Western Museums Research Articles

Museum space and the experience of the sacred

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the dichotomous way we talk about and experience the sacred in art museum space. While Western museum culture has generally encouraged the notion of the museum visit as a quasi-religious, even transcendent, aesthetic encounter with art and architecture, it has shunned particular and obvious expressions of religious devotion. Why is a certain understanding of “sacred space” permissible, while other meanings of that term seem to make museum professionals uncomfortable? Using numerous examples, this essay first considers museum space and the way we have come to talk about it, paying particular attention to the evolution from classical to modern architecture and the effect that has had on the museum experience. It then considers the treatment of religious artifacts and cultures in museum spaces and how this might be changing today, as museums deliberately pursue exhibitions with a more ambitious social agenda, one with contemporary religious content and relevance. The author uses Stephen Greenblatt's formulation of two contrasting modes of museum experience, “resonance” and “wonder,” to think through varying dimensions of visitor response, and suggests how a sacred/not sacred tension in Western museums is a product of specific historical relationships between culture, art, and museums.

Display, Restitution and World Art History: The Case of the ‘Benin Bronzes’

The article begins by discussing changing modes of display for non-Western visual cultures in Western museums, including Britain. Using the ‘Benin bronzes’ as a case study, the article argues for the existence of three distinct frameworks of display, linked to changing paradigms of art practice (broadly speaking, academic, modernist and postmodern/postcolonial). In the second part, the article moves on to discuss issues surrounding debates over the restitution of works held in Britain and elsewhere to their places of origin, again using the case of the Benin bronzes to focus broader questions. Finally, the discussion moves outwards to consider some of the implications for current debates about a ‘world art history’: arguing that this latter needs not only to guard against the prospect of a quasi-imperial expansion of current liberal notions of ‘art’, but, perforce, must also take account of contemporary practices, themselves critical of both academic and modernist conceptions of ‘art’.

Wonders without wounds: On singularity, museum and organisation

This paper consists of two parts. The first provides a philosophical history of the concept of wonder, taking Heidegger's reading of the Greek verb thaumazein (‘to wonder') as its point of departure. It shows how the Greek sense of wonder, understood as a dwelling in the everyday, has changed over time. Wonder becomes understood as curiosity and amazement, and gradually turns into something suspicious in the modern age. The second part illustrates how the modern loss of wonder that Heidegger speaks of can also be seen in the history of the Western museum, in particular its transition from Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, to the birth of the modern museum at the end of the eighteenth century. The paper argues that the modern museum has developed a way of organising its objects that destroys their singularity, and that thereby the experience of wonder in the Greek sense of thaumazein is lost. The tentative conclusion suggests that the hostility to wonder as manifested in the modern museum can also be found in forms of modern organisation in general, and that it is embodied in organisational figures like the manager, the professional and the knowledge worker.

The Transcultural Roots of Modernism: Imagist Poetry, Japanese Visual Culture, and the Western Museum System

If the direct and massive influence of Asia on Western literature of the last century were adequately acknowledged and researched, it would be possible to see Anglo-American Modernist poetry as part of a global, rather than a merely provincial, cultural development. This article demonstrates that imagist poetry, traditionally regarded as the first authentically Modernist literary initiative to appear in English, was in fact a response to a dramatic resurgence in pan-Asian cultural awareness that had begun in Tokyo during the closing years of the nineteenth century, and which spread across Eastern Asia and the Indian Subcontinent to reach Europe a few years before the onset of the First World War. A large quantity of previously unpublished documentary evidence is presented to show that the imagist experiments of Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, and John Gould Fletcher were indebted to an engagement with Japanese visual culture that was far deeper than has ever previously been suggested. The venues for these seminal meetings between East and West were the museums of Britain and the United States.

UTIMUT: past heritage-future partnerships: discussions on repatriation in the 21st century

More than ever before, ethnic groups, peoples and nations are fighting to regain control of their lost cultural heritage and ancestral human remains and this raises questions as to the Western museums’ ownership of their foreign collections. This book, however, identifies a need to move beyond discussions of ownership, power and control in favour of exploring new kinds of partnerships between museums and the peoples or countries of origin, partnerships based on equitability and reconciliation. The authors explore a wide variety of different cooperative approaches such as knowledge sharing, capacity building, and physical as well as virtual repatriation.

