Bethany Edmunds, NYU

In 2006 a wave of Polynesian art resurfaced from the storehouses of British Museums. Some three hundred years on from Captain James Cook’s first arrival in New Zealand the sacred objects of a colonial past were revisited, re-interpreted and recreated. Power & Taboo: Sacred Objects from the Pacific was a temporary exhibition of selected pieces at the British Museum, from their unparalleled Pacific collection of art and artifacts, dating between 1760 and 1860.1 Pasifika Styles: A fusion of contemporary style and technological innovation with ancient traditions, [..] unites the new wave of contemporary Pacific art and culture with extraordinary historical collections at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.2 These two case studies will be the focus of this analysis on the perceptions created by the naming of an exhibition. What’s in a name? Who’s telling the story? And, how does this contribute to the museum experience and the generation of knowledge about the Pacific?

Both Power and Taboo and Pasifika Styles presented material culture of the Pacific peoples, and as described by Rosanna Raymond “the Pacific emerge(d) into the public eye in the United Kingdom through a series of exhibitions and associated events that were spread across the southeast, creating a new Polynesian triangle of sorts between Cambridge, Norwich, and London.”3 Polynesia, a collection of cultures whose geographic location is bound by the tides of Tangaroa, the god of the ocean, and the ancestors who traveled aboard waka or canoes to share languages, histories and artistic practices. The role of art and artifacts as taonga or sacred treasures that disseminate cultural knowledge is a concept that is consistent throughout the Pacific and was recurrent within each of these exhibitions. Even though these commonalities were displayed; the juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary, art and artifact, primitive and civilized, presented an interesting basis for the discussion of curatorial choices made within each exhibition.

Advertising images for ‘Power and Taboo’ on the left, and ‘Pasifika Styles’ on the right.

Power and Taboo
The name itself insights imagery of awe and the untouchable, forbidden and exotic, especially when coupled with an unwitting mascot, the feathered head of a Hawaiian god sculpture with bulging eyes and a teeth bared grimace. The impression presented through the exhibitions name and marketing is one of an ancient distant world that will transport the viewer from the hustle and bustle of London streets to the antiquated cultures of a time gone by, allowing the visitor to stare at sacred objects of primitive art, from the safety of their confinement behind the shields of glass cabinets. In a London visitors guide review of the exhibition the author comments “So what we have here are apparently terrifying, nightmare gods, high-maintenance gods who demanded a lot of work of their adherents. Why might these societies, living in what we might think of as an idyllic world of swaying palm trees and soft sea breezes, have chosen to create such deities?”4 This outlook is reiterated by the information presented to the wider audience via didactic labels and the supporting website, the text is set in the past tense with constant reference to the Gods, the powerful and the sacred. The intention of the curators to acknowledge the validity of Polynesian values with statements such as “But traditional beliefs still survive: many Polynesian visitors to the museum come to greet the displays not as groups of objects, but as living treasures with immanent power”5, is somehow diminished by the very display of these objects which effectively discredits their mana or power, and tapu or taboo. Western perspectives continue to confirm the savage image of ethnographic objects, which is again reconstructed through this exhibition and its colonial viewpoint.

The concluding works of the exhibition are a waiata or song written by Che Wilson (2006) that describes the loneliness felt by taonga within museums, and a sculpture by renowned contemporary master carver Lionel Grant. The text associated with Grants carving discusses connections to the land and the ancestors, but no reference is made to either the gods or the sacred. Either the curators decided that only the ‘authentic’ artifacts from pre-colonial collections demonstrate the sacred ‘power and taboo’ or; Grant made a conscious choice to create a carving appropriate for a general audience who needs not be exposed to ‘potentially very dangerous’ sacred objects such as the Rarotongan god-stick6.

‘The only surviving wrapped example of a large staff god image from Rarotonga in the Cook Islands.’

Pasifika Styles
‘To me this name immediately places us which I feel is really important but is still not too specific i.e. not Aotearoa...not Samoa, not Tonga but alludes to the Pacific and encompasses us all...the ability to immediately take the person whether young, old, naive, or Polynesian specialist to know where they are heading to.”7

Pasifika is the Polynesian word encompassing the Pacific, and Style has elements of method, fashion, and in a contemporary world alludes to new trends and distinction. As quoted above, the name aims to speak to an eclectic audience, to educate and transport them on a journey through the Pacific. The artists’ voice is prevalent in Pasifika Styles from the choice of name for the exhibition, the marketing and logo design and the label text that is presented in the first person from the artists themselves. The context in which the show was created allows for curatorial choices to be made that would not normally be seen within the constraints of an ethnographic museum.

Co-curated by Samoan artist Rosanna Raymond, and Amiria Henare resident curator and lecturer at Cambridge University, the exhibition was the exploration of a conversation between objects, an artist and an anthropologist, all born in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Built on a trajectory of contemporary Polynesian and Maori art that began in New Zealand in the 1970’s, Pasifika Styles is another stepping stone in the renaissance of Polynesian art and culture being expressed with new materials and techniques, and based on the stories and philosophies of the many generations who have gone before.

The museum catalogue Pasifika Styles: Artists inside the museum is a compilation of essays and photographs that takes the audience behind the scenes to discover the processes involved in the creation of this exhibition. In a book review by Henare she discusses a conversation between herself and Raymond and their desire to push “beyond the restraints of the 'ethnic art' box to which it was assigned” and use Pasifika Styles as a platform for artists to present their work and commentate on contemporary issues.8 For such a groundbreaking exhibition critical attention was hard to come by; the UK and NZ fine arts press were virtually silent on the topic and the Museums Journal tried unsuccessfully to get it reviewed.9 The controversial nature of the exhibition presents artists works that challenge the very collection and display methods of the Museum itself, therefore the intention of the museum support was questioned, and Henare says that “for others it was clearly another case of a museum trying to update itself by inviting 'indigenous' artists to add their 'cultural' art to the collections.”10

Artists, Anthropologists and the Audience
The debate about the contextualization of ethnic objects is an ongoing topic of discussion between anthropologists, artists and indigenous communities. In her article What Became of Authentic Primitive Art? Errington dissects the evolution of Primitive Art as a category that was invented at the turn of the century, and through the recognition of avant-garde artists and collectors began to gain market value as it entered the mainstream of established art. The notion that “authentic” primitive people live as they have lived for centuries, untouched by Western civilization, and that “authentic primitive art” is work created by those people for their own uses and not for external sale, has been highly criticized.

Critiques by Fabian (1983), Clifford (1988) and Price (1989), among others, led to “primitivism” being thoroughly discredited as a Western ideological construct.11 In New Zealand, the mid 80’s were also a prominent time in the re-evaluation of these concepts as Maori artifacts gained international stardom when displayed as Art with a capital A, in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. In his paper Postcolonial Pasts and Postindigenous Futures: A Critical Genealogy of Maori Art, McCarthy highlights that at the same time, Pacific material was displayed as ‘art/artifacts’ at the American Museum of Natural History, and downtown at MOMA primitive art was hung alongside new masters like Picasso et al to suggest ‘affinities’ between the tribal and modern.12 He uses three examples of ‘Waharoa’ or Maori carved gateways from a 100 year period to assess how the “culture of display was inflected by the complex and specific relations of power/knowledge, modernity and nationhood, (and shows) how different forms of Maori Art were made visible through the categories of display current in the museum at that time.”13

For the wave of Pacific artists who’s work was presented at Pasifika styles the opportunity to engage with the “authentic primitive art” of their ancestors provided a vehicle for the continuation of cultural art practices, allowing the taonga to breathe a breath of new life. A chapter in the catalogue by doctoral candidate Carine Durand, entitled Fieldwork in a Glass Case, describes the ethnographic research process that she engaged in with the development and installation of Pasifika Styles. “It appeared that the Maori and Pacific Island artists involved in the project were conducting their own ‘fieldwork’ both within and outside the museum and that, through their artistic installations they were offering alternative ways of selecting, arranging, and presenting the ‘data’ they collected.”14

One of these artists was Lisa Reihana, a Multi Media Artist whose installation He Tautoko is featured on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, she created the third Waharoa in McCarthy’s analysis, and was one of Durands case studies. In her written contribution to the catalogue she says, “Pasifika Styles is an exciting model that progressive museums can use to re-invigorate their collections. As an artist it presented the perfect opportunity for me to extend my practice, by directly engaging with Maori customary taonga.”15 Durand continues to explain how her ethnographic research was altered by her interaction with the artists in their installation process, and by submitting herself to Polynesian oral traditions of teaching and learning she became a subject within her own study. The internal dynamic of the exhibition therefore became a research project, a learning environment and a venue for the development of knowledge for both the artists and anthropologists alike. So what then for the audience?

Both exhibitions were complimented by the common network of Polynesian artists who had traveled to the UK to assist in the preparation and installation of Pasifika Styles. A dynamic program of workshops, performances and artists’ demonstrations designed for audience participation, accompanied the exhibitions and highlighted the living nature of Polynesian culture. The openings both honored Polynesian protocols, although each event was distinctly different and further illustrated the role of the living people as objects within the intention of the museums displays. For Power and Taboo Ngati Ranana, the London Based Maori Culture Group, were invited to perform in front of an adulatory audience of museum professionals and media. They then led the crowd through the exhibition reciting karakia or Maori prayers, a practice that confirmed their connection to the taonga, and in turn, reiterated the wider audience’s sense of wonder attached to the power and taboo of the objects.

Contrasted by the artist-driven opening of Pasifika Styles, the Polynesian diaspora of London participated in the process with a complete powhiri or welcome ceremony, which fully engaged the audience and the objects. Protocols based in tradition were led by Che Wilson wielding the taiaha carved spear of his ancestor, reciting and bringing life to the song that was written on the walls of the British Museum. The space resonated with the sounds of an ancient Putatara Maori trumpet, as it echoed through the gallery halls singing for the first time in over a century. Anita Herle, Senior Curator at the CUMAA writes, “The museum agreed to the request that specific items from the collections be used in the opening ceremonies, confident that the cultural descendants of their makers would ensure their well being.”16 The trust displayed in this reciprocal relationship between the museum and the indigenous communities is a dynamic example of the exciting model that Reihana spoke of for museums to re-invigorate their collections.

Knowledge Generation
By considering the content of traditional vs. contemporary, and artifacts vs. art that were displayed in these two exhibitions, certain curatorial choices are reminiscent of Ethnographic and Fine art display methodologies. The myth of authentic primitive art that was apparently dispelled in the 90’s seems to have resurfaced in the form of gods and sacred objects. How authentic are the representations portrayed by the contemporary indigenous practitioners whose work contributes to the continuum of Polynesian culture? If the exhibition names were swapped and the ancient artifacts at the British Museum were entitled Pasifika Styles would this effect the audiences’ interpretation of the objects as living objects with imminent power? What if the contemporary works at the CUMAA were assigned the title Power and Taboo, would the commentary by the artists support or dispel the stereotypes that are evident within these two eminent words? The power, knowledge and nationhood mentioned by McCarthy are no longer a one sided investment, as museum workers are willing to collaborate with source communities and members of those communities, whether artists or cultural ambassadors, are actively engaged in the critique and interpretation of knowledge through objects. Cultural objects of Pacific origin are equally as powerful and sacred as the people with whom they communicate, whether carved in greenstone or Perspex these taonga continue to translate messages of gods, the land, people and their experiences, and the museum creates a sacred space for the exchange of tangible and intangible knowledge to materialize.

About the Author
I, Bethany Matai Edmunds, am a Contemporary Maori Artist who has learnt the skills of traditional Maori cloak weaving from a young age. In 2000 I graduated from Northland Polytechnic with a Bachelor of Applied Arts: Maori Design and Technology, and since then have exhibited throughout Aotearoa New Zealand and in 2002 displayed my work in Maorien Lurra an exhibition of Maori culture hosted by the Basque people of Northern Spain. In 2006 I participated in Pasifika Styles as an exhibiting artist and, although not in attendance for the opening, I travelled to the U.K. alongside Kahutoi Te Kanawa to deliver a series of weaving workshops and demonstrations to museum workers and the public. I was involved in the opening of Power and Taboo and the closing ceremony of Pacific Encounters at the Sainsbury Center in Norwich, England. I am currently completing a Master of Arts: Visual Culture, Costume Studies at New York University. With a specific focus on the storage and display of Maori Korowai (cloaks) within international Museums and, in a broader context the presentation of Maori, Polynesian and Indigenous histories through the exhibition of material culture.

Continue reading "The ‘Power and Taboo’ of ‘Pasifika Styles’" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 6:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Haidy Geismar, NYU

Exquisite Bodies focuses on the popular anatomical models used to educate both medics and everyday people about the most familiar workings of the human body - childbirth and so on - and also about the physical effects of smallpox, syphilis and other venereal diseases. This "popular history of the anatomical model" ranges from the award winning models of Joseph Towne, the official model maker at Guy's hospital to the extremely popular museum of Roca in Barcelona.

It is noteworthy that many of these objects circulated in widely diverse contexts: as well as being used for teaching in medical schools, and for the popular dissemination of knowledge about the human bodies, they were prominently displayed at World's fairs and formed part of many fairground attractions. Like the Hunterian Museum, and other medical museums, in the 19th century, the acquisition of knowledge about the human body was fraught with concern for exceptions, strange cases, and the moral underpinnings of infectious disease. no wonder that models of syphilitic genetalia are here presented with lifelike busts of bearded ladies.

Objects such as the "anatomical virgins" married technical skill with an insight into cultural values and questions about the human body. Modelists such as Towne were concerned to maintain the veracity of the corpses they used as their models and unlike those artists representing the human body in its more idealised form, were unflinching in their portrayal of the stubbled chins, and anguished expressions of the people that ended up as cadavars (unclaimed corpses drawn from the lowest echelons of society).

Behind a red velvet curtain the most shocking models of disease stricken genitalia speak to the every day concerns of the 18th and 19th centurys. The exhibition is provocative, insightful, oddly moving, and at times disturbing. It makes an excellent compliment to the Assembling Bodies exhibition in Cambridge (reviewed earlier on this site here). Exquisite Bodies runs until October 18th, 2009.

See also this BBC site about the Cambridge exhibition Assembling Bodies: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8224706.stm previously discussed on the blog here

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 6:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Anita Herle & Mark Elliott,
Cambridge Univ. Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology

Details of some of the objects shown in Assembling Bodies. © MAA.

How do we know and experience our bodies? How does the way we understand the human body reflect and influence our relations with others?

Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination is a major interdisciplinary exhibition at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) University of Cambridge, open from March 2009 to November 2010. Curated by Anita Herle, Mark Elliott and Rebecca Empson, the exhibition explores some of the different ways that bodies are imagined, understood and transformed in the arts, social and biomedical sciences. They displays showcase Cambridge’s rich and diverse collections, complemented by loans from national museums and exciting contemporary artworks. It brings together a range of remarkable and distinctive objects, including the earliest stone tools used by human ancestors, classical sculptures, medieval manuscripts, anatomical drawings, scientific instruments, the model of the double helix, ancestral figures from the Pacific, South African body-maps and kinetic art.

