There are very different ways to travel in a city. One of these means could be through sounds, noises, music. The sound of manea and jazz makes me think at Bucharest.
'Cristina' is a song interpreted by the jazz singer Maria Raducanu. This is an exceptional jazz piece of music that originaly was a manea interpreted by Azur.
I have also found a version of the song that sounds more like an original manea. Please listen to the difference manea.
The lirics (in Romanian) are something like this:
'When I met you, Cristina, you had a painfull beautifull hair and an apple flower was on your hair.
When the night comes over Bucharest/ I look at the girls and see that you are not there.
When we got separated, Cristina, you had a painfull beautifull hair and an apple flower fell down from your hair.'
For those intereted in what a manea is, please go and search. Briefly, it is a kind of music with oriental touch that can be heard in most Balkan countries, bearing different names: from turbo-folk to others...
When I hear this song I am thinking at the neighborhood that starts at back of Lizeanu junction, after one passes the barrier of the blocks of flats from Obor market. It is a very green and poor area, with small houses and improvised colours and textures. The sound of manea and jazz makes me think at Bucharest, summer, sunset, jazz and manea and last but not least, the fragility of an apple flower.
I have also received this version of the song, if you fancy rock manea. I did! Robin and the Backstabbers. Multumesc
marți, 29 mai 2012
vineri, 20 aprilie 2012
How to learn to be a curator
This is a programe in France (Grenoble) to train future curators in the field of arts.
The application deadline: 30th of April.
Please, see for the application pack and procedures:
http://www.ecoledumagasin.com/spip.php?article151
Application
Candidates are expected to have attained a level equivalent to a master’s degree, or to have some years of significant professional experience. They are aware of the production and the mediation of contemporary art within the institutional contexts, and are open to the current landscape of diversifying sites, forms, languages and economies of culture specific to emergences in the field of contemporary art. A sufficient level of cultural knowledge allows the candidate to question the debates on art, from other theoretical fields.
Considering the pedagogy at the École (autonomy of the participants, individual researches, study trips, meetings and seminars), the capacity to work both independently and collaboratively is necessary. The École du Magasin is an international program that welcomes artists, curators and theoreticians from all over the world. The languages of communication in the program are English and French. Candidates are expected to have sufficient knowledge of both languages. An ability to shift between languages is encouraged.
Session expenses are covered by the École. Participants are not required to pay tuition fees, but must assure their own living expenses. Please note that the École being organised independently from the University system, application to grants offered by the Ministry of Education are hardly received. Candidates searching for a financial support should rather apply to funds developed for an international residency by national or international public or private cultural organisations.
Admission to the École du Magasin is approved in two stages :
1. A pre-selection based on an application, which includes :
* Application form
* Current Curriculum Vitae
* Curatorial project proposal
* 1 Letter of motivation
* 3 cover letters
* Copies of Diploma and/or proofs of employment
The curatorial project proposal is of no more than three A4 pages recto/verso, and includes a curatorial statement, a presentation of the location of the project as well as the participating artists, and a realistic budget. The candidates precisely define the object of this project, and articulate its relevance within the field of art. The proposal must clearly convey the concerns and the nature of the project.
NB : The proposal is for admission purposes only and is not intended for consideration during the session.
Application must be sent between 1st February and no later then 30 April 2012. Only complete dossiers will be considered.
2. An interview with a jury in Grenoble. Pre-selected candidates will be informed by letter of the date of the interview (scheduled in June). Interviews via Internet can be arranged on a case-by-case basis.
The application deadline: 30th of April.
Please, see for the application pack and procedures:
http://www.ecoledumagasin.com/spip.php?article151
Application
Candidates are expected to have attained a level equivalent to a master’s degree, or to have some years of significant professional experience. They are aware of the production and the mediation of contemporary art within the institutional contexts, and are open to the current landscape of diversifying sites, forms, languages and economies of culture specific to emergences in the field of contemporary art. A sufficient level of cultural knowledge allows the candidate to question the debates on art, from other theoretical fields.
Considering the pedagogy at the École (autonomy of the participants, individual researches, study trips, meetings and seminars), the capacity to work both independently and collaboratively is necessary. The École du Magasin is an international program that welcomes artists, curators and theoreticians from all over the world. The languages of communication in the program are English and French. Candidates are expected to have sufficient knowledge of both languages. An ability to shift between languages is encouraged.
Session expenses are covered by the École. Participants are not required to pay tuition fees, but must assure their own living expenses. Please note that the École being organised independently from the University system, application to grants offered by the Ministry of Education are hardly received. Candidates searching for a financial support should rather apply to funds developed for an international residency by national or international public or private cultural organisations.
Admission to the École du Magasin is approved in two stages :
1. A pre-selection based on an application, which includes :
* Application form
* Current Curriculum Vitae
* Curatorial project proposal
* 1 Letter of motivation
* 3 cover letters
* Copies of Diploma and/or proofs of employment
The curatorial project proposal is of no more than three A4 pages recto/verso, and includes a curatorial statement, a presentation of the location of the project as well as the participating artists, and a realistic budget. The candidates precisely define the object of this project, and articulate its relevance within the field of art. The proposal must clearly convey the concerns and the nature of the project.
NB : The proposal is for admission purposes only and is not intended for consideration during the session.
Application must be sent between 1st February and no later then 30 April 2012. Only complete dossiers will be considered.
2. An interview with a jury in Grenoble. Pre-selected candidates will be informed by letter of the date of the interview (scheduled in June). Interviews via Internet can be arranged on a case-by-case basis.
joi, 29 martie 2012
Sfânta Înţelepciune / Holy Wisdom
Hagia Sofia, muzeu din Istanbul, 20 lire turceşti intrarea (aproximativ 8 euro), comoară a lumii. După cum ne spune draga de Wikipedia (scuzaţi lenea, nu mai traduc):
“Hagia Sophia (from the Greek: Ἁγία Σοφία, "Holy Wisdom"; Latin: Sancta Sophia or Sancta Sapientia; Turkish: Ayasofya) is a former Orthodox patriarchal basilica, later a mosque, and now a museum in Istanbul, Turkey. From the date of its dedication in 360 until 1453, it served as the Greek Patriarchal cathedral of Constantinople, except between 1204 and 1261, when it was converted to a Roman Catholic cathedral under the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople of the Western Crusader established Latin Empire. The building was a mosque from 29 May 1453 until 1931, when it was secularized. It was opened as a museum on 1 February 1935.
The Church was dedicated to the Logos, the second person of the Holy Trinity, its dedication feast taking place on 25 December, the anniversary of the Birth of the incarnation of the Logos in Christ. Although it is sometimes referred to as Sancta Sophia (as though it were named after Saint Sophia), sophia is the phonetic spelling in Latin of the Greek word for wisdom – the full name in Greek being Ναός τῆς Ἁγίας τοῦ Θεοῦ Σοφίας, "Church of the Holy Wisdom of God".”
Clarificare/remarcă importantă: din 360 până în 1054 (Marea Schismă), Sofia a fost, pur şi simplu, Catedrala Creştinătăţii. Şi acum…da, muzeu. Este greu să faci o asociere mentală între interiorul acela şi cuvântul muzeu. Poate că imaginea mea despre un „muzeu” era, până acum, cea a unui spaţiu aseptic, neutru, în care importante erau exponatele şi felul în care erau puse în valoare, şi nu „pereţii”.
În Sophia m-am simţit strivită, dar strivită în mod plăcut, dacă mi se permite formularea, de Istorie, nici mai mult nici mai puţin decât de o mare bucată din istoria umanităţii. Nu m-a apucat zelul religios, nu m-am simţit nici mai ortodoxă nici mai atee ca de obicei. Dar am simţit „uimire şi cutremur” uitându-mă la fecioara Maria (care stă acolo, privind vrute şi nevrute cu un calm...divin, din 867) şi la îngerii ieşiţi parcă dintr-un text apocrif, doar aripi şi război.
Din punctul meu de vedere Hagia Sofia (Sfânta Înţelepciune, să nu uităm) a devenit unul dintre cele mai convingătoare şi valoroase muzee de istorie din lume. Când vezi sfinţi palizi lângă împăraţi bizantini lângă citate într-o minunată caligrafie arabă te apucă un fior al vechimii, indiferent de ce ai nimerit acolo şi cu ce aşteptări.
Bineînţeles, în acest caz este vorba de mai mult decât un muzeu, oricât de minunat ar fi acesta. Dar una din calităţile sale trebuie să reprezinte o caracteristică esenţială a oricărui muzeu care merită acest nume: un muzeu trebuie să te mişte, intr-un fel sau altul. Din muzeu trebuie să ieşi cu mintea mai deschisă şi spiritul mai înălţat decât înainte să păşeşti acolo.
Am aruncat o privire pe lista Patrimoniului Mondial UNESCO, cât şi pe cea a criteriilor de selecţie (http://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria/). Hagia Sofia nu se află, momentan, pe lista permanentă, deşi ar cam trebui să fie. Aşa că aştept...
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul museum, 20 Turkish lira entrance fee (approximately 8 euros), treasure of the world. As our dear Wikipedia informs us:
“Hagia Sophia (from the Greek: Ἁγία Σοφία, "Holy Wisdom"; Latin: Sancta Sophia or Sancta Sapientia; Turkish: Ayasofya) is a former Orthodox patriarchal basilica, later a mosque, and now a museum in Istanbul, Turkey. From the date of its dedication in 360 until 1453, it served as the Greek Patriarchal cathedral of Constantinople, except between 1204 and 1261, when it was converted to a Roman Catholic cathedral under the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople of the Western Crusader established Latin Empire. The building was a mosque from 29 May 1453 until 1931, when it was secularized. It was opened as a museum on 1 February 1935.
