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 (1) | 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 (0) | 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 at 4:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | 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 (0) | 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 (3) | 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 (0) | 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 (0) | 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 at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | 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 (4) | 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 at 4:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | 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 (4) | Posted to Exhibition reviews | From the news | Good Links | Objects and visual analyses

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading "Indigenous Motivations" »

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 (1) | 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 at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | 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.

Continue reading "Vik Muniz" »

Posted by Haidy L Geismar at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | 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 (1) | 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 at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | 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 (0) | 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 at 4:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)