Atomised. Jim Bond. 2005. ® John Coombes.

The idea of assembly evokes two distinct but overlapping themes that underlie the exhibition. Jim Bond’s kinetic sculptures illuminate one notion of assembly – the process of putting something together, of creating something new from component parts. Positioned at the entrance to the gallery, Atomised (2005) is triggered by the movement of visitors into the gallery. An openwork human figure is pulled apart and put together by external telescopic ‘arms’. A second sculpture, Anamorphic Man (2009), consists of sections of the body suspended from the ceiling in the central area of the exhibition. These apparently abstract fragments converge into a human figure from a single vantage point. The realisation of the body’s form is thus dependant on the viewer’s perspective.

Anamorphic Man. Jim Bond. 2009. 6.4m x 2m x 2.5m. As seen from below. ® MAA.

A second notion of assembly refers to a gathering for a common purpose, such as a legislative ‘body’. Assembling Bodies brings together a multitude of human forms originating from different times, places and perspectives. The diverse nature of the material brought together and the legal documents that frame the introductory installation also point to the political implications of the ways that distinct bodies are known and regulated. Different ways of knowing the body have a profound impact on the ways that bodies are imagined and acted upon.

Photographic montage of the introductory section ‘An Assembly of Bodies’. © MAA.

The Curators aim to reveal and challenge preconceived notions of the body through the use of nuanced and at times startling juxtapositions. The conceptual organising principle for the exhibition was ‘exploring the technologies that make bodies visible’. The gathering of diverse objects demonstrates how different social and material technologies for making bodies visible bring new and often unexpected forms into focus. In this way Assembling Bodies works to transcend the dualism of subjects and objects and to argue that bodies are social in their materiality. Materiality is often associated with permanence, yet the exhibition focuses on changing and emergent forms. The objects on display show that technologies through which humans make bodies visible have a tangible, transformative effect on the body, both conceptually and materially. This idea is highlighted by the kinetic art that punctuates the exhibition space and is activated by the movement of bodies.

The exhibition is not conceived or arranged as a linear story. The displays are organised in overlapping thematic zones, each containing clusters of artworks, instruments and ideas. One side of the gallery focuses on techniques of measurement and classification, pointing to the productive and often uneasy interchange between anthropomorphic measurement, anatomy and the arts. The other side of the gallery focuses on relations between bodies, exploring how bodies are inextricably linked to their material environment, mapped through genealogies and genomes, extended through various technologies and distributed in different forms. There are multiple links between objects located in different areas of the exhibition. The layout of the gallery, interactive exhibits and website, encourage the visitor to develop multiple and surprising connections between the displays and assemble new bodies.

While each of the assembled bodies are situated within specific historical and cultural contexts, the exhibition does not attempt to provide detailed narratives of the body over time or in particular places. Instead the curators take advantage of the comparative method to throw differences into relief, to identify similarities between diverse materials and to make the familiar appear strange and open to investigation. Unexpected juxtapositions provoke new ways of comprehending the body, while artworks and interactive displays encourage visitors to explore the sensory capacity of their own bodies. The variety of bodily forms and their potential for transformation reveal that definitions and boundaries are not stable. We all live with differing and multiple bodies.

Exhibition catalogue by Anita Herle, Mark Elliott & Rebecca Empson. With contributions by Jim Bond, Dusan Boric, Simon Cohn, Sarah Franklin, Dianne Harris, Oliver Harris, Jessica Hughes, Bonnie Kemske, Maryon McDonald, Hayley MacGregor, Elizabeth Mills, Robin Osborne, Tom Rice, John Robb, Marilyn Strathern, Sarah Tarlow. 96 pages, full colour with 94 images.
Price: £12 + p&p (free postage within the UK)
Email: cumaa@hermes.cam.ac.uk

Highlights from the exhibition:

(Left) Model of the Double Helix. 2003. Created by Claudio Villa and Roger Lucke after the original Crick and Watson model. © Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. (Right) Malangan Sculpture. Late 19th century. Wooden funerary sculpture with shell eyes. New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. © MAA 1890.177.

Positioned alongside each other, the DNA model and the malangan draw attention to their ability to mark the particular characteristics of a person and then to distribute their life force to their descendants. Both objects were originally intended to be ephemeral.

(Left) Family Group. Abraham Willaerts. 1660. © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 534 (Right) Genomic Portrait. Marc Quinn. 2001. Double portrait of the geneticist John Sulston comprised of a realistic photograph and a sample of the sitter’s DNA in agar jelly mounted in stainless steel. © National Portrait Gallery 6591, 6592(1).

The juxtaposition challenges the viewer to consider the accuracy of different forms of portraiture, and underlines the complexity of different understandings of descent.

Death mask of Sir Isaac Newton. John Michael Rysbrack. 1727. © Trinity College, Cambridge.

Newton's death mask is a treasured relic of the great scientist, which became a specimen for phrenological investigation. In the mid-nineteenth century it precipitated a debate in phrenological circles following the claim that the weakness of Newton’s causality bump did not match his extraordinary achievements.

Bilum ‘Tree’. 2009. Installation of netbags from Papua New Guinea based on the imagination of Marilyn Strathern. © MAA.

The body is known by its capacity: it can grow things within, it can bring forth, can reproduce itself in others. It can also stand for a collectivity, an assembly of persons who together produce something.

Acknowledgements: Assembling Bodies is a research component of a larger Leverhulme-funded project “Changing beliefs of the human body”. Additional support was provided by the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England, and the Crowther-Beynon Fund, University of Cambridge. Full acknowledgements and the names of the many contributors are listed in the catalogue and website [http://maa.cam.ac.uk/assemblingbodies].

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Objects and visual analyses

Joanna Alario, NYU Museum Studies

In the Connecticut River Valley, the thirteen-thousand-strong Pequot tribe lived in villages, practicing agriculture and trading products with neighboring groups. Similar to so many other Native people across the nation, the arrival of the English and their foreign diseases decimated the Pequot, reducing their population by close to eighty percent. Following growing hostilities between the Pequot and Colonial authorities, the Pequot Wars of 1636-1638 further diminished the tribe. Surviving Pequot, numbering between two thousand and twenty-five hundred, were either captured and sold into slavery or absorbed into neighboring tribes with whom they had ancestral ties (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:42; Quin 1999:54; Lawlor 2006:35). In 1638 the Pequots became the first “terminated” tribe with the Treaty of Hartford. The Treaty declared that “the Pequots shall no more be called Pequots, but Narragansetts and Mohegans” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:43). In the years that followed, the Pequots reclaimed their name and petitioned for expanded lands for their reservation. However, their reservation lands continued to be sold off by the state and, by 1972, 204 acres remained, with only two women—Elizabeth George Plouffe and Martha Langevin Ellal—left living on the land (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:43-44).

Skip Hayward, the grandson of Plouffe, was inspired by his grandmother’s commitment and encouraged tribal members to move back to the reservation “to reclaim illegally seized land, gain federal recognition, achieve economic self-sufficiency, and revitalize tribal culture” (Quin 1999:54). The Mashantucket Pequot Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1983 granted the tribe with federal recognition and $900,000 to purchase back their tribal lands. Ten years after the ruling, the tribe expanded into gaming as a means to support the future of their reservation. The Foxwoods Resort and Casino provides funds for the reservation’s infrastructure and has made the Pequot the wealthiest tribe in the nation (Lawlor 2006:31; 35-36).

To gain tribal membership one must provide documentation that lineally links them to a person appearing on the 1900 or 1910 tribal roll calls. After so many decades away from the reservation, the Pequot today represent a highly diverse ethnic background (Lawlor 2006:34). Because of this racial component and the fact that history considers them to be long extinct, the “Indianness” of the Pequot has been called into question over and over. For example, Atlantic City casino developer Donald Trump, who faced direct competition from Foxwoods, stated to a Connecticut legislative subcommittee: “Go up to Connecticut, and you look at the Mashantucket Pequots…They don’t look like Indians to me. They don’t look like Indians to Indians” (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:46). The Pequots faced a continued need for legitimizing their presence even after gaining federal recognition and chose to open a tribal museum. Tribal museums throughout North America are “sites for establishing Native American humanity, historical presence, and contemporaneity for post-colonial audiences” (Erikson 1999:46). In 1998, the Manshantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center opened and serves as a vehicle for authenticating the Pequot people both past and present.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mpmrc/2889751391/

CONTEXT OF TRIBAL MUSEUMS
Before I delve into the specifics of the MPMRC, it is helpful to know the definitions and history of tribal museums. Lisa J. Watt, a member of the Seneca tribe, is the founder and principal of Tribal Museum Planners and Consultants, an organization in place “to inform tribes about the challenges and opportunities that building a museum entail and present program ideas that help meet [their] cultural goals” (“Lisa”). She defines a tribal museum as a “museum, cultural center, heritage center, history center, or interpretive center that is owned and operated by any one or more of the federally recognized or unrecognized American Indian tribes, either on or off reservations” (2007: 71). They exist to perpetuate tribal culture and traditions, to hold onto the material culture, to construct and instill a tribal identity, to maintain a presence in the world, to define tribal territory, to exert tribal sovereignty, and to reinforce treaty rights. They serve as a public declaration, saying “we are important and worth culturally maintaining” (Watt 2007: 73). Tribal museums help reclaim and preserve their cultural heritage, often by building upon earlier traditions concerned with protection and transmission of knowledge, and expand to include overall community development (Kreps 2003: 114). Anglo-American understandings of ownership and rights of access do not always translate in the realm of tribal museums (Isaac 2007: 5-7; Kreps 2003: 114). In his observation of four Northwest Coast museums, Clifford notes that, in contrast to majority museums, “tribal museums express local culture, oppositional politics, kinship, ethnicity, and tradition” (1991: 225). He lays out the agenda of a tribal museum as follows:

(1) its stance is to some degree oppositional, with exhibits reflecting excluded experiences, colonial pasts, and current struggles; (2) the art/culture distinction is often irrelevant or positively subverted; (3) the notion of a unified or linear History (whether of the nation, of humanity, or of art) is challenged by local, community histories; and (4) the collections do not aspire to be included in the patrimony (of the nation, of great art, etc.) but to be inscribed with different traditions and practices, free of national, cosmopolitan patrimonies (Clifford 1991: 225-226).

Carla Roberts, director of a Phoenix-based Native American Arts organization writes “there have always been mechanisms in native communities for transmitting cultural values from one generation to another” (Kreps 2003: 107). The curator of New World Ethnology at the Burke Museum in Seattle James Nason supports this statement with his description of the Southwestern kivas, which were used “[to house] collections whose use was vital to the members of the pueblo and their sense of place in the world” (1999). The widely practiced method of passing on cultural knowledge through oral traditions and ritual practices has been inhibited in recent years because of an increasing generational gap in Native American communities (Isaac 2007: 9-10).

The Osage Tribal Museum in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, established in 1938, is considered to be the oldest tribal museum in the United States (Watt 2007: 70). The first wave of tribal museums coincided with the American Indian Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, during which time tribes began to question the museum’s authority and Native American representations. Under President Nixon in the 1970s, tribal museums were also seen as a source of job opportunities and a chance to diversify tribal economics. The next wave of tribal museums occurred in the 1990s when tribes with resources, knowledge, and desire established museums (Isaac 2007; Nason 1999; Watt 2007: 70-71). Gwyneira Isaac, an assistant professor and the director of Arizona State University’s Museum of Anthropology, cites Fuller and Fabricius’ argument that links the growth of tribal museums to a loss of tribal knowledge and a rise in self-determination, causing “the need for a new forum to transmit cultural knowledge [to meld] with the needs for autonomy and self-sufficiency” (2007: 10). Nason feels that tribal museums “complete a circle that began with alien institutions imperialistically collecting and interpreting Native American culture and ended with a resurgence of tribal communities” (1999).

THE MASHANTUCKET MUSEUM AND RESOURCE CENTER
The MPMRC is a 308,000-square-foot facility opened on August 11, 1998 and was founded to “serve as a major resource on the history of the Tribe, the histories and cultures of other tribes, and the region’s natural history” (Quin 1999: 54). Funding for the facilities came from the lucrative gaming industry at Foxwoods, which also helped fund education and healthcare on the reservation. Costing close to two hundred million dollars, more money went into the Pequot tribal museum than the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (Erikson 1999:49). Exhibits cover Pequot life in southeastern Connecticut from the last Ice Age to the present, featuring displays like “a glacial crevasse, a caribou hunt of 11,000 years ago, a sixteenth century Pequot village, an eighteenth century farmstead, and a twentieth century trailer home” (Erikson 1999:46). It features a high level of transparency by featuring curators’ and researchers’ voices throughout the exhibits, as well as including information about how the exhibits were constructed (Lawlor 2006:46).

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mpmrc/2889752101/

Anthropologists have long acknowledged the draw of life group dioramas, however, the MPMRC has taken this technique to new heights (Hinsley 1991: 347-348). The largest display in the MPMRC is the 22,000-square-foot immersion style diorama of a 16th century coastal Pequot village. There is also a palisade fort next to the village, set fifty years after the village scene, included to represent the impact of European presence in the area. Patricia Pierce Erikson, currently a visiting professor at the University of Southern Maine, described the Pequot Village as follows:

Bombarding visitors’ senses are the smells of the forest and campfires, the sounds of chipmunks and running water. The human dimension of the diorama depicts daily life and provides a basis for interpreting coastal subsistence activities and Contact-period social structure (1999:50-51).

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mpmrc/2889752079/

Visitors use audio-guides as they walk through the display. It offers both “unattributed” Pequot perspectives, as well as anthropologists’ and archaeologists’ interpretations of the diorama (Erikson 1999:51).

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mpmrc/2889751271/

An important element of the Pequot Village display is the use of sound. Douglas Quin was one of the researchers who developed the soundscape. In addition to recreating what the environment sounded like in the 17th century, researchers had to figure out a way to represent the Pequot language as there are no native living speakers. After looking at other Algonquin languages, tribal members from Maine were brought in to record exhibition scripts in the Passamaquoddy language (Quin 1999:64). Other portions of the exhibit that utilized secondary voices—areas such as the sweat lodge ceremony and the hide tanning display—utilized recordings of voices of Native peoples from all over North America, including Navajo and Osage, to create “a collective resonance and identity” (Quin 1999:65).

In addition to the Pequot Village, the MPMRC has exhibits that speak to the continued presence of the people and culture. The Life on the Reservation gallery establishes Pequot presence in the Post-Pequot War time period, effectively dismissing accepted notions that the tribe was extinct. The stories featured in this exhibit include those of Pequot children working as indentured servants in colonial households, as well as those tribal members who learned the English legal system in an attempt to hold onto their traditional territory. This gallery is where the trailer home sits to represent the hardships faced by those who lived on the reservation in the 1970s. Also present in the Life on the Reservation gallery is the story of the casino and how it impacted the Pequot’s land claims and their contemporary lives (Erikson 1999:47-48).