The Church was dedicated to the Logos, the second person of the Holy Trinity, its dedication feast taking place on 25 December, the anniversary of the Birth of the incarnation of the Logos in Christ. Although it is sometimes referred to as Sancta Sophia (as though it were named after Saint Sophia), sophia is the phonetic spelling in Latin of the Greek word for wisdom – the full name in Greek being Ναός τῆς Ἁγίας τοῦ Θεοῦ Σοφίας, "Church of the Holy Wisdom of God".”
Important remark/clarification: from 360 to 1054 (year of the Great Schism), the Sophia was, simple as that, the Cathedral of Christendom. And now…yes, museum. It’s difficult to mentally associate this building with the word “museum”. Maybe that’s because my mental image of a museum has been that of a rather “aseptic” space, somewhat neutral, where the important part was always played by the exhibits and their positioning, and not by “the walls”.
In the Sophia I felt crushed, but in a very pleasant way if I may say so, by History, a large chunk of humanity’s history. Religious zeal did not grab me, nor did I feel more orthodox or more atheistic than usually. But I felt “fear and trembling” while looking at the Virgin Mary (standing on the wall, watching a little bit of everything with…divine calm, since 867) and the angels brought out of an apocryphal text, all wings and war.
From my point of view the Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom, let’s not forget that) has become one of the most convincing and valuable history museums of the world. When you see pale saints next to Byzantine emperors next to quotes written in a wonderful Arabic calligraphy, you experience a thrill of the ancientness, no matter why you ended up there and what you had been expecting.
Obviously, in this case we are referring to a space that is much more than just a museum, but one of its qualities must represent a characteristic essential to any space worth being named as such: a museum must touch you, even more so, a museum must shake you. You need to walk out with a mind that’s more open and a spirit that’s more enlightened than before.
I had a look at the UNESCO World Heritage list and at the selection criteria (http://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria/). Currently the Hagia Sophia is not on the permanent list, though it should be. So, I am waiting…
miercuri, 21 martie 2012
about the future or the past of museums
(I do not like the conclusion of the article. So I invite you to read only the beginning...mostly for the stories included)
Future tense, VII: What's a museum?
by James Panero
On the changing nature of our cultural institutions.
However perplexing the problems of the present and the future, however sobering the obligations laid upon the museums of America through the destruction of war, the past gives confidence for the days to come.
—Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1946
What’s a museum? Lately, it seems, the answer is whatever we want. Today’s museums can be tourist attractions, department stores, civic centers, town squares, catalysts of urban renewal, food courts, licensing brands, showcases for contemporary architecture, social clubs, LEED-certified environmentally conscious facilities, and franchise opportunities. A “well-run museum is eerily like an upscale suburban shopping mall,” says an article in The New York Times. A cafe with “art on the side,”?advertises London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. “We are in the entertainment business, and competing against other forms of entertainment out there,” says a one-time spokesman for the Guggenheim museum. “Inclusive places that welcome diverse audiences” and “reflect our society’s pluralism in every aspect of their operations and programs,” suggests the American Association of Museums. “We live in a more global, multicultural society that cares about diversity and inclusivity,”?so “service to the community” is now among the museum’s à la carte options, says Kaywin Feldman, the latest head of the Association of Art Museum Directors. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, museums are even about “bringing art to those with Alzheimer’s or post-traumatic stress disorder, and farming crops for donation to local food banks,” initiatives that have been promoted through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
By the numbers, today’s museums are thriving enterprises. Billions of dollars have been spent in recent years on expansion projects. In the United States, there were 46 art museums in 1905, 60 in 1910, and 387 in 1938. Today there are 3,500 art museums, more than half of them founded after 1970, and 17,000 museums of all types in total, including science museums, children’s museums, and historical houses. Attendance at American art museums is booming, rising from 22 million a year in 1962 to over 100 million in 2000, with 850 million Americans visiting museums of all varieties each year.
Yet if today’s museums are successful cultural caterers with wide-ranging menus, no matter where we find them, their fare manages to taste more and more the same. A handful of the same celebrity architects now designs new wings and even whole museum cities such as Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi. Facilities in Spain, Boston, the Middle East, and Los Angeles all look different in the same way. An international class of museum professionals job-hops among Beijing, Paris, New York, and Qatar spreading a common corporate culture, where top directors are expected to command million-dollar salaries, oversee thousands of employees, fund-raise, invest and spend endowments on massive expansions, horse-trade the assets on the walls to create blockbuster shows that can attract headline-making crowds, and spin these activities to the press.
Is all this hyperactivity the glow of health or the flush of fever? Philippe de Montebello, the former director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, suggests the latter. With yesterday’s art traded away for today’s trends, exhibition halls taken over by “social space,” and new buildings expanding around traditional facilities, museums are shedding their old skin and remaking themselves in our image. It is said that museums have gone from “being about something” to “being for somebody.” “The work of art, once sovereign, has ceded primacy of place in many an administration’s attention to the public,” de Montebello lamented in a lecture at Harvard, published in the book Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust. Museums have traditionally been focused on their permanent collections. By emphasizing the visitor, museums now risk forsaking the visited and their own cultural importance. Museums were once the arks of culture. Now the artifacts at greatest risk may be themselves.
Prosperity is a great teacher,” wrote William Hazlitt, but “adversity is a greater.” The story of London’s National Gallery in wartime offers up a poignant lesson about the historical relationship between museums and their permanent collections, and the lengths that nations will go to save them.
During the Second World War, Kenneth Clark, the National Gallery’s young director, needed to get his institution’s collection of European paintings out from under the Luftwaffe’s bomb sites. As recounted in Suzanne Bosman’s 2008 book The National Gallery in Wartime, Clark was right about the threat to the collection in central London. Between October 1940 and April 1941, Nazi nighttime aerial bombardment struck The National Gallery nine times. On October 12, 1940, a German explosive leveled what had been the Raphael room.
At first Clark removed the Gallery’s holdings from Trafalgar Square to a discrete handful of universities, libraries, and castles scattered across Wales and Gloucestershire. When Germany inaugurated its Liverpool Blitz and Nazi bombers came within striking distance of these temporary homes, Clark prepared an even more drastic contingency. He was aware of the U-Boat menace. Nevertheless, he drew up plans to ship the permanent collection off the British Isles to the safety of Canada.
When Clark approached Winston Churchill about the move, the Prime Minister had a better idea. “Hide them in caves and cellars,” Churchill declared by telegram, “but not one picture shall leave this island.” Churchill’s remarks signaled the importance of The National Gallery and, in particular, its permanent collection to the identity of the nation. A work of art may exist in isolation, but a culture of art lives through museums and the collections these museums have maintained for the public. These permanent collections embody a museum’s identity even more than its buildings, its record of traveling shows, or any other aspect of its operations. Clark wanted to save the works of art. Churchill saw that Britain needed to preserve its culture of art as well. Sending away the art might spare the canvases, but it would mean disrupting the permanence of the permanent collection.
In 1941, Clark found a way to honor Churchill’s determination. First he reunited the scattered collection by retrofitting an abandoned slate mine into an air-conditioned storage facility. A year later, he began bringing the collection back to The National Gallery through the “Picture of the Month” initiative.
In January of that year, a letter published in the Times of London signed by a “picture-lover” wondered if there could be a way to bring the treasures of the permanent collection back on public view. “Because London’s face is scarred and bruised these days,” the writer suggested, “we need more than ever to see beautiful things.” Clark devised a way to bring up one masterpiece from the slate mine and exhibit it temporarily on Trafalgar Square. By night, and during daytime air raids, Clark moved the painting to a strong room in the basement. The first masterpiece to see the wartime walls was Margaretha de Geer, a work attributed to Rembrandt purchased by the Gallery in 1941 but, until then, never placed on public view. Even with severe limitations on travel, Clark calculated that as many visitors came to see that one painting each day as would have visited the entire National Gallery on a day in peacetime.
Clark chose the next painting—the first official “Picture of the Month”—by reading the suggestions that poured into his offices at the Gallery. The top request, he discovered, was Titian’s Noli Me Tangere. The painting depicts Mary Magdalene reaching out towards Christ after the resurrection, who tells her, “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my father.” “Almost certainly it was not the historical or physical truths of the picture that really mattered, but its poetic truth,” notes Neil MacGregor, the director of The National Gallery from 1987 to 2002. These pictures are not solitary objects but the visual bonds of a nation. They “exist to enable the public to explore through them their own personal and shared experience, as generations have done before us and will do in the future.”
The art critic Herbert Read, writing during the war, declared The National Gallery to be “a defiant outpost of culture right in the middle of a bombed and shattered metropolis.” At the conclusion of hostilities in 1945, Clark ensured the swift return of the entire collection to Trafalgar Square. The rehanging of the paintings became a cause for national celebration. As a reporter for the Observer concluded at the time, “The National Gallery is far more genuinely a national possession than ever before.”
From its founding, The National Gallery, like all great museums, has meant more than the sum of its parts, however magnificent. Leo von Klenze, who designed several institutions throughout Munich in the first half of the nineteenth century, including the Glyptothek, called the modern museum “one of the truly living ideals of this age.”
The identity of The National Gallery is not found on a balance sheet but through an intangible idea tied to a collection held and displayed in the public trust. Since this museum was created when the House of Commons purchased the picture collection of the banker John Julius Angerstein for the nation in 1824, The National Gallery, which opened on Trafalgar Square in 1838, has from the start represented a British ideal of parliamentary government. Unlike many of the other museums in Europe, with their permanent collections nationalized from other pre-existing institutions, the collection of The National Gallery was purchased on behalf of the British people by their lawful representatives. To have sent away The National Gallery’s collection in wartime would have meant sending away a manifestation of British self-rule. The masterpieces that came on view through Clark’s “Picture of the Month” initiative were not merely Rembrandts and Titians, but the Rembrandts and Titians of The National Gallery, of Parliament, and of the British people.
