Dani's Day Eight Reflections

June 16th, 2015

Journaling

9:30am- 10am

I finished yesterday's journal entry.

Research

10:25am- 10: 45am and again from 11:10am to 11:25am (I met up with Maeve while I was researching)


In 1981, the Montclair Museum of Art held an exhibition of Turkmen tribal carpets. The New York Times wrote a response article that focused on the tension between representing an object as an art versus an artifact. The article stated:

"Perhaps the simplest, yet most appropriate, distinction would be that an artifact is primarily the product of craftsmanship and skill, while a work of art is invested with an emotional, philosophical, spiritual or esthetic quality that reaches beyond. It has an ambiguous something that is not always easy to define, perhaps a special element that elevates it from the realm of workmanship to a more-significant level."

"One does not need a rigorously academic education to appreciate these works. Response is immediate and intuitive."

Interestingly, this response to the Turkmen tribal carpets resembled the conversation we had with the Education and Evaluation Departments on Tuesday. In the case of the carpets, cultural artifacts become art when their aesthetic value evokes a response from the audience. As Marla expressed about some of the artifacts in the Look Again exhibit, if an object is compelling or evokes an emotional response, that can be enough. Educating  the audience on the "philosophical or spiritual importance they had for the peoples who created them" is not the only goal.

At the PMA, "Look Again" is truly open-ended. It can simply mean looking closer to recognize unique features in the craftsmanship of an object. If that is the goal, I guess some of the prompts could be successful when they are actually read. I've noticed that the curators clearly struggled to find the balance in educating visitors on the cultural origins of the objects and focusing on the aesthetic of the objects.

More Observations

12:00pm-2:30pm

Interpretation Team Presentation

2:40pm-4:15pm

This was, by far, the most interesting presentation I've seen thus far. Although I support the team's desire to create various access points for visitors to engage with art, I found some of the things they said to be contradictory, which could signify the tension that they must have in choosing to facilitate learning and design spaces in aesthetically pleasing ways.

In relation to Creative Africa, I was most interested in the idea that museums should not assume that their audience has a substantial amount of prior knowledge about the art. Similarly, the ways in which people engage with art is largely informed by their own lived experiences. They don't leave their identities at the door.

I'm also interested in learning more about what the team may have to sacrifice in order to design exhibits that "blow people's minds". The team described one of their goals as "challenging you to understand the concepts." They may very well have done that with Creative Africa. The concepts that I would have hoped to have been challenged in Look Again may not have been the concepts that the team had chosen to have the audience explore (and clearly weren't). In terms of historical and contemporary African art, I think it's so important that you have a curatorial and interpretation team that has substantial background knowledge in the cultures being represented and understanding of how cultural information could best be translated to a diverse community. I think there's this prevailing idea that art is neutral. I think the museum completely missed the idea that by representing African art and placing it on a public platform, they are also participating in the ways people construct meaning out of the art and the people who made it, often times, in relation to their own place in the world. The way they chose to represent African historical art has become increasingly problematic to me, especially after talking to visitors. I don't understand how the museum could have felt that it was appropriate to have hanging artifacts on the wall. The inability to see a problem with that makes me question what part of the audience they  are catering to and who they are neglecting to see as valuable visitors. I think the Interpretation Team's use of living labels could have been a perfect way to balance aesthetic and learning. Given that special exhibitions, like this one, make up 8 million dollars of the budget, I don't understand why Creative Africa was only planned in a year. I don't understand why so may culturally insensitive and careless mistakes were made. So far the exhibit seems more sensationalizing and exoticizing than educating.



http://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/15/nyregion/art-vs-artifacts-in-montclair.html