Native Americans have been the subjects of portrait projects since the nineteenth century during the age of salvage anthropology (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:179). The MPMRC appropriates this method not to capture the evidence of a dying people, but to show the cultural survival of the Pequot tribe:

The portraits reinvigorate the historic progression of life on the reservation by introducing the contemporary to the visitor experience. As the oral histories provide a shared remembered history, the portraits give that history an individual face. While they indicate each other as a group and destabilize essential notions of “Indianness,” the portraits provide a progression of possible singular connections for the visitor, mixing elements of person al, historic, and cultural markers, and offering multiple routs for recognition (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:208).

The Tribal Portrait Gallery is an exhibit that “encourages visitors to humanize popular notions of Native peoples generally, and Pequot people in particular” (Erikson 1999:46). It is comprised of black-and-white portraits of tribal members and has accompanying recorded interviews from the Mashantucket Pequot oral history project (Bodinger de Uriart 2007:163). John J. Bodinger de Uriarte, who worked for and studied the MPMRC and the Foxwoods Casino, feels that the Tribal Portrait Gallery, like the overall museum space, becomes a charged contact zone (2007:208).

THE POWER OF A TRIBAL MUSEUM
Tribal spokesperson, Lori Potter, made a statement to the Tribal Tribute that effectively sums up the MPMRC’s purpose and power to bring legitimacy to the Pequot: “When I was a little girl and I looked up our tribe in an encyclopedia, it said we were a warlike tribe that was extinct. That was a lie, and I never forgot it. Now, our tribe is strong and united again, and this museum will make it possible for the world to know the truth” (Erikson 1999:46). In addition to the impact of the physical institution, the MPMRC is also making a presence on the internet. Its website has information about the tribe history, the exhibitions, as well as educational resources and information about programming. They have also broken into the realm of social networking sites, like Facebook, which serves as another outlet to make connections with people and maintain their contemporary presence (“Mashantucket”).

A criticism of the MPMRC concerns the “Disney-fication” of the displays that supposedly distracts from the authenticity of the information (Lawlor 2006:49). The style of display toes the same line of “infotainment” that other majority museums face. Curators have had issues with the level of entertainment present in the museum since Franz Boas’ time at the American Museum of Natural History. It persists in this case as well, yet the immersive life group experience at the MPMRC appears to be awe-inspiring and engaging. Coupled with their institution’s transparency, the technology remains grounded by the cultural information.

Another criticism is that the Pequot Village exhibition falls into the museum trap of displaying Native American cultures only in the light of the pre-Contact past and that the sheer size of the exhibit (22,000-square-feet) physically overshadows the displays about current Pequot life, thus diminishing their importance (Erikson 1999:52). Size, however, is not always a fair indication of social importance. People are proud of their heritage and possibly feel an ache of nostalgia for a life they never had the chance to know first hand, so they put that past on full display. Some museums only present Native peoples in the past and include nothing of their contemporary life. The MPMRC, however, makes the effort to include present-day elements of their culture to show the ties to the past (the recognizable “authentic Indian”) and how through all the changes time has brought, they are still a living, breathing, distinctive people with a legitimate claim to their culture.

Continue reading "Legitimizing a People: The Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

Savannah Fetterolf, MA Candidate, Anthropology Dept. Columbia Univ.
smf2157@columbia.edu

Photographs speak for themselves, asking the viewer to pause for a moment and look at the immobilized subject. Instantaneously freezing a moment in time and documenting it as it is, photographs leave seemingly little room for the same type of temporal and physical alterations that occur during the processes of creating a painting or a sculpture, implying that a photograph is more realistic and true to the portrayal of an actual subject. However, photographs are not always documentary – photographers pose their subjects, manipulate the camera lens to zoom in and out, or edit the angle from which they shoot the picture. Despite these various ways of manipulating a subject, photographs can be altered to an even greater extent with modern tools such as digital imaging software which allows for the complete fabrication of images.

So, if photographs are not telling you exactly how life is or giving you all of the details about the scene they capture, what are they really saying? Few visitors to an art gallery would think to engage them in more than a brief “hello,” taking every word they utter as an absolute truth.

Only the third installation in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography” organized by Mia Fineman, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Photographs at the Met, consisted of 34 images and a few smaller works all of which were carefully selected from the museum’s permanent collection. Yet, without taking the time to really engage the photographs, the selection hung in the white-walled, high-ceilinged room did not appear to be significantly remarkable. Seemingly random and haphazard in their subject, the outstanding curation expanded the conversation with each image so that their intention was to invite visitors to participate in a dialogue about what was real and what was an illusion, not only about their aesthetic and compositional qualities.

Neither the open gallery space nor the narrative of the exhibit directed the viewer to move through the images in a particular order. The freedom to wander between soldiers trudging through a landscape and a house teetering on the edge of a mudslide was refreshing and indicated the overall cohesiveness of the exhibit and Fineman’s diligence in the project of opening up a dialogue. What was important in the exhibit, though, was to read the accompanying text beside each image since it detailed the ways in which the artist manipulated the subject of the photograph during the creation of the image. Through these panels, images became more than documentations of reality and reality became more than a given truth since it was subject to interpretation based on slippery, indefinable criteria. Ultimately, this collection of images encouraged people to talk about how each artist made conscious decisions in regards to every detail in their work, no matter how minute, when formulating the subject that they presented.

Robert Gober (American, b. 1954)
Untitled, 1999
Gelatin silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2000 (2000.334.1)

The emerging reality from the dialogue between photograph and viewer was far more complex than initially met the eye. The black and white photograph “Untitled” by Robert Gober featured a mousetrap lying in a bed of ferns. Documenting this particular moment in the mousetrap’s existence is nothing extraordinary; however, something still appeared slightly odd about the photograph even though it was so apparently normal. The image might have been staged and not found naturally in this arrangement, but it was certainly real in the sense that all of the components exist in actuality. The longer one stared, the more uncomfortable one became with the image. Finally, it became obvious that the mousetrap was far too large when considered in terms of the scale of the surrounding ferns. What you actually had here, was a photograph of a human-sized trap amongst the ferns.

Implicit in the many conversations about the distinction between reality and illusion was a dialogue regarding the power that technology wields in manipulating our understanding of this increasingly unclear distinction.

Craig Kalpakjian (American, b. 1961)
Corridor, 1997
Silver dye bleach print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the artist, Sarah Wittenborn Miller, and Robert Miller, 1999 (1999.345)

Upon first glance, Craig Kalpakjian’s “Corridor” appeared to be an average, rather nondescript hallway in a modern office building. However, with the help of the text panel, visitors learned that this space never existed in three-dimensional reality, but was entirely manufactured using computer software and then turned into a digital image. Whereas Gober’s work featured real materials, Kalpakjian’s image was an illusion since it did not physically exist outside of this picture.

Although much newer than the majority of the pieces that call the two million square feet of the Met home, the inclusion of “Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography” fulfilled a historical role of art: it was engaging because it asked visitors to think and talk in addition to look.

“Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography” was at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, through March 22, 2009.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Steven Mandis, Columbia University
steven@mandis.net

The role of women in Classical Athens are examined in a novel exhibition: “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens,” at the Onassis Cultural Center at the Olympic Tower Building in Midtown Manhattan. This marks the first major exhibition in the tenth anniversary season of the Onassis Cultural Center, used principally for temporary art exhibitions related to Hellenistic culture.

In Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian general Pericles suggests that one of the key principles responsible for the greatness of Athens’ democracy was the involvement of its citizens in political life. And yet, in Pericles' time, only Athenian men were considered citizens. Interestingly, Pericles does go on to mention women specifically, but he neither discusses their role nor their involvement in civic life or democracy. Instead, Pericles focuses on women's virtue, declaring that the greatest virtue for a woman is to be talked about the least amongst men - whether for good or bad.

Ancient written sources from the Classical period rarely mention women and, when they do, these fleeting references nearly always only allude to the protection of their virtue. Consequently, we have limited knowledge from textual sources about women's role in the public life of Classical Athens - leading us to misconceptions about their exclusion from public life altogether. To both correct these misconceptions and fill the gaps in the textual record, the curators, Nikolaos Kaltsas, Director of the National Archeological Museum of Greece, and Alan Shapiro, Professor of Archeology at Johns Hopkins University, have collaborated in the exhibition: “Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens.”

The artifacts in the exhibition speak to us from over two and a half millennia. A comprehensive collection, the exhibition's many objects, made in the Classical period for everyday and ritual use and later deposited as tomb offerings, provide vivid documentation of women’s roles in Athenian society. The exhibition unfurls a story about ancient Greece that cannot be read in texts, but which can only be extracted from careful observation of the artwork and other artifacts. The curators examine these objects with fresh eyes, revealing heretofore unknown facets of women's lives in ancient culture that have long been overlooked or misinterpreted. Indeed, it has been over a decade since such a significant exhibition in America has taken a serious and fresh look at women in the ancient world (the 1995 ''Pandora's Box: Women in Classical Greece'' at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore and the 1997 ''Women in Ancient Egypt'' at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

With over 155 rare archaeological objects, the visually-rich exhibition brings together collections from seven countries with three primary aims: to shed light on an under-studied and rarely discussed topic, to re-examine and revise existing outdated views or misconceptions about the exclusion of women from public life in Classical Athens, and to show how women’s participation in cults and festivals contributed to their civic identity.

Much of life in fifth century B.C. Athens involved maintaining a balance and harmony between mortals and gods. Religious life, then, wove both these strands together into public and private spheres of life. The exhibition's artifacts document the religious practices of Classical Athens and reveal the complex intersection of women’s roles in that society, particularly in relation to religious cults and festivals. Most importantly, these objects reveal that women were not completely removed from public life.

However, the exhibition does not suggest that women in Classical Athens were treated as equals of men or maintained the power of citizens. Instead, the exhibition points out that not only did women not possess citizenship, but they also could not vote. Still, the exhibition uses material culture to present a subtle but important nuance: that within a system of restrictions, women carved out key roles in public and civic life.

“Worshiping Women” is thematically arranged into three main sections, each with its own well-written, concise introductory wall text and dedicated space. “Goddesses and Heroines” introduces the principal female deities of Athens and Attica, whose cults and festivals most actively engaged women - namely Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Demeter and her daughter Persephone. Several painted figured clay pots used to hold water for bridal baths are on display in this section. Crowd-pleasing marble statues of various goddesses are also shown. One of the most moving objects in the collection is a ritual water basin found inside the Parthenon offered to a god by a proud woman who not only had her name inscribed upon it but also identified herself as a washerwoman. The inscription is personal and connects us to the object; it also lets us know that even women of modest means participated in rituals.

The second section, “Women and Ritual,” explores the practice of ritual acts such as dances, libations, sacrifices, processions, and festivals in which women were active in the Classical period. This section includes a dazzling group of red-figure vases, shards, and votive reliefs that display scenes of the rituals in which women participated. Additionally, there are several memorable small cases and containers used for offerings. In some of these, remnants of burnt offerings can almost be imagined, providing a sense of intimacy and immediacy, connecting us in a physical, tangible way to the past.

In the final section, “Women and the Cycle of Life,” the exhibition explores how religious rituals defined moments of transition (birth, marriage, child bearing, and death). These transition moments were often recorded on vases made especially for the occasions. In this section, one of the highlights is a wedding bowl; its vivid imagery is almost exclusively nuptial. The painted scene on the bowl idealizes the bridal couple as beautiful young adults, surrounded by small Erotes to symbolize the erotic attraction of the couple. This section also displays several marble gravestones and white funerary vases. The gravestones and vases show women preparing the deceased for burial and tending their graves.

As challenging exhibitions often do, this show makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of ancient society. Women are almost invisible in written sources from this era, therefore, by presenting this story through artwork and material culture of the Classical period, the exhibition corrects or at least revises common misconceptions about the lives of Athenian women. Ultimately, we come away from the exhibition discovering that even though women's participation in the political process was, indeed, limited, their participation in cults and festivals allowed for some degree of civic identity for women in Classical Athens.

The exhibition, moreover, has a particular relevance to the present. The ideals of democracy in Pericles’ Classical Athens included equality as a founding principle. And yet, although women in Classical Athens had a civic identity, they were certainly not equal to men. The exhibition does remind of us of this major contradiction in the democracy of Classical Athens. After the election and inauguration of our first black President, the exhibition should cause us to reflect upon our own democracy and its contradictions.

“Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens” continues through May 9 at the Onassis Cultural Center, 645 Fifth Avenue, near 52nd Street; (212) 486-4448, onassisusa.org.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Tennessee v. John T. Scopes Trial: Outdoor proceedings on July 20, 1925, showing William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. [2 of 4 photos], 1925
Watson Davis
Black and white photographic print, 3 inx4.25 in
Smithsonian Institution Archives
Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes Trial Photographs
Image No. SIA2007-0124

The Smithsonian Photography Initiative invites the public to participate in an unprecedented online dialogue about the impact of photography on history, culture and everyday lives. Visitors to “click! photography changes everything” are encouraged to submit their photos and stories about the many ways photos shape experience, knowledge and memory.

The Smithsonian Photography Initiative recently started selecting stories and images submitted by site visitors on an ongoing basis to be regularly uploaded to the “click!” Web site. In addition, on a bi-monthly schedule, it is issuing more specific and theme-based calls for visitor-contributed content. New images and stories will join an archive of written and filmed commentaries that the Initiative began collecting last year from invited experts investigating how photography has changed the progress and practice of their diverse fields—from anthropology to astrophysics, from media to medicine, from philosophy to sports.

The Initiative is collecting and sharing images and narratives that shed light on how photography influences who people are, what people do and what people remember. Has a photograph been used to document property loss, inspire a hairstylist, sell a house, beat a traffic ticket or helped with the decision about where to go on vacation? Has a single photograph ever influenced what someone believes in or who someone loves? Visitors can go to the website and follow the easy steps to share their stories about the power of photography and to see images and read stories submitted by others.

Selected entries from the general public will be featured alongside those by invited experts such as Stewart Brand, founder and editor of the legendary Whole Earth Catalog, who understood how photography could change the way people viewed Earth and their life on it; Diane Granito, an adoption specialist and founder of the Heart Gallery, who explains how commissioning and exhibiting compelling photographic portraits of foster-care children helped the children find new families and homes; and Lauren Shakely, publisher at Clarkson Potter of a string of best-selling cookbooks, who describes how and why photography can change the kinds of food people crave.