The great museums of the West, founded mainly between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, have almost all functioned like The National Gallery to represent the characteristic ideals of their nations, almost always through an identity intimately connected to their permanent collections.
The Louvre was founded in 1793 to represent the French Revolution through the nationalized treasures seized from the monarchy, the church, and later colonial conquest, all to be exhibited in a seized Bourbon palace. The Prado Museum, which Ferdinand VII opened to the public in 1819 as the Royal Museum of Paintings and Sculptures, represented the last sparkles of beauty from the fading Spanish Crown. The Hermitage Museum, founded by Catherine the Great in 1764 and opened to the public in 1852, represented Russian imperial power through its ability to import great art from the West. After 1917, when many masterpieces of its permanent collection were sent into storage like locked-up dissidents, the Hermitage became a manifestation of totalitarian state control.
The many museums that emerged in Germany in the nineteenth century mainly sought out a spiritual ideal. Friedrich Hölderlin saw museums as “aesthetic churches,” where the artists are the anointed priests. The Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who called museums temples of art, applied neoclassical elements to his designs. Schinkel’s museums served to recast the royal patrimonies of their collections into art in the public trust after the work was, for a time, nationalized by Napoleonic France. The pillared porticos like those on Berlin’s Altes (Old) Museum, known as the Royal Museum when it opened in 1830, also turned his buildings into latter-day Greek temples. The soaring entrances of Schinkel’s museums were meant as places where, as he put it, “the individual could recollect himself and prepare himself for the mysteries that awaited him; it was not to be a social place, but rather a place where the individual divorced himself from society.”
The close association of European museums and their permanent collections with national ideals was underscored by their ownership, which to this day almost always remains some form of government control. Britain’s National Gallery, for example, describes its governing structure as a “non-departmental public body, whose sponsor body is the Department for Culture, Media and Sport,” with a board of trustees appointed primarily by the Prime Minister.
In the United States, the same cannot be said of comparable institutions. American museums began to propagate a generation later than their European counterparts as an answer to those institutions, yet with a key difference that is so apparent it is often overlooked. American museums vary widely in their missions, but they almost all share a similar story as institutions founded and supported by private individuals. Today, most of them remain not-for-profit institutions largely supported through private donations.
Their private status might seem to preclude the association of American museums with a national identity, but the lack of government ownership in fact goes to the heart of their own ideal. It may seem that the philanthropy supporting American museums is ancillary to the treasures the institutions contain. But those treasures, however singular, are also tokens of the idealism behind the institutions that maintain them.
As manifestations of private wealth transferred to the public trust, American museums were founded, in part, to represent virtue. The visual education offered to the public by these museums through their permanent collections is not just an education in art history but also a lesson in how individual hard work can become an expression of virtue by giving over objects of beauty to the public trust. No other country has seen such private wealth, accumulated through industry, willingly transferred to the public good. Even as institutions around the world now attempt to supplement their own government funding with private support on the American model, the philanthropic culture of the United States remains a singular phenomenon. The countless “American Friends of . . . ” groups that now exist for cultural institutions around the globe are testament to America’s continued abundance of philanthropic energies.
Virtue in both private and public life was of primary concern to the American Founders, who along with education and the rule of law included virtue among the foundations of freedom. “’Tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” George Washington said in his Farewell Address. Or as John Adams wrote in a letter to Mercy Otis Warren in 1776: “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics. There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty.”
The American museum consciously emerged out of this ideal of self-governance, a belief that a virtuous people with a passion for the public good might create institutions in the public interest that could one day rival or even exceed the museums of Europe, all without the compulsion of government. Among the many philanthropic pursuits of the American public, the American art museum has received particular attention because its treasures serve as tangible manifestations of virtue.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art became the first of three great encyclopedic museums to open its doors in the United States within a decade of each other. Founded in 1870 and opened in 1872, it was closely followed by The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1876 (also founded in 1870) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1877 (founded in 1876)—institutions that were quite different from the ones we know today but nonetheless born out of a similar philanthropic urge. As recounted in Winifred E. Howe’s two-volume History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, published in 1913 and 1946, the Met’s founding generation emerged out of the destruction of the Civil War to speak in bold terms about the virtues of their creation. They directly connected their new museum with the ideals of a reunited nation. In 1866, John Jay gave a speech at a party of his fellow countrymen at the Pré Catalan in Paris celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of national independence. “It was time for the American people to lay the foundation of a National Institution and Gallery of Art,” he urged. A committee of men formed on the spot to pursue the idea back in New York.
In 1869, with Jay as president of the Union League Club, an institution that had strongly supported the Union cause in the Civil War, the club’s Art Committee issued a report that had widespread implications for the future of art:
It will be said that it would be folly to depend upon our governments, either municipal or national, for judicious support or control in such an institution; for our governments, as a rule, are utterly incompetent for the task. . . . An amply endowed, thoroughly constructed art institution, free alike from bungling government officials and from the control of a single individual, whose mistaken and untrained zeal may lead to superficial attempts and certain failures; an institution which will command the confidence of judicious friends of art, and especially of those who have means to strengthen and increase its value to the city and to the nation, is surely worth consideration in a club like this.
So that this consideration would not be confined to the Union League alone, the club sent invitations to members of the city’s other thriving private clubs and art academies to join the discussion. Three hundred people turned out for a meeting at the Union League, then on Twenty-sixth Street.
Few of them were as central to the culture of nineteenth-century New York as William Cullen Bryant. The editor of the New York Evening Post and a member of the Union League, he became the outspoken leader of the initiative for a new art museum. Bryant Park, in back of the main branch of the New York Public Library, bears his name. Bryant never expected government to fund the Metropolitan. In fact, he expected the private philanthropy behind the institution to repudiate big government. This assurance of purpose was unmistakable when Bryant addressed the conference at the Union League:
Our city is the third great city of the civilized world. Our republic has already taken its place among the great powers of the earth; it is great in extent, great in population, great in the activity and enterprise of her people. It is the richest nation in the world, if paying off an enormous national debt with a rapidity unexampled in history be any proof of riches; the richest in the world, if contented submission to heavy taxation be a sign of wealth; the richest in the world, if quietly to allow itself to be annually plundered of immense sums by men who seek public stations for their individual profit be a token of public prosperity. My friends, if a tenth part of what is every year stolen from us in this way, in the city where we live, under pretense of the public service, and poured profusely into the coffers of political rogues, were expended on a Museum of Art, we might have, reposited in spacious and stately buildings, collections formed of works left by the world’s greatest artists, which would be the pride of our country.
The aim of the Met’s founders was not only to found a museum in New York, but also to inspire like-minded philanthropy across the country. “The other cities will follow rapidly in the wake of New York in this movement,” predicted the art historian George Fisk Comfort, and he was right. Speaking at the Union League, Comfort furthermore advocated an encyclopedic museum “to represent the History of Art in all countries and in all ages of art both pure and applied.”
After the New York State legislature granted the Met its Act of Incorporation in 1870, by the first decade of the twentieth century the institution was already far along building out the massive beaux-arts treasury we now find on Fifth Avenue and enriching it with a singular permanent collection—a private institution on public land. One reason for the Met’s rapid ascent was the financier J. P. Morgan. His virtuous role in the cultural institutions across the city inspired New York society. A member of the Union League, Morgan was an original subscriber to The Metropolitan in 1870, became a trustee in 1888, and assumed the board presidency in 1904. “That a man known universally for his acumen in finance,” writes Winifred Howe, “should devote both time and talent to the active administration of a museum of art placed such institutions on a new footing. Other men of affairs decided that art was worthy of their attention, even their collecting, and the Museum deserving of their support.”
In a memorial tribute after his death in 1913, The Metropolitan issued a resolution that took particular note of Morgan’s virtue and spoke directly to his qualities of patriotic citizenship:
He loved all forms of beauty, and with his largeness of nature and of means he became the greatest art collector of his time, and in the history of art his name must always rank with those great princes of the Old World who in former centuries protected and encouraged genius. He was as unselfish with his treasures of art as he was with his fortune. He believed that the happiness of a whole people can be increased through the cultivation of taste, and he strongly desired to contribute to that end among his own countrymen.
Looking back on the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946, its president William Church Osborn noted that “New York owes its museum of art to the public-spirited interest of some of its citizens.” He also urged his generation to “fix with sureness the philosophic and economic principles underlying all such institutions, since rapidly changing social and economic conditions are certain to bring about in the future a great need for understanding and continued study of these principles.”
Osborne’s urging was prescient. The assuredness of American museums through the first decades of the twentieth century, rooted in the virtues of their founders and supporters, gave way to a creeping professionalism that, in the name of good business and “best practices,” sought to strip the institutions of their virtuous past.
A new bottom-line sensibility that aimed to maximize revenues and attendance numbers cut against the founding principles of American museums. “When art museums rush to be commercial or seek to titillate their visitors we see a lamentable failure of nerve,” says de Montebello, who went against the grain of this professionalized museum culture as director of the Metropolitan. “Our institutions—even though often founded by businessmen in league with civic officials—were not created to make money and vaunt civic identity.”
This failure of nerve is especially apparent in cases of deaccession, where institutions have justified turning their permanent collections into chattel that can be sold for profit. Among the earliest uses of the term “deaccession” was in 1972. The New York Times art critic John Canaday wrote that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then under the direction of Thomas Hoving, “recently deaccessioned (the polite term for ‘sold’) one of its only four Redons.”
