Critical Museum Studies

Dalla fine del XX secolo, i tentativi di rileggere le collezioni museali sono stati declinati in alcuni casi attraverso narrazioni non lineari che non rispettano le tradizionali categorie della storia dell'arte. L'articolo intende indagare le cause di questa tendenza globale dal punto di vista culturale, sociopolitico e teorico. Queste pratiche si sono avvicinate alle collezioni museali come ad una forma di archivio e sono state sviluppate negli ultimi trent'anni in particolare da diverse istituzioni dedicate all'arte contemporanea, rimodellando gli allestimenti e il loro ruolo istituzionale. Attraverso l'analisi di tre casi studio, il Centre Pompidou di Parigi con la mostra Modernités plurielles (2013-2015), il Van Abbemuseum di Eindhoven con The Making of Modern Art (2017-2021) e il Museo Sztuki di Łódź con Atlas of Modernity (2014-oggi), l'articolo analizza la necessità istituzionale dei musei contemporanei di rileggere e riscrivere la storia della "modernità" e delle loro collezioni nel XXI secolo attraverso l'uso di narrazioni dialettiche. Il rapporto tra l'istituzione, le collezioni e la loro narrazione sarà analizzato come carattere distintivo dell'identità e della missione del museo.

In: Imke Hansen, Enrico Heitzer, Katarzyna Nowak (Hg.): Ereignis & Gedächtnis. Neue Perspektiven auf die Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Berlin 2014, S. 217-253; Zweitveröffentlichung in: Daniela Allmeier u.a. (Hg.): Erinnerungsorte in Bewegung. Zur Neugestaltung des Gedenkens an Orten nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen. Bielefeld: Transcript 2016.

ISBN: 978-3-937624-72-3
Bestellung im Buchhandel oder über bestellung@pg-va.de

Wie geht die Bildungsarbeit im ethnologischen Museum mit dem kolonialen Erbe der Institutionen um? Kann das ethnologische Museum ein Ort des Verlernens sein, und wenn ja, wie? Die zweibändige Publikation widmet sich der Vermittlungsarbeit in dekolonisierender Perspektive.

Der erste Band, Eine Analyse gegenwärtiger Diskurse in einem konfliktreichen Praxisfeld, basiert auf einer qualitativen Interviewstudie mit Vermittler*innen in Museen in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. Die Analyse macht Vermittlung in ethnologischen Museen als Feld widerstreitender Wissensordnungen sichtbar, zwischen den Konventionen besucher*innenorientierter Museumspädagogik, Partizipation, reflexiven Ansätzen aus der Ethnologie und der postkolonialen Kritik. Im Double Bind zu handeln zeigt sich mit Rückgriff auf post- und dekoloniale Zugänge in der Pädagogik als  zentral für eine pädagogische Ethik im ethnologischen Museum. Zugleich argumentiert die Studie mit historischen Kontextualisierungen, dass die Widersprüche selbst einer dekolonisierenden Lektüre unterzogen und verschoben werden müssen, um zu Handlungsräumen zu gelangen.

Veröffentlichung: 26.07.2021 (Neuer Vertrieb: 30.5.2022)
Sprache: deutsch
744 Seiten, Klappenbroschur
ISBN: 978-3-937624-72-3
Bestellung im Buchhandel oder über bestellung@pg-va.de

ICOM China and Museums Association of China requested the keynote speech on the ICOM's offered theme: I readily responded as China represents not only the grand culture but also a civilization in its own right. My Chinese experiences, be it from lecturing over-there or receiving their awarded projects in Dubrovnik (at The Best in Heritage conference) where always rewarding and it needed a gesture of thanks.

What I have to say is much explained in other texts on this site and my own www.mnemosophy.com where the video version of this lecture is recorded.

Please consult another, vast text on museums in China:
"Museums and public engagement, four decades of changing concepts and strategies in China"

In: Elke Gryglewski, Verena Haug, Gottfried Kößler, Thomas Lutz, Christa Schikorra im Auftrag der AG Gedenkstättenpädagogik (Hg.): Gedenkstättenpädagogik. Kontext, Theorie und  Praxis der Bildungsarbeit zu NS-Verbrechen, Berlin 2015, S. 19-43.