“click!” also presents seven videos—available online, as downloadable podcasts and on YouTube—that feature Smithsonian curators, historians and scientists speaking about photography at the Institution. Visitors to the site can see and hear Lonnie Bunch, the director of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, explain the role photography plays in building a new museum about cultural identity. In another video, Lisa Stevens, curator of primates and pandas at the National Zoo’s Department of Animal Programs, describes how photography, in addition to turning pandas into celebrities, spreads knowledge about little-known species, generates funds and raises public awareness of conservation issues.

At this transitional moment—as digital technology alters the form, content and transmission of photos—the goal of “click!” is to provide a unique opportunity and gathering place for experts and the public alike to reflect on the history, spread, practice and power of photography.

Continue reading "How Does Photography Change Our Lives? How Has Photography Changed Your Life?" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links

Sara Lilah Rockefeller, MA Candidate,
Anthropology Dept. Columbia Univ.
slr2151@columbia.edu

Like most of Hirokazu Fukawa’s work, “A Thought at the Edge of the Continent; Manchuria to Siberia 1942-1947” is both raw and spiritual, detached and undeniably human. It uses crude materials, unfinished wood and florescent lights that appear to have been ripped from an office ceiling to create angular structures that somehow, through a fluidity of repetition, form a narrative; a puzzle to be interpreted by the viewer.

Curated by the artist and installed in the main gallery of Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT, the exhibition was many things at once. In a sense it was a memorial to Fukawa’s father and his experience as a Japanese sniper and prisoner during World War II. It was a story told and constructed in a multi-vocal display of two-dimensional prints, 3D sculpture, audio and video media. And perhaps most of all, it was the reflection of the artist’s journey to understand a past that can never be known.

Real Art Ways, founded in 1975 as an “alternative” venue for artists of diverse backgrounds, includes a theatre, cinema, and visual art gallery. While the organization began as a small museum run by local artists, it has expanded into an internationally renowned space. Managed by Director Will K. Wilkins, Real Art Ways remains faithful to its roots as a showcase for local, often unconventional artistic expression. For Fukawa, a professor of art at the University of Hartford, this was the first exhibition at Real Art Ways.

Fukawa’s original intention, relayed in a note at the entrance to the gallery, was to display his father’s past as a riddle, exploring the historical specificity of his experience while tying it to an examination of contemporary suicide bomber attacks. While the idea may have been political, the outcome is on a more personal level. Fukawa’s work evolved throughout his four year process of research and creation to focus on the abstract notion of memory.

As a soldier in the Japanese Army, stationed in Manchuria, or Manchukuo as it was called by the Japanese occupiers, Fukawa’s father was given a landmine and told to lie in a foxhole and wait for a Soviet tank to approach before blowing himself up. No tank arrived and the war ended but the surviving Japanese soldiers were abandoned by their army and taken to a POW camp in Siberia. The artist’s father was one, among an estimated 600,000 Japanese, that remained prisoner in Siberia for several years after the war.

Growing up, Fukawa heard bits and pieces of this story but never fully understood what had happened. So a few years ago, as his father’s memory was beginning to surrender to Alzheimer’s, he began to ask questions that eventually led him on two separate journeys to Japan and north-eastern China, and to Siberia. It was on these trips, as well as through conversations with other POW’s and with his father that Fukawa began to piece together a story.

The artist was surprised to find that the story he was uncovering in his research did not always match his father’s account. At one point his father mentioned being taken to a location that, according to the single discharge paper that serves as the sole record of his time in the army, he was never taken.

The exhibition played with the notion of accuracy and authenticity of memory. There were three main pieces in the puzzle: a sculptural installation that includes two major structures alongside built speakers, four prints framed on one wall, and a video room with three adjacent monitors.

When entering the gallery attention was immediately drawn to Blizzard, an installation of dozens of blinding fluorescent lights on thin wooden boards, arranged floor to ceiling on an angle. The viewer can maneuver in-between the boards and be encircled by a white, linear repetition of lights while listening to a medley of Communist anthems and abstract music coming from snowball-esque plaster speakers. While there is no descriptive text or title presented alongside the work, a binder at the entrance to the gallery shares the artist’s interpretation. Blizzard echoes a snowstorm that Fukawa’s father faced in Siberia.

The other major sculpture in the room payed respect to Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivist model tower Monument to the Third International, built by Tatlin as an homage to the Bolshevik Revolution. Fukawa’s rendition, entitled The Third International, uses the same unfinished wood as Blizzard to brace a spiral staircase that leads up to a platform, perhaps a podium for a dictator of the Soviet Union or Imperial Japan.

Also in the main gallery was a single line drawing, Marching, that traces the route that the artist’s father walked from China to Siberia, and a set of three prints labeled Starvation 1,2 and 3. In the Starvation prints Fukawa layers 12th century Buddhist scrolls of starvation hells, pencil sketches of his father and other POW’s, and real ferns and other plants that the soldiers ate to survive.

Separated from the main gallery by a curtain is the video room. Three televisions simultaneously display a more literal, while decisively disjointed, narration of his father’s past. The central screen shows Fukawa’s father remembering and retelling his story into a microphone. The left screen shows dark cells and tunnels and the screen to the right shows footage of the artist’s trips to the locations of his father’s past. The soundtracks of all three videos alternate and overlap evoking a dream or a memory just out-of-reach.

Fukawa’s exhibition is a thoughtful, engaging, and ultimately successful exploration of the often dream-like, ephemeral quality of memory and the inevitable dissatisfaction one faces in an attempt to know the past.

While the link between Fukawa’s work and the other show on at the same time at Real Art Ways was not overtly displayed, the two shared a common element. The second exhibition was a collection of works by Taiga Ermansons, who began embroidering miniature patterns onto Kleenex tissues after receiving instruction in the art of crochet from her aunt, a prisoner in a Siberian camp between 1945 and 1953. The fragility of Ermansons’ media, and the subtlety of association between Fukawa’s and Ermansons’ shared influence reflect the overall theme of Fukawa’s exhibition; the delicate, transient, and blurred nature of history and of human memory.

“A Thought at the Edge of the Continent: Manchuria to Siberia 1942-1947” and Taiga Ermansons’ works are at Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St, Hartford, CT, (860) 233 6691, ran until March 22.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

This is the first in a series of exhibition reviews written by students enrolled in Erin Hasinoff’s Exhibiting Cultures: Politics and Practices of Museum Exhibitions at Columbia University. Exhibiting Cultures is one of the two core courses offered in the Museum Anthropology MA Program. In addition to learning the craft of writing reviews, students are curating an exhibition, Out of the Box: Anthropology Collections Unpacked, which will be on display in Columbia’s Low Library from May 11 to June 3, 2009. Check back for more information about the show.

October 31 2008–April 5 2009
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York

Reviewed by Constance Smith, MA Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University
crs2150@columbia.edu

In 1979 Judy Chicago's monumental installation The Dinner Party was exhibited for the first time.

Thirty years on, the work has been seen by more than one million viewers and remains controversial for its striking symbolic history of women in the Western world. Chicago set out to "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record”, and although now considered by some critics as overly reductive and simplistic, the work has been seminal in inspiring discussion and research on feminism, in the art world and beyond. Since 2007 The Dinner Party has been installed at the Brooklyn Museum, New York City, where it forms the focal point of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

The Sackler Center's latest exhibition directly engages with the discourses stimulated by The Dinner Party. Curated by Maura Reilly and Nicole J. Caruth, Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection presents almost fifty artists – male and female – and includes recent acquisitions and major loans of works by Kiki Smith, Tracey Emin, Tracey Moffatt, and Lorna Simpson. Reflecting the museum's commitment to developing an archive of feminist art, the exhibition encompasses photography, painting, installation, sculpture, video and performance art from the 1970s to today. This span of artists from different generations working in a variety media enables the show to chart historical and contemporary feminisms, and traces the changing concerns of contemporary artists working within the historic framework of feminist art.

The title of the exhibition plays on the notion of 'the master's house'. Museums have historically been a male domain, dominated by grand masters of art history, in which women have featured mostly as the subject of works and not as creative agents in their own right. 'The master's house' also refers to the idea of the home as a traditionally feminine sphere, where a woman's role as carer and nurturer ensured the well-being of the 'master'. By burning down that house, this exhibition seeks to proclaim not just the creativity and independence of women, but the leading role feminist art has played in shaping the wider art world over the last forty years.

Among the featured works are Carrie Mae Weems's Untitled (Man Smoking/Malcolm X), a photograph from the artist's 1990 Kitchen Table series in which Weems depicted herself seated at the same table with various companions and an array of props and backgrounds. In this work she plays cards with an African-American man beneath an image of Malcolm X, weaving African-American politics with allusions to black feminist campaigns such as those of Rosa Parks. Kara Walker also draws on gender and racial issues in Keys to the Coop, 1997, a dramatic black and white linocut of a young African-American girl running with the head of a chicken in her hand. The keys in her hand suggest salvation, but the girl is clearly an anti-heroine.

Sex and sexuality are unsurprisingly prominent in the exhibition, sometimes in very provocative forms. Caroline Schneeman's 1975 performance piece Interior Scroll is remembered through a dramatic larger-than-lifesize black and white still, capturing the artist in the process of removing the scroll from her vagina and reading it aloud to her audience. An i-pod audio-video hub next to the work features an interview with Schneeman, in which she describes waking with the image of the work in her mind, and using it to explore ideas of inner knowledge. The use of i-pod hubs with artist interviews is one of the most successful features of the exhibition, enabling artists to explain their often very theoretical work. In Schneeman's case it is particularly useful, overcoming some of the problems of ephemerality inherent in displaying performance art.

A newly acquired work by Cuban performance artist Ana Mendieta references debates in feminist archaeology over the depiction and reverence of women in ancient societies. Guanaroca (First Woman), 1981, is a photograph of a site-specific carving by Mendieta in the caves of Aguila near Havana, Cuba. The work takes up the much-explored feminist iconography of the fertile goddess (the second place setting in Chicago's Dinner Party, and the theme of a related temporary exhibition nearby) and exaggerates elements of the female body still further. Although in part marking an ancient appreciation of the female form, Mendieta's focus on female genitalia is also unnerving, perhaps suggesting the timeless categorization of women as sexual objects.

The curators of the exhibition emphasize the multiple and historical discourses of feminism, stressing that there is no single look or narrative to feminist art. Part of this agenda is the inclusion of male artists such as Nayland Blake, whose “bunny” sculpture challenges constructions of masculinity, highlighting the impact feminism has had in the reconsideration of male as well as female histories. Feminist activism is often assumed to be limited to Europe and America; the inclusion here of artists from the rest of the world suggests the wider nature of feminist discourses. Particularly powerful are three images from South African artist Berni Searle's Colour Me series. Exploring the intersections of race, colonialism and gender, she transforms her prone body into a display fetish in images resonant of colonial classifications of racial 'types'. Covering her naked body for each image with a different spice – paprika for red, turmeric for yellow and cloves for brown – Searle's work recalls apartheid divisions of the South African population into black, white and colored, whilst the foregrounding of her body implies a fourth multi-racial but still marginalized category: women.

The works featured in Burning Down the House are thought provoking, often dramatic, and occasionally shocking. The juxtaposition of different media, themes, nationalities and generations of artists reflects the impossibility of making reductive statements about feminism, and recognizes the diverse influences historical feminism still has in informing contemporary considerations of women and gender-related issues. Yet in some ways this diversity is also the exhibition's downfall; neither the works nor the curation do much to expand on the introductory panel's dual interpretations of 'the master's house'. Beyond the simple fact of their inclusion in a show on feminism, there is little curatorial attempt to understand how the featured art or artists are breaking down barriers of domestic confinement or macho museum culture. One wonders also whether isolating feminist art in its own wing of a museum really affects the status quo all that much. Wouldn't demonstrating how such art can not only hold its own against the rest of the canon, but has also powerfully informed it, be a more powerful feminist statement?

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge

Press release:

an exhibition at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
University of Cambridge

March 18-April 18 2009

Opening event, with lecture by Georgina Beier, on March 17, from 3 pm

**

Mathias Kauage was an exuberant painter and a founding figure of modern art in the Pacific.

Kauage (c. 1944-2003) was born in Chimbu Province in the Papua New Guinea highlands. In the late 1960s he was employed as a labourer in Port Moresby and was inspired by an exhibition of drawings by a fellow-Highlander, Timothy Akis. Like Akis, he was encouraged by Georgina Beier. Together with her husband Ulli, Georgina influentially supported contemporary art, theatre, and literature in Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere.

Kauage’s work evolved rapidly. Early on he drew fantastic creatures inspired by Chimbu myth, but soon progressed to scenes of Moresby town life and political events. Embracing colour, he went on to produce major paintings around Papua New Guinea’s Independence in 1975, aspects of colonial history, and his own experience – not least his meeting with the Queen, who awarded him an OBE in 1998. His later works were often signed ‘Kauage – Artist of PNG’.

This exhibition foregrounds a previously unexhibited group of early Kauage drawings and beaten copper panels, which form part of a generous donation to the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology by Dame Marilyn Strathern (William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, 1993-2008), who conducted fieldwork in the PNG Highlands and in Port Moresby from the 1960s onward.

Visitors to the exhibition also get the chance to listen to a rare early recording of Kauage singing and playing Chimbu instruments such as a bamboo flute.

‘Kauage: Artist of Papua New Guinea’ is a revelation of Kauage’s creativity. His unique intelligence and visual inventiveness suggest new ways of thinking about the emergence of ‘modern art’ beyond the West.

On Tuesday March 17, a public lecture and symposium coincide with the exhibition opening. Georgina Beier will speak on Creating his own tradition at 2.30 pm in the McDonald Seminar Room, in the McDonald Institute (off Downing Street, directly adjacent to the Museum). Helena Regius, Ruth Phillips, and Nicholas Thomas will contribute to a panel discussion.

**
The Museum plans in due course to publish a catalogue of the collection, together with Marilyn’s previous donation of textiles from Hara Hara Prints, a screenprint workshop in which Georgina Beier also played a key role (see Strathern, ‘Emblems, ornaments and inversions of value’ in Kuechler and Were (eds), The Art of Clothing, UCL Press 2005). In the context of this project, we would be most interested to hear from anthropologists and others who were in Port Moresby in the 1970s or subsequently, and own original works by Kauage or contemporaries, and/or may be able to help with relevant information.

Enquiries to Nicholas Thomas

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Announcements and Listings | Exhibition reviews

Amiria Salmond, Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Pasifika Styles. 2008. Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, in association with Otago University Press. ISBN 978-1-877372-60-5

Francis Upritchard, Sports Heads (2005). Photo: Kerry Brown

This book explores the making of the Pasifika Styles exhibition (Cambridge, UK, 2006-2008) from the perspectives of artists, art historians and academics.

Pasifika Styles was the first major exhibition of contemporary Maori and Pacific Island art in Great Britain. The show featured the work of contemporary artists from New Zealand whose work responded to Maori and Pacific Island cultural issues and influences. Located in a museum, in and amongst historical ethnographic artefacts, it aimed to challenge assumptions about art and about culture in the Pacific, emphasizing continuities and connections as well as contemporary innovations.


