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Week 4 Notes: Collecting and Exhibiting

Henrietta Lidchi, "The Poetics and Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures" (Chapter 2 and associated readings A-E in Representation) (OR)

• The Classical History of the Museum:
  • Museum as a space dedicated to the muses: a place of study: there is a historical connection to the dedication of space to knowledge.
  • The changing history of museums reflects changing structure of knowledge.
  • The classical museum was not specifically an interior or exterior space.
  • There were museums dedicated to different purposes.
    
    
• Cabinets of Curiosities
  • The cabinet was generally a private collection of nobility.
  • The collections were diverse and eclectic.
  • Art and artifact, nature and culture were combined. (note: this combination still remains in what is presented in museums of natural history or science)
  • It represented knowledge as curiosity. Curiosity was a means of striving for universal knowledge through a strategy driven by diversity and breadth. The curious object was a prize form of knowledge insofar as it was a conquest of an extreme aspect of the unknown. The world is conceived as the known and the unknown (rather than say, the true and the false)
  • This was a non-hierarchical organization of knowledge (or less hierarchical) which preceded Linean classification.
  • Reflected "research" rather than pedagogy.
  • The catalog for the Tradescant collection was drawn up much later when it was being transformed into a modern museum.
  • The world conceived as the known and the unknown: knowledge as curiosity:
• fluidity between catagories of nature and culture; art and artifact
• fortuitous aquisition of objects
• generally not open to the public
• The Museum of Jurassic Technology http://www.mjt.org/
• Cabinet of Curiosities: example 1, example 2, example 3,
• grouping: example 1, example 2
  
  
• The Ethnographic Museum
• Most of the collections of early ethnographic collections were acquired in fortuitous ways rather than through organized research techniques.
• Anthropology and Ethnography are sciences of invention rather than discovery in so far as they create their object through the development of systems of classification.
• The ethnographic museum sought to classify the objects of cultures that were seen as pre literate, exotic, primitive, simple savage, etc..
• Visual communication was adopted as the didactic medium of the Museum and of colonial pedagogy (as well as the pedagogy of the working class). But it was also the tool of scientific analysis of the other. This contradiction is somewhat explained by the fact that the objects are regimented though the system of classification and labeling.
• Their is a dissonance between an object's physical permanence and its unstable meaning.
• The convergence of education, entertainment and leisure.museums do not deal solely with objects, but with ideas about what the world is or should be.
• Linean classification
• John Tradescant
• The Forster Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum: http://projects.prm.ox.ac.uk/forster/MSViewer/index.html
• Russian Ethnographic Museum: Example1 , Example 2, Example 3, Example 4
  
  
• The Great Exhibitions
  • there is a shared history of the great expositions, the circus and the museum.
  • The history of exhibiting not only cultural artifacts but living people.
  • Great Exposition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, the Crystal Palace Exhibition, in London in 1851
  • World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893--
• Susan Vogel: "Most of what is displayed in museums was never intended to be displayed in them."

Coco Fusco, "The Other History of Intercultural Performance" (OR)