From Chris Pinney, UCL Anthropology and Northwestern University:

An Example of the New American Orientalism, but raises interesting questions of the materiality of transmission. William Mazzarella's "Internet X-Ray: E-Governance, Transparency and the Politics
of Immediation in India" Public Culture 18(3) Fall 2006 has an interesting analysis of new technologies and 'rumour' in South Asia.

See the following news story from the Chicago Tribune, (full story pasted in the 'continue reading' section for those of you who are not registered):
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0704260009apr26,1,6246569.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

LETTER FROM KARACHI

Rumors of cell phone deaths greatly exaggerated
Tales of a virus that kills with one call became the talk of Pakistan, the Tribune's Kim Barker writes

By Kim Barker
the Tribune's South Asia correspondent

April 26, 2007

KARACHI, Pakistan -- The rumor spread quickly, from the small town of Sialkot to the nation, from cell phone to cell phone, friend to friend. The text messages warned of a virus if people answered phone calls from certain numbers.

The virus would not hurt the phone. Instead, in a scene out of a horror movie, it would kill the recipient. Immediately.

"Plz ignore calls frm 0A9-888888 or with screen with dancing snake & changing colours its a deadly virus and in some regions of Pakistan death are being reported," began one message.

Another said: "it's a virus to kill a person. Plz it's not a joke it's damn serious virous."

In mid-April, these messages swamped Pakistani cell phone users, causing many to turn off their phones -- better safe than sorry -- and many others to grow frustrated that anyone could possibly believe the prank. Newspapers, television stations and cell phone companies were flooded with questions from worried consumers.

For Pakistanis who treat cell phones as a necessary appendage, this was serious. People talk on cell phones while watching a movie in the theater, while walking on a treadmill at the gym. Literate, illiterate, urban, rural, such distinctions did not matter. Even the skeptical seemed to know someone who knew someone who died from answering a cell phone or who had read about someone who died.

Shaukat Ali talked to a friend who saw it in the newspaper -- that a man dropped dead just after answering his mobile phone. "When he got the call, he died like he was poisoned," said Ali, 45. "There was blood and foam coming out of his mouth."

Other Pakistanis said they did not believe the rumor because it was not technically possible. And some discounted the rumor out of bravado or fatalism.

"I'm standing here where suicide bombers could hit," said Fareed ul-Haq, 22, a security guard outside the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi. "If I'm not afraid of them, why would I be scared of a cell phone message?"

But the panic forced the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority to issue a denial. Phone companies sent out text messages urging people to be calm.

Still, the rumor continued to grow, evidence of the power that word of mouth has in Pakistan and all of South Asia, of the tendency of some people to suspend logic and believe in a kind of magic, in spirits and dreams and the unknowable.

This is not the first rumor to sweep the country or the region. A countrywide power outage last fall sparked widespread rumors of a coup against Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. After the deadly earthquake in Pakistan in fall 2005, people were convinced that rumors predicting other earthquakes were true, no matter the logic used to try to dissuade them.

An earlier rumor insisted that 2-rupee coins featuring three clouds, worth about 3 1/2 cents, were actually made of gold. Some entrepreneurs sold these coins for up to $1.70. Another rumor said that a man was injecting a deadly virus into provocatively dressed women in malls.

Pakistan is hardly alone. Last year, the cell phone threat hit India, which earlier struggled through the hysteria of the dreaded Monkey Man, a half-human, half-monkey who terrified cities and villages, allegedly marauding and killing people wherever he went. More seriously, in all of South Asia, health workers routinely have problems persuading people to vaccinate their children against polio.

And no wonder people in Pakistan were confused about the cell phone rumor. The News, a respected newspaper here, ran a story on the front of its city section discounting the rumor. But another story in the section, written by the vague "Our Staff Reporter," said two people were seriously hurt when they answered the bad phone numbers. One fell unconscious, the other started bleeding from the ears, and doctors had no medicine to treat this kind of virus. The story then concluded: "However, we will provide medicines to these patients on [an] emergency basis, the doctors said."

Another newspaper rejected the rumor but featured the headline of "Killer Mobile Virus."

A few days later, political cartoons began mocking the phone virus. Another text message warned people not to attend work meetings because that would bring on a virus instantly causing them to work. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority bought quarter-page newspaper advertisements titled "Beware of rumors" that clarified: "There is nothing true about the rumors saying that a call from various numbers can damage the human body. There is no such virus found in mobile phones anywhere in the country."

And a new rumor gained credence -- that the death threat had been cooked up by the mobile phone companies, which wanted people to spend money by sending out text messages. A weary Mubashir Naqvi, the chief executive officer at Ufone, one of the largest cell phone companies in Pakistan, said this conspiracy was also false.

"In our part of the world, people like gossiping," Naqvi said.

----------

kbarker@tribune.com

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to From the news

Continuing the digital-book theme that's been emerging on materialworldblog:

Michael Brown's book, Who Owns Native Culture (2003, Harvard University Press), has a supplementary electronic resource which consolidates current links to recent developments in cultural and intellectual property issues, especially those concerning indigenous peoples. It contains links to legislative documents, websites, and other publications, is well designed and easy to browse. Whilst the book does not reference much of the extensive anthropological, historical and legal literature on these issues - the web resource is really excellent, supplementing many of the case-studies with literature and links. Its an exemplar of how the web can enhance a paper publication and keep it up to date, and should be a go-to place for those interested in tracking property issues in comparative cultural context.

www.williams.edu/go/native/

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Good Links

A Series of Explorative Seminars Examining Innovation in Art and Science

John Flaxman, Monument to John & Susannah Phillimore, 1804, Plaster, UCL SC1009, Courtesy of UCL Art Collections

Fridays 10.30 – 12.00 Strang Print Room, South Cloisters, University College London

Summer Term 2007

A series of innovative seminars critically examining the nature of the prototype and its relation to innovation in the arts and sciences. Speakers drawn from Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture, and History of Art at UCL.

