire here, a vindictive descendent there, and writings that could have illuminated and explained a wiped out of existence, leaving the historian to cobble together that which is left in order to make sense of a past. The absences can be glaring, often leading to the historian to wonder whether accidents are really to blame. The gaps are no less relevant for objects. Historical accidents may preserve objects that later assume a greater significance because of their endurance. A hunter and gather is frozen in ice. A particular pharaoh’s tomb is left unraided. A volcanic eruption froze a city in time.
History will always have its accidents and some objects will always survive. But later when these objects are excavated and displayed they, in a sense, become the past for those alive. In this way, accidents can have a profound impact on future understanding. Objects may take on significance disproportionate to their historical role. Take for example the tomb of King Tutankhamen. Ask people about Ancient Egypt and King Tut will be the first thing out of their mouths. Children learn about him in school. Comedians write songs about him. The History Channel devotes numerous programming hours to explore his death. But who was King Tut? A significant ruler? A consolidator of empires? No, he was a rather insignificant king who ruled less than a decade. Yet in our imaginations of Ancient Egypt he dominates. This is because of an accident of history. His tomb was not raided. King Tut left his stuff behind. These visually stunning artifacts are displayed in museums in the hope that they shed light on an ancient civilization. But in the tangibility and their “alive-ness” these objects obscure that which has been lost. And King Tut becomes a much more important figure to us dead, through his surviving objects, than he ever was alive.
Some objects survive; some don’t. But it is through the survivors that we attempt to grasp a time past. In displaying these survivors, we imbue upon them an explanatory power that may be problematic. After all, what if Vanilla Ice becomes the King Tut for our time?
Posted by Owen Whooley at 01:55 PM | Comments (1)
public and private distinctions
The most penetrating theme for me in this week’s reading was the public/private distinction, and the trouble that ensues when we collapse this distinction. This theme arose in varying levels of subtlety throughout all the readings, most visible to me in “From Parlor to Living Room”. As the parlor becomes transformed into a living room because of social change, consumption, religion, and even cults of personality (concepts that Haltunen does a great job of weaving together), one issue that remains consistent is the question of “where do we put our guests?” because they must be “put” somewhere. With increasing consumerism (along with other social change that I can guess at but not state authoritatively) “guest” can be replaced with any other person we have a relationship with: “where do we put our children?” (the playroom); “where do we put our husbands?” (the den, a room with a television… or at least that’s how it is in my family); and again our guests (in the guestroom! I recently read a design magazine that advised hosts to encourage their extended stay guests to either 1) stay in the guestroom or 2) get them to leave the home entirely. So much for hospitality.). So, while Haltunen traces the “gradual transformation of the highly specialized and intensely Victorian house into the open and unspecialized twentieth-century house”, if we continue into the late twentieth century and even the twenty-first century, we see a return to specialization in some ways. Which begs the question that we ask a lot: fashion changes all the time, so why is this change, from parlor to living room, especially interesting or important?
The Destination Cultures reading also conjured the private/public distinction for me. In thinking about differences between in context and in situ, I became uncomfortable. Not because of anything particular about what was written, but because of the idea of intervention, and what that means for how we conceive of place and object. As ethnographers, we intervene. We not only enter private, or even sacred, spaces, but we sometimes take things back with us. We revere these objects to the point of fetish, as Barbara elaborates: “true to what I call the fetish-of-the-true-cross approach, ethnographic objects, those material fragments that we can carry away, are accorded a higher quotient of realness.” (30). I would ask, who appoints the objects a higher quotient of realness? What about the objects’ original place of residence (I am trying to stay away from a language of ownership here, so excuse the awkward language)?
Fresh off a conference presentation, I cannot help but think of my ethnography of spoken word poets. I went in looking for an object: the site, the performance, the performer, some commodity for sale. Empirically, I needed a unit of analysis, but theoretically I wanted to approach the field using a specific object approach, and I was frustrated that I couldn’t, because these units of analysis didn’t exist in neat ways. So there was nothing for me to “take back” but my own notes and impressions. One reason was because the poets were so hostile to having their performances “canned” – they did not want their poetry in books, they did not want to be on television -- they just wanted to perform in front of real people.
Preserving and displaying objects can be a double edged sword. Appointing value (social, aesthetic, monetary) to an object could be beneficial. It could also do a disservice to a place, person, or object that does not want to be objectified. I think my tension isn’t only as an ethnographer, but also as a member of a society that thinks that anything – object, experience, lifestyle, personality – could be bought and sold; and how this informs my orientation to the world in all sorts of ways.
Posted by Jane Jones at 01:13 PM | Comments (1)
Classify This!
