Dani's Day Twelve Reflections

June 22nd, 2016

Journal

10am-11:30am

Maeve and I caught up on our journal entries.

Tour/Meeting with John Vick

11:30am-1:30pm

I found it interesting that John Vick stated that the object is the primary source in this context because of the ways written/oral histories have been destroyed by colonialism. I don't think he understands how continuing the practice of reducing these artifacts to their aesthetic value contributes to the erasure of the meaning it held for those who created them. Since these artifacts were so closely linked to social life, allowing the audience to focus on the aesthetic is another way of simplifying African cultures for western consumption. It's easy to consume something when it's only ever viewed as something dead and irrelevant to the living. In this way, museums continue enact violence against the dead.

His description of their process in deciding how to represent the artifacts in the space was exactly as I had suspected. By promoting "close-looking" he and his team wanted the audience to focus on the artifact first. The ability for the audience to leave more informed about the cultural context of the pieces and how they were "acquired" is secondary. He explained that this was the result of the museum's tendency to view aesthetic pleasure and learning as mutually exclusive. He felt that it was more important to "peak the audience's curiosity."

Similar to using colonialism as an excuse for why the exhibit lacks cultural context, John and his collaborators assumed that the audience wouldn't read anyway. If you assumed that your audience wouldn't read anyway, why go through the trouble of formulating 300-word prompts? Were the prompts solely experimental or lazy? Furthermore, who is the audience? From his description, one would assume that the audience comprises of specialists who already know the cultural/artistic context and the rest are people who only want to focus on the form of the artifacts. From my experience in observations and interviews, both the specialists and general visitors want facts. They want a narrative because they are interested in what they're viewing. Of course some visitors will want to only focus on the aesthetic. People don't need to be prompted to do that in an art museum. It's redundant. Providing context challenges the audience to "look again". To me, the act of looking again means using the aesthetic to create an access point for understanding the meanings and functions the artifact served for the culture that created it.

I'm interested in how/if the ideas and desires of the community advisory board are integrated into the process. In general, I want to know more about how the galleries in Creative Africa connect. Why are there two shows on textiles? When discussing creativity in Africa, why do we need an exhibition about artifacts? Africans are still creating and are greatly contributing to the world in artistic ways.

I was happy to hear that dialogue about who is qualified to represent art of different cultures is happening in the museum; however, the fact that they still continue to make the same mistakes signifies that conversation and ideas are not enough. The museum needs to hire people who are qualified and reflect the diversity of the art in the collections.

Also, is there a way that we could be given access to see the rest of the museums collection of African/African American art in storage???

Lunch

1:30pm-2:00pm

Interviews 

2:00pm- 5:00pm

I loved doing interviews! So far it seems that most people expected the prompts to provide cultural context. One person  told me that they stopped reading them once he realized they didn't have any useful content. Another women told me that she had been to several African countries and thought that it was interesting to see the artifacts displayed as they were since many of them are still being used by people today.