George Nuku, Outer Space Marae (2006). Photo: Kerry Brown

The show (like the book) was a labour of love on the part of everyone involved, and generated lots of publicity in New Zealand (the opening featured on prime time news and it was the subject of two separate documentaries commissioned by Maori Television). Strangely, however, critical attention has been hard to come by - the Museums Journal tried unsuccessfully to get it reviewed, and the fine arts press in the UK and New Zealand were virtually silent on the topic.


Rosanna Raymond, Eye land Part II: Welcome 2 da K’lub (2006)

Why? As one of its curators, and co-editor of this volume (with Rosanna Raymond) I think the show wasn't able (despite our intentions) to break out of the 'ethnic art' box to which it was assigned (perhaps inevitably, because of its location in an ethnography museum). For us it was a platform on which a group of artists (not all of whom were of Polynesian descent) could present their work and commentate on contemporary issues (including conventions of ethnographic representation), but for others it was clearly another case of a museum trying to update itself by inviting 'indigenous' artists to add their 'cultural' art to the collections. ('Real' contemporary art being, of course, culturally unmarked, or rather marked by ethnic signifiers that are sufficiently abstracted, used ironically, or have been critically sanctioned - think 'the New Chinese Art' etc.)

Can Pacific Art ever avoid this problem?

These issues and others are discussed in the various contributions to our book. All feedback gratefully received!

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Book Reviews | Exhibition reviews

Fred Myers, NYU and Roger Benjamin, Sydney University

The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University presents Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, on view January 10-April 5, 2009.

Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi (Pintupi, 1920-1987), Mystery Sand Mosaic, 1974. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas board. Collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson.

The acrylic painting movement represents the emergence of an art form firmly associated with Aboriginal Australia, but it is a movement that began only 37 years ago. Since its advent at the settlement of Papunya, 200 kilometers west of Alice Springs, this movement has grown in reputation and developed in variety as its visual language has been adapted by different Aboriginal peoples in far-flung communities. For over twenty years, this art has been widely exhibited and acquired by Australian state galleries and, increasingly overseas. Indeed, a salient moment in its recognition was its exhibition as part of the highly successful “Dreamings: the Art of Aboriginal Australia” at the Asia Society Galleries in New York, in 1988.

Icons of the Desert is a rare exhibition for focusing on the founding, initial expressions of Papunya art, exploring their origins in the paintings on small masonite boards, produced at Papunya in the years 1971-1973. These early paintings – on what AGNSW curator Hetti Perkins has called “the humble materials of white detritus; fruit cases, skirting boards and discarded timber panels” -- emerged as affirmations and expressions of the continuing vitality of Indigenous culture in the face of decades of assimilation policy. The “early Papunya boards,” as they are known, have a unique status within the history of Aboriginal art. Few in number (around six hundred in number were made), they are also the first works (apart from drawings on paper made at the request of anthropologists in the 1940s) to transfer the inspiration and designs of Indigenous ceremonial imagery to a permanent surface. Improvised and reworked in the space of the new surfaces, the designs are also still in use within communities – in body painting, ceremonial objects, and temporary ground-paintings.

The visual qualities of early Papunya boards make them a uniquely appealing body of work. As the first encounter between the imaginations of ceremony, story and song and the space of the painted flat surface, the images are quirky and unpredictable, highly innovative and varied, as the painters invented a visual language that later became more regularized. They have the freshness of trial and error, of experiment by artists who were seasoned in other media but applied themselves to new dimensions. The white schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon provided these materials and encouraged the painting of the senior Aboriginal men who had approached him, recognizing their enthusiasm and inventiveness.

The status of this art in Australia is greater than that accorded First Nations art in North America; it is accepted as a dynamic movement with substantial intellectual underpinnings. No collection of contemporary Australian art is considered complete without recent Aboriginal painting by some of the masters of this movement. The great names in the history of this movement – Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula and Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, among others – are well represented in the Collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson.

The collection of the Manhattan-based Wilkersons was assembled principally during the 1990s. The collection is uniquely disciplined in its collecting focus: that the early Papunya boards are both objects beautiful in themselves and the historic seedbed for the future developments of desert painting. At a time when world record prices for Aboriginal paintings were being set almost every year at Sotheby’s, works in this collection were the subject of considerable media attention. The jewel of the collection, Johnny Warrangkula’s Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa, 1973, made the front page of The Australian on two different occasions as it achieved world record prices.

Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula (Luritja, ca. 1918-2001), Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa, 1972. Synthetic polymer paint on composition board. Collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson.

The exhibition consists of fifty paintings, most of modest dimensions. As well as the early Papunya boards, a small number of works from the collection indicate the later development of the Papunya style. The organizing institution is the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of art at Cornell University, where the exhibition has very recently opened and where a symposium will take place in mid-February. Andrew Weislogel has been responsible for the development of the Cornell venue, the catalogue, and its programming. From here it will travel to the Fowler Museum at UCLA and come to the Grey Gallery at NYU in September 2009.

At New York University, the Grey Gallery is organizing programming with one of us, Fred Myers, Professor and Chair of Anthropology at NYU. Myers undertook doctoral research around Papunya from 1973-75, when the movement was still in formation. He witnessed certain paintings in the Collection being executed, made sketches and analyses of them at the time, and befriended the leading artists as part of his research on the social life of the Pintupi people. His essays on the interpretation of Aboriginal art culminated in his book, Painting Culture: the Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Duke University Press, 2002), which recently won the J.I. Staley Prize for outstanding book in Anthropology, and he has continued to write about Pintupi painting. Roger Benjamin, the curator of the exhibition and editor of the catalogue, trained in art history and has worked on the art and theory of Matisse, French Orientalist painting, and contemporary Australian Aboriginal art. In 2003 he published Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism and French North Africa (which won the prestigious Motherwell Book Award in 2004) and curated “Renoir and Algeria” for the Clark Art Institute. Formerly Director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, he is currently Research Professor in the History of Art in the university. The catalogue includes essays by Benjamin, Myers, Vivien Johnson, and Richard (Dick) Kimber, and a preface by Hetti Perkins.

ICONS OF THE DESERT: EARLY ABORIGINAL PAINTINGS FROM PAPUNYA (opens 12 Feb 2009)

Old Walter Tjampitjinpa (Pintupi, ca. 1912-1981), Rainbow and Water Story, 1972. Synthetic polymer paint on composition board. Collection of John and Barbara Wilkerson.

I

Continue reading "Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

I just stumbled upon this website, created by the research library in the American Museum of Natural History and had to post a link - a selection of historical images from the museum's history showing the development of the diverse displays and people making and engaging with them across time - a really great resource and a visual ethnography of the museum itself!

http://images.library.amnh.org/photos/index.html

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links

Artists from Wellington's Weta Workshop and Totem Decks recently held an exhibition on artistically designed skateboards at the Underground Arts and National Tattoo Museum. Due to its popular appeal, the exhibition ran for an extra 10 days from 23 Sept until 18 October. But the exhibition was not only successful in New Zealand - on the evening before the opening the curators were suprised by a call from the British Museum inquiring about purchasing some of the works.

The Underground Arts and National Tattoo Museum manager Steve Maddock was overjoyed when he learned that the BM had purchased some of the intricately laser-etched skateboard decks in his subcultural Board Culture exhibition.

“Some of these designers are huge. There are people who have worked for Disney, Marvel, Weta and Warner Brothers [...] It’s amazing having these artists involved. This is one of the biggest exhibitions we have ever had”. Among other items, the exhibition featured decks created by some of the people at Weta such as Greg Broadmore, Leri Greer and Christian Pearce. Other contributing artists included multi-award-winning American cartoonist Frank Cho (New Avengers, Liberty Meadows), New York pin-up artist Alberto Ruiz, Disney animation designer Ron Cobb (Sleeping Beauty, Star Wars), and filmmaker Wojciech Wawrzyniak (Love Hurts).

Regarding the interest from the BM, Maddock added “They wanted the decks with Aboriginal designs on them". These were selling for $1000 to $2500 AUD each. The exhibition was secured on the recommendation of Oscar-winner Richard Taylor of Weta, who has been a long-time friend of Maddock's and the Museum. Despite support from such high profile people, the Tattoo Museum remains little known outside the alternative community. Regardless, Maddock promises that it will remain a staunch supporter of the local alternative arts scene. He extended the exhibition to allow Wellingtonians a chance to see the decorated decks, now sanctioned by one of the most internationally recognised institutions for collections as a part of the world’s cultural heritage.

And it's not the first time that 'alternative sports' equipment has been used as the canvas for contemporary art. In 2003 Surfer's Against Sewage ran an exhibition around the UK called Longlife which featured the works of 10 artists, who designed a variety of artistic surfboards which they donated to SAS for auction at the end of the tour. The artists included Maia and Damien Hirst, the graffiti artist Banksy, the professional surfer Laird Hamilton, Paul Kaye of Dennis Pennis fame, the American Surf Culture designer Jamie Carson, the musicians Richard D. James of the Aphex Twin and David Hewlett of Gorillaz and Tank Girl. The auction raised in excess of £77,000.

This month sees the second version of that exhibition and auction, Drawing Boards, a collection of 14 surfboards, this time made on eco-friendly prototypes. Tracey Emin, Sir Paul McCartney, Kurt Jackson, Nick Walker, Beejoir, Pure Evil, Eine, Mau Mau and Gavin Turk are amongst the artists that feature.

Continue reading "Board Culture & Urban Art" »

Posted by Patrick Laviolette at 12:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Images:
Melanie Jackson, A Global Positioning System, 2006 Film still, Courtesy of the artist

The exhibition Local worlds: spaces visibilities and transcultural flows open to the public in Lagos Portugal (until September 9 2008) [1] presents the two projects commented here: Oranges by Inês Amado and Global Positioning System by Melanie Jackson. Both reflect the intricacies of the global flows, following the trajectories of particular objects, relying on an archaeological approach of everyday items that follow the routes of global imperialism/capitalism. Jyotsna G Singh in her Companion to the Global Renaissance suggests similarly an archaeology of “local “knowledge (following Certeau and Foucault), that relies on “a micro-historical perspective on globalism by tracing the exchange and movement of material objects — artworks, spices, silks, pigments, metals, and cloth — in order to understand the trajectories of the east-west encounters.’ [2]

With Laranjas (2008), Portuguese London-based artist Inês Amado fills one of the spaces at the Fortaleza Pau da Bandeira [3] with oranges as a gift to the visitors. Presented on the floor, the oranges are surrounded by a soundscape of a journey on the river Thames produced in collaboration with London-based artist Dave Lawrence that evokes the long journey of the fruit around the world. In the installation, the orange becomes a relational object, a fruit that symbolizes the journeys of terrestrial globalization and the cultural hybridization resulting from the food exchanges occurring in colonial journeys. [4]

As Inês reminds us, oranges arrived in Portugal from Arab countries (the bitter orange), followed by the Chinese orange trees (which resulted in the sweet orange) brought in by Vasco da Gama the navigator, and the third wave of the oranges already exported by the Portuguese into the world. Used to work with food (her long-term project Bread Matters is dedicated to the study of bread [5]), in this project Inês departs from the orange to reflect on the fact that Portuguese culture is not monolithic and results from complex processes of hybridisation. If on one hand, the orange’s spherical shape evokes the globe, it is also a fact that internationally the orange symbolises Portugal. Several countries that imported orange trees from Portugal, started giving the oranges varied names derived from the word Portugal, such as Portokale (Albania), Portughal (Kurdistan), Portugaletto (Piemonte) and Portugales (Greece).

The predominance of contemporary panoptic society, with means of controlling borders and people in an uneven way results that paradoxically commodities circulate much more easily than people that are kept in place through tight border regimes. This vision of technology is one the driving forces behind the animation work A Global Positioning System (2006) by American, London-based artist Melanie Jackson.

The animated film charts the journey across the globe of the GPS unit, as a reverse journey from a promotional brochure selling the benefits of the handheld GPS to an urban western audience to the varied components of its production. Breaking down the GPS manufacturing workflow is made out of two movements: on one hand panning across the world, from the global centres of consumption into the factories in China and further afield into the mines of Congo or the rubber trees in Sri Lanka; and on the other hand, a zooming in process, going from the macro-scale of the global economy into the most intimate gestures of manual production and the microscopic components of the gps unit. Melanie presents this journey as a way of depicting the material process of production and challenges the disjunction that capitalism operates between things and their image. From images of miners working in the sandpits of Congo, she uses drawing as away to develop connections with the more abstract level of high tech glossy consumer technology.

As the voice over narrates: this GPS contains materials that come from the following places: Guinea, China…India…Germany, England, Zambia…Brazil, Australia, Turkey, Nigeria, Spain, …Mexico, Chile, Philippines, USA, Argentina, Portugal, Japan, Korea…South Africa…Angola, Democratic Republic Of Congo, Namibia, Venezuela…
Paula roush , co-curator Local Worlds

[1] for more information on the project visit http://www.localworlds.org/
The complete version of this text is available at http://www.localworlds.org/en/theory/

[2] Jyotsna G. Singh ed., A Companion to the Global Renaissance – 1550-1660: English Culture and Literature in the Era of Expansion. Michigan State University. Forthcoming, available at: http://www.msu.edu/~jsingh/publications.html [Accessed May 11, 2008].
[3] 17th century fort built between 1679-1690 (according to the stone inscription over the main door), by the sea, as a defence fortress against naval British, Spanish and pirate attacks, acquired by the municipality of Lagos in 1983, and converted into exhibition space related to the history of the discoveries and local modern art. http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortaleza_de_Lagos [Accessed May 4, 2008].
[4] For further information on the relationship between the age of ‘the discoveries’ and food cultures, see Gupta, A., 2006, Movimentações globais das colheitas desde a ‘era das descobertas’ e transformações das culturas gastronómicas, in Manuela Ribeiro Sanches ed, Portugal não é um país pequeno. Contar o “império” na pós-colonialidade. Lisboa: Edições Cotovia, pp. 193-214.
[5] For more information visit the project’s site: http://www.breadmatters.org/BM/ [Accessed May 4, 2008].

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Jennifer Stampe, Museum Studies, New York University

In April, Erica Lord performed Artifact Piece, Revisited at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, George Gustav Heye Center, in New York City. In reprising James Luna’s work The Artifact Piece, first presented in 1987 at San Diego’s Museum of Man, Lord asks us to reassess relationships among Native American peoples, museums, and anthropology now, after twenty year’s work at repatriation, collaboration, and Native self-representation. In addition to returning to issues of stereotype and expropriation raised by Luna, Lord broached several concerns not apparent in Luna’s work, including the position of Native women in the popular mind and the role of consumption and commodification in identity-production.