Sessions chaired by Dr Graeme Were, UCL Museums & Collections.
No booking required but spaces limited – please arrive promptly.

Enquires: g.were@ucl.ac.uk

Schedule:

• Friday May 4th Dr Victor Buchli – Anthropology Prototypicality: Origins and Status

• Friday May 11th Dr Tom Gretton – History of Art
  Prototypes, Stereotypes and Matrices: Typographic Magazine Illustration from Handicraft to Photography in the last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century

• Friday May 18th Professor Susanne Küchler – Anthropology
  Beyond the Prototype: Art and Science in the early 20th Century

• Friday May 25th Professor Jonathan Hill – The Bartlett School of Architecture
  Building the Drawing

• Friday June 1st Dr Stephen Quirke & Zahed Tajeddin - Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology
  Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of the Work of Art? Late Bronze Age Pottery Moulds from the Residence City of Akhenaten, 14th Century BC Egypt

  Posted by at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Announcements and Listings

Tree of Life.A reproduction of the first-known sketch by Charles Darwin of an evolutionary tree describing the relationships among groups of organisms.The image was featured in Darwin, the most in-depth exhibition ever mounted on this highly original thinker.The exhibition ran from November 19, 2005, through August 20, 2006, at the American Museum of Natural History. © By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Last year my graduate students in the class Anthropology and Museums wrote a collective review of the Darwin Museum. It was a great exercise in using the material and visual configuration of an exhibition to think through broader issues about the intersections between science and the public. The review has just come out in the journal Museum Anthropology, and here is the introduction:

"When the exhibition, Darwin, opened at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) on November 19, 2005 there was a certain amount of trepidation in the air. One commentator noted “It isn’t very often that a mere visit to an exhibition counts as a political act, but that’s certainly how it feels these days as you mount the steps of the American Museum of Natural History.”1 Indeed, this sense of controversy and heightened politics ensured that the Museum failed to get any corporate sponsorship to support the exhibition and its development. However, anticipated picket lines, hate mail, and sabotage within the gallery failed to materialize publicly. Shortly after the exhibition opened, Judge John Jones ruled, against a school Board of Trustees in Dover, Pennsylvania, that it was unconstitutional to teach intelligent design as scientific theory in public schools, in turn successfully pushing aside serious legal consideration of Intelligent Design theory as a rival to Evolutionary theory in explaining the order and diversity of the natural world.

Rather than framing a controversy between sacred and secular knowledge, the Darwin exhibit at the AMNH asks a fundamentally different and difficult question: How do you display science qua science? If objects are the central tools that curators use to tell stories, what objects do you choose when displaying a scientific theory? This review seeks to ask how exhibitions such as Darwin produce, as well as represent, ideas about science as a particular kind of enterprise and practice, one dedicated to the progressive accrual of objective knowledge, able to transcend political tensions between sacred and secular knowledge in the present day. The review has emerged from a graduate seminar in the Program in Museum Studies at New York University, entitled Anthropology in and of Museums. Each member of the class visited the exhibition with a particular theme, problematic or issue in mind, which we then brought together during our seminar discussions and edited together into a single review. We aimed to use the tools available to us as museum anthropologists to critically unpack some of the structures of thought, display strategies, broader contexts and experiences of the exhibition. Our themes interrogated the exhibition from a number of different directions, asking what the exhibition could illuminate for us about the culture of science in the mid nineteenth century and today; the practice of science and of scientists; and the impact of spectacle, collections, materiality and technology (e.g. the museum complex) on both the production of science and its public representation. However, rather than undertaking intensive background research into these issues, we privileged the exhibition as a site of knowledge production—asking how the particular configuration of objects, images, text, and space facilitated our understanding of these issues."

The full review can be accessed via Anthrosource for those with subscriptions: http://www.anthrosource.net/toc/mua/2007/30/1

To balance this, we greatly enjoyed finding out more about the creation of a new Creationism Museum in the US.

You can find out more about the Creationism Museum by watching this You Tube clip:
you tube creation museum

And by going to the website http://www.answersingenesis.org/museum/

A recent critique can be found on:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070326_a_world_where_lies_are_true/

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | From the news | Good Links | Objects and visual analyses

Ana O'Keefe, Studio Art Major, Anthropology Minor, Senior undergraduate, NYU,

Indigenous Motivations: Recent Acquisitions from the National Museum of the American Indian

Native Guatemalan, Juanita Velasco’s request that, “We must always remember our culture, language, and clothing so they will continue,” is explored through works in the current exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian, which is dedicated to revealing the traditions, innovations and contemporary art practices of Native peoples. “Indigenous Motivations” acts out the Museum’s mission as a living museum by exhibiting a series of works that they’ve acquired since 1990, including pieces made after the 1950s, in an effort to focus on the ways Native artists continue to build and define their cultures and identities through the practice of art in contemporary society.