Cincinnati’s Infernal Regions Exhibit and the Waning of Calvinist Authority

The Infernal Regions exhibit, which was hosted by Cincinnati’s Western Museum from 1828 to 1867, presented visitors with a vivid virtual hell. Created primarily by English author Francis Trollope and soon‐to‐be‐famous sculptor Hiram Powers, the exhibit featured an array of realistic, mobile automatons, as well as special effects of sound and lighting. Famous in its time, the simulated hell reflected a fundamental transformation of American religious culture. While some visitors took the exhibit’s content seriously, the producers of the Infernal Regions were critics of Calvinist theology, and they treated their subject – hell, damnation, and eternal suffering – as a source of entertainment and profit. While the mechanical ingenuity and novelty of the Infernal Regions drew thousands of paying customers, the religious content signaled the declining power of Christian ministers to control religious and moral discourse – especially the fading ability of educated Calvinist ministers to maintain rigorous doctrines of predestination and hell.

The Violence of Collection: <i>Indian Killer</i>’s Archives

The Violence of CollectionIndian Killer’s Archives Janet Dean (bio) At the close of Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, in a final chapter titled “Creation Story,” a killer carries a backpack containing, among other things, “dozens of owl feathers, a scrapbook, and two bloody scalps in a plastic bag” (419). Readers schooled in the psychopathologies of real and fictional serial killers will be familiar with the detail: body parts or other “trophies” (to use this killer’s term) often serve to memorialize a murderer’s acts (149). That the tokens of violence here are scalps and owl feathers reflects the racial entanglements of this particular killing spree and of Alexie’s novel in general. The accompanying scrapbook points to a less spectacular, if no less significant, concern of the text, a concern with the systematized collection and preservation of artifacts of violent racial encounter. As the chapter title indicates, the killer’s collection creates: it produces a narrative of ethnographic trauma and racial identity. The archive is resistant to tribal specification. The killer, wearing a mask of “cedar, or pine, or maple,” brings his archive to “this reservation or that reservation. Any reservation, a particular reservation” (419). Still, the killer’s dance, “over five hundred years old,” draws hundreds of indigenes, “all learning the same song, the exact dance” (420). At the center of a spontaneous, revelatory ceremony, the archive seems to generate an indigenous identity that is both specific and generalized, a touchstone for all Native American experience since European contact. The creation of “Creation Story” enacts a central paradox of collections, which theorists have argued serve to contain objects [End Page 29] in a system of knowledge and simultaneously to solidify the identity of the collector. Collections, it has been argued, reveal more about those who create them than about the objects collected. The scalps and scrapbook in the killer’s backpack may memorialize acts of violence against white men, but they are by no means a contemporary adaptation of the warrior’s counting coup. Rather, the artifacts are at the center of a radical redefinition of indigenous identity produced through the archive of racial encounter. The anonymous Native Americans seemingly drawn by the items in the killer’s pack are poised to learn “the exact dance” of indigenous identity. That identity is predicated here on artifacts of non-Native being, on objects—white scalps—that define the non-Native other as victims of violent interracial encounter. The killer’s collection reflects Alexie’s penchant for ironic reversal: in contrast to the familiar dynamic of western museums and private ethnographic archives, white men are the objects of collection rather than the collectors here, and Native Americans are the ones reveling in the accumulation of artifacts. In fact, the killer’s collection serves as counterbalance to the many collections in the novel that are created by whites to define Native Americans and, consequently, to maintain a racial hierarchy in the modern world. An anthropology professor covetously files away audiotapes of tribal elders performing oral narratives. The white father of an adopted Native American son pores over his atlases of colonized spaces, while his wife conducts research in her collection of books on Native American history and culture. A detective novelist eavesdrops in an indigenous watering hole, accumulating material for his book. A white professor’s syllabus for his course on Native American studies gathers a more conventional set of “Indian stories” in the required readings. Through such collections, white authority figures mark their understanding of and their authority over “authentic” Native American culture by accruing both real and imagined artifacts of indigenous existence. To various degrees, these white acts of collection resemble the anthropological appropriation of tribal objects that has been the subject of intense debate between tribal leaders and administrators [End Page 30] of mainstream cultural institutions in recent years. While that debate centers on material artifacts, on art works, ceremonial items, and human remains, Alexie focuses on the collection of more abstract cultural property taken, sometimes forcibly, off the reservation. Such collections serve as the basis for Alexie’s critique of cultural imperialism. In Indian Killer, collections are part of the mechanism of racial and ethnic...

