A city that sat on its treasure's but didn't see them...
A Story in the NY TImes about Le Corbusier chairs in Chandigarh and some shifty market shenanigans... (link passed on with thanks from Miriam Basilio)
March 19, 2008
January 22, 2008
Where statues go to die?
Good article about the demise of statues of famous despots by David Cannadine...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7196530.stm
Statues to the mighty are erected as permanent monuments. But those regarded as heroes by one political regime are often denounced as villains by the next, their statues left unloved or toppled and carted off to the wilderness.
November 21, 2007
Textile Conservation Centre (TCC) Under Threat
It came as a shock within the museum world to learn of the proposed closure of the Textile Conservation Centre in Winchester. The TCC is one of the world’s leading centres in textiles research, conservation and development. Having merged with the University of Southampton in 1999, it offers a range of postgraduate courses in textiles studies and applied textiles arts, and is considered by museum and conservation professionals to be a centre of excellence in this field. Even with a track record for high level publications by leading scholars of conservation and textiles research, and innovative research projects such as the AHRC-funded Concealed Garments project, the University of Southampton proposes to close the TCC on financial grounds in 2009.
For further details:
http://www.icon.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=632&Itemid=15
To sign petition:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/TCCClosure/
October 16, 2007
Unclaimed baggage
Great story on the BBC about the 1,000,000 people a year that visit the unclaimed baggage repository in Scottsboro, Alabama, where you can view, and purchase, the luggage that is never claimed.
DO NOT fail to check out their website:
October 9, 2007
US man seeks change for $1m bill
A man who handed over a counterfeit million-dollar bill to a cashier at a Pittsburgh supermarket and asked for change has been arrested....
October 4, 2007
The Anne Frank Tree
Today it was announced:
that plans have been set in motion to preserve the Chesnut Tree that Anne Frank sought solace from during her confinement in hiding during World War Two. The tree has become an important materialisation of Anne herself...and a way of thinking through poetically, the emotional aspect of her hiding...
Check out the website for the Anne Frank Tree, an interactive digital memorial to which you can add your own leaves to:
http://www.annefranktree.nl/index.aspx?lang=en
Part of the Anne Frank House website where there is also a webcam from which you can view the tree live, out of the same window that Anne did.
May 4, 2007
materialworldblog - in the (NYU) news
Just wanted to share with our readers a short piece about the use of blogs in universities, which includes a description of material world blog...
May 3, 2007
Musée du Quai Branly: the future or folly?
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?" »
May 1, 2007
Native leaders vent anger at opening
The Allied Tsimshiam Tribes of Lax Kw'alaams and Metlakatla are less than enthusiastic about the opening of an exhibition of objects from the Dundas Collection which was auctioned to much controversy at Sotheby's New York last Autumn. Fundraising efforts by Canadian Museums and Tribal groups failed to generate enough funds and the collection was eventually purchased by a Canadian Family in an attempt to 'repatriate' the artefacts. The Thompson family gathered together the other purchasers and arranged a national touring exhibition, but there is still a great deal of resentment at the fact that this valuable collection has been broken up into many parts and continue to circulate on the market.
The article from the Globe and Mail is reproduced in the continue reading section.
See also http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2006/10/06/dundas-collection-auction.html
April 27, 2007
Rumors of cell phone deaths greatly exaggerated
From Chris Pinney, UCL Anthropology and Northwestern University:
An Example of the New American Orientalism, but raises interesting questions of the materiality of transmission. William Mazzarella's "Internet X-Ray: E-Governance, Transparency and the Politics
of Immediation in India" Public Culture 18(3) Fall 2006 has an interesting analysis of new technologies and 'rumour' in South Asia.
See the following news story from the Chicago Tribune, (full story pasted in the 'continue reading' section for those of you who are not registered):
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0704260009apr26,1,6246569.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
Continue reading "Rumors of cell phone deaths greatly exaggerated" »
April 21, 2007
Darwin, Creationism and Museums
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/
April 15, 2007
Even more disturbing auctions....
Following our ebay theme of disturbing auctions and reflectoporn, this story in the Guardian describes how a Cambridge student was banned from ebay after putting himself up for sale. Ebay countered that his "listing breached eBay's No Item policy and has been removed ... You may not list intangible items or items whose existence cannot be verified, such as ghosts, souls or spirits."...
February 27, 2007
Speaking of the Oscars...
Ed Potton has written a great article on the materiality of production and political economy of the Oscar statuettes in the London TImes...