Hoving was the first museum custodian to conceive of his permanent collection as a ready source of capital. In 1970, he purchased a Velázquez portrait for $5.5 million but lacked the funds to cover it. He began looking for works to sell, and the bequest of the late Adelaide de Groot was his principal target. Against the heiress’s wishes that her collection remain in the institution, Hoving sold off masterpieces from her donation—most notably The Tropics by Henri Rousseau—through Marlborough Gallery. The sale was so controversial that the Met’s curator of European painting refused to sign the deaccession form. Hoving signed it for him.
Even as the Metropolitan under de Montebello, Hoving’s successor, rejected this legacy of affronting virtue, Hoving’s ideas infected museum culture. Granted, by narrowing or “refining” a collection through deaccession, a museum can perform a valuable function. It can free up work from storage that may be second-rate or repetitive. A museum can raise money in a restricted endowment from the sale, to be used for the purchase of art that might better serve its mission. Peer-review organizations such as the Association of Art Museum Directors issue guidelines that, at least on paper, restrict these practices in line with traditional standards. The aamd forbids museums, for example, from using the sale of art in their permanent collections to pay for general operating expenses or to underwrite loans. Such rules are designed to prevent museums from treating their art collections as ATM machines and sources of fast money.
But museums have been finding ways around AAMD, even as this association finds subtle ways to relax its own rules. Museums have claimed, for example, that the art in their permanent collections suddenly does not fit their mission statements, even if the work has been on display for generations. Museums use deaccession to “trade up” their permanent collections, liquidating the symbols of donor virtue while creating a slush fund for their own acquisitions. Museums have decided that certain works are of secondary importance because they are rarely shown, although this record of exhibition may merely reflect the taste of the curators.
If a museum is defined by its permanent collection, then any exhibiting institution with a permanent collection is a type of museum, even if it calls itself something different. Yet museums now routinely declare themselves to be something else just to get around the rules of AAMD, disregarding the spirit of virtue these rules represent.
One of the worst acts of deaccession occurred against the legacy of none other than William Cullen Bryant, the great advocate of the Metropolitan Museum. At the start of the twentieth century, Bryant’s daughter gave Kindred Spirits, Asher B. Durand’s 1849 Hudson River School masterpiece depicting Bryant and Thomas Cole standing at Kaaterskill Falls, to the permanent collection of the New York Public Library. In 2005, Paul LeClerc, the president of the Library, sold the painting for a $35-million payday. Even after exhibiting Kindred Spirits for decades, the Library claimed it was not a museum and therefore free to sell the painting for cash. The LeClerc sale was a direct affront to the founding generation of New York’s cultural institutions and a demonstration of how his professional class could subvert the ideals of virtue at will.
The sale also inspired others. Two years later, Thomas Jefferson University, a medical school in Philadelphia, announced plans to sell one of the most recognizable paintings in the United States, Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (1875), for $68 million unless a local institution could match the price within forty-five days. (The Philadelphia Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy ending up splitting the bill.)
In 2006 the Albright-Knox Art Gallery sold $71 million of its collection of older art in order to buy contemporary work, claiming the older art did not fit its mission statement. In 2008 the National Academy Museum in New York sold two valuable Hudson River School paintings to fill a budget gap, proclaiming its primary status as an art school. In 2009, the trustees of Brandeis University announced plans to shut down the school’s Rose Art Museum and sell off the entire collection to raise general revenue. All the while, countless other institutions have worked under the radar to liberate their permanent collections from the restrictions imposed (as they see it) by the outdated mores of their donors.
While the profit motive drives the businesses that fund philanthropy, the perceived profiteering of American museums breaks a covenant they have made with the public and damages the culture of virtue that continues to sustain them. Sometimes this is done consciously, as museum professionals attack the past from within. At other times these professionals do damage with the best intentions. Any museum decision that appears to capitalize on the permanent collection—from gift shops to high ticket prices to fancy restaurants to facility rentals—risks diminishing the museum’s virtue in the eyes of the public. What most museum professionals fail to recognize is that the principle of virtue means that good business often becomes bad business once inside the gates of these institutions.
Headline-making cases of deaccession are only the most extreme perversions of America’s museum ideal, because they strike at the very embodiments of virtue. Most of today’s museums therefore acknowledge that their collections maintain some special status, at least in the eyes of a reactionary public. They have learned that deacessioning can invite unwanted publicity. So rather than go after the collections themselves, museums will more often update the facilities that contain them in order to recast or cover over the virtuous meaning of the objects inside.
Today the American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869, is a rare holdout of traditional museum culture. Its awesome display of cultural confidence begins with James Earle Fraser’s equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt riding through a triumphal arch at its front entrance. This foregrounds a soaring lobby designed by John Russell Pope in 1936 after Roman baths—a notably civic model compared with the more religious classicism of Germany’s museums. The same sense of veneration is applied to the facilities within. Bold signs throughout the institution proclaim the donors of specimens, all without a postmodern preamble about the misuse of taxidermy. Artisans are still trained to preserve the animal models and diorama rooms of the biologist Carl Akeley, who died on assignment for the museum at the spot now depicted in the gorilla diorama. The Hall of Northwest Coast Indians has been left primarily as Franz Boas, the great anthropologist, designed it at the turn of the last century. A refurbishment of this hall that could restore its original windows, uncover its columns, and elevate the lighting would easily bring this room back to its inaugural splendor. Ten years ago, the original architecture of the fourth-floor dinosaur rooms was similarly uncovered in a brilliant restoration sponsored by David H. Koch.
There was a time, however, when this museum was far less assured of its past. In the 1940s, the institution’s fanciful Romanesque Seventy-seventh-Street facade, designed by J. C. Cady in pink granite dotted with turrets and globes, was to be wiped out with the application of a monolithic slab that the critic Christopher Gray likened to “some gigantic crematorium.” This new look represented the new faceless sense of what museums suddenly were supposed to be—museums without histories.
What saved this museum? In part the AMNH came to see its own history as an object worthy of protection and study. It also got lucky, undergoing budget cuts right before the wrecking ball arrived. Today the museum seems more dedicated than any other to polishing up its past and celebrating its own history along with the history of its permanent collection.
Many other institutions have been far less fortunate. The Brooklyn Museum, designed by McKim, Mead & White, lost its grand outdoor Met-like staircase to the rhetoric of “public access” in the 1930s, when the entrance was brought down to street level, the stairs ripped out, and a lobby carved out of the original auditorium. This loss created an architectural imbalance that has only been aggravated through the recent addition of a $63-million glass atrium. In the 1950s, the museum’s beaux-arts lobby was similarly stripped of its ornamentation and a drop-ceiling installed. All of these moves were designed to conceal, reinterpret, or destroy the museum’s one-time architectural grandeur and patrimony.
Today’s museum capital projects often follow a similar pattern. With the addition of new materials, new restaurant spaces, new entertainment venues, and new contemporary art galleries designed by celebrity architects, they can be particularly seductive. The new 70,000-square-foot $114-million wing of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which opened on January 19, is but the latest. Designed by Renzo Piano, the new facility offers “purpose-built spaces for concerts, exhibitions, and classes, along with enhanced visitor amenities,” according to the museum’s press office, including a “cube-shaped performance hall and an adjustable height special exhibition gallery,” a visitor welcome area called the “Richard E. Floor Living Room,” apartments for artists-in-residence, a store called “Gift at the Gardner,” a greenhouse, and a restaurant called “Café G.”
The building, which required the demolition of Gardner’s historic carriage house, now serves as the only entrance to the institution and connects with the original museum through a glass-enclosed umbilical cord, which penetrates the back of Gardner’s fanciful Venetian building.
Compared to Gardner’s grand pastiche of a museum and the limitations imposed through her trust, the Piano addition is ostentatiously invisible, obsequiously deferential, and more than willing to cater to the creature comforts of the visitor/end-user. The vertiginous theater-in-the-square turns the spectator into a spectacle. The Kunsthalle for new art, the eateries, shops, and apartments are all sumptuously attractive. A “geothermal well system, daylight harvesting, water-efficient landscaping techniques, and the use of local and regional materials” may make the new building eligible for leed gold certification.
But what has been lost in the shuffle? How will this facility affect Gardner’s original vision and the mysteries of her creation? And if the new building is meant merely as an engine to generate new donors, couldn’t the trustees just as easily apply $114 million directly to the preservation of the original facility (where the water stains of a rusted-out skylight continue to streak down the interior walls)?
In countless cases, the concern is that museum professionals have come to regard their founding generations with suspicion rather than reverence. They question the legacy of these industrialists and “robber barons.” They suppress the American idiosyncrasies of their institutions to appeal to international ideals. They undercut the signs of private philanthropy in order to seek out greater state control. They advance a new populist rhetoric that trumpets appeal and “access” over beauty and virtue. They attack their own “imposing” facilities and “elite” permanent collections. They undermine the art and architecture their supporters had given to the public trust. All along they sell their own expanding ranks and bureaucratic sensibilities to a complicit donor base as a way to counter, conceal, update, and “reinterpret” the influence of their museums’ dubious histories.
But what if museums were to see these histories as something worthy of preservation and reverence? Some institutions have already taken such a turn. The Frick Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Museum of Natural History are three of the institutions that have quietly rejected the spiraling demands of the professionalized museum by cultivating their own founding principles.
What if all American museums were to embrace the virtuous intent of their founders and supporters? The answer is that the American people, once again, could become the connoisseurs of virtue.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Future-tense--VII--What-s-a-museum--7298, retrieved on 20th of March 2012
Future tense, VII: What's a museum?
by James Panero
On the changing nature of our cultural institutions.