The curators faced the challenge of fitting a large amount of works from a variety of places and cultures into common themes that Native people’s around the America’s share. The result is a layout of three main wall installations presenting the topics of tradition, innovation, and art. These succeed in pulling the individual works displayed throughout the room back into context by including photographs and quotes of and by the different communities and artists, revealing how the works fit into their everyday lifestyles.

Each of the three separate wall installations display an actual work within the surrounding text and photographs that serve as a symbol for the whole theme to be discussed. The first piece that faces the viewer upon entry is a beautiful example of Mayan woman’s clothing appearing under the title of “Tradition.” It was brought to my attention that the actual huipil, chiq, faja and tzute of the Ixil Maya culture belonged to Juana Velasco, a staff member of the museum who continues to teach weaving classes and offers tours in the traditional dress of her native village. The combination of the weavings with the accompanying quotes resonated strongly with me as I realized that while the artistic objects were presented behind glass, they were by no means static, and rather actively participating in a dialogue between the creators, users, collectors and the viewers.

Under the theme of tradition, there is clearly care and concern in creating a framework for the clothing that goes beyond an inscription of the location, materials, and date of the pieces. Often lost throughout an exhibition of art or artifacts is the voice of the artist and the insight into their background. Here it appears imperative that the true story behind these objects is told through a culmination of the Native artists from the different cultural regions in order to make the necessary distinctions behind their individual practices. They also come together to support the claim in their right to participate in present times by continuing to change and adapt while still preserving their customary values. Therefore this section of the exhibit works to explore the ways in which Natives keep their traditions alive through the practice of making and wearing the clothing, weaving the baskets, or playing the drums, in order to connect to past ancestors, relate to their community, establish a sense of home, and pass on beliefs and concepts into the future.

The Andean Quechua and Aymara men’s hats are displayed separately from the Andean women’s hats, which are shown apart from the moccasins and other footwear of Alaskan natives, allowing for an understanding into the unique roles of clothing as being culturally and gender specific. When expressed through Velasco’s example of her design and pattern specific huipil, “Sometimes when I travel, Indian people from Guatemala see me and know exactly where I am from. They instantly recognize it by my clothes,” it becomes clearer that different cultures use clothing and personal items as a means of self- expression, and are each capable of their own distinctly complex articulations of their cultural identity.

Other displays juxtapose different versions of the same item such as on the wall of masks where a Mexican styled jaguar mask is shown alongside a Raven mask from Alaska, Cherokee Bear mask and others. While this creates a visually stimulating experience that challenges the eye to make stylistic distinctions among the grouping, it feels like there is more of a role in the hand of the exhibition designer to create an appealing overall design than to reveal distinctions and background on the individual artists and uses of the masks.

In addition to supporting the idea that Indigenous cultures participate in the ever-changing world by presenting how they carry on their past traditions, this exhibit also works to defend Natives rights in partaking in the tourist market under the second wall installation entitled, “Innovation.” A large collection of small souvenir-sized totem poles, an art form that has become synonymous with Native Americans is contained within the installation acting as the Guatemalan huipil did to symbolize a common theme. This time the works pertain to the question of production and craft as an art form. Under headline questions such as, “weaving lives,” “appropriating the personal,” “new media and new markets,” and “American designs” the pieces in this section explore the ways in which Indigenous peoples have advanced in passing on their culture to non-natives through the selling of their native products.

The display of basketry reveals the long-standing traditional practice of basket weaving. The intricate designs expose how time-consuming the practice must be and that as times changed and it became harder to sustain oneself for economic reasons, Natives had to become more creative in generating income through the sale of their native artistic objects. Kuna Artist Carlos Lopez explains, “Our grandmothers did not need to sell their molas because the land, the animals living there, and the sea provided everything they needed to sustain life.” How then is native art defined under these new terms of commodity and how can one be sure the item is authentic? What this exhibit succeeds in teaching is that there is not but one form of true genuine native art, and rather it continues to change and adapt to new circumstances while still holding onto tradition.

One way the native artists were able to create works that could be more successfully sold to tourists was by working in a smaller scale. As works became smaller, such as shown by the miniature Navajo pictoral rugs, or miniature Alaskan woven baskets, they were better fit for the collection of non-natives. Smaller scaled objects allowed for greater production, yet while they were geared to fit the desires of others, you can see how the works still maintain the traditional practices and have the power to transcend their form, style and meaning onto the buyer. It is hard to ignore the patience, skill and dedication required in the making of Delia Poma’s engraved gourds from Peru that reveal entire intricate cosmologies within such a small area.

The flow of the objects within the display cases and on the walls makes it possible to draw the connections between changes in form and materials among the different works within the exhibit. With the influence of Western and American art forms, it is possible first-hand to see how Natives transitioned their more commonly used 3-D works into the traditional fine-art form of 2-D paintings and drawings. However as the Natives adjust to the growing markets and develop designs of a different modern tradition in order to attract buyers of non-native cultures, their unique Indigenous standards and ideas still hold true within these commercial products. A distinct example of this is revealed in the Kuna Panamanian and Mexican yarn paintings in which the traditional practice of brightly used colors and natural materials like bees-wax and dyed yarn are still incorporated into the non-traditional picture plane.

