Just heard about the Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine. Had to find this strip which is the only one I remembered from when I was a kid. (via Calvin and Hobbes Comic Strip, June 04, 1990 on GoComics.com)
Visual culture and cultural practice.
When I saw this:
It reminded me of this:
top: installing Zoe Strauss’ billboard project, 2012. below: Aleksandr Rodchenko.Sovetskoe foto (Soviet Photo), no. 10. October 1927. currently on view at MoMA.
I Announce Natural Persons to Arise
I announce natural persons to arise;
I announce justice triumphant;
I announce uncompromising liberty
and equality;
I announce the justification of candor,
and the justification of pride.I announce that the identity
of These States
is a single identity only;
I announce the Union
more and more compact, indissoluble;
I announce splendors and majesties
to make all the previous
politics of the earth insignificant.I announce adhesiveness—
I say it shall be limitless, unloosen’d;
I say you shall yet find
the friend you were looking for.I announce a man or woman coming—
perhaps you are the one, (So long!)
I announce the great individual,
fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate,
compassionate, fully armed.I announce a life that shall be copious,
vehement, spiritual, bold;
I announce an end that shall lightly
and joyfully meet its translation;
I announce myriads of youths,
beautiful, gigantic, sweet-blooded;
I announce a race of splendid
and savage old men.
Museography and the Heart of Darkness
Little compares to the grandeur found in galleries of Greco-Roman sculpture. Such hallowed halls–with their skylights and gardens, ceilings stretching to the heavens– are what many call to mind as the archetypal museum experience. There is a manner in which marble can render a room bright; sunlight bounces off of it when positioned just so, heightening the sensation of an exalted encounter.
Such presentation becomes analogous with art itself.
Let there be light.
One morning at the Met I turned a corner from such bright galleries into the interior rooms where the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas are on view. By comparison, the overall layout is dark and cramped, the lights are dim, the ceilings low. Strangely enough, work by contemporary artists from these regions suffer the same treatment. Between Heaven and Earth, 2006 by El Anatsui–whose spectacular tapestries I have seen shimmering in full daylight on building exteriors in Berlin–is relegated to this cloistered viewing area. Two Hands, 2010 by South African sculptor Claudette Schreuders is best left to be viewed on the Met’s website.
The relative duskiness in the rooms feels reflective of the Western worldview of the so-called “dark continent”, as though some unexamined prejudice has been applied to the design. Faced with the drastic difference, it becomes plain to me: the manner in which we come to revere cultures in history is due in part to the way their art is presented.
As I move between these two sections with very different museography, I think about the degree to which people have always made work in their own image: that Greeks who used marble, Africans who used wood and indigenous Americans who used earthen clay all utilized materials that approximated the color of their skin. There are exceptions: the ivory carvings of Benin, terracotta statues of China, all uses of stone. (Contemporary artists who deal with the stigma of making “racialized” work because their work looks like them can find refuge in the antiquities.) Still, the use of wood, bone, clay or non-precious metal feels like “the alternate” medium, as though it lacks the same importance to marble. (Schreuders sculpts in wood, El Anatsui works in metal.)
Some of these inequities arise when designing around the color in the works, chromatizing complexions. Years ago I worked on a project where photographs of west Africans were set in deep black and brown painted rooms. This portion of the exhibition became referred to “the heart of darkness” and for unarticulated reasons it was considered a natural and appropriate setting for the work. However, the habit of designing a space in with this strategy underestimates how people intuit cultural and historic value based on color, space and light.
Psychologically, dim displays cannot compete. The museography does little to reverse the opinion that this work–or these people–are worth glorfiying.
Students of museum studies, designers and curators must consider these factors and how the way work is presented reflects or contributes to long-standing bias. If a curator’s role is to contextualize the importance of a work of art, the designer must find approaches that truly reach those goals.