However perplexing the problems of the present and the future, however sobering the obligations laid upon the museums of America through the destruction of war, the past gives confidence for the days to come.
—Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1946
What’s a museum? Lately, it seems, the answer is whatever we want. Today’s museums can be tourist attractions, department stores, civic centers, town squares, catalysts of urban renewal, food courts, licensing brands, showcases for contemporary architecture, social clubs, LEED-certified environmentally conscious facilities, and franchise opportunities. A “well-run museum is eerily like an upscale suburban shopping mall,” says an article in The New York Times. A cafe with “art on the side,”?advertises London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. “We are in the entertainment business, and competing against other forms of entertainment out there,” says a one-time spokesman for the Guggenheim museum. “Inclusive places that welcome diverse audiences” and “reflect our society’s pluralism in every aspect of their operations and programs,” suggests the American Association of Museums. “We live in a more global, multicultural society that cares about diversity and inclusivity,”?so “service to the community” is now among the museum’s à la carte options, says Kaywin Feldman, the latest head of the Association of Art Museum Directors. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, museums are even about “bringing art to those with Alzheimer’s or post-traumatic stress disorder, and farming crops for donation to local food banks,” initiatives that have been promoted through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
By the numbers, today’s museums are thriving enterprises. Billions of dollars have been spent in recent years on expansion projects. In the United States, there were 46 art museums in 1905, 60 in 1910, and 387 in 1938. Today there are 3,500 art museums, more than half of them founded after 1970, and 17,000 museums of all types in total, including science museums, children’s museums, and historical houses. Attendance at American art museums is booming, rising from 22 million a year in 1962 to over 100 million in 2000, with 850 million Americans visiting museums of all varieties each year.
Yet if today’s museums are successful cultural caterers with wide-ranging menus, no matter where we find them, their fare manages to taste more and more the same. A handful of the same celebrity architects now designs new wings and even whole museum cities such as Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi. Facilities in Spain, Boston, the Middle East, and Los Angeles all look different in the same way. An international class of museum professionals job-hops among Beijing, Paris, New York, and Qatar spreading a common corporate culture, where top directors are expected to command million-dollar salaries, oversee thousands of employees, fund-raise, invest and spend endowments on massive expansions, horse-trade the assets on the walls to create blockbuster shows that can attract headline-making crowds, and spin these activities to the press.
Is all this hyperactivity the glow of health or the flush of fever? Philippe de Montebello, the former director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, suggests the latter. With yesterday’s art traded away for today’s trends, exhibition halls taken over by “social space,” and new buildings expanding around traditional facilities, museums are shedding their old skin and remaking themselves in our image. It is said that museums have gone from “being about something” to “being for somebody.” “The work of art, once sovereign, has ceded primacy of place in many an administration’s attention to the public,” de Montebello lamented in a lecture at Harvard, published in the book Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust. Museums have traditionally been focused on their permanent collections. By emphasizing the visitor, museums now risk forsaking the visited and their own cultural importance. Museums were once the arks of culture. Now the artifacts at greatest risk may be themselves.
Prosperity is a great teacher,” wrote William Hazlitt, but “adversity is a greater.” The story of London’s National Gallery in wartime offers up a poignant lesson about the historical relationship between museums and their permanent collections, and the lengths that nations will go to save them.
During the Second World War, Kenneth Clark, the National Gallery’s young director, needed to get his institution’s collection of European paintings out from under the Luftwaffe’s bomb sites. As recounted in Suzanne Bosman’s 2008 book The National Gallery in Wartime, Clark was right about the threat to the collection in central London. Between October 1940 and April 1941, Nazi nighttime aerial bombardment struck The National Gallery nine times. On October 12, 1940, a German explosive leveled what had been the Raphael room.
At first Clark removed the Gallery’s holdings from Trafalgar Square to a discrete handful of universities, libraries, and castles scattered across Wales and Gloucestershire. When Germany inaugurated its Liverpool Blitz and Nazi bombers came within striking distance of these temporary homes, Clark prepared an even more drastic contingency. He was aware of the U-Boat menace. Nevertheless, he drew up plans to ship the permanent collection off the British Isles to the safety of Canada.
When Clark approached Winston Churchill about the move, the Prime Minister had a better idea. “Hide them in caves and cellars,” Churchill declared by telegram, “but not one picture shall leave this island.” Churchill’s remarks signaled the importance of The National Gallery and, in particular, its permanent collection to the identity of the nation. A work of art may exist in isolation, but a culture of art lives through museums and the collections these museums have maintained for the public. These permanent collections embody a museum’s identity even more than its buildings, its record of traveling shows, or any other aspect of its operations. Clark wanted to save the works of art. Churchill saw that Britain needed to preserve its culture of art as well. Sending away the art might spare the canvases, but it would mean disrupting the permanence of the permanent collection.
In 1941, Clark found a way to honor Churchill’s determination. First he reunited the scattered collection by retrofitting an abandoned slate mine into an air-conditioned storage facility. A year later, he began bringing the collection back to The National Gallery through the “Picture of the Month” initiative.
In January of that year, a letter published in the Times of London signed by a “picture-lover” wondered if there could be a way to bring the treasures of the permanent collection back on public view. “Because London’s face is scarred and bruised these days,” the writer suggested, “we need more than ever to see beautiful things.” Clark devised a way to bring up one masterpiece from the slate mine and exhibit it temporarily on Trafalgar Square. By night, and during daytime air raids, Clark moved the painting to a strong room in the basement. The first masterpiece to see the wartime walls was Margaretha de Geer, a work attributed to Rembrandt purchased by the Gallery in 1941 but, until then, never placed on public view. Even with severe limitations on travel, Clark calculated that as many visitors came to see that one painting each day as would have visited the entire National Gallery on a day in peacetime.
Clark chose the next painting—the first official “Picture of the Month”—by reading the suggestions that poured into his offices at the Gallery. The top request, he discovered, was Titian’s Noli Me Tangere. The painting depicts Mary Magdalene reaching out towards Christ after the resurrection, who tells her, “Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my father.” “Almost certainly it was not the historical or physical truths of the picture that really mattered, but its poetic truth,” notes Neil MacGregor, the director of The National Gallery from 1987 to 2002. These pictures are not solitary objects but the visual bonds of a nation. They “exist to enable the public to explore through them their own personal and shared experience, as generations have done before us and will do in the future.”
The art critic Herbert Read, writing during the war, declared The National Gallery to be “a defiant outpost of culture right in the middle of a bombed and shattered metropolis.” At the conclusion of hostilities in 1945, Clark ensured the swift return of the entire collection to Trafalgar Square. The rehanging of the paintings became a cause for national celebration. As a reporter for the Observer concluded at the time, “The National Gallery is far more genuinely a national possession than ever before.”
From its founding, The National Gallery, like all great museums, has meant more than the sum of its parts, however magnificent. Leo von Klenze, who designed several institutions throughout Munich in the first half of the nineteenth century, including the Glyptothek, called the modern museum “one of the truly living ideals of this age.”
The identity of The National Gallery is not found on a balance sheet but through an intangible idea tied to a collection held and displayed in the public trust. Since this museum was created when the House of Commons purchased the picture collection of the banker John Julius Angerstein for the nation in 1824, The National Gallery, which opened on Trafalgar Square in 1838, has from the start represented a British ideal of parliamentary government. Unlike many of the other museums in Europe, with their permanent collections nationalized from other pre-existing institutions, the collection of The National Gallery was purchased on behalf of the British people by their lawful representatives. To have sent away The National Gallery’s collection in wartime would have meant sending away a manifestation of British self-rule. The masterpieces that came on view through Clark’s “Picture of the Month” initiative were not merely Rembrandts and Titians, but the Rembrandts and Titians of The National Gallery, of Parliament, and of the British people.
The great museums of the West, founded mainly between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, have almost all functioned like The National Gallery to represent the characteristic ideals of their nations, almost always through an identity intimately connected to their permanent collections.
The Louvre was founded in 1793 to represent the French Revolution through the nationalized treasures seized from the monarchy, the church, and later colonial conquest, all to be exhibited in a seized Bourbon palace. The Prado Museum, which Ferdinand VII opened to the public in 1819 as the Royal Museum of Paintings and Sculptures, represented the last sparkles of beauty from the fading Spanish Crown. The Hermitage Museum, founded by Catherine the Great in 1764 and opened to the public in 1852, represented Russian imperial power through its ability to import great art from the West. After 1917, when many masterpieces of its permanent collection were sent into storage like locked-up dissidents, the Hermitage became a manifestation of totalitarian state control.
The many museums that emerged in Germany in the nineteenth century mainly sought out a spiritual ideal. Friedrich Hölderlin saw museums as “aesthetic churches,” where the artists are the anointed priests. The Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who called museums temples of art, applied neoclassical elements to his designs. Schinkel’s museums served to recast the royal patrimonies of their collections into art in the public trust after the work was, for a time, nationalized by Napoleonic France. The pillared porticos like those on Berlin’s Altes (Old) Museum, known as the Royal Museum when it opened in 1830, also turned his buildings into latter-day Greek temples. The soaring entrances of Schinkel’s museums were meant as places where, as he put it, “the individual could recollect himself and prepare himself for the mysteries that awaited him; it was not to be a social place, but rather a place where the individual divorced himself from society.”
The close association of European museums and their permanent collections with national ideals was underscored by their ownership, which to this day almost always remains some form of government control. Britain’s National Gallery, for example, describes its governing structure as a “non-departmental public body, whose sponsor body is the Department for Culture, Media and Sport,” with a board of trustees appointed primarily by the Prime Minister.