Bodies of Color

Brazilian art and performance have become frequent offerings to Western museums and stages in recent years. After Brazil: Body and Soul (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2001), the massive three-month Tropicilia festival at the Barbican (London, 2006) featured visual art, music, film, theatre, and dance celebrating the cultural revolution that re-defined Brazilian art and national identity in the 1960s and beyond. The exhibition part, curated by Carlos Basualdo, traveled from Chicago to London, Lisbon, and finally to the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Historians credit Hdlio Oiticica and his 1967 Tropicilia exhibition in Rio de Janeiro as the singular event which ignited a cultural upheaval, soon to be suppressed by years of military dictatorship. While the music of Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, and the movement that became known as tropicalismo, continued to have a lasting influence on world music

Displaying Traditional Yorùbá Religious Objects in Museums: The Western Re-Making of a Cultural Heritage

This paper, based on doctoral research carried out from January 2003 through July 2005, addresses the interpretation and representation of non-Western religious material culture in Western museums and offers a comprehensive view of the way traditional religious Yorùbá objects are displayed in contemporary museums in Britain. Museum exhibitions can be conceived as a visual narrative, which absorbs the religious essence of traditional religious non-Western objects into broad categories. At the same time, these categories are still strongly affected by Western aesthetic appreciation, understanding, and classificatory systems. In museum displays, traditional Yorùbá religious material culture loses its distinctiveness and is absorbed into global pan-African representations. Therefore, in order to be able to reach more informed or "authentic" interpretations, museums should include the memories and voices of the people who are "closer" to the original meanings of traditional religious objects.

The Theology of Memory: Mormon Historical Consciousness

Research Article| January 01 2007 The Theology of Memory: Mormon Historical Consciousness Steven L. Olsen Steven L. Olsen Steven L. Olsen received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has worked for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for his entire career and currently serves as an associate managing director of the Family and Church History Department. He has presented and published widely in the fields of Mormon studies and museum studies, has taught anthropology at Brigham Young University, and has served in a variety of professional service organizations, including the Western Museums Association, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Utah State Humanities Council, Utah Office of Museum Services, and American Society of Church History. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The FARMS Review (2007) 19 (2007) (2): 25–35. https://doi.org/10.5406/farmsreview.19.2.0025 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Steven L. Olsen; The Theology of Memory: Mormon Historical Consciousness. The FARMS Review 1 January 2007; 19 (2007) (2): 25–35. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/farmsreview.19.2.0025 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressMormon Studies Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Eastern religions come to western pennsylvania university museum and kipp gallery, indiana museum of pennsylvania

(2006). Eastern religions come to western pennsylvania university museum and kipp gallery, indiana museum of pennsylvania. Material Religion: Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 394-396.

Museums and Globalization

It has now been almost fifteen years since Rosalind Krauss published her influential essay on the cultural logic of the late capitalist which identified a profound shift in both the identity of museums, and the increasingly corporate nature of the contexts in which they operate.1 From our vantage point today in the twenty-first century, museums appear to have completed this shift and firmly entered a new era of existence. Everywhere around us we see an increased public interest in museums, and a heightened role and renewed visibility for them in our society. Every year seems to bring either a new museum controversy, like the Sensation exhibit in Brooklyn, or a new mega-museum itself, always bigger and better than the last, like the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, or the Tate Modern in London. It is widely recognized that museums are central to urban redevelopment, and that the museum commission for an architect is considered the capstone of an architectural career. At the same time, the most recent economic downturn has led the media to increasingly speculate that museums are suffering from an identity crisis today, perched precariously at the financial brink while over-marketing their collections and sacrificing their institutional integrity.2 So what exactly is the nature of this new era, and how should we critically approach these numerous and often contradictory trends? Clearly, there is no pure oppositional practice vis a vis the contemporary that is to say, no museological context wholly uncontaminated by the circuits of capitalism, or the history of power of the western museum. How, then, should we begin to assess the range of emergent museum practices and counter-practices within an era of globalization? What standards of judgment are appropriate for this kind of critical task? And what is the role of the museum in the new public sphere dominated by globalization? Such questions, I argue, point to the necessity of a global perspective in a critical approach to museums today, one that is not exclusive to the logic of the art but rather grounded in the dynamics of a broader emergent culture of exhibiting, and situated within a historical frame. By briefly examining the international practices of the Guggenheim Museum, in particular, I offer in this essay one critical approach to the phenomenon of the globalising museum, and suggest the value of a postcolonial perspective for a museum studies that is relevant to the twenty-first century. The McGuggenheim Effect As Krauss recognized, the new era of the late capitalist museum was perhaps best embodied by the figure of Thomas Krens, the aggressive director of the Guggenheim Museum, who became somewhat of a Donald Trump or a Bill Gates of the museum world. Krens earned this reputation during the 1990's by presiding over a major expansion of the an initiative he called the Global Guggenheim, which many feel was unprecedented in the art museum world. When Krens arrived at the Guggenheim in 1988 at the age of forty-two, with an MBA from Yale instead of the requisite doctorate in Art History, the museum consisted of the famous Frank Lloyd Wright building in New York and a small subsidiary collection in Venice. Under Krens, the Guggenheim built new branches in New York's Soho, Berlin, Las Vegas and of course Bilbao, and pursued much-hyped additional projects in Venice, Brazil, Russia, and lower Manhattan. In an interview with Forbes Magazine in 1998, Krens continued to tick off the places he wished to see more Guggenheims installed: Two or three institutions in South America, he boasted, as well as East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.3 Such bravado also drove several blockbuster shows at the New York Guggenheim under Krens like The Art of the Motorcycle in 1998 and Giorgio Armani in 2000/2001, an exhibition consisting famously of clothing made by the fashion designer. The official sponsor of the latter was In Style magazine, but Armani himself made an individual gift-reportedly fifteen million dollars-to the museum. …