Advancing still in order to connect to viewers both of native and non-native traditions, the final wall installation entitled “Art” is surrounded by the most contemporary work in the Museum’s new collection, and introduces Native Artists who participate in the field of the contemporary fine arts. These works appear far more critical, introspective, and personal towards Native history, politics, and traditions. Roxanna Swentzell of Taos New Mexico created the sculpture, “Hands Up!” which works to cover many of the general ideas that contemporary Native American artists appear concerned with. Here she uses a traditional material of ceramics and paint, yet is creating her own symbol based off of a traditional sacred Kossa figure, that is now retelling a story that she’s formulated based on her own observations and assumptions. By re-thinking, re-working traditional themes through a different scale, media, position, and context these artists show the power art has in perpetuating the continual growth of culture so that it cannot die out.

The exhibition is laid out so that you begin at the center of the room, and while the accompanying text guides your viewing experience, there is no clear direction or linear path to follow when viewing the works. See for yourself how traditional and contemporary art practices can co-exist and work to inform one another. The overall design and layout of works relates well to the concept behind the collection as working within a cyclical story of past, present and future in an informative and inspiring way.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Following our ebay theme of disturbing auctions and reflectoporn, this story in the Guardian describes how a Cambridge student was banned from ebay after putting himself up for sale. Ebay countered that his "listing breached eBay's No Item policy and has been removed ... You may not list intangible items or items whose existence cannot be verified, such as ghosts, souls or spirits."...

Ebay bars man who advertised himself for sale

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 6:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to From the news

A series of workshops funded by the AHRC and organised by UCL Museums & Collections.

UCL Museums & Collections warmly invite you to a series of workshops exploring touch and object handling in the context of museums. This series is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Workshop 6: End of project conference: Touch and the value of object handling.
Friday 4 May 2007, University College London, Anatomy JZ Young Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building.

Programme:

• 10am-10.30am Registration and Tea/Coffee. UCL, Anatomy Gavin de Beer Lecture theatre, Anatomy Building

• 10.30-10.45am Introduction and Welcome: Dr Helen Chatterjee, Deputy Director, UCL Museums & Collections and AHRC Touch Workshop leader. UCL, JZ Young Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building

• 10.45-11.20 Prof. Alan Wing, Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham

  "Moving into touch research: a personal account"

• 11.20-12.00 Bernadette Lynch, Head of Public Programmes and Academic Development at The Manchester Museum, University of Manchester

  'The amenable object': working with diaspora communities through a psychoanalysis of touch

• 12.00-1.15 pm Lunch

• 1:15-2:00 concurrent discussion sessions facilitated by:
  Dr. Fiona Candlin, The School of Continuing Education Birkbeck, University of London

      »Dr.David Prytherch, Research Fellow in Haptics & Computer Interfaces for Craft, Birmingham Institute of Art & Design, University of Central England

      »Jane Samuels, Access Manager, Department of Learning & Information, The British Museum

      »Dr Helen Chatterjee, Deputy Director, UCL Museums & Collections and AHRC Touch Workshop leader; and Devorah Romanek, UCL Anthropology PhD, and AHRC Touch Workshop project assistant

• 2:15-3:00 concurrent discussion sessions facilitated by the same as above

• 3:00pm-3.20pm Tea/Coffee. UCL, Anatomy Gavin de Beer Lecture theatre, Anatomy building

• 3.20pm-4pm Plenary address and conclusion, Bernadette Lynch. UCL, JZ Young Lecture Theatre, Anatomy Building

    Please bring any thoughts, questions and ideas you have to contribute to the discussion sessions.

To book a place and/or for further information contact Devorah Romanek on email: d.romanek@ucl.ac.uk
Visit: www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/events
This workshop is FREE; Tea/Coffee will be provided.

This programme is generously funded by the AHRC Research Workshops scheme.

Posted by at 4:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Conferences and other events

Jacek Goldman and his sister Wanda. Krakw, 1924.

"My mother Wanda Meloch (nee Goldman) was killed in Bialystok after the Germans invaded in the summer of 1941. Jacek left the Warsaw Ghetto to join the partisans and nobody ever heard from him again. I received this photograph from my family in New York."- Katarzyna Meloch, Warszawa

A one-day colloquium on Sunday April 29, 2007 at the Bronfman Center, New York University, 7 East 10th Street, New York City.

Organized by the Working Group on Jews, Media, and Religion, Center for Religion and Media, New York University

The colloquium will explore photographic practices in Jewish life, with special reference to portraiture and its role in memorializing the "vanished world" of East European Jewry before the Holocaust. We will focus on threesubjects: the iconic images of Roman Vishniac, devotional images of disciples of Lubavitch Hasidic leaders, and the contemporary photographer Rafael Goldchain's project of re-enacting family portraits. This day-long program will inaugurate a larger project of the Working Group on Jews, Media, and Religion devoted to Jewish photographic practices.

Participants include: Maya Benton, Jonathan Boyarin, Susan Chevlowe, Olga Gershenson, Faye Ginsburg, Rafael Goldchain, Samuel Heilman, Marianne Hirsch, Shelley Hornstein, Andrew Ingall, Jenna Weissman Joselit, Laura Levitt, Maya Balakirsky-Katz, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Max Kozloff, Vivian Mann, Jeffrey Shandler, Sadia Shepard, Patricia Spyer, Wendy Steiner, Leah Strigler, Aviva Weintraub, Carol Zemel, Angela Zito.

