"History is not the past; it is the sense we make of the past" - Ken Yellis
This week our readings challenged us to think about how we
contextualize public art, monuments, artifacts, and historical objects. The
readings for this week hold important insight on the ways the public and museum
visitors perceive what is publicly displayed, and the ways these displays
create meaning through time. In Kirk Savage's book, Standing Soldiers,
Kneeling Slaves, the meanings behind public monuments are explored, as well
as their impact through time. This book gave an introduction to commemoration
and monument-making up front, but Savage's main focus was on "the age of
monuments" so to speak - the period directly after the Civil War. Before
focusing on specific monuments, Savage took care to explore themes of commemoration
and display - who paid for these
statues and who made them? The
groups and individuals who fund-raised for public monuments had specific
reasons for doing so. They typically took pride in "speaking for the
majority", and announced that they merely acted as channels through which public opinion could be expressed in a
permanent manner. (6). Savage also explained that "to commemorate is to
seek historical closure". (4). Meaning that a monument should express
public opinion on a historical subject, and once it is (literally) in stone,
the issue can finally be laid to rest.
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| The Emancipation Memorial Courtesy of {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Memorial} |
My favorite example from the book came from chapter four, "Freedom's Memorial", which analyzed a controversial "monument to emancipation"
of Abraham Lincoln. The idea for the monument came directly after the assassination
of Lincoln, and was financed entirely by free blacks - it would be the first
public monument to display emancipation as a victory for freedom, and it would
be called the Freedmen's Memorial to Abraham Lincoln (Emancipation Monument).
It was completed in 1876 after much debate and controversy over proposed models
for the monument. What this chapter comes down to is that the monument was
intended to "make the interracial nation a palpable reality in public
space", but instead the finished product was "the very archetype of
slavery: (the bronze freedman) is stripped, literally and figuratively, bereft
of personal agency, social position, and accouterments of culture. Juxtaposed
against the fully dressed, commanding figure of Lincoln, the black figure's
nudity loses its heroic aspect and works instead as negation." (90). The
monument is about domination, rather than emancipation. Once you understand the
underpinnings of the monument in this example, it becomes easier to see this
happening in so many! The body language of figures in monuments, the
"classical" poses of white men, and the juxtaposition of height,
clothing, and expression make the undercurrent of racial tension evident in
many monuments. This chapter makes me think about perception and
projection. What ideology do I want to put out there in exhibits? Obviously one
of acceptance, but how much of the contextualization done in museums are
products of our own biases and life experiences?
In Ken Yellis's “Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me: Reflections on
the History Wars,” museum exhibits are looked at with a critical eye to
examine just what message is being displayed to the public. I have read this
piece twice before this class, so instead of recycling old ideas, I thought I'd
look at this from a different angle. Rather than focusing on how difficult and contested subject
matter was displayed, I'd like to think about the why. This brings to mind the controversial traveling anatomy
exhibit - Bodyworlds. Bodyworlds is an exhibit that displays plastinated
human remains (bodies, particular organ systems of the body, developmental
stages of organs, etc.) in somewhat theatrical poses and settings. For example,
there is a "horse and rider" display of a human muscular system
riding a horse's muscular system. This exhibit sways back and forth between art
and science, and has left audiences bothered and intrigued along the way. So
why does this controversial "scientific" exhibition draw so much
attention? Why did Mining the Museum stir
up so much excitement? Are block buster exhibits the new normal? It's
interesting to think about the possibility of always looking for "the next
best thing" within museum exhibition, and the implications of focusing so
much on aesthetics and public reaction. Are we as museum professionals doomed
to strive to display the cool history?
This concerns me because while displaying weird, scary, or fun historical
content is bound to draw crowds ($$$), the stories which need to be displayed
the most (those of marginalized peoples, or critiques of the exclusive past) don't
always afford the cool & fun exhibits. Perhaps shock is the new
expectation. Perhaps Bodyworlds is
the new normal.
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| The Rearing Horse with Rider - Bodyworlds Courtesy of {http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/media/picture_database_auto/} |
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