The ongoing media debate surrounding 'fake news' is of particular relevance to archaeologists because archaeology has a vested interest in promoting authenticity, facts, and expertise and delegitimizing non-professional, fake and pseudo-archaeologies. This paper considers the convergence of these themes in the media coverage the 2021 Victoria stone pillar affair.

History, celebrity and everyday experience are often intimately woven together in ways that scholars have not yet rigorously investigated through the lens of temporality. In this article, I will examine the discursive convergence of unlikely narratives – often through the historical happenstance of their simultaneous occurrence – and argue that such convergences are fundamental to the ways in which celebrity life narratives circulate, evolve and are revised within culture. I will propose the method of historical adjacency for illuminating such convergences and use the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as a case study to examine the insight gained through analysis of such convergences, focusing particularly upon the revival of interest in her in 2001 and the co-opting of her life narrative into the contemporary narrative of female strength and dignity post 9/11.

edited by Bruno Brulon Soares, UNIRIO

Were it not for Bruno Brulon, we would probably not meet, dear reader. Or, maybe we would in Dubrovnik at The Best in Heritage. However, I regard this opportunity to speak to you from my long perspective as a privilege, especially not being obliged to speak from the theoretical high grounds. Being old usually turns into full time job, but fascinations keep postponing that. Bruno knows that my disheveled manner and disrespect of form may serve some purpose (in these leaden times) as introduction to other more serious readings. I was easily persuaded, as for decades I am sharing as much of my work as I can. To this purpose, I have created “my own” conference. To share more, I have created a site www.mnemosophy.com and have put all my texts and books on Internet freely accessible. I believe that humanist and social science products should be highly accessible, or, to be honest, entirely free.

In particular feminist perspectives have highlighted how the knowledge production practices of curators and of art educationalists are rarely considered to be of equal value. The fact that many artistic and curatorial formats draw on art educationalists’ knowledge and expertise as raw material but thereby neglect to name sources and references has also come in for criticism. What can we do to prevent knowledge production in the field of art education and outreach from being marginalised? How can we challenge the attributions laid down by and in art institutions?

ÖZET

Tüm dünyada hazırlıksız yakalanılan Covid-19 pandemisi kültürel hayata katılımı doğrudan etkilemiştir. Pandeminin uzun bir zamana yayılması kültürel hayata katılımda çeşitli önlemler alınmasını beraberinde getirmiştir. Müzelerin pandemi süreciyle birlikte geliştirdikleri izleyici katılım yöntemleri de bu önlemler arasında yer almaktadır. Bu makalede izleyici kavramı, güncel izleyici geliştirme modelleri ile pandemi sürecinde müzelerin durumu ve dönüşen izleyici geliştirme stratejilerine değinilecektir. Müzelerin güncel izleyici geliştirme stratejileri ve yeni katılım metotları üzerine düşünmek olası yeni pandemilerin yönetilmesinde deneyim ve bilgi birikimi yaratacağı için önemlidir.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Müze, İzleyici Geliştirme, Covid-19

MUSEUMS AND THEIR AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES OF DURING THE PANDEMIC

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic, which caught unwares the entire world, directly affected the participation to cultural life. Its long time effects paved the way for diverse measures to facilitate the participation in cultural life. The museums’ audience participation methods adapted to the new pandemic conditions are among such measures.This article discusses the concept of audience, up-to-date audience development models, the conditions of museums during the pandemic and transformation of audience development strategies. It is important to explore recent audience development strategies and participation methods of museums as it would contribute to the common experience and knowledge for the management of potential pandemics.
Keywords: Museum, Audience Development, Covid-19

It was a call from ICOM China to deliver a short, 15 min introductory speech to their annual meeting at the occasion of International Museum Day. Of course I could not say no. Aware that that was not an the circumstance for a long, innovative speech, I decided to serve my hosts best with a choice of a few slides and some basic ideas. The original was a video clip shown to the audience and these here are the notes I have used to produce it.

The concept of intangible heritage can have significant implications for museums in the areas of collecting, making exhibitions and working with communities. Drawing on the model of the 'post-museum' envisioned by Hooper-Greenhill (2000), some of the ways in which the concept of intangible heritage can affect museum practice are examined. The limitations and concerns around the engagement of museums with intangible heritage are analysed and future challenges are identified. It is hoped that this paper will provide practical insights and help explain how the concept of intangible heritage can contribute to the discussions around the 'post-museum'. The aim is that the issues discussed will raise awareness with respect to the impact of intangible heritage and invite museums to extend their concern from objects per se to the human element inherent in objects.