December 21, 2006
Touch and Object Handling in the Context of Museums
UCL Museums & Collections is running a series of workshops exploring touch and object handling in the context of museums. This series is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The third workshop centres on ‘Touch and memory: the role of reminiscence’ – see details below:
Workshop 3: “Touch and memory: the role of reminiscence”
University College London
Archaeology Lecture Theatre
Friday 5th January, 2007, 10 am – 4 pm
Speakers:
- Dr. Alberto Gallace, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford
- Professor Mike Rowlands, Department of Anthropology, University College London
- Emma Clarke, Head of Audience Development and Communities, Learning and Information Department, British Museum
- Laura Phillips, Audience Development and Communities, Learning and Information Department, British Museum
- Bernie Arigho, Director of Reminiscence Research and Development, Age Exchange
To book a place and/or for further information contact Devorah Romanek on email: d.romanek@ucl.ac.uk
Visit: www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/events
FUTURE WORKSHOPS IN THIS SERIES
- Therapeutic approaches to touch: Object handling and hospital patients
Friday 2 February 2007, Royal London Homeopathic Hospital - Knowledge transfer in object handling: with specific reference to disadvantaged or
underrepresented groups.
Friday 2 March 2007, British Museum - End of project conference: Touch and the value of object handling
Friday 4 May 2007, University College London
November 22, 2006
Hornsleth: identity cards, ethics, and 'art'
I read about this on the BBC this week and felt so uncomfortable I thought it was worth a post here:
The Danish artist Kristian von Hornsleth has drawn criticism from the Ugandan government from intervening in the state project to get everyone to have identity cards. He has offered pigs and goats to the inhabitants of one particular village in exchange for them taking his name in this process.
Storm over pig-for-name artist
At first I thought this was a provocative and interesting intervention into the issue of forcing citizens to conform to state regulated identity practices and materialities. Carrying federally recognized id cards is taken for granted in the USA but remains a contentious issues in the UK.
Then I went to the artist's website (http://www.hornsleth.com/). The open invitation of an exhibition of photographs of the Ugandan villagers is below:
I'm not sure if this really is a critique of materializing identity for state purposes or some bizarre megalomaniacal attempt to self-replicate throughout the African continent.
There are two really interesting articles in American Ethnologist of May 2006, both of which deal with the material tensions of state identity documents. Gaston Gordillo, in his paper The Crucible of Citizenship, starts from the observation of how many people he worked with in Argentina voluntarily showed him their identity documents over and over again. Holding and showing documents is an important part of claiming state legitimacy for indigenous peoples. Barbara Yngvesson and Susan Bibler Coutin, in their paper, Backed by Papers, have a more ambivalent relationship to the materialisation of identity in paper cards and its effects. Taken together both articles give depth to the shock-factor of Hornsleth's art project. Their abstracts and link to the journal may be found below:
The crucible of citizenship: ID paper fetishism in the Argentinean Chaco
Gastón Gordillo
In this article, I examine how indigenous people of the Argentinean Chaco have internalized their past alienation from citizenship rights through the fetishization of those objects long denied to them: identity (ID) papers. In the early 20th century, shortly after the Argentinean state’s military conquest of the region, government agents excluded these groups from hegemonic notions of nationality and citizenship because of their alleged savagery but simultaneously expected them to show written proofs of their reliability. In the following decades, this contradictory experience made many indigenous people view ID documents and other written records as objects with a force of their own, with the capacity to deflect state violence and shape major aspects of a group’s collective history. Drawing on the concept of “state fetishism,” I analyze the peculiarities of ID-paper fetishism in the Chaco by focusing on the historical and current experiences of the western Toba and the Wichí. In particular, I explore how Toba and Wichí views of ID papers include ideological forms of reification of social practice but also critical interpretations that capture the power dynamics involved in state documentation. [citizenship, fetishism, the state, identity papers, indigenous people, Toba, Wichí, Gran Chaco, Argentina]
Backed by papers: Undoing persons, histories, and return
Barbara Yngvesson and Susan Bibler Coutin
Deportations of long-term U.S. residents to El Salvador and roots trips that Swedish transnational adoptees make to their countries of birth attempt to reconnect individuals to their origins. As they (re)connect, however, such journeys dismantle, reconfiguring the original departure—emigration or adoption—in ways that can destabilize current, future, and past selves and the national and familial belongings in which these selves are embedded. By examining the paths and disjunctures that journeys “back” entail, we consider the significance of “return” for the production of legal knowledge. [adoption, deportation, law, return, El Salvador, Sweden, United States]
http://www.music.columbia.edu/%7Ececenter/AES/ae332.html
Haidy Geismar, NYU (with thanks to Josh Bell for discussion about the AE articles)