On Recognizing Things

AbstractIn this paper, travelogues and scientific reports on the exploration of Central Africa (ca 1875-1914) are read against a background of renewed interest in the anthropology of material culture. Of special interest is what these sources reveal about the epistemic, political, and economic conditions of collecting «ethnographic objects». Concentrating on the concept of recognition and its denial, the paper argues that objects found their place in Western museums and schemes of interpretation to the extent that they were dematerialized; decontextualization was constitutive of ethnographic objects and their collection. Comparing ethnographic objects with ethnic artefacts, commonalities and differences are shown to have been rooted in contrasting, yet inextricably linked, projects of creating identity as well as alterity.

On Recognizing Things

AbstractIn this paper, travelogues and scientific reports on the exploration of Central Africa (ca 1875-1914) are read against a background of renewed interest in the anthropology of material culture. Of special interest is what these sources reveal about the epistemic, political, and economic conditions of collecting «ethnographic objects». Concentrating on the concept of recognition and its denial, the paper argues that objects found their place in Western museums and schemes of interpretation to the extent that they were dematerialized; decontextualization was constitutive of ethnographic objects and their collection. Comparing ethnographic objects with ethnic artefacts, commonalities and differences are shown to have been rooted in contrasting, yet inextricably linked, projects of creating identity as well as alterity.

The Transatlantic Trade in African Ancestors: Mijikenda Memorial Statues (Vigango) and the Ethics of Collecting and Curating Non‐Western Cultural Property

This article details obstacles to deterrence of the global trade in non‐Western cultural properties and examines the ethics of Western collecting and curating of such property. We focus on the theft and global marketing of memorial statues (vigango) erected by the Mijikenda peoples of East Africa, relating an unusually well‐documented case study, tracing two statues from their theft to their appearance in U.S. museums. We describe the large‐scale extraction of such statues from Kenya and its impact on the Mijikenda, their quantity and distribution in U.S. museums, and local deterrence efforts. We call for greater activism by Western museum staffs, anthropologists, and other scholars to curb the trade in non‐Western cultural properties. We recommend (1) tightening legal loopholes, (2) strengthening observance of international agreements and the U.S. and international museums' codes of ethics, (3) stepping up field efforts to deter theft, and (4) educating the public about this growing trade. [Keywords: East Africa, Mijikenda peoples, international trade in African cultural property, museum ethics]

Constructing consciousness: Diasporic remembrances and imagining Africa in late modernity

Several simultaneous aesthetic movements have emerged in the African Diaspora that critically explore and reference Africa to address the questions of ‘history, migrations and trans-national practices’. This paper critically examines some of these recent processes of deploying and displaying particular African aesthetic forms in North American museums to raise questions about the re-telling of Africa's past in the Western museum. The paper also seeks to explore the new deployments that diasporic blacks, who are revisiting, exploring and evoking Africa, are evolving in the process of making art. Art that nourishes the act of becoming, articulating new identities and forging new meanings of existence that extends the meanings and identities of the black self even as they speak from a particular place, history, and experience.