This article argues that the future of palaces-museums lies on the fragile balance between bedazzlement and provocation. The author discusses how historic palaces need to equally invest in the production of impressive displays as well as in the development of strategies to inspire visitors to find deeper meaning behind the splendour of the site’s architecture and history.
This text presents some of the first results of a project that brought together a group of scholars and the staff of the National Palace of Sintra to define the principles that should guide the design of a new long-term exhibition.

What is so “critical” about critical heritage studies? This has been debated by academics working in the interdisciplinary field of heritage studies and professionals working in the allied fields of historic preservation, heritage management, and museology. For some, adding the word “critical” to heritage studies suggests a schism in this interdisciplinary field between those that are “critical” and those that are somehow not. An unhelpful mischaracterization suggests that those engaged in critical heritage studies are overly “theoretical” and only interested in critique, while others in heritage studies are only interested in developing “best practice” for the protection or safeguarding of heritage. Critical heritage studies does not have a monopoly on theory or critique. However, it is an approach to the study of heritage that seeks to understand the social, cultural, and political consequences heritage has and subsequently make some form of intervention into heritage policy and practice. This is because a “critical” heritage studies both emerged from and operates at the intersection of debates and tensions between academic research and the practices of managing and conserving those things and elements defined as “heritage.”

This paper reviews the development of critical heritage studies and the research agendas that currently frame this movement.

This project aims to revisit the American quilt as a work of art deserving of a different kind of use, care, repair, and preservation than that recommended by classical conservation theory. Defined as a pieced and layered textile that has been stitched or tied together through acts of surface mark making, this study locates the quilt at a productive interstice of Heidegger's conception of the work of art, feminist craft theory, and the speculative aesthetic paradigms articulated by Deleuze with the later work of new materialists Jane Bennet and Brian Massumi. Taking shape as a feminist material ontology responding to the occidental subject-object paradigm and the conceptualism of modernist art theory, I suggest that the quilt is a work of art that is strangely something other than a whole, static, consistent object that can be regarded at a distance or preserved as such. Rather, the quilt is vital, affective, and active in its very presence-a work of art that addresses maker, user, and viewer through precognitive encounters of intensities and force.

Forwarding Salvador Muñoz-Viñas' provocations of contemporary conservation theory, I suggest that such a work of art may be flattened or enframed if preserved or saved in the same manner as a painting or a sculpture; a vital materialism suggests and demands also a preservation of its praxis and poetics. I posit that such a work of art is only truly preserved through maintenance, continual re-engagement, and iterative alteration. Through such practices, the maker-preserver imparts time and historicity back into matter through use and repair, re-virtualizing the quilt and its potentialities. The iterative quilt that remains in relations is working as art-there is no conservation, only endless individuation.

Despite a history deeply implicated in an imperial, bourgeois and phallocentric social order, the museum is a cultural institution that can be redeemed from this legacy of racism, classism and sexism. Or so it would seem from reading the now burgeoning critical scholarship on museums. Here, almost all of the museum’s analysts argue that, in some way or another, the institution can be reformed so that it can overcome the exclusions of the past and realize its true democratic vocation. Seduced by the institution’s own rhetoric of its democratic potential, these cultural analysts produce redemptive narratives that ultimately mimic the reformism of the museum’s own political logic. Defending this contention, this article proceeds, first, by demonstrating the persistence of this redemptive narrative as an enduring trope in critical museum scholarship; second, it focuses on two sophisticated variations on this narrative - those articulated respectively by James Clifford and Tony Bennett. Third, drawing on Foucault’s work on subjectivation, this article proposes a critical politics that returns to museums not with the demand that they better represent ‘us’ so that ‘we’ can finally ‘discover who we are’, but rather with the theoretical and political injunction that, as modern institutional sites that subjectivize subjects, museums are one of those key cultural loci where ‘we’ might, indeed must, ‘refuse what we are’.

Zwei Ausstellungsbesuche in Pandemiezeiten: Unsere beiden Autorinnen besuchen vor Ort mit Maske und zu Hause im Netz die Ausstellung "Ich sehe was, was Du nicht siehst" des Stadtlabors des Historischen Museums Frankfurt. In ihrem zweistimmigen Artikel legen sie ihre Erfahrungen nebeneinander und sind überrascht von den Ergebnissen.