• Full program: http://modiya.nyu.edu/modiya/handle/1964/974

• Please RSVP: Lauren Shweder Biel, mailto:les259@nyu.edu

• This colloquium coincides with the exhibition And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews, a program of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, North American Council, and The Florence & Chafetz Hillel House at Boston University, at the Yeshiva University Museum, 15 West 16th Street.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Conferences and other events

UCL Department of Anthropology
Lecturer in Visual and Material Culture

»Applications are invited for a two year lectureship in Visual and Material Culture to begin 1st September 2007. The post is intended to cover sabbatical leave.

Applicants should have submitted a PhD and have begun publishing in the field of anthropology. While the post is open to candidates with expertise in material culture there will be a preference for a specialisation in the field of visual culture. We are looking for applicants who will complement existing areas of expertise in the Department. Applications from qualified candidates specialised in any area of the world are welcome.

• Further particulars are available at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/main/index.htm

• This appointment is available from 1st September 2007 on the UCL salary scale Grade 7 in the range £25,889 to £31,840 p.a. plus £2,497 London Allowance.

• A UCL application form may be downloaded from the web (site). Applications consisting of the application form, a CV, the names and contact details (certainly e-mail) of three referees and a cover letter describing the candidate’s research interests and teaching expertise should all be sent electronically to the Departmental Administrator, Mrs Alena Kocourek (a.kocourek@ucl.ac.uk).

• Closing date: 11th May 2007.
  University College London Taking Action for Equality.
  

Posted by at 6:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Announcements and Listings

Invisible Culture, Issue 11, Curator and Context: Fall 2007

»Online at: www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/

»Deadline for Papers: May 20, 2007

In his 1965 book Museum Without Walls, Andre Malraux critiques museum conventions of display that deaden art of the past. In fact, over time the artworks have morphed, affected by their surroundings, and taken on new lives as different kinds of aesthetic objects. Three years later, Roland Barthes would identify the death of the author and the emergence of the reader in the making of meaning. These writers' prescient articulations of the fusions - and confusions - of art object, context, artist, and viewer foresaw today's hyper-interaction of art media and the overlapping of roles in the museum and beyond.

What these texts leave out is the seemingly unmarked presence of an intermediary between the artwork and the viewer - the curator - and the world she has traditionally inhabited - the museum. "The gallery space is no longer 'neutral,'" wrote Brian O'Doherty in 1976, at a time when artistic practice turned the ideology of the gallery space upon its head. While underlining the pertinence of the museum's physical and contextual impact on the reception of art, he too neglects the curator.

Douglas Crimp's seminal text On the Museum's Ruins laid bare the changing state of the museum by examining shifts in art practice and the rising significance of photography as challenges to the institution. To continue rethinking the museum as a site for art display and the interlinked roles of the artist, artwork, curator, and viewer follows in the steps of these theorists and their peers, to say the least of the decades of artists who have interrupted conventional modes of display in museums through strategic creative applications. As globalization gives way to new cosmopolitanisms, and new media art transforms the site of the museum into the virtual realm, what has become of the curator? By some accounts the role of the curator may be in decline as alternative art spaces, tactical art interventions, and virtual museums refute her role and the institutional power it implies. The other side might see instead a curatorial practice that takes on a multiplicity of roles - as artist, as architect, as nation - and has increased significance in the frenzied world of the international art fair.

Invisible Culture invites papers and projects concerned with contemporary (post-1960s) curatorial and museum practice. Submissions in the form of 2,500-6,000 word papers from all disciplines, as well as digital projects (virtual museums, online art exhibitions, and internet-based endeavors, for example) are welcome. Entries may include but are not limited to investigations of the following topics:

* the relevance and changing role of the curator * artist as curator * curator as translator * criticism and interpretation of exhibitions * models of curating and display * new media projects, the virtual museum * ethics of display * histories of curating * visual anthropology * sense studies, anthropologies of the senses * changes in culture and science museums, museums of natural history * curator as mediator of cultural exchange * architecture and context * global visual culture * problems of cultural translation * alternative exhibition sites * challenges to exhibition display: performance, video and installation art * the interactive exhibit * hybrid art forms and multimedia displays * museum studies * communication/audience studies * cultivation of art audiences * curating and the expansion of global art markets * collections, collectors and curators * curating the biennial/international art fair * cosmopolitanism, diasporas of artists and curators at home and abroad * display and the politics of identity * authorship * emerging area and regional curatorial networks * developments in institutional critique * the location of the frame

Submissions and inquiries should be directed to Mara Gladstone, Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester at mgladstone@gmail.com. Deadline for submission is May 20, 2007.

*Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture* is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to explorations of the material and political dimensions of cultural practices: the means by which cultural objects and communities are produced, the historical contexts in which they emerge, and the regimes of knowledge or modes of social interaction to which they contribute. http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/

Posted by at 4:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Announcements and Listings

Amanda Thai, Junior undergraduate majoring in Anthropology and Gender Studies, NYU.

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance is an exhibition of Papuan Gulf art displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition is ensconced in the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas gallery on the first floor, as a cool grey box amongst the relatively chaotic three-dimensionality of the gallery itself. The main emphasis of the display is the masks, boards and objects collected from Papua New Guinea, kept in glass cases and complimented with text below and photographs. This choice of representation sets the atmosphere of the exhibit, and reveals the contrasting nature between the exhibit and the pieces on display.