Sanctification, preservation and display have preoccupied my mind for the past nine months as a museum studies student. I’ve studied and read about objects, museum spaces, exhibitions, cultural centers, exhibits and have come to find that you can put anything in a museum as long as you present it correctly. Either in situ or in context you can make anything become singular. An Ikea plastic water pitcher is on display at the MET, I’m sure there are millions like it all over the world. But if it is juxtaposed with another pitcher from the 1920’s then design becomes the main dialogue between the objects. The pitcher becomes reclassified and we look at it as a piece of art first and foremost.
With preservation and display we can classify things for later generations, situating objects within a spectrum relating to decade and style is a very handy tool. We can then think of objects in a style relating to ‘the 20’s’ or the ‘60’s’ or ‘the Victorian era or style’. In this way BKG’s example of museums as travel can be expanded to time-travel, allowing the visitor to see what ‘the past was like’. If we look at style as a historical marker in relation to interior design I see a problem. Don’t we lose our categories or markers of historical style when individual style and the ‘performing self’ influence decoration? We can no longer step into a room and call it English Tutor, French Renaissance or American Colonial. What if Jane Doe is a little English Tutor and American Colonial with a flare of Turkish style?
If every style is singular if we are all our own identity, if we are all individuals how do you continue to classify the world? No one personal style can be a representation of a distinguishable class, we become unclassifiable. Do we make a grand category and say: “The style of the turn of the millennium was individual style.” The style could be seen as intangible, as knowledge, recognition of your individuality. As individuals we can be clumped together and classified, we will be remembered and displayed as a category of individuals.
The problem I outlined above (I’m sure there is a name for it) seems to be taken care of with the Maori concept of taonga. Having objects, places, things that represent people throughout time and connects them together with living people allows for individual expression while binding them to an on going tradition. This idea doesn’t account for all the things that aren’t taonga or the ambitions of urban Maori youth today.
I would like to join Harvey in a battle over terms (his being “consumer culture”) mine would be ‘modernity’ and to follow ‘post-modernity’. It makes me feel like I’m living in a pre-determined future that was laid out in the 19th century.
Posted by Jean-Luc Howell at 12:54 PM | Comments (1)
Fragmented Fabulations
I am doing research for a paper on counterculture at the moment, as well as on how it interlinks with hip and consumerism, which has temporarily put me in a state where everything I see and hear is related to counterculture and its mimicking younger sisters. However, just as Andrea’s overworked immune system made last week’ texts blend and blur creatively in her mind, so is my occupationally injured little mind seeing connections between counterculture and “sanctification, preservation and display” that I really did not expect to be there.
To begin at the beginning, my research is increasingly making me ponder about and dissect my own personal way of understanding something as being truly countercultural, and when I identify something as merely strutting in the borrowed plumes of the real thing. So far I have realized that I approach counterculture as if it were an ontological category of sorts, which is why I wind up feeling genuinely betrayed when what I think is the real deal turns out to be fake. And this is exactly what happened to me in the wee partying hours of Friday night.
The fake in question is a guy who goes to a prestigious art school in the city. He looks very dark and mysterious, does not shave, has tattoos and a piercing, and did line upon line of coke on an untidy kitchen table on Friday night (may I just add that I am not a druggie myself). In short, he had the countercultural semantics down: He had the artistic and larger than life vocation and the alternative awareness that goes hand in hand with it, he was stripping away any sign of traditional sophistication, and had the looks of the outlaw all while managing to nurse the aesthetics of self-destruction.
But then it happened. He took off his dark wool sweater only to expose a major flaw: A bright green Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt, with a large cotton “A&F” logo decorating his torso, which was otherwise characterized by lacking just the right amount of body fat.
“Abercrombie and Fitch” as I have come to learn here in the U.S, is “preppy cool”, which is not something you want to identify with when you are “urban cool”, and - according to my own socio-cultural logic - least of all if you are countercultural. Thus, you can understand why I felt the need to question him why on god’s earth he had chosen to wear just that. He didn’t get me, and after a little verbal ping-pong, he finished me off with a “Sarah, it’s a t-shirt!!!” Poor guy. Even I found myself annoying.
The display and the context of the display, as BKG argues, forecloses what is being shown (153). Heritage is not prior to identification, evaluation, conservation and celebration, rather value is added to existing assets in an act of co-optation between actors who have an interest in making viable an exhibit of “what once were”.
Respecting my Friday night anecdote, The Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt was a fragment, which in the context of a set of other particular fragments as well as in the context of a particular moment in time and space, both created and tore down the countercultural. One might say that the guy visually and ideationally articulated a whole range of – to my culturally indoctrinated mind at least - sanctified signifiers, while the sudden exposure of the A&F t-shirt grimly de-sanctified that very articulation.
I wonder about the way I have used the “fragment” here and if I am using it in compliance with the Benjaminian concept of it? What puzzles me is that the initial compilation of fragments, in the situation described above, one slight change in the display of fragments changes the total image from being sanctified and worthy of preservation, to becoming empty, almost like a simulacrum. Which makes me wonder if my use of the fragment is more compliant with Benjamin’s concept of Allegory. In other words, the meaning of the other signifiers (i.e. the tattoos, the drugs, the art) disappear so abruptly. And I am not sure if the fragment, in Benjamin’s view, is entirely devoid of heritage prior to identification. Whereas the allegory is…?