In this comparative, international study Marilena Alivizatou investigates the relationship between museums and the new concept of “intangible heritage.” She looks at the rise of intangible heritage within the global sphere of UN cultural policy and explores its implications both in terms of international politics and with regard to museological practice and critical theory. Using a grounded ethnographic methodology, Alivizatou examines intangible heritage in the local complexities of museum and heritage work at the National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, the National Museum of the American Indian, the quai Branly Museum and the Horniman Museum.  This multi-sited, cross-cultural approach highlights key challenges currently faced by cultural institutions worldwide in understanding and presenting living heritage.

1990年代以來，臺灣社會逐漸浮現一群透過跨國婚姻移民、移工，特別是東南亞社會，而產生的社會新成員。由於文化、社會經驗的差異，其具體生命處境與其子女教育問題成為致力於社會批判關懷與教育改善的團體所關注的重要議題。博物館該如何思考與應對這種社會文化現象？
晚近博物館的批判性研究對博物館角色的反省，視博物館為凸顯社會不平等的論述平臺，並強調其作為社會包容性的角色。為了維繫社群感與主張其社會、政治經濟要求的群體，紛紛向控制其文化呈現的機構挑戰其再現權利。博物館對文化的再現既然是一個爭論的場域，博物館在實務上如何面對社會的多元文化與多元社群的需求？誰能控制展示媒介與如何展示也成為多元文化再現必須思考的議題。本文首先耙梳文化賦權、社會與文化包容相關概念，接著從新移民相關的展示教育案例討論其背後的文化關懷。最後，綜合析論新移民議題在臺灣社會與博物館界的文化意涵與其可能性為何。

My article discusses how the universal exposition is displayed in the Petit Palais museum in Paris. The Petit Palais’ articulation of its own relationship to the Exposition of 1900 raises important questions about whether or not the full and complex history of the exposition can be on display in the same space reserved for national pride and mass tourism. Through a reading of the permanent installation at the Petit Palais, I examine what the universal exposition reveals about grappling with legacy.

Yazının başlığındaki soruyu tartışmaya başlamadan önce bir adım geriye giderek "müze nedir?", "müze deyince ne hissediyoruz, gözümüzün önüne ne tür imgeler geliyor?" üzerine düşünmek istiyorum. 18. yüzyılda kamu müzelerinin doğuşundan 20. yüzyılın ortalarına kadar, toplumun büyük kesiminin müzeler hakkındaki genel intibası bu alanların sıkıcı, loş, eski eşyaların tıkıştırıldığı bir arka oda ya da mezarlık hissi uyandıran alanlar olduğudur. Bu hissiyatın altında yatan nedenlerden biri müzeyi çoğunlukla arkeoloji müzeleri, doğa tarihi müzeleri ve güzel sanatlar müzeleri ile eşitleme eğiliminin olmasıdır. Müze denince tahayyül edilen nesnelerin bitki ve hayvan fosilleri, lahit, Antik Çağ heykeli, Rönesans dönemine ait tablo ya da heykel ile sınırlı kalmasında ise bu eğilimin katkısı olduğu söylenebilir. İçinde alay tınısı barındıran ve ölü bir geçmişe gönderme yapan "müzelik" ve "müze gibi" ifadeler de müzenin güncelle bağı olmayan köhne mekânlar olduğu imajını pekiştirmektedir. Peki, bu düşünceler gerçeği yansıtıyor mu(ydu)? Müzeler aslında nasıl yerler(di)?

This essay explores the ways in which questions of citizenship and national identity have informed survey exhibitions of American art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It looks, in particular, at three exhibitions: The West as America, 1991; American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915 (2009); and Behold! America (2021).

Stobiecka and Stobiecki discuss phenomena taking place within and around the field of historiography, including commercialisation, “gadgetisation” and techno-enthusiasm. In the first case, history becomes a commodity that must compete with other goods on the market. In the second case, history is treated as a game, which leads to the
objectification and trivialisation of historical experience. Techno-enthusiasm, finally, is rooted in the digital preferences of the agencies sponsoring cultural institutions and their belief that an immersive vision of the past will attract more visitors to emerging cultural establishments. In contemporary Poland these phenomena intersect especially in the
dominant model of the narrative museum critiqued by the authors.