TIP- The Web-Based Library Portal at Western Kentucky University and Its Implications for Libraries Becoming “Portals of First Choice” for Their Communities

This paper examines a library's need for a Web portal and reviews how Western Kentucky University Libraries and Museum created its unique library portal, the Topper InfoPortal (TIP). It also describes the unique concept and design of TIP and suggests that TIP can serve as a potential model for libraries to become “portals of first choice.”

Japan in American Museums: But Which Japan?

The Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized symposium, Asia in Museums, as part of celebrations of the museum's seventy-fifth anniversary in 1998. I was asked to talk aboutJapan in museums. When I was given my topic, in American Museums, I immediately responded with question: Which Japan? The theme and my response gave me an opportunity to reflect on collections in this country and their functions. My investigation took me down both familiar and unfamiliar paths of thinking about the reception and presentation of in foreign culture. This paper relays the gist of my presentation, and my continued theoretical musing about Japanese art as notion rather than about the objects themselves that make up this category. The general theme of the symposium was the examination of how Asian cultures are perceived and presented in museums. Our intention was to review broadly how Western museums, through their collections and displays, have told stories about cultures. To the extent that they narrate other societies by means of selected objects drawn from various cultures, museums today share their ancestry with nineteenth-century ethnographic museums. In recent catalogue published for Images of Other Cultures, an exhibition of ethnology held in Osaka showcasing artifacts from the British Museum, various scholars observed how and what artifacts from Japan were displayed in the British Museum during the early decades of the twentieth century.l According to one report, Japan was shown in two different types of space in the museum. On the one hand, Japan was part of the ethnographic gallery devoted to artifacts from Africa and Oceania. Here objects were presented alongside those of the Ainu, an indigenous community in northern Japan of distinctly non-Japanese linguistic and ethnic identity. On the other hand, paintings were represented in the prints and drawing gallery, and other objects, such as porcelain, metal work, lacquer ware, and netsuke,2 were displayed as works of art in the Oriental or T6yo [sic] gallery. The report also notes that a great deal was already known about the periods and styles of painting and substantial number of paintings were exhibited according to these categories in the prints and drawings gallery.3 In the Osaka exhibition catalogue,John Mack of the British Museum addressed in his essay two major issues concerning ethnological collections and ethnographic exhibitions. One issue has to do with the question, What are ethnographic collections and exhibitions about? He examined the role

Donald Cardwell (1919-1998)

Donald Cardwell was for forty years the leading British historian of tech nology. His first book, The Organisation of Science in England (London, 1957), led to his first teaching job as lecturer in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Leeds; it was reprinted in the 1970s and remained a recommended text for the Open University for over a decade. His second book, Steam Power in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1963), led to his appointment as reader in the history of science and technology at the Manchester College of Science and Technology (soon to become the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, or UMIST), where he stayed until his retirement in 1984. As the principal of UMIST, Vivian Bowden, guided his college toward international leadership, so Donald developed an international reputation. His books From Watt to Clausius: The Rise of Thermodynamics in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1973; published by the University of Iowa Press in 1989) and Technology, Science and History (London, 1972; published in the United States as Turning Points in Western Civilization) brought interna tional recognition in the form of the Dexter Prize (1973) and the Leonardo Da Vinci Medal (1981). Donald is the only non-American scholar to have been awarded both these honors. In building an international reputation Donald did not neglect his adopted home of Manchester. In 1968 he organ ized a conference and edited a collection of essays on John Dalton and the progress of science to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the great Manchester chemist. Six years later he edited another volume to celebrate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Manchester Mechanics Institution, the precursor to UMIST. But his most important contribution to Manchester was his championship of a sci ence museum for the region. That idea took concrete form when one of Donald's research assistants, Richard Hills, was appointed director of the locally funded North Western Museum of Science and Industry. Now, as the

La " Maison du pays ". L'exposition du patrimoine dans les musées privés d'Afrique de l'Ouest et du Cameroun

Abstract "Maison du pays": Exhibitions in Private Museums in Western Africa and Cameroon. — From the start of the colonial era, traditional powerholders undertook to set up, or supported setting up, museums most of which were private establishments. Nowadays, local and religious authorities, ethnie associations, and artists are, in turn, creating museums—usually and mainly with the intention of promoting the authority or identity of the founders, whether persons or groups. But do these museums have a feeling, such as exists in African societies, for a cultural heritage? Given both the meaning, as seen through exhibitions, assigned to the objects they store and the image they present of the group or community whose culture they display, very few of them depart from the Western museum model as conveyed by national museums.