In the United States, the same cannot be said of comparable institutions. American museums began to propagate a generation later than their European counterparts as an answer to those institutions, yet with a key difference that is so apparent it is often overlooked. American museums vary widely in their missions, but they almost all share a similar story as institutions founded and supported by private individuals. Today, most of them remain not-for-profit institutions largely supported through private donations.
Their private status might seem to preclude the association of American museums with a national identity, but the lack of government ownership in fact goes to the heart of their own ideal. It may seem that the philanthropy supporting American museums is ancillary to the treasures the institutions contain. But those treasures, however singular, are also tokens of the idealism behind the institutions that maintain them.
As manifestations of private wealth transferred to the public trust, American museums were founded, in part, to represent virtue. The visual education offered to the public by these museums through their permanent collections is not just an education in art history but also a lesson in how individual hard work can become an expression of virtue by giving over objects of beauty to the public trust. No other country has seen such private wealth, accumulated through industry, willingly transferred to the public good. Even as institutions around the world now attempt to supplement their own government funding with private support on the American model, the philanthropic culture of the United States remains a singular phenomenon. The countless “American Friends of . . . ” groups that now exist for cultural institutions around the globe are testament to America’s continued abundance of philanthropic energies.
Virtue in both private and public life was of primary concern to the American Founders, who along with education and the rule of law included virtue among the foundations of freedom. “’Tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” George Washington said in his Farewell Address. Or as John Adams wrote in a letter to Mercy Otis Warren in 1776: “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics. There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty.”
The American museum consciously emerged out of this ideal of self-governance, a belief that a virtuous people with a passion for the public good might create institutions in the public interest that could one day rival or even exceed the museums of Europe, all without the compulsion of government. Among the many philanthropic pursuits of the American public, the American art museum has received particular attention because its treasures serve as tangible manifestations of virtue.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art became the first of three great encyclopedic museums to open its doors in the United States within a decade of each other. Founded in 1870 and opened in 1872, it was closely followed by The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1876 (also founded in 1870) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1877 (founded in 1876)—institutions that were quite different from the ones we know today but nonetheless born out of a similar philanthropic urge. As recounted in Winifred E. Howe’s two-volume History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, published in 1913 and 1946, the Met’s founding generation emerged out of the destruction of the Civil War to speak in bold terms about the virtues of their creation. They directly connected their new museum with the ideals of a reunited nation. In 1866, John Jay gave a speech at a party of his fellow countrymen at the Pré Catalan in Paris celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of national independence. “It was time for the American people to lay the foundation of a National Institution and Gallery of Art,” he urged. A committee of men formed on the spot to pursue the idea back in New York.
In 1869, with Jay as president of the Union League Club, an institution that had strongly supported the Union cause in the Civil War, the club’s Art Committee issued a report that had widespread implications for the future of art:
It will be said that it would be folly to depend upon our governments, either municipal or national, for judicious support or control in such an institution; for our governments, as a rule, are utterly incompetent for the task. . . . An amply endowed, thoroughly constructed art institution, free alike from bungling government officials and from the control of a single individual, whose mistaken and untrained zeal may lead to superficial attempts and certain failures; an institution which will command the confidence of judicious friends of art, and especially of those who have means to strengthen and increase its value to the city and to the nation, is surely worth consideration in a club like this.
So that this consideration would not be confined to the Union League alone, the club sent invitations to members of the city’s other thriving private clubs and art academies to join the discussion. Three hundred people turned out for a meeting at the Union League, then on Twenty-sixth Street.
Few of them were as central to the culture of nineteenth-century New York as William Cullen Bryant. The editor of the New York Evening Post and a member of the Union League, he became the outspoken leader of the initiative for a new art museum. Bryant Park, in back of the main branch of the New York Public Library, bears his name. Bryant never expected government to fund the Metropolitan. In fact, he expected the private philanthropy behind the institution to repudiate big government. This assurance of purpose was unmistakable when Bryant addressed the conference at the Union League:
Our city is the third great city of the civilized world. Our republic has already taken its place among the great powers of the earth; it is great in extent, great in population, great in the activity and enterprise of her people. It is the richest nation in the world, if paying off an enormous national debt with a rapidity unexampled in history be any proof of riches; the richest in the world, if contented submission to heavy taxation be a sign of wealth; the richest in the world, if quietly to allow itself to be annually plundered of immense sums by men who seek public stations for their individual profit be a token of public prosperity. My friends, if a tenth part of what is every year stolen from us in this way, in the city where we live, under pretense of the public service, and poured profusely into the coffers of political rogues, were expended on a Museum of Art, we might have, reposited in spacious and stately buildings, collections formed of works left by the world’s greatest artists, which would be the pride of our country.
The aim of the Met’s founders was not only to found a museum in New York, but also to inspire like-minded philanthropy across the country. “The other cities will follow rapidly in the wake of New York in this movement,” predicted the art historian George Fisk Comfort, and he was right. Speaking at the Union League, Comfort furthermore advocated an encyclopedic museum “to represent the History of Art in all countries and in all ages of art both pure and applied.”
After the New York State legislature granted the Met its Act of Incorporation in 1870, by the first decade of the twentieth century the institution was already far along building out the massive beaux-arts treasury we now find on Fifth Avenue and enriching it with a singular permanent collection—a private institution on public land. One reason for the Met’s rapid ascent was the financier J. P. Morgan. His virtuous role in the cultural institutions across the city inspired New York society. A member of the Union League, Morgan was an original subscriber to The Metropolitan in 1870, became a trustee in 1888, and assumed the board presidency in 1904. “That a man known universally for his acumen in finance,” writes Winifred Howe, “should devote both time and talent to the active administration of a museum of art placed such institutions on a new footing. Other men of affairs decided that art was worthy of their attention, even their collecting, and the Museum deserving of their support.”
In a memorial tribute after his death in 1913, The Metropolitan issued a resolution that took particular note of Morgan’s virtue and spoke directly to his qualities of patriotic citizenship:
He loved all forms of beauty, and with his largeness of nature and of means he became the greatest art collector of his time, and in the history of art his name must always rank with those great princes of the Old World who in former centuries protected and encouraged genius. He was as unselfish with his treasures of art as he was with his fortune. He believed that the happiness of a whole people can be increased through the cultivation of taste, and he strongly desired to contribute to that end among his own countrymen.
Looking back on the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946, its president William Church Osborn noted that “New York owes its museum of art to the public-spirited interest of some of its citizens.” He also urged his generation to “fix with sureness the philosophic and economic principles underlying all such institutions, since rapidly changing social and economic conditions are certain to bring about in the future a great need for understanding and continued study of these principles.”
Osborne’s urging was prescient. The assuredness of American museums through the first decades of the twentieth century, rooted in the virtues of their founders and supporters, gave way to a creeping professionalism that, in the name of good business and “best practices,” sought to strip the institutions of their virtuous past.
A new bottom-line sensibility that aimed to maximize revenues and attendance numbers cut against the founding principles of American museums. “When art museums rush to be commercial or seek to titillate their visitors we see a lamentable failure of nerve,” says de Montebello, who went against the grain of this professionalized museum culture as director of the Metropolitan. “Our institutions—even though often founded by businessmen in league with civic officials—were not created to make money and vaunt civic identity.”
This failure of nerve is especially apparent in cases of deaccession, where institutions have justified turning their permanent collections into chattel that can be sold for profit. Among the earliest uses of the term “deaccession” was in 1972. The New York Times art critic John Canaday wrote that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then under the direction of Thomas Hoving, “recently deaccessioned (the polite term for ‘sold’) one of its only four Redons.”
Hoving was the first museum custodian to conceive of his permanent collection as a ready source of capital. In 1970, he purchased a Velázquez portrait for $5.5 million but lacked the funds to cover it. He began looking for works to sell, and the bequest of the late Adelaide de Groot was his principal target. Against the heiress’s wishes that her collection remain in the institution, Hoving sold off masterpieces from her donation—most notably The Tropics by Henri Rousseau—through Marlborough Gallery. The sale was so controversial that the Met’s curator of European painting refused to sign the deaccession form. Hoving signed it for him.
Even as the Metropolitan under de Montebello, Hoving’s successor, rejected this legacy of affronting virtue, Hoving’s ideas infected museum culture. Granted, by narrowing or “refining” a collection through deaccession, a museum can perform a valuable function. It can free up work from storage that may be second-rate or repetitive. A museum can raise money in a restricted endowment from the sale, to be used for the purchase of art that might better serve its mission. Peer-review organizations such as the Association of Art Museum Directors issue guidelines that, at least on paper, restrict these practices in line with traditional standards. The aamd forbids museums, for example, from using the sale of art in their permanent collections to pay for general operating expenses or to underwrite loans. Such rules are designed to prevent museums from treating their art collections as ATM machines and sources of fast money.
But museums have been finding ways around AAMD, even as this association finds subtle ways to relax its own rules. Museums have claimed, for example, that the art in their permanent collections suddenly does not fit their mission statements, even if the work has been on display for generations. Museums use deaccession to “trade up” their permanent collections, liquidating the symbols of donor virtue while creating a slush fund for their own acquisitions. Museums have decided that certain works are of secondary importance because they are rarely shown, although this record of exhibition may merely reflect the taste of the curators.
If a museum is defined by its permanent collection, then any exhibiting institution with a permanent collection is a type of museum, even if it calls itself something different. Yet museums now routinely declare themselves to be something else just to get around the rules of AAMD, disregarding the spirit of virtue these rules represent.