There are five cultural groups from the Gulf province represented: the Elema speaking group in the east, the Purari Delta group, the Urama Islanders, the Era River group, and the Kerawa group in the west which includes Goaribari Island. However, these groups so distinctly identified in the opening paragraph are grouped together in the exhibit, with glass cases showing spirit boards from multiple groups right next to each other. The photographs below the cases pictures examples of the objects above. This manner of presenting the pieces indicates a belief in the importance of the broad function of the art object over the art object itself. In doing so, it simultaneously uproots these art objects from the subtle nuances of their own specific surroundings and groups them indiscriminately within the Margaret Meadian ethnographic present ‘Papuan Gulf’.

The use of photography also indicates this encompassing approach. The opening paragraph states that the “history of photography in Papuan Gulf essentially parallels that of sustained colonial contact, because it was primarily nonlocal visitors who made the photographs.” By using photographs in this exhibit to describe the objects displayed above them, and then further removing these objects from their specific cultural contexts creates a very colonizing view of the material. The supplementary text does not aid to refute this perception. The majority of texts focus on the photographers and their backgrounds more than they do the cultural significances of the objects themselves. While some highlight certain physical attributes of a certain piece, a casual browser of the exhibit leaves knowing more about the Western travelers who took the pictures and the techniques they used to do so instead of the importance of the objects on display.

One of the many photographs in the exhibit shows a man holding up two kakame – clan spirit statues. One of these statues is displayed behind the photograph, and an examination between the two indicates that the statue itself is lacking a loincloth present in the photograph. There is no additional explanation to the loincloth’s disappearance. The treatment of the kakame reveals the exhibit’s failure to accurately present the objects in their cultural contexts. A description of another photograph states that the photograph’s subject’s “personal ornament indicate that [the photograph’s subject] is probably a young girl.” As personal ornaments are used to distinguish the gender of the subject, the kakame’s ornamentation then, in the shape of its loincloth could have much cultural significance as well. The lack of a loincloth may mean something entirely difference from the presence of a loincloth. Unfortunately, a visitor would never know if this was the case. The exhibit instead chooses to mention that the man holding the two statues in the photograph remains unnamed – peculiar because the photographer usually lists the names of his friends. Nothing is said of either kakame or its significance.

However, the kakame is only one piece of the exhibit. The glass cases that dominate the space characterize the inadequateness of the presentation to fully appreciate the nature and form of the objects. Many of the pieces set in the glass cases are masks or items with ritual significance. The back wall of the exhibit displays two boards, both with holes or ledges on the bottom used as holds for holders to “raise above their heads” during dances. As the title of the exhibit indicates, these items are intended to move with dancers in rituals ‘coaxing the spirits to dance’. Their creators embodied spirits within the form of the objects themselves, and these spirits lived through the shape and lines of the object. Footage of four keveke dancers at Kinomere Island shows the way these objects are meant to be used and perceived in their cultures. The objects are meant to be experienced, not only viewed. Taken out of context and placed in within glass cases, visitors of the exhibit are barred from ever experiencing these objects in the way they are originally intended to be experienced. The glass boxes distance the viewers from these objects in an alien way from how these objects are meant to interact with its surroundings, and doing so actually changes the nature of the objects themselves. These objects on the Papuan Gulf had a spiritual life, ever-changing as dancers carry them through multiple dances and rituals. As soon as they are locked in cool, sterile glass cases, the very nature of the objects change from metaphysical spirits to the bounded lines and contours of high art.

While the exhibit treats these objects with utmost respect – each object carefully labeled and catalogued, the exhibit respects these objects as Western art, in ways that Western art should be respected, rather than as Papuan objects. Even the labels are Western oriented, as they do not describe the maker or purpose of the object, but rather the Western photographer and the history of the photograph. Text accompanying the footage of keveke dancers described the documenter, James Francis Hurley being admonished for rearranging scenes for a more dramatic shot, yet that he “officially collected objects and photographed places that no longer survive in any other way.” The text perfectly describes what the exhibit actually does if it does not allow the visitor to fully comprehend Papuan Gulf objects as such, and that is to allow reflection on the Western societies that have visited the Papuan Gulf. Did the objects really survive, if they are eventually rearranged and displayed as Western art is displayed?

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reaffirms a familiar concept in Western mentalities of art as paintings and sculptures. Once created, art is immovable and frameable. Art is easily captured in a single photograph and hung up neatly on walls. Art is collected and institutionalized. The objects in the exhibit, once installed become these western art pieces and are forced to conform to what is acceptable as art by Western art institutions. They are no longer worn or used by participants but observed distantly by observers. The glass separating the masks and shields of the Papuan Gulf from the audience is physical evidence of this break, and the photographs are legacy of the change these objects underwent in the translation. A description of the exhibit by the Metropolitan Museum of Art writes of “historical photographs” within the exhibit. Viewing the exhibit itself, one must ask the question of whose history do these photographs embody? Surely, the history of the Papuan Gulf is not the main focus here, and one would have to coax a lot harder for the spirits to truly dance.