In his performance-as-installation, Luna, a member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, lay stretched out on a bed of sand in a horizontal glass case, dressed in a loincloth and surrounded by personal effects and official documents, including his divorce decree and high school diploma. The work performed Native presence: against the prevalent idea that American Indian people vanished under European domination or were reduced to those traces found in static exhibit halls, Luna lodged himself in the museum as a living, animate, disruption of established power relations. As Jean Fisher put it in a 1992 Art Journal article, Luna’s work did not simply threaten to return a controlling gaze: rather, she wrote, the presence “of the undead Indian of colonialism . . . and the possibility that he may indeed be watching and listening disarms the voyeuristic gaze and denies it its structuring power” (Fisher 1992:48-9). The Artifact Piece thus came to exemplify a postcolonial critique of museums and anthropology that troubled long-standing assumptions about the relationship between “us” and “them.”

Lord’s Artifact Piece, Revisited was mounted at NMAI with Luna’s cooperation, in conjunction with an exhibit of his Emendatio, a piece commissioned by the Smithsonian for the 2005 Venice Biennale. In Lord’s hands, the physical disposition of the work did not differ much: it consisted most fundamentally of the artist’s body on display, surrounded by artifacts from her life made museum objects through anthropological commentary. This included a text panel giving the ethnographic particulars about her species (Homo sapiens), culture (Athabaskan/Dena), and region (Alaska). But where Luna’s work relied upon the threat that the museum-goer’s gaze might be returned, Lord’s depended more substantially on inviting that gaze and the viewer’s desire. Labels mounted in the case with her called attention to her pedicure (identifying her painted toenails as a component of a ritual for attracting a mate), her endomorphic body type and wide hips (suitable for childbearing), and her pierced ears and nose, specifying that while these were not traditional, they did allow her to wear ornaments acquired through traditional practices of gifting and trading. In this way, Lord called attention to ways that constructions wrought by the gaze are not only raced but gendered, such that Native American women find themselves in different relation to museums and anthropology, as well as popular culture, than that experienced by Native men. The larger issue here, the phallocentrism of the museum gaze, is a subject that goes much remarked in discussions of contemporary art and in the literature on exoticism but is comparatively absent in Native American studies. Lord provides us with a way to begin to attend more completely to the multiple desires and pleasures active in museum display.

In his work, Luna drew attention to his scars, explained in label text as the remainders of injuries suffered while drinking. Alluding to Luna, Lord noted her scars and bruises, but attributed them to biking and skateboarding accidents sustained in the course of what she termed an active lifestyle. This small difference between passive, depressive drinking and active, healthful—if dangerous—biking, suggests a world of change: where Luna takes up, and even embraces, stereotype in order to confront it, Lord refuses stereotypical associations, aligning herself with an ethnically unmarked, and perhaps unexpected, community of X-sporting youth. In a similar move, Lord wore a buckskin dress, described in label text as made of “traditional materials, moose and deer hides” and “previously used in the ritual of costuming for the popular American holiday of Halloween.” With this, Lord drew attention to multiple vectors of appropriation, suggesting that “playing Indian” is a Native pursuit as much as a non-Native one.

Continue reading "Artifact Piece, Revisited: Erica Lord at the National Museum of the American Indian, April 3-5, 2008" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

There is a good review of the Creation Museum at the literary journal, n+1:

Creation Nation

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 4:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Notes from the Field | Objects and visual analyses

The Rockefeller wing opened in 1982, sponsored by Governor Nelson Rockefeller as a memorial to his son, Michael Rockefeller who disappeared on a collecting trip amongst the Asmat in Papua New Guinea and moved the collections from the Museum of Primitive Art into the bastion of Great World Art that is the Metropolitan Museum. With the current reinstallation the enshrinement of Oceanic material culture "as art" is doubly reinforced.

The Gallery has been featured in a number of 'best of" lists:
http://goldwaterlibrary.typepad.com/rgl/2008/01/aaoa-best-of-th.html

And
Read the review in the NY TImes and checkout the slide shows:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/arts/design/16ocea.html?_r=1&ex=1195880400&en=67dd70f4be773968&ei=5070&emc=eta1&oref=slogin

However, the emphasis on non-western art, as fine art, complete with a refocus on the oceanic collections as being authored by specific "artists" has arrived a little late. Little is made of the idea of art as a cultural practice, embedded within social relations, rather the aestheticisation of these affective creations are celebrated in a majesterial way. By contrast, the Native American collections feel extremely "underrepresented" as either art or artifact - their display feels very much like an after-thought...

What follows are a series of comments and descriptions by different visitors to the space. Please feel free to add your own comments below:

The Redisplay of the Oceanic Collection in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Fanny Wonu Veys, Musee Quai Branly, Paris (formerly Graduate Intern, Department of Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, Metropolitan Museum of Art).

The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art officially reopened on Friday 14 November 2007. More than four hundred objects from different parts of Oceania are shown in the redesigned first floor galleries which are accessible from the Modern Art wing in the west, the Greek and Roman Art wing in the east and the African art wing in the north. These entrances are marked by introduction text panels on Oceania.

The display of the objects is arranged geographically. Australia, New Guinea and Island Melanesia occupy the main space with the slanted windows reaching from the ground to the mezzanine level. The Australia display includes both traditional historical objects as well as contemporary paintings. Some of the most impressive New Guinea pieces include Asmat bis poles that were collected during the Michael Rockefeller expedition of 1961 and formed part of the initial Nelson A. Rockefeller Museum collection that was housed in the Museum of Primitive Art, founded in 1955. The Kwoma ceiling made of more than two hundred painted sago palm spathes is now installed in full in the central part of the exhibition space. These paintings, that traditionally adorned the inside of a ceremonial men's house, were commissioned specially by former Oceania curator Douglas Newton to be displayed in the Metropolitan Museum. A slit gong from northern Vanuatu is one of the most prominent pieces of the Island Melanesia section.

The above mentioned freestanding objects were installed first, starting with the Kwoma ceiling and followed by the Asmat bis poles, and other large objects such as canoes and drums. A specialist team of riggers worked in close collaboration with the museum conservators.

Smaller compartmentalized sections are dedicated to the arts of Polynesia, Micronesia and Island Southeast Asia. A number of Polynesian objects were received on long term loan from other museums. For the first time, one case is dedicated to the display of Polynesian barkcloth, thus contrasting and complementing the objects made out of hard materials such as wood and bone and representing an important aspect of women’s art. As textiles are sensitive to light, this display will rotate. One case in the Polynesian section displays Micronesian objects including a gable figure, a mask, a navigational ‘stick chart’ and several household implements such as bowls and food pounders.

The Island Southeast Asia subdivision covers objects made and used by indigenous peoples living in Taiwan, Borneo, the Philippines and Indonesia. There is a wide variety of materials ranging from the ikat textiles from Sumatra (Indonesia), to gold jewellery from Indonesia and the Philippines, wooden masks from Borneo, paper divination books from the Batak people in Sumatra and wood architectural sculpture carved by the Paiwan, one of the indigenous peoples in Taiwan.

All the objects on display are accompanied by labels giving object name, if possible also in the vernacular language, materials, dates, and collector. Many items have more extensive information, elaborating on their iconography, use, and significance. Each of the six areas – Australia, New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia and Island Southeast Asia – is introduced by general information panels which are accompanied by detailed maps indicating all the islands from which the objects originate.

For the first time, a catalogue written by the Oceania curator Eric Kjellgren and discussing a selection of the Metropolitan Museum’s Oceanic collection was produced to accompany the opening of the renewed gallery.

Continue reading "Forum - the reopening of the Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (32) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

The store-front window museum, the City Reliquary, in Brooklyn NYC has expanded its remit into a larger space:

http://cityreliquary.org/aboutus/archives/cat_overview.shtml

This is a good example of a community initiative taking on a greater momentum and an opportunity to watch a museum growing from scratch....

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links

I'ld like to draw your attention to a project which has just come to fruition by Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblett: the publication of the book, They called me Mayer July, and opening of the exhibition of the same name.

"The only Jew in the volunteer fire brigade."

Barbara's father, Mayer Kirschenblatt taught himself to paint, aged 73, and has created an evocative visual record of his life in Poland before World War Two and his emigration to Canada. Drawing on interviews conducted over decades and in Mayer's own words, the book and exhibition are a visual ethnography of Polish Jewish life, and highlights the redemptive power of art as a medium to not only evoke memory and narrate life histories, but to reconnect to the past and to broader cultural histories.

The project has a website:
http://samanthamyers.typepad.com/theycalledmemayerjuly/

The exhibition will travel from California, to Poland, to Amsterdam and New York City.

BKG discusses the project:
http://samanthamyers.typepad.com/theycalledmemayerjuly/daughters_afterword.html

Mayer Kirschenblatt has also recorded an audio narrative which can be accessed through the website, and for US visitors, by calling a cellphone number
http://samanthamyers.typepad.com/theycalledmemayerjuly/2007/09/listen-to-mayer.html

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Book Reviews | Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Objects and visual analyses

Sandra Rozental, NYU Anthropology PhD

The Wellcome Collection opened its doors to the public in June of 2007. The museum is housed within the Wellcome Trust building on Euston Road in central London. This was the original site of the first Wellcome Museum that opened in 1913 as an educational tool for professionals interested in science and the history of medicine. Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), after establishing a pharmaceutical empire, began an ambitious project of collecting artifacts across time and space that were related to understanding the human body and curing its ailments. The collection grew to immense proportions, attaining one million objects in the 1930s, most of which are ethnographic artifacts. After many decades in storage and a brief appearance in a major exhibition at the British Museum in 2003 focusing on Wellcome and his collecting ventures “Medicine Man,” and serving as part of a literary experiment in a collection of short stories based on a handful of objects in “The Phantom Museum,” the forgotten collection has finally found a permanent exhibition space.

The Wellcome Collection houses permanent galleries and temporary exhibitions, as well as a library. The core of the museum is a space designed to echo an early twentieth century exhibition space where 500 objects of Wellcome’s original collection are on view, displayed by object type as they would have been given the taxonomical trends during his lifetime. The gallery is divided in sections such as “beginning of life” with objects related to fertility, birth and conception; “end of life” with artifacts used for mortuary practices, funerals, and death rituals; “understanding the body” with a display on acupuncture, nails and x-rays, among many. Other sections are entirely devoted to a type of object like “masks,” “votive offerings,” “metal instruments” and “artificial limbs.” Certain objects are presented more like curiosities such as a lock of King George III’s hair, or Napoleon’s toothbrush. The objects are displayed in glass cases without any labels. To find out information about the object such as provenance and what it was used for, the viewer must open cabinet-like doors behind which explanatory labels are hidden.

The second permanent display is called “Medicine Now,” focusing on what has happened to medicine since Wellcome’s death in 1936. This section’s collection includes both objects related to medical practice and artworks commissioned especially for the gallery from artists asked to respond to medical issues. Three contemporary medical topics are central in this display: obesity, malaria, and genetics. Much of the exhibition focuses on exposing the disparity in medicine’s availability and development in the global North where obesity is the main illness, and the global South where people die of malaria and starvation. The last section of the exhibition invites the viewer to become part of two current research projects: the first, to find the average face, and the second to create a map of biometric identities. Although the exhibition hints at some debates in recent medicine, certain key issues are either not addressed or simply glossed over such as HIV, stem-cell research, abortion and contraception, controversies over pharmaceutical companies, the increasing reliance on antidepressants, to cite only a few.

The unfortunate silences in “Medicine Now” might be due to a lack of space to cover all of these topics, a handicap that might be remedied by using temporary exhibitions to address some of these pending issues. The current temporary exhibition, “The Heart” certainly delves into a particular body part in all its complexity. The show, curated by Emily Jo Sargent and James Peto, and on view from June 21 until September 16 2007, is comprised of scientific artifacts and artistic works. It dissects the heart as an organ that has been explored by scientists interested in finding out its role within the body, but also looks to its role as a symbol, at times thought to contain the human soul, at others understood as the container of our emotional selves. The introductory label states: “This exhibition looks at the evolution of our understanding of what the heart is, what it does and what it means (…) It follows the development of our anatomical knowledge of the heart, but also considers its far-reaching cultural and symbolic significance.”

Acknowledging a Western bias, the exhibition includes an exploration of the material culture generated around this human bodily organ. The collection is comprised of Egyptian papyrus, 17th and 18th century anatomical illustrations, Leonardo Da Vinci drawings, film footage about the first human heart transplant in 1967, a modern perfusion machine used to substitute the heart during surgery, Aztec sacrificial knives, Sacred Heart imagery, Victorian valentine cards, a silver heart-shaped casket for Thomas Hardy’s heart, who like Livingstone’s, was subject to a separate burial, as well as specimens, both animal and human, of hearts and venal system (all the exhibitions warn the public that they contain human remains at the entrance of the galleries). Other objects include poems about hearts, as well as audio tracks of songs such as “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley and “Your Cheatin’ Heart” by Hank Williams. Many contemporary artworks also pepper the gallery such as Andy Warhol’s “Heart,” Ana Mendieta’s performance pieces, and two video installations by Jordon Basemen, one showing an open heart surgery, and the other, entitled “1+1=1,” shows Patrick Williams, a recipient of transplanted lungs and heart, discussing his experience. The entire gallery is invaded by the reverberating sound of a beating heart, at first a disquieting soundtrack that soon becomes almost a part of the viewer’s own body as she navigates in the exhibition space.

This multidisciplinary show focusing on a very specific topic, a body part that is literally the core of our being, is a promising beginning for the Wellcome Collection’s temporary displays, one that allowed curators to use many objects from the original collection and library, as well as explore more recent developments and include contemporary artifacts as both specimens and artworks. Hopefully, “The Heart” will be the first of many such intricate exhibitions at this new venue.

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Copyright: © musée du quai Branly, photo Arnaud Bauman

Mary Stevens, PhD candidate, UCL (French and Anthropology)

Musée du Quai Branly, 8 April to 20 July 2007

Almost a year after it opened, the Musée du Quai Branly remains the subject of intense speculation (including on this blog): how will its highly contested museographical project develop in the future? The dust had barely settled from the inauguration before the emphasis on aesthetics that characterizes the permanent exhibition had started to feel dated. The first major temporary exhibition, D’un regard l’autre, which traced five centuries of western representations of non-western peoples, was interpreted by many as a corrective to the de-historicized aesthetic shock of the galleries above. For all the splendour of its exhibits, New Ireland: Arts of the South Pacific, which runs from 8 April to 2 July, in turn represents a new chapter in the working through of the tension between art and anthropology in the new institution.

The exhibition, which occupies a large section of the ground floor ‘garden’ galleries, presents 150 objects from New Ireland and its neighbouring archipelago, arranged primarily according to location – separate sections display items from the south, central and northern regions – and subsequently according to a combination of aesthetic and functional criteria (Malagan sculptures are divided up into birds, fish, figures and couples and masks for lifting taboos, for example). The exhibition involved an uncommonly long preparation phase (ten years); it was originally commissioned for the Grand palais, a major temporary exhibition space in Paris, but was delayed on account of the upheavals that accompanied the creation of the Quai Branly. During this time, in order to establish a comprehensive database of objects, the curators visited a staggering 132 museums, a very large number of which are represented here. New Ireland: Arts of the South Pacific thus provides a unique opportunity to compare the very finest masks and sculptures to have found their way into European collections.