One of the worst acts of deaccession occurred against the legacy of none other than William Cullen Bryant, the great advocate of the Metropolitan Museum. At the start of the twentieth century, Bryant’s daughter gave Kindred Spirits, Asher B. Durand’s 1849 Hudson River School masterpiece depicting Bryant and Thomas Cole standing at Kaaterskill Falls, to the permanent collection of the New York Public Library. In 2005, Paul LeClerc, the president of the Library, sold the painting for a $35-million payday. Even after exhibiting Kindred Spirits for decades, the Library claimed it was not a museum and therefore free to sell the painting for cash. The LeClerc sale was a direct affront to the founding generation of New York’s cultural institutions and a demonstration of how his professional class could subvert the ideals of virtue at will.
The sale also inspired others. Two years later, Thomas Jefferson University, a medical school in Philadelphia, announced plans to sell one of the most recognizable paintings in the United States, Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (1875), for $68 million unless a local institution could match the price within forty-five days. (The Philadelphia Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy ending up splitting the bill.)
In 2006 the Albright-Knox Art Gallery sold $71 million of its collection of older art in order to buy contemporary work, claiming the older art did not fit its mission statement. In 2008 the National Academy Museum in New York sold two valuable Hudson River School paintings to fill a budget gap, proclaiming its primary status as an art school. In 2009, the trustees of Brandeis University announced plans to shut down the school’s Rose Art Museum and sell off the entire collection to raise general revenue. All the while, countless other institutions have worked under the radar to liberate their permanent collections from the restrictions imposed (as they see it) by the outdated mores of their donors.
While the profit motive drives the businesses that fund philanthropy, the perceived profiteering of American museums breaks a covenant they have made with the public and damages the culture of virtue that continues to sustain them. Sometimes this is done consciously, as museum professionals attack the past from within. At other times these professionals do damage with the best intentions. Any museum decision that appears to capitalize on the permanent collection—from gift shops to high ticket prices to fancy restaurants to facility rentals—risks diminishing the museum’s virtue in the eyes of the public. What most museum professionals fail to recognize is that the principle of virtue means that good business often becomes bad business once inside the gates of these institutions.
Headline-making cases of deaccession are only the most extreme perversions of America’s museum ideal, because they strike at the very embodiments of virtue. Most of today’s museums therefore acknowledge that their collections maintain some special status, at least in the eyes of a reactionary public. They have learned that deacessioning can invite unwanted publicity. So rather than go after the collections themselves, museums will more often update the facilities that contain them in order to recast or cover over the virtuous meaning of the objects inside.
Today the American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869, is a rare holdout of traditional museum culture. Its awesome display of cultural confidence begins with James Earle Fraser’s equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt riding through a triumphal arch at its front entrance. This foregrounds a soaring lobby designed by John Russell Pope in 1936 after Roman baths—a notably civic model compared with the more religious classicism of Germany’s museums. The same sense of veneration is applied to the facilities within. Bold signs throughout the institution proclaim the donors of specimens, all without a postmodern preamble about the misuse of taxidermy. Artisans are still trained to preserve the animal models and diorama rooms of the biologist Carl Akeley, who died on assignment for the museum at the spot now depicted in the gorilla diorama. The Hall of Northwest Coast Indians has been left primarily as Franz Boas, the great anthropologist, designed it at the turn of the last century. A refurbishment of this hall that could restore its original windows, uncover its columns, and elevate the lighting would easily bring this room back to its inaugural splendor. Ten years ago, the original architecture of the fourth-floor dinosaur rooms was similarly uncovered in a brilliant restoration sponsored by David H. Koch.
There was a time, however, when this museum was far less assured of its past. In the 1940s, the institution’s fanciful Romanesque Seventy-seventh-Street facade, designed by J. C. Cady in pink granite dotted with turrets and globes, was to be wiped out with the application of a monolithic slab that the critic Christopher Gray likened to “some gigantic crematorium.” This new look represented the new faceless sense of what museums suddenly were supposed to be—museums without histories.
What saved this museum? In part the AMNH came to see its own history as an object worthy of protection and study. It also got lucky, undergoing budget cuts right before the wrecking ball arrived. Today the museum seems more dedicated than any other to polishing up its past and celebrating its own history along with the history of its permanent collection.
Many other institutions have been far less fortunate. The Brooklyn Museum, designed by McKim, Mead & White, lost its grand outdoor Met-like staircase to the rhetoric of “public access” in the 1930s, when the entrance was brought down to street level, the stairs ripped out, and a lobby carved out of the original auditorium. This loss created an architectural imbalance that has only been aggravated through the recent addition of a $63-million glass atrium. In the 1950s, the museum’s beaux-arts lobby was similarly stripped of its ornamentation and a drop-ceiling installed. All of these moves were designed to conceal, reinterpret, or destroy the museum’s one-time architectural grandeur and patrimony.
Today’s museum capital projects often follow a similar pattern. With the addition of new materials, new restaurant spaces, new entertainment venues, and new contemporary art galleries designed by celebrity architects, they can be particularly seductive. The new 70,000-square-foot $114-million wing of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which opened on January 19, is but the latest. Designed by Renzo Piano, the new facility offers “purpose-built spaces for concerts, exhibitions, and classes, along with enhanced visitor amenities,” according to the museum’s press office, including a “cube-shaped performance hall and an adjustable height special exhibition gallery,” a visitor welcome area called the “Richard E. Floor Living Room,” apartments for artists-in-residence, a store called “Gift at the Gardner,” a greenhouse, and a restaurant called “Café G.”
The building, which required the demolition of Gardner’s historic carriage house, now serves as the only entrance to the institution and connects with the original museum through a glass-enclosed umbilical cord, which penetrates the back of Gardner’s fanciful Venetian building.
Compared to Gardner’s grand pastiche of a museum and the limitations imposed through her trust, the Piano addition is ostentatiously invisible, obsequiously deferential, and more than willing to cater to the creature comforts of the visitor/end-user. The vertiginous theater-in-the-square turns the spectator into a spectacle. The Kunsthalle for new art, the eateries, shops, and apartments are all sumptuously attractive. A “geothermal well system, daylight harvesting, water-efficient landscaping techniques, and the use of local and regional materials” may make the new building eligible for leed gold certification.
But what has been lost in the shuffle? How will this facility affect Gardner’s original vision and the mysteries of her creation? And if the new building is meant merely as an engine to generate new donors, couldn’t the trustees just as easily apply $114 million directly to the preservation of the original facility (where the water stains of a rusted-out skylight continue to streak down the interior walls)?
In countless cases, the concern is that museum professionals have come to regard their founding generations with suspicion rather than reverence. They question the legacy of these industrialists and “robber barons.” They suppress the American idiosyncrasies of their institutions to appeal to international ideals. They undercut the signs of private philanthropy in order to seek out greater state control. They advance a new populist rhetoric that trumpets appeal and “access” over beauty and virtue. They attack their own “imposing” facilities and “elite” permanent collections. They undermine the art and architecture their supporters had given to the public trust. All along they sell their own expanding ranks and bureaucratic sensibilities to a complicit donor base as a way to counter, conceal, update, and “reinterpret” the influence of their museums’ dubious histories.
But what if museums were to see these histories as something worthy of preservation and reverence? Some institutions have already taken such a turn. The Frick Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Museum of Natural History are three of the institutions that have quietly rejected the spiraling demands of the professionalized museum by cultivating their own founding principles.
What if all American museums were to embrace the virtuous intent of their founders and supporters? The answer is that the American people, once again, could become the connoisseurs of virtue.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Future-tense--VII--What-s-a-museum--7298, retrieved on 20th of March 2012
duminică, 22 ianuarie 2012
luni, 17 octombrie 2011
expozitii despre comunism in Germania, triunghiul didactic
Nici eu nu stiam ce e aia triunghiul didactic pana nu am citit documentul de mai jos. E un fel de schema despre cum anume se fac expozitiile. Nu cred ca ar fi reguli de aur, ci doar minime cerinte. Necesita oarecare rabdare sa ajungeti la partea asta explicativa, dar cred ca merita.
Pentru cei ce sunt interesati sa afle mai multe despre expoziţiile, memorialele, muzeele, centrele, bibliotecile care se ocupă de expunerea comunismului in Germania recomand raportul in format Pdf scris de Corina Palasan in 2008 vizita de studiu. Avand in vedere toate prefacerile de la noi, e de actualitate.
(Nikolaikirchplatz nr.5-7, Berlin)
In principiu, institutiile vizitate sunt urmatoarele:
Biblioteca memorială a victimelor stalinismului
Memorialului Divizării Germaniei de la Marienborn (punct de frontieră dintre fosta RDG si RFG)
Memorialului Zidului Berlinului (Mauer Memorial din Bernauer Strasse nr.111) si Centrul de Documentare
Centrul de cercetare şi documentare din Normannenstrasse, amplasat în sediul fostului sediu central al STASI (STASI-Zentrale, din Ruschenstrasse nr. 103) Fundaţiea Topografia Terorii
Memorialul Conferinţei de la Wannsee (Am grossen Wannsee nr. 56-58)
Centrul din Leipzig al Autorităţii federale pentru Documentele Serviciului Securităţii Statului (STASI) al fostei RDG (BStU) (
Forumul de Istoriografie din Leipzig
bunkerului STASI, aflat în localitatea Machern, cam la 60 km de Leipzig din Dittrichring nr.24) Memorialul de la Berlin-Hochenschoenhausen Runden Ecke ("Colţul Rotund"), constituit în fostul sediu STASI din Leipzig (Genslerstrasse nr.66) (Topographie des Terrors, din Stresemannstrasse 111)
Pentru cei ce sunt interesati sa afle mai multe despre expoziţiile, memorialele, muzeele, centrele, bibliotecile care se ocupă de expunerea comunismului in Germania recomand raportul in format Pdf scris de Corina Palasan in 2008 vizita de studiu. Avand in vedere toate prefacerile de la noi, e de actualitate.