Works Cited

• 2007. Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/14/ebay_wing_mirror/

A couple of years ago a student of mine wrote an essay on the concept of objectification, and the importance of modes of externalisation as the means by which we come to know ourselves. To illustrate this she used the phenomenon of reflectoporn. This is where people flouted the ban on pornography on E-Bay by putting up for auction objects such as mirrors, kettles with reflective surfaces and such like, which when given a second glance, turn out to dimly reflect naked persons presumed to be the people who are selling the things. As far as I know this is not a particularly extensive phenomenon, but it has attracted a sort of urban myth status with hundreds of websites telling us that the phenomenon exists. Rather in the manner of all those essays on the way shopping malls use pastiche, it has become a very obvious way to claim something profound about the modern world. Still even if it doesn’t actually say anything of the kind, its kinda weird and kinda intriguing, and I guess we have just become one more of those websites that is spreading the word. So, just in case someone out there needs a quick and dirty example for some essay on material and visual culture, don’t bother with this one. We already know. Incidentally the student then went on to become a first class researcher.

Danny Miller, Anthropology, UCL

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Objects and visual analyses | Topics for Discussion

April Strickland, PhD student, NYU Anthropology

This exhibition of Pierre Bourdieu’s photographs from Algeria is part of a collection of over 1,000 images taken by Bourdieu as part of his field research, 1958–1961. Though never intended to be museum objects, the images lend insight into the Algerian struggle for independence from France, and provide evidence of the quotidian effects of displacement that many Algerian peasants experienced in the 1950s. They also provide an interesting visual record of the methodology and praxis of Bourdieu, who was then in his twenties and a fledgling sociologist.

The exhibition has traveled to Smith College, where it will remain until March 25, 2007. It was accompanied by a faculty seminar and a public symposium. A corresponding exhibit is now on display at Goldsmiths, University of London where it will be on view until May 2007. Information about the exhibition and upcoming related events at Goldsmiths can be found at http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/sociology/bourdieu.php

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Janet Borgerson and Jonathan Schroeder

Small, inexpensive, and well-designed, Peter Pauper Press books fit fetchingly into a suitcoat pocket or evening bag. With dependably colorful, decorative dust jackets and entertaining, easily digestible content, few books could be as cheering to give and receive. Perhaps this is why so many found their way into US upper-middle class (and striving) den bookshelves and kitchen cupboards in the 1950s and 1960s. Peter Pauper’s attractively printed cookbooks, poetry volumes and lifestyle hints now recirculate through libraries, discerning used bookstores and as collectibles on eBay. Tantalizing traces of consumption linger in these used books – some apparently stored, tight and unopened, in a bedside table, forlornly filed away in an attic trunk, or boxed and forgotten in a basement bin, while others indicate heavy use, as cherished recipe book, favorite collection of poems, or crucial guide to concocting cocktails. Via an examination of collective collecting memory, this chapter explores the aesthetic dimensions of books – given, received, coveted, and inscribed, then rediscovered and displayed as cultural icons or nostalgic treasures.

In this project, we argue that the popular value of used goods – including books – contradicts the notion that ‘clean’ and ‘new’ determine the borders of consumer desire. We analyze examples from a proliferating personal library in some detail, describing and examining the material pleasures of these used texts, including ‘inscriptions’ such as previous owner’s marginalia – written annotations, highlights and notes left in the pages. Opening these thin volumes for the reader illuminates the ways in which used objects can evoke, and give material form to, the abstract ideas of history and heritage but also, on a more intimate level, prompt nostalgic wonderings around their biographies and past uses. We argue that such wonderings play a central part in the creation of an object’s value, one not embraced in more traditional framings of consumption stemming from a consideration of new goods.

What many consumers value, the efficient market often eliminates. We point out a paradox of online booksellers’ focus on ‘clean’ or ‘tight’ books, free from inscriptions and marks. Economist and philosopher Georges Bataille might recognize marginalia and inscriptions as excess value, excluded by the unreflective operations of the mainstream market, yet contributing to an overall productive environment in a mode that is wasted. Collectors often treasure marked up pages; researchers find these shadowy scribblings provide unobtrusive data about past owners and previous eras. Such qualities provide retro revelations, valued, often, in the wasteland beyond clear financial gains.

The Peter Pauper Press: A Case Study of Collectibility

Peter Pauper Press helped popularize the gift book market by marketing petite, relatively inexpensive and innocuous volumes – perfect solutions for anniversaries, birthdays, or house warming parties. Their 4 1/2 x 7 inch books, with stylized collage, woodcut graphics and craftily coordinated colors emerged in early form from the Beilenson family’s press in 1948. Running the gamut from lauded literature to lascivious limericks, the Mount Vernon publisher produced condensed editions of John Donne, Francis Bacon and Omar Khayyam; volumes of Japanese Haiku, Chinese love lyrics, and Portuguese sonnets; as well as little puzzle books and quippy quotes about love and women. Their ‘Simple’ series – such as Simple Italian Cookery and Simple Spanish Cookery – predated today’s ‘for Dummies’ and ‘for Beginners’ guides by decades. An ‘ethnic’ cookbook series introduced uncertain chefs to intriguing ingredients and dishes of Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Hawaiian and colonial American gastronomy.

Our favorite examples are from the delightful ‘ABC’ series, which includes drink and dining recipes for all occasions. These colorful cookbooks, each in the same tidy size, and featuring similar, pleasing designs, focus on specialized culinary themes, for example, ‘chafing dish cookery’, ‘herb and spice cookery’, ‘ wine cookery’, ‘and ‘microwave cookery’. We are not alone in valuing these minor manuscripts: several recent exhibitions reveal the growing estimation and cultural cachet of Peter Pauper Press -– demonstrating how marginal publications often transform into culturally notable artifacts, due to their provenance, their publication history, or their popularity. We invite the reader to join us as we dust off an expanding archive of little literature, a unique retro window into an aesthetic economy of books.