Continue reading "New Ireland: Arts of the South Pacific" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 4:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

SAFE is a not-for-profit awareness raising and lobbying organization based in the US, which aims to draw attention to the systematic pillaging and looting of archaeological sites worldwide, linking up to the work of British archaeologists such as Colin Renfrew working at the Macdonald Institute at Cambridge University.

http://www.savingantiquities.org/

They encourage student participation through poster sessions and internships, run public programs and have an excellent website. Those in New York should try to attend Oscar Muscarella's subversive tours of the Metropolitan Museum's Greek, Roman and Ancient Near East Galleries. Founded by a group of private individuals in the wake of the looting of the Baghdad Museum, SAFE exemplifies the ways in which concerned individuals can try to make a difference. Of course, targeting concerned scholars is only part of the task - we need to reeducate collectors as to the implications of the trade in antiquities.

The recent re-opening of the newly renovated Greek and Roman galleries at the Met shows just how much Antiquities are still used to boost the reputation of wealthy collectors into immortality. Recent scandals, such as the arrest of Getty Curator Marion True and dealer Robert Hecht and the negotiation by Italian authorities with the Metropolitan Museum to return the famous Euphronios Krater feel as though they exist in a different world to these galleries (even though the krater is still just in the next room, with a small label acknowledging that it is on long term loan from the Republic of Italy)...

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Topics for Discussion

Sandra Rozental, NYU Anthropology Graduate Student

Museums have been pooling from film in both literal and figurative ways. Galleries are peppered with screens and video installations, film segments and screening areas, but they are also generating "blockbuster" shows and featuring trailer-like advertisements for their exhibitions on television and in cinemas.

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is no exception, with the added plus of hosting a the largest ethnographic and documentary film festival in the United States once a year, the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival. Despite its long and intricate relationship with film, in the last few months, the museum has been greatly transformed by film. Since A Night at the Museum, a film based on a book by Milan Trenc, directed by Shawn Levy, and with Ben Stiller playing the main character, was screened around the world, visitors come to the museum looking for the film's many characters: Attila the Hun, Jedediah, Sacajawea, the Easter Island talking head, and Dexter the monkey, among others. In their quest to merge fiction and reality at the museum, visitors are unavoidably disappointed: not only was the film not filmed in the museum in New York, but it was actually done in a building based on the AMNH constructed as a sound stage in Vancouver, Canada. External shots of the actual AMNH were used throughout the film to make it appear that the story takes place inside the Central Park museum.

Rather than working to correct the misunderstanding, and sport its identity as an institution with an educational and scientific mission, the AMNH has been more than happy to take on its role in the film as a marketing strategy. The IMDB website states that visitors to the AMNH increased 20% after the film's opening, a statistic that clearly did not go unnoticed by the museum's public relations team. These days, the museum has very literally let the museum display and characters constructed by the movie inside its walls, using large cutouts of the film to lure visitors to its giftshop, selling AMNH certified "Night at the Museum" badges, and offering "night at the museum" sleepovers during which, for a huge sum of money, children can spend an actual night in one of the museum's halls, using flashlights and going on expeditions with wild buffalo and a blue whale, waiting for Teddy Roosevelt to come to life.

Sleepover Link:http://www.amnh.org/kids/sleepovers/

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Topics for Discussion

April Strickland, NYU Anthropology PhD Student

CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed is an exhibition of French photographer Frederic Chaubin’s images of late Eastern bloc architecture, and was on view at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City until June 16.

Chaubin’s images, taken over a five year period, include a wide array of structures not often represented in the history of Soviet architecture, such as a Crimean union health center, an Estonian cross-country skiing resort, and secluded summer homes of party leaders in Lithuania and Armenia. The photographs are beautifully composed, and draw attention to the monumental and often witty combination of landscape and architecture, as well as discrepancies between architecture constructed for the public good and vast private residences available only to a slim minority.

Writing of the architects (acknowledged in the exhibit when possible), the website remarks,
“Operating in a cultural context hermetically sealed from the influence of their Western counterparts, they drew inspiration from sources ranging from expressionism, science fiction, early European modernism and the Russian Suprematist legacy to produce an idiosyncratic, flamboyant and often imaginative architectural ménage. Unexpected in their contexts, these monumental buildings stand in stark contrast to the stereotypical understanding of late Soviet architecture in which monotonously repetitive urban landscapes were punctuated by vapid exercises in architectural propaganda.”

http://www.storefrontnews.org/current.php

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 3:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Olga Kravets, Bilkent University

a reconstructed living room

Having a keen interest in both everyday life and GDR (well, actually in the socialist past), I visited the “Dictatorship and Everyday Life in the GDR” exhibition while in Berlin in April 2007 (the exhibition is on until July, 29). Set up by the German Historical Museum, the exhibition aims to show “How the citizens of the GDR succeed in coping with their everyday life.” [link: Scroll down for Panoramic Pictures] The collection spreads across two floors and is arranged in themes – work and retirement policy, education and family policy, for example. The life of GDR citizens is represented largely through the official insignia, such as party membership cards, school/work uniforms, birth/school/pension certificates, work records, newspapers, posters and so on. There are also a few typical ‘resistance’ items such as blue jeans, The Beatles records, and some bohemian art pieces. While the exhibition is impressive in its size and organization, I was disappointed. For me, such artifacts relate to the ideology (dictatorship) aspect i.e. the structuring of everyday lives, but do not necessarily tell much of what that everyday life was like. They certainly do not provide any insight into the question of “How did the citizens of the GDR succeed in coping with their everyday life?”

Leaving the exhibition, I was wondering if it was at all possible to present in a museum format “state and dictatorship, on the one hand, and strategies of daily life, on the other.” After all, “strategies of daily life” are meant to be enacted…

But then, I just happened to be passing by a sign inviting to a “GDR Museum Berlin.” It turned out to be a private museum, located across the Palast der Republik, the now-half-demolished, former house of the East German parliament. Opened sometime in 2006, the museum aspires to offer “a hands-on experience of everyday life in the GDR.” Like the German Historical Museum “Dictatorship…” exhibition, the museum collection is organized thematically. Namely, the museum has displays on family, work, education, culture, fashion, housing, holidays and consumption in the GDR. While the museum’s concerns and themes are overlapping with those of the “Dictatorship…” exhibition, its display could not be more different. Two points of difference are particularly noteworthy. First, there are hardly any glass showcases, rather the display is an arrangement of a smaller scale concrete-slab apartment block buildings, the ubiquitous symbols of the socialist past still standing in parts of the former socialist countries.

starting a “Trabi

The windows and parts of the buildings can be open to reveal school notes, camping gear, fashion magazines, shopping lists, kitchen utensils, bottles of cleaners, clothing, movie tickets, and a variety of other things. Visitors are encouraged to touch, play with, sit on, listen to, smell, etc. (and they sure do – see photos).

Second, the museum collection consists mainly of the mundane objects once used by East Germans. The artifacts on display are so ordinary that the curators are compelled to remind visitors that ‘the toilet paper is a museum exhibit, please do not remove.’ The ordinariness of the artifacts is further emphasized through the arrangement of the items with the reference to an individual’s life stages and private experiences such as birth, school years, marriage, childbirth, etc. rather than a historical timeline. Thus, the nature of artifacts along with the way they are presented makes these objects appear devoid of the immediate ideological loading that was readily apparent in the artifacts dominating the “Dictatorship…” exhibition. The museum addresses this issue in a straight forward fashion. It features a little Stasi corner, a miniature Berlin Wall and numerous slogans on its red walls. Perhaps more interestingly, the museum frames (sometimes literally) the tension between the daily life and ideology, the lived socialism and the proscribed one, in exhibits themselves. For instance, the set of baby clothes is overplayed with the charts of the party-planned and the actual birth rates in the country. Then, the display of camping gear and photos of nude beaches is juxtaposed to the map of places the East Germans were allowed to travel to. The examples of such juxtapositions are many.

While the museum treats its subject matter with respect and seriousness, it does have a Disney-ish feel to it. Firstly, in contrast to official (state) exhibitions, this museum is not shy about presenting GDR as a spectacle, an entertainment, a market(ing) offering for tourists’ consumption i.e. essentially about making GDR a commodity or at least using it as a brand that sells. At the exit the visitors are offered an extensive collection of the GDR merchandise and there is also a café where they can try some East German treats.

Secondly, the GDR museum is about entertainment first, and about education…afterwards. History is (made) fun here. There is no explicit commentary or particular path for visitors to follow. Rather they discover for themselves the museum’s script by locating artifacts partly hidden in the drawers in the maze of socialist apartment blocks. The artifacts are not labeled and/or described individually, but organized in themes to be experienced. For example, with headphones in a Stasi corner, visitors can eavesdrop on people exploring the recreated GDR living room in the other section of the museum. Other experiences include starting a Trabant auto, trying a garment from a wardrobe, learning dance moves while listening to the East German pop hits, watching a GDR fashion show or a party parade, playing a game of soccer for a winning East German team, to name a few.

work in GDR

In this way, to use a cliche, history is made exciting and accessible to many (and one does see kids and young people enjoying the museum)… Of course, at this point the critics of the museum and its approach might exclaim “what (kind of) history!?” And, I do not have an answer to that but I’d note that despite the Disney-ish feel (which, I understood, was supposed to make me uneasy), I liked the museum. I was pleasantly surprised at the playful and lively atmosphere in a museum talking about the socialist past; this is a notable departure from the way the socialist life is usually discussed and presented. Besides, in my view, this tiny private museum gives a better insight into “How the citizens of the GDR succeeded in coping with their everyday life?” than the “Dictatorship…” exhibition or a permanent display on GDR at the German Historical Museum, for that matter. The museum’s extensive collection of mundane objects suggests that the citizens of the GDR ‘coped’ by engaging in very ordinary daily activities so familiar to people anywhere - they studied for exams and danced at discotheques, cleaned their flats and cooked dinners, used contraceptives and watched soccer on TV…and yes, there were party parades. But, it is these routines of daily human living that possibly made the socialist life with all its politics and ideology bearable. Academically speaking there is nothing new in this, but it is a refreshing message to hear from an exhibition devoted to the socialist past.

References:

• 1. Brochure for the “Dictatorship and Everyday Life in the GDR” (March 30 – July 29 2007; From the Collections of the German Historical Museum) http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/ddr/index.html
  
• 2. Brochure for the “GDR Museum Berlin: a hands-on experience of history” (permanent exhibition) www.ddr-museum.de

[Click to read more for additional photos]

Continue reading "Socialism could be fun…?" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 2:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Notes from the Field

Dasha A. Chapman, NYU, Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program

Basil Alkazzi, British, b. 1938 Sea of Spirit Dreams, III, 1997

There has been talk of a New Harlem Renaissance. the speak is filled with hope – a new Harlem, a revived Harlem, Harlem’s second-coming – and real-life happenings – businesses, arts, culinary attractions. I recently visited one site of this proclaimed re-birth: the Museum of Art in Origins (MoAAO) on 162nd Street.

Opened in November, 2005, the Museum is housed in Professor George Preston’s brownstone in Jumel Terrace on Sugar Hill. As the most affluent part of Harlem, Sugar Hill has been known for its residents: well-known African-American artists and intellectuals like Duke Ellington and W.E.B. DuBois. This history is what has provides the neighborhood its grounding – and its cachet – for this second Renaissance.

The Museum is part of a network of cultural institutions and Harlem history sites. It opened at the same time as Kurt Thometz’s rare and used-book store, Jumel Terrace Books, which is also housed in his brownstone. The bookstore specializes in African, African-American, and local history books. The two establishments are located just down the street from one another, and are also in close proximity to Marjorie Eliot’s Parlour Entertainment where jazz concerts take place every Sunday afternoon in her home.

Bamilike Thumb Piano. From the museum's impressive "Traditional African Art" Interactive Map: Click to View Online Map.

Cultural collaboration and a vivid arts scene are intended to animate and inspire the neighborhood and its surroundings. The literati that attend these events are part of a movement to foster greater appreciation and production of the arts. Underlying this mission is an interesting formulation of "origins" – both for "Harlem" as a place in peoples' minds, and for the people who actually inhabit this place.

Continue reading "A Consolidated Materiality for the New Harlem Renaissance?" »

Posted by William Brian Thomson at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Notes from the Field

Following our earlier blog entry about Quai Branly, here are some photographs sent in by editor-at-large Aaron Glass of the exterior, and see Aaron's comment on our earlier posting:
http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/hg26/materialworld/2007/05/musee_du_quai_branly_the_futur.html

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Ross Hemera Kaiwhakaahua & Patrick Laviolette, School of Visual & Material Culture, Massey University

http://www.maoriart.org.nz/

In carrying on with this blog’s recent theme of indigenous art, objects and display, we take you to Aotearoa. The end of April has just seen an exhibition of world class contemporary jade and wood carvings, jewellery, paintings, sculpture, silver and weaving by Maori artists. This was part of a Maori arts and cultural festival launched in the capital by the Minister of Māori Affairs whose inaugural speech is attached below.

Korotangi Series 5 by James F Ornsby

It has been some time, now, since such a significant event on the New Zealand art calendar last occurred. This exhibition of Maori art was especially successful in two aspects. First, as a showcase of, up to the minute work of, Maori artists the exhibition included a comprehensive ranch of the very highest quality – from tertiary students to emerging and mid career artists to our original trailblazers including Fred Graham and Para Matchitt. Secondly, for Maori an event such as this brings an extra special dimension – whanaungatanga. Artist, family and friends from all over the motu, arrived in support to provide the necessary human presence for the works in this exhibition. The occasion also being a time for reminiscing with old friends, networking and meeting new artists.

Continue reading "Maori MARKet" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Danny Miller, Anthropology, UCL

Indigo installation by Shihoko Fukumoto. The museum attendant informed me that they had all been asked to wear blue denim jeans for the duration of the exhibition.

A major exhibition on Indigo is coming to an end at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester on 15 April 2007 , but then moves to Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery 19 May - 1 September 2007 and then Brighton Museum & Art Gallery and Hove Museum & Art Gallery 29 September 2007 - 6 January 2008. The exhibition seemed to me to be clearly inspired by the classic text on Indigo by Jenny Balfour-Paul and published by the British Museum which I would strongly recommend to anyone with an interest in the topic. Indigo is not just any old dye. Its unique properties that mean it can be fixed to cloth without a mordant has made it perhaps the most significant dye in history ranging from the woad of ancient Europe to a major player in trade routes. This exhibition brings together fine examples of textiles from all over the world. Mostly these are historical but there is a small section on fashion denim and finally a room of contemporary art work based on denim cloth.

