Digging Deeper
Let’s Talk About the Elephant in the Room: Destroying, Removing, Tearing Down, or Blowing Up Historical References
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Betty Lou Williams
Revisionist history is about reinterpreting the past based on contemporary insights/perspectives. The real problem is if we had only known then what we know now, history might look very different and so might the times we live in. In Darwinian theory, social evolution should have made us a smarter, faster, better, and the quality of life should reflect these virtues. But sadly, this is not necessarily true. Museums, sites, and monuments face the risk of being compromised given this trend of repatriation and eradication. Destroying history is an ignorant attempt to correct the past by means of elimination in order to forget it and there is great danger in doing so. Once individuals rip out, tear down or blow up a building, a historical site or monument they are actually calling more attention to it as opposed to discussing and reconciling issues. Can the past be wiped clean or rewritten? Once history is forgotten it is doomed to reoccur. George Santayana once said, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We need to attempt the larger feat, which is to come to terms with the past and admit to our mistakes and learn from them.
Other People's Lives: Parallel Museums and New Institutional Forms
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paz Sastre
This review begins with the Deloche's parallel museums that emerged from the Museo Cartáceo or "paper museum" of Cassiano dal Pozzo (1606-1689) to the applications of virtual reality and augmented reality of the twenty-first century. The parallel museums renegotiate the ways of archiving and showing works in different media and question the limits of the institution, pose new institutional forms, and show that what differentiates the museum is not the building or the collection but the ends that guide its meaning. Then museology is no a science but an ethic, a practical philosophy responsible for defining both values and behavior for the field of the museum. A new digital museology would therefore be in charge of establishing an ethic for the new images, something that today any app does implementing functions, terms of use, and privacy policies. All the institutions inherited from the modern national state that gave birth to the museum are being affected by the ethics of the new images. But institutional museums remain oblivious to the debates on open access, open data, open government, open science, or digital commons. The absence of an ethical positioning is affecting more incisively to contemporary art museums because the proliferation of contemporary art museums and their dependence on large private capital are the two central characteristics of the twenty-first-century museum. As Claire Bishop has analyzed, the museum’s spectacular architecture staged a diversity devoid of frictions that bears the values of an outdated multiculturalism. The radical museology alternative is to strengthen the historical collections. But historical collections are held only by those who have political and economic power. If the sacralization of the work is maintained, the criticisms of the twenty-first-century museum would survive in its radical version. A radical museology has to face the challenge that contemporaneity poses, the invention of new institutional forms. For the first time the institutional museum could learn from other people's lives instead of teaching us about them.
Widen our Gaze: Visual Literacy in the Museum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Helene Verreyke, Sofie Vermeiren
We experience the world around us through visual language. The digital revolution has even elevated the amount of images we see on a daily basis and emojis have become our universal language. Although artworks are at the core of the museum, wall texts are still the main entrance into the world of exhibitions. We use words to describe what we see in museum galleries, however, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Why do museums still focus on text when the visual has become increasingly important? Museums can be ideal places to enhance and stimulate visual literacy. Often, museums are places where knowledge is transferred to the visitors, however, connections can be created between the experiences and knowledge of the visitor and the artworks. Focusing on visual literacy stimulates inclusivity. You don’t have to be an expert in a particular topic, or absorb the art historical information to be invited into the club. Focusing on visual literacy breaks down the barrier and stimulates dialogue. In M-Museum Leuven (Belgium) we collaborated with academic partners who have experience in creating a competency model for visual literacy in the class room. The big challenge was to translate this theoretical model into interpretation tools that have the same effect in the museum galleries. This new approach changed the way we work in the museum, breaking the silos between the curatorial and education department and creating the need to continuously evaluate the interpretation tools - a practice worth sharing.
Agile Objects and Agile Teachers: Teaching and Curating in the University Museum
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jim Harris
The interpretive frameworks that guide and determine the public display of collections draw closely on the specific specialisms of curators. These might be, for example, historical, art-historical, anthropological or archaeological. However, making those collections accessible as tools for teaching across the broad intellectual range of a university means opening them to other interpretations and other modes of looking. The same object will be as differently interesting and useful to scholars from different academic subjects as the disciplines themselves. Making museum collections useful as resources for enhancing and developing the university curriculum, therefore, requires an agile teaching-curatorial practice which encourages the interrogation of the object from the standpoint of the discipline at hand rather than the delivery of information from the point of view of the curator. Drawing on the experience of the Andrew W Mellon Foundation-funded University Engagement Programme at then Ashmolean Museum in the University of Oxford, this paper discusses some of the ways that the museum’s display and reserve collections have been deployed in teaching, for example in medicine, literary and language studies, theology and philosophy. It explores the role of the Teaching Curator in developing this agile practice and in training non-museum academics to employ object-led teaching as part of their own pedagogy, and considers the capacity of both the collections and individual objects themselves to express the quality of ‘agility’ as they are serially re-examined by students and scholars from across the academy.