About Book Collecting

What makes books worth collecting? A hypertext of interests influences acquiring, buying or collecting used books. For example, our hankering for Hawaiiana, as a general genre, prompted our purchase of Peter Pauper Press Simple Hawaiian Cookery. Our fondness for a specific eras’ designs and colors – such as the fashion for combining salmon pink, turquoise blue, and black – provoked us to pick up Festive Salads and Molds. The collecting craze commenced. We began scouring used bookstores coast to coast – from Titcomb’s in Cape Cod to Moe’s in Berkeley by way of John King’s in Detroit. Sometimes, we found a separate Peter Pauper section, but the biggest rush came from spotting a copy amongst aging cookbooks and poetry, flashing like gold flecks in our prospector’s pan. Fortuitously, we found a few among our parents’ books, another in a grandmother’s cabin, and, as we regaled our friends with tales of the hunt, they humored us with used gifts of Peter Pauper Press to complement our enlarging collection. In over ten years collecting Peter Pauper Press, we find that searching for elusive examples, ruminating over what’s worth collecting, bargaining over prices, and displaying precious purchases increase the pleasures of the used text. We love finding a obscure volume at the back of a dimly lighted used bookstore, and continue to compete between ourselves to discover the most desirable example, plucked from the shadows of neglect, filling a previously unrevealed hole in our oeuvre.

Valuing Inscriptions and Marginalia

Unintimidating and intimate in scale, Peter Pauper Press volumes perhaps invited small authorial interventions. Gift books, moreover, often call for personal inscriptions to the recipient. This excess text often adds value to the collected book. Yet a World Wide Web search suggests that ‘clean’ and ‘tight’ copies – with no marks and uncreased or unbroken bindings – bring in bids on eBay and other online selling sites. Vendors appear to believe that a book must be as close to untouched as possible, that any distinguishing feature, whether sudden reader revelations or judgments noted in margins, are unwelcome and devaluing.

However, some book collectors (like us) value ephemeral notations – often anonymous – made in distant places and times, rediscovered and puzzled over years later. Margin marks personalize books, reminding the reader which recipe went well or jogging the memory about what joke worked when. Gift inscriptions mark meaningful moments and relationships. These marginalia help transform the profane object into a sacred keepsake. Of course, an author’s signature enhances a book’s collectibility. Furthermore, when someone famous graces a book with notes, then every detail and comment may be of interest, and if a well known artist marks a text, then every sketch and scribble becomes significant.

Tracing Consumption: Recirculating the Gift

Traces of consumption reveal humanity behind our objects of desire. An unexpected aspect of our research shed light into the intimate nature of buying and selling. Collecting books and used book buying may be influenced by profit making hopes, but here we have turned to the pleasures of the used text, the ephemeral and eclectic, a respect, attachment, and connection to small practices, marginalia, gifts, intimate life experiences, and personalities from the past, drawing unexpected insights from looking at little literature and paying attention to the lessons beyond the text.

The pleasures of used texts invoke cultural norms and class-related social practices – style, taste, and etiquette – packaged and presented to an upwardly mobile market. Peter Pauper Press served as an accessible introduction to a wider world, creating cosmopolitan consumers quoting African proverbs, Blake’s poetry and Chinese love lyrics over chafing dish delights. The Peter Pauper Press output might be termed the ABC of cosmopolitanism – guidebooks to a mobile, articulate, cultured life. These little books made belle-lettres authors, exotic ingredients, and foreign figures available to mainstream US consumers, much as hi-fi record albums brought faraway sounds onto 1950s patios. Thus, Peter Pauper Press’s attractive books contributed small signals of success in the quest for adventurous dining, broader horizons and cultural capital.

Used goods tell consumption stories and consumption stories sell used goods. We have shown how material practices, such as collecting, gift giving, and inscribing, create meaning. Consumption traces alter the text, marking books with sacred, and, sometimes, economic value – as witnessed by the attention that famous figures’ marginalia attracts. Marginalia – banished by booksellers, expunged from electronic databases, and erased by efficient indexing – animates consumption objects, offering nostalgic narratives of everyday lives. This excess – gingerbread recipe notes preserved in The Melting Pot Cookbook, a scholar’s scribbled comments on an influential tome, ancestral names written in the family Bible – defies the assumption that ‘clean’ and ‘new’ determine the borders of consumer desire. These traces of consumption – largely absent from the References emerging electronic marketplace – offer unobtrusive insights into the pleasures of the used text, demonstrating how consumers, collectors and curators imbue books with meaning, how books become part of everyday life, and why they carry so much potential value for families, friends, and fanatical collectors within an aesthetic economy of books.

Images used with permission of Managing Editor Nick Beilenson at Peter Pauper Press. All examples from author’s collection.

Janet Borgerson is Reader in Philosophy and Management and Jonathan Schroeder is Professor of Marketing at the University of Exeter. They are founding members of the Information Society Network.

Further reading:

• Borgerson, Janet L. and Jonathan E. Schroeder (2006) “The Pleasures of the Used Text: Revealing Traces of Consumption,” in Consuming Books: The Marketing and Consumption of Literature, S. Brown, (ed), London: Routledge, 46-59.

Posted by William Brian Thomson at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Objects and visual analyses