I confess I am becoming increasingly obsessed by the potential of denim as a topic for material culture studies and I have ambitions to develop an exhibition myself one day based on the wearing and significance of contemporary denim. This would have, however, very little in common with this current display which has other concerns. Firstly aesthetic. As someone not usually given to art exhibitions, I found the materials themselves ravishing and have already decided to go at least once more to feast on the visual display. Secondly there is a commitment to the survival and reconstruction of a craft that was so important historically and in many areas had almost disappeared after the development of industrial substitutes. The exhibition includes 50 minutes of film mainly based on documentaries about such restored local traditions of Indigo production and cloth dyeing in India, West Africa and elsewhere and is well worth watching in its own right. Mostly this is celebratory though there is some mention of the particularly exploitative conditions of South Asian colonial Indigo production. Unusually this is one exhibition which does not divide between Europe and the rest, since the reliance upon Indigo for blue was as important in ancient Britain and more recently for the likes of William Morris as it was for Japanese or for West African textiles. While it could be associated with elites it has also been seen as the egalitarian dye of Mao suits, and blue jeans. Overall the exhibition is an entrancing and enjoyable way to come to an understanding of one historical material whose significance is still rarely appreciated.

Posted by William Brian Thomson at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Graeme Were, UCL Museums & Collections

Since its opening last year, critics have declared Chirac’s museum of ‘primitive art’ in Paris – better known as the Musée du Quai Branly – as ill-judged, neo-colonial, and racist to list just some of the negative terms deployed. If those weren’t strong enough, the new museum has even been dubbed the ‘Musée des bogus arts’ (Fiachra Gibbons, The Guardian, 3 July 2006) and less flattering still, France’s answer to the Millennium Dome, but even more of a folly. Oh dear – could it get any worse? Yet amid the jibes and controversy, art critic Jonathan Jones of The Guardian (The Guardian 1 Nov 2006) courageously breaks rank and hails the new ethnographic museum to be a thrilling spectacle that rekindles that ‘spirit of amazement’ that our Enlightenment ancestors would have marvelled at. In view of his wholehearted endorsement of the museum, perhaps all this commotion could be put down to another case of French bashing by disgruntled Brits. Having received several invites to visit the museum, I finally took up the offer and decided to find out once and for all what the fuss was all about.

The Musée du Quai Branly stands on the Left Bank of the Seine on the Quai Branly not far from the Eiffel Tower. The museum itself is striking, designed by Jean Nouvel the French architect responsible for the Institut du Monde Arabe among other places. Situated amid a garden with meandering pathways, the museum immediately imposes its presence on the visitor as you enter it beneath raised stilts holding above cube-like structures painted in earthy colours. I was pleasantly surprised to see, as Jonathan Jones points out, there are long queues of people avidly waiting to get in.

Once entering the main museum entrance foyer, you are greeted by an elevated glass structure inside which contains musical instruments on open storage. This is incredibly impressive. However, one is left wondering whether this is merely an aesthetic touch or that the storage feature has become integrated into the display as a functioning visitor / collections space in an attempt to salvage them from dusty store rooms. A temporary exhibition space is located to the right, currently housing an exciting installation by African artist Yinka Shonibare as well as a major collection of New Ireland art from Papua New Guinea.

The main displays are located on the first floor. To reach this space, you follow a circular ramp which gradually winds around the musical instrument storage area and climbs upwards. As you walk along the elevated ramp, your senses are immediately stimulated by moving film images beamed onto the floor in front of you depicting indigenous performances accompanied with sounds coming at you from many directions. I found this captivating but uneasy about the thought of people trampling over the film footage.

On reaching the main area, visitors enter Oceania, one of the four continental sub-spaces that the floor is divided into (each space was divided by earth coloured walls – note no Europe). Okay, this may be problematic in that it is inherently ethnocentric, but for many visitors this is very logical – the same spatial arrangement was deployed in Liverpool’s World Museum to good effect. The space itself was also very crowded, reminiscent of my visit to the Velasquez exhibition at the National Gallery. But what struck me most in the Quai Branly was how the displays were set up. I found that the entire space was badly lit – it was in fact deliberately dark with lit cases to draw the visitor to the object. Minimal labelling accompanied the objects on display – this exhibition certainly fell into the aesthetic mode of representation.

Continue reading "Musée du Quai Branly: the future or folly?" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 4:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | From the news

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 (6) | 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.

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

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.

Continue reading "Two-Dimensional Dancing" »

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

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 (2) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Fanny Wonu Veys, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

After a research visit to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, I decided to visit another Smithsonian museum: the National Museum of the American Indian. Ever since I saw the building works in progress in 2003, I tried to keep updated on what was happening in the museum. It was a unique opportunity for me to see the museum now that it had been open for a little over two years.

Architecturally, the museum building built in hand-cut Minnesota goldstone, with its curvilinear forms and its surrounding garden which includes one hundred and fifty native species contrasts with the other stark white, rectangular buildings on the National Mall and other parts of the city. The visitor enters from the east – the other Smithsonian Museums have their entrances situated on the Mall side or one of its parallel running avenues – , goes through the now ubiquitous bag search routine, and is welcomed into the circular Potomac area, the meeting point for guided tours, arts and craft markets and demonstrations. This area spans the four levels of the museum and is closed off by a step-dome on which daylight, caught by prisms in one of the windows, is reflected.

The ground (first) floor is dedicated to the Museum’s Mitsitam café, the small Chesapeake museum store and the Rasmuson theatre, while the second floor holds the large Roanoke museum shop and an exhibition entitled ‘Return to a native place’ which focuses on the native peoples of Washington D.C.’s local Chesapeake region. The third and fourth floors have the exhibition spaces which are organised thematically into our lives, temporary exhibition space (third floor), our universes, our peoples and the Lelawi theatre (fourth floor). In each section, respectively looking at contemporary native life, native beliefs and native history the voices of indigenous curators representing groups from North, Central and South America are heard. The third and fourth floors are also home to object-rich cases where part of the museum’s vast collection is presented and where visitors can have a self-guided experience through the use of interactive screens. The museum argues that its aim is to give visitors the opportunity to listen to the stories of people that are geographically and culturally related, not taking into account political boundaries. However, it seems to me that existing political boundaries were the major drive force to include the Hawaiian Islands and to exclude Greenland from representation in the museum.

Hawaii which became the fiftieth state of the United States of America in 1959 is represented – only to a limited extent I must admit – by a photo in the ‘our lives’ section and an outrigger canoe outside the main theatre on the third floor. The Hawaiian indigenous people would traditionally be categorised as Polynesians, sharing cultural and linguistic traits with their other Polynesian neighbours. It has been argued that the concept of Polynesia first used in its current meaning in 1831 by Jules Sebastien Dumont d’Urville is still valid. It would thus seem that the main reason to include Hawaii, is its political affiliation with the United States in whose capital this museum of the American Indian is based.

Greenlandic Inuit have many linguistic and cultural affinities with the arctic peoples of North America. Even geographically Greenland belongs to the continent of North America. However, Greenland’s political affiliation with Denmark - as a former colony and since 1979 as an autonomous part of Denmark – seems to have been reason enough not to be one of the museum’s indigenous voices. I would be interested to know how indigenous Hawaiians feel about being included into the National Museum of the Native American Indian and what Greenlandic Inuit feel about being excluded. The answer to this question depends in part on the type of political and cultural relations Inuit from Greenland uphold with those from Canada and Alaska and consequently to what extent Greenlandic Inuit feel they have affinities with the other indigenous peoples of the American continent.

Continue reading "The National Museum of the American Indian" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Calcite fish shaped jar, used for holding perfumed oils or unguents, Middle to Late Bronze Age (1650 - 1150 BC)
Image Courtesy of the Institute of Archaeology, UCL

The exhibition highlights the extraordinary finds made by the archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie, who was Professor of Egyptology at UCL and spent many years working in the area around modern Gaza in the 1920s and 30s. The sites he dug are now divided between the modern states of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. They include major towns and trading centres which flourished over 5000 years ago. He found beautiful pottery and jewellery and a huge variety of tools. This is the first time that many of these unique artefacts – housed in UCL’s Institute of Archaeology – have been on public display.

The exhibition is on at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, Thornhaugh Street, London and is open from Tuesday to Saturday 10.30am to 5.00pm.

If anyone has visited the exhibition and would like to comment on it or write a review, then please submit your postings to MaterialWorldBlog. It would be interesting to create discussions around this exhibition and others.

Posted by Graeme Were at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Haidy Geismar, NYU

Whilst of course, all art is material culture, Vik Muniz, a Brazilian artist, who I saw in September at Sikkema Jenkins Gallery in Chelsea, New York is one of the few contemporary artists whose work resonates profoundly with material culture studies in its own right, without needing the meditation of critical discourse.

Muniz himself outlines the importance of materiality in his own artist's manifesto:
"Basically, we artists make art so we can evidence the materialization of an idea, to test it in the material world, only in the end to transform it back into actual visual stimuli, making a connection between ourselves and the world we live in" (Vik Muniz, Reflex: a Vik Muniz Primer, 2005, Aperture Foundation, page 22)

Vik Muniz, Clown Skull, From Relics series.

For many years, Muniz has playfully engaged with materiality, creating paintings from chocolate, wire, thread, sugar, dust and tomato sauce. His 'Equivalents' series played with Alfred Steiglitz's famous cloud photography by remaking images of clouds, which have often been observed to look like other things (such as Durer's hands) from cotton wool.

Vik Muniz, Durer's praying hands, from Equivalents series.

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Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | Good Links | Objects and visual analyses

Gabrielle Berlinger, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University and editorial assistant, Museum Anthropology

With the close of Chinese year of the pig (2007), the Museum of Chinese in the Americas (MoCA) will also close its exhibition galleries on the 2nd floor of a retired, century-old school building. It will open new doors in 2008 at 147-151 Lafayette Street on the west side of New York City’s Chinatown. Although architect Maya Lin, renowned for Washington’s Vietnam Memorial, is presently at work designing the new space, MoCA’s past will remain present on Mulberry Street for one more year. I recently visited the Museum to grasp this past and imagine its future. While not grounded in its physical space, MoCA remains grounded in meaning and mission.

Founded in 1980 by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Charles Lai as a two-year venture called the New York Chinatown History Project, this 26-year old project-turned-museum (in 1992) makes up for its modest appearance and size with extensive collections and vibrant public programming. Upon my last visit, I discovered that the Museum affirms its founding mission to reclaim, preserve, and interpret the history and culture of Chinese in the Western Hemisphere by moving forward with dynamic material and interactive technology that increasingly involve the curious public.

Source: www.gothamist.com

MoCA's main, ongoing exhibit entitled “Where is Home? Chinese in the Americas" welcomes visitors into a small space designed by architect Billie Tsien to resemble the inside of a Chinese lantern, though his intention is not initially obvious. The round, wooden structure supports a panoply of objects and is backed by thin rice paper onto which panel descriptions are printed. Among the objects, a worn “Chinese Laundry” sign hangs next to a vintage Chinese baseball team photograph, an ancestor worship shrine with incense and oranges, and three Chinese dragonhead costumes. The core aspects of Chinese-American life are divided into framed areas that define but also box in each section. The presentation feels crowded and over-stimulating but conveys a sense of the progression of Chinese cultures across continents and over time.

Continue reading "From East to West: The Museum of Chinese in the Americas (New York City, NY)" »

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

Larissa Hjorth, Games and Digital Art at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

1. Snapshots: Portrait of the mobile explores the ways in which we imbue mobile technology as an extension of ourselves; both in terms of self-expression and self-identification but also as an object inflected by the particularities of the socio-cultural. In this project we are greeted by portraits of mobile phone users. But rather than face portraits, we are met by their mobile phones. On the one hand this work explores the rhetoric around the personification of technologies, most notably the mobile phone. On the other hand, the work investigates how much one’s mobile phone can tell a story about their user/ owner. Can the mobile phone be symbolic of one’s lifestyle? How many clues does it leave about the user’s identity and social capital? In this work I spoke to 150 people (from Seoul and Melbourne) and took pictures of their phones and asked them about how they personalized their phone.

Posted by Graeme Were at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

The Couch: Thinking in Repose, Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna, Austria, Exhibition Review 5 May - 5 November 2006

Martina Grunewald, PhD candidate in Design History and Material Culture, University of Applied Arts, Vienna

On Sunday, 5 November 2006, the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna closed the doors to “The Couch: Thinking in Repose,” a special exhibition commemorating Freud’s 150th anniversary this year. Using a cross-disciplinary approach, curator Lydia Marinelli focused on literature, art, science, and design from the mid-nineteenth century until today in an illuminating exploration of the most intimate and complex relationship between neurology and—well—a divan conspicuous by its own absence. The exhibition encompassed paintings, sculpture, photographs, books, furniture, china, and tableware as well as interviews and music. The original psychoanalytic couch, however, was missing. Complete with Oriental rug and cushions, it is to be found at the London Freud Museum, in the house where Freud and his family found refuge after their 1938 emigration.

Maybe it was precisely the original’s absentia that unleashed a flow of free associations in Vienna. Spencer Finch’s “Ceiling (above Sigmund Freud’s couch),” four elliptical pastel colour fields in different shades of beige on paper, recalled the patient’s limited range of sight during therapeutic sessions. To help clients relax and speak without inhibition, Freud always sat at the couch’s top end, vanishing from their perception as they reclined. In addition, most of Freud’s vast archaeological collection of antiquities, his books and papers, retreated from the patient’s view. In setting up the exhibition, Marinelli and her team found themselves in a similarly empty space of references. They produced a broad, if not comprehensive, discussion of the sofa as an eclectic piece of furniture that has been appropriated by its diverse usages over the years as much as it has participated in their gestation.

Continue reading "Freud's Therapeutic Boxsprings" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 7:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | Posted to Exhibition reviews

Nicky Levell, PhD student, UCL Anthropology

On Saturday 30 2004, the Totems to Turquoise exhibition debuted at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The opening ceremony, from 12.00 – 5.00 pm in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, began with a special welcome by representatives of New York’s local Native American community, including Sidney Hill, the spiritual representative of the Iroquois Confederacy. Ceremonial leaders of the Haida and Navajo nations then gave their blessings for the exhibit and the afternoon concluded with dance performances by communities from the northwest and southwest.

Having spent the past two years touring the States (New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles), the exhibition is being brought to the Pacific Northwest. As a prelude to the opening of the exhibit, the Vancouver Museum and its sponsor, the Bill Reid Foundation, organized a ceremonial announcement of the exhibition that took place in Vanier Park on Wednesday August 23, 2006.

Continue reading "Review: Prelude to Totems to Turquoise - Native North American Jewelry Arts of the Northwest and Southwest" »

Posted by Graeme Were at 4:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Posted to Exhibition reviews