Perhaps Benjamin’s fragment is more conceptually compatible with Tapsell’s “taonga”? “Taonga”, understood as “threads from the past, acting as here, or guides” that “link up the interconnecting relationships within the genealogically patterned universe of (Maori) society”. I am not really sure, but it seems that “taonga” serves as an agent in the process of preserving something that (the Maoris believe) is there prior to identification.
The concept of “taonga” in turn seems to enlighten the creation of the concept of “personality” of the twentieth-century. Perhaps it does not make so much sense to think of interior decorating as something from the past acting as here. Rather, decorating serves as a guide to the authentic self, the aura of the self. However, not the self in isolation, but the self in co-optation with one particular genealogically patterned society.
Posted by Sarah Carlson at 12:39 AM | Comments (2)
March 31, 2006
Thoughts on Stuff
1. My name is.... vs. I am... I was thinking about what Harvey said a few weeks ago about how he introduces himself in different places, that he said he introduces himself as "I am...." in places where he's famous. And I thought about fame. It's a kind of love that does not have to do with intimacy, with friendship, with knowing someone in a day-to-day way. I can be proud of a friend's fame but if I participate in that part of her life, I become distanced. Is fame part of an admiration for the objects one produced as distinguished from friendship which is about the company of another person with all the rough edges (fame seems to create a picture that doesn't include the quirky weirdness of being human)? Actors get fame because of the veneer they produce--in a photo (some people are just famous for looking a certain way), and some are famous for performances they produce on film. Stage actors today can pass by un-noticed, fame-less, for the most part.
2. "I'm embarrassed to be human. I'm embarrassed to be wanting what I despise." I heard this on WFUV this morning and I thought of Harvey's comment on my blog questioning what it means to be "duped" that goods are made to look good and we ignore the subtext, how people are treated and the environment is treated to make that object. The song addressed what it's like to be conscious of the conflict. I didn't hear the name of the performer.
3. BKG and Karen Halttunen talk to the movement of meanings in objects over time--the museum object (from "quiet contemplation" to "experience") and objects in a home from (expression of "morality" to "personality").
4. BKG's book reminded me of a Curiosity Cabinet. The Cabinets of Curiosities were the first museums, or the proto-museums of the 16th/17th/18th (?) centuries (stuff people brought back from ocean voyages and etc.). People kept collections of things in drawers and boxes in their homes. The book reminded me of this because of the images--many pages opened up to a new one or two, and each was stranger than the last. The writing is effervescent with ideas.
5. I was fascinated by BKG's idea that laughter prompted the explanatory museum object label. Strange that the human reaction of joking (and the idea that it trivialized the object) could change the course of a whole way of dealing with objects.
6. Now that we no longer have to use our gaze to hunt, to gather, what is gazing for? I think of the way rituals evolve around our habits--those who smoke (anything) have a whole series of behaviors, around how you place your body when you smoke, how you light up what you smoke, how you position what you smoke. For those who drink alcohol, there are whole establishments for just that purpose, types of glasses for kinds of drink, rituals for recovery the next morning from having drunk to much. Maybe looking at art came about as a kind of ritual of looking--like smoking and drinking alcohol are elaborations on necessary functions breathing and drinking water--looking as an extension of finding the perfect seal to hunt or berry to eat. Dunno.
7. I have actually walked in the Elephant (depicted in BKG's book) that was at Margate. Or one of the New Jersey elephants. This is the only extant one. You climb up stairs inside the elephant's leg, and can see out small windows in its rib cage. It was worthwhile, and I recommend it.
8. Halttunen's comments reminded me of something I read somewhere about the transition to the cinema helping to create the cult of personality which replaced the cult of character (in which Clara Bow supplanted Emerson, Thoreau and other characters in the American popular imagination). What gets lost when it's about appealing to what you see rather than what you read and think in relation to what used to be taken seriously as a soul? What's gained?
9. Halttunen's comments about the qualities of the summer house being adapted for every day living reminded me about the old saw about the process of fashion being the progress of underwear moving outward to the surface of the garment...
10. I love the paradoxes of visual culture. If there is to be "no striving for effect", how do you strive for that look? I must look effortless, she thought with furrowed brow. The look of being "used" and "cared for"... I'm sure I can find that at Pottery Barn.
11. Last week when Jean Luc told us where his clothes came from, I wanted to go around the room and find out where everyone's clothes came from and how they felt about them.
12. Is a house a "dead giveaway" if you don't ever have anyone over? The instructions about housing all seem so precious. As if you could, by showing yourself to strangers by inviting them into your home, somehow get them to love you. Oy vey.
Posted by Andrea Siegel at 11:52 AM | Comments (1)