(Nikolaikirchplatz nr.5-7, Berlin) In principiu, institutiile vizitate sunt urmatoarele:
Biblioteca memorială a victimelor stalinismului
Memorialului Divizării Germaniei de la Marienborn (punct de frontieră dintre fosta RDG si RFG)
Memorialului Zidului Berlinului (Mauer Memorial din Bernauer Strasse nr.111) si Centrul de Documentare
Centrul de cercetare şi documentare din Normannenstrasse, amplasat în sediul fostului sediu central al STASI (STASI-Zentrale, din Ruschenstrasse nr. 103) Fundaţiea Topografia Terorii
Memorialul Conferinţei de la Wannsee (Am grossen Wannsee nr. 56-58)
Centrul din Leipzig al Autorităţii federale pentru Documentele Serviciului Securităţii Statului (STASI) al fostei RDG (BStU) (
Forumul de Istoriografie din Leipzig
bunkerului STASI, aflat în localitatea Machern, cam la 60 km de Leipzig din Dittrichring nr.24) Memorialul de la Berlin-Hochenschoenhausen Runden Ecke ("Colţul Rotund"), constituit în fostul sediu STASI din Leipzig (Genslerstrasse nr.66) (Topographie des Terrors, din Stresemannstrasse 111)
building peace in the minds of men and women?
se refera la SE Europei
e un workshop - deci se lucreaza.
aduna directori de muzee din mai multe state din SE Europei.
Daca subiectul e SE Europei, intalnirea organizata de UNESCO are loc la Venetia sau Torino, firesc, nu?
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/events/culture-events/?tx_browser_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=4672&cHash=cfaa382ee6
Si cica vor face o expozitie umblatoare in care vor vorbi despre pace si razboi. Cine vor vorbi? Directorii de muzee!
e un workshop - deci se lucreaza.
aduna directori de muzee din mai multe state din SE Europei.
Daca subiectul e SE Europei, intalnirea organizata de UNESCO are loc la Venetia sau Torino, firesc, nu?
http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/events/culture-events/?tx_browser_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=4672&cHash=cfaa382ee6
Si cica vor face o expozitie umblatoare in care vor vorbi despre pace si razboi. Cine vor vorbi? Directorii de muzee!
miercuri, 12 octombrie 2011
Muzeul Comunismului din Praga
Ii multumesc lui Cosmin Budeanca pentru textul de mai jos. Comentariile vor aparea dupa!
"În 21 februarie [2010] am avut ocazia să vizitez Muzeul Comunismului din Praga (http://www.muzeumkomunismu.cz/). Deşi e poziţionat în zona centrală a oraşului, ocupă câteva încăperi situate la etajul 1 al unei clădiri şi nu este foarte bine semnalat. Preţul biletului era de aproximativ 7 euro, destul de mult în opinia mea pentru cât era de vizitat, însă cu toate acestea, şi mai ales în pofida faptului că era duminică seara pe la ora 18, eram totuşi câţiva vizitatori înăuntru.
Nu aş putea spune că muzeul este unul spectaculos. Este mai degrabă un fel de încercare de a prezenta câteva aspecte ale comunismului, însă lipsa spaţiului face ca imaginea generală să fie a unei debarale în care sunt înghesuite tot felul de obiecte.
Lăsând la o parte însă ce nu mi-a plăcut, trebuie să apreciez în mod deosebit că s-a făcut un astfel de demers, absolut necesar într-o capitală a unui stat fost comunist, atât de vizitată de turişti. Nu este nici pe departe de anvergura „Casei Terorii” de la Budapesta, însă dacă iau în calcul faptul că în Bucureşti nu există nici măcar atâta, nu pot decât să laud ideea.
De asemenea, m-a impresionat în expoziţie un filmuleţ despre căderea regimului comunist în Cehoslovacia şi cântecul Dĕkuji (Mulţumesc), interpretat de Karel Kryl, în finalul filmului. Cei interesaţi pot să-l asculte aici: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGXIuNhZrQk
tur virtual la adresa http://www.muzeumkomunismu.cz/virtualtour/tour.php?lang=en"
Alte imagini de Cosmin Budeancă
Lăsând la o parte însă ce nu mi-a plăcut, trebuie să apreciez în mod deosebit că s-a făcut un astfel de demers, absolut necesar într-o capitală a unui stat fost comunist, atât de vizitată de turişti. Nu este nici pe departe de anvergura „Casei Terorii” de la Budapesta, însă dacă iau în calcul faptul că în Bucureşti nu există nici măcar atâta, nu pot decât să laud ideea.
De asemenea, m-a impresionat în expoziţie un filmuleţ despre căderea regimului comunist în Cehoslovacia şi cântecul Dĕkuji (Mulţumesc), interpretat de Karel Kryl, în finalul filmului. Cei interesaţi pot să-l asculte aici: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGXIuNhZrQk
tur virtual la adresa http://www.muzeumkomunismu.cz/virtualtour/tour.php?lang=en"
Alte imagini de Cosmin Budeancă
marți, 4 octombrie 2011
arta si antropologie vizuala la Bruxelles- Sound Image Culture
Sound Image Culture - SIC
Un program unde se invata cum anume se concretizeaza un proiect de antropologie vizuala.
unde? La Bruxelles
cat? 500 de euro
ca sa ce? ca sa ai parte de coaching in domeniu de la artisti, antropologi si inca ceva, de vazut pe site si sa termini proiectul inceput
cand? deadline pentru aplicatii 10 Ianuarie 2012 pentru 6 luni in 2012
burse? merita intrebat
http://www.soundimageculture.org/en
Un program unde se invata cum anume se concretizeaza un proiect de antropologie vizuala.
unde? La Bruxelles
cat? 500 de euro
ca sa ce? ca sa ai parte de coaching in domeniu de la artisti, antropologi si inca ceva, de vazut pe site si sa termini proiectul inceput
cand? deadline pentru aplicatii 10 Ianuarie 2012 pentru 6 luni in 2012
burse? merita intrebat
http://www.soundimageculture.org/en
vineri, 30 septembrie 2011
The concise dictionary of dress, an exhibition in the working stores of V&A
Located within the working store for the V&A’s vast reserve collections of furniture, ceramics, glass, jewellery, textiles, fashion and fine arts, The Concise Dictionary of Dress began with a journey through a turnstile, into an industrial goods lift and up to the first in a sequence of intriguing definitions in a walk-through dictionary of dress…
Cast objects and photographs, tableaux of clothing and accessories were arranged amongst the rolling racks and wrapped objects stored at Blythe House, the former headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank in Olympia, west London. The anatomy of the building revealed surreal and evocative interventions in unexpected places; metaphors of repression and ceremony; fragments of the clothed body briefly glimpsed.
Commissioned by Artangel, The Concise Dictionary of Dress re-described clothing in terms of anxiety, wish and desire, as a series of definitions created by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and accompanying installations designed and assembled by fashion curator Judith Clark.
The Concise Dictionary of Dress is also a 128-page hardback book. Illustrated in colour and with written contributions from Adam Phillips and Judith Clark and specially commissioned photography by Norbert Schoerner, it was published in April 2010 by Violette Editions in association with Artangel priced £25.00.
The second edition of the Artangel Podcast was released on 19 May 2010 and saw Artangel Co-Director Michael Morris take a walk through the V&A's vast, maze-like stores at Blythe House - in the company of the building's longstanding manager Glenn Benson. Click here to listen, download or subscribe.
retrieved from:
http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2010/the_concise_dictionary_of_dress/about_the_project/the_concise_dictionary_of_dress
on 30 September 2011
Cast objects and photographs, tableaux of clothing and accessories were arranged amongst the rolling racks and wrapped objects stored at Blythe House, the former headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank in Olympia, west London. The anatomy of the building revealed surreal and evocative interventions in unexpected places; metaphors of repression and ceremony; fragments of the clothed body briefly glimpsed.
Commissioned by Artangel, The Concise Dictionary of Dress re-described clothing in terms of anxiety, wish and desire, as a series of definitions created by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and accompanying installations designed and assembled by fashion curator Judith Clark.
The Concise Dictionary of Dress is also a 128-page hardback book. Illustrated in colour and with written contributions from Adam Phillips and Judith Clark and specially commissioned photography by Norbert Schoerner, it was published in April 2010 by Violette Editions in association with Artangel priced £25.00.
The second edition of the Artangel Podcast was released on 19 May 2010 and saw Artangel Co-Director Michael Morris take a walk through the V&A's vast, maze-like stores at Blythe House - in the company of the building's longstanding manager Glenn Benson. Click here to listen, download or subscribe.
retrieved from:
http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2010/the_concise_dictionary_of_dress/about_the_project/the_concise_dictionary_of_dress
on 30 September 2011
luni, 19 septembrie 2011
CFP: Wonderful things, Surrealism and Egypt
Call for Contributors:
Dada/Surrealism special journal issue:
"Wonderful Things" - Surrealism and Egypt
(http://ir.uiowa.edu/dadasur/)
In November 1922 Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt's
Valley of the Kings, the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th
century. This discovery triggered an enormous Egyptomanic craze in Europe
and America, evident across architecture, the arts and popular culture. This
special issue of Dada/Surrealism (http://ir.uiowa.edu/dadasur/) will mark
the 90th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb by evaluating
Egypt’s significant and diverse impact on surrealism.
This influence can be traced throughout surrealism’s diverse artistic
productions and manifestations, as Martine Antle notes: “among all the
countries of the Middle East, Egypt remained the country of predilection for
surrealism throughout the vanguard period” (2006). Sphinxes, pyramids, eyes
of Horus and other Egyptian figures and symbols play significant roles in
the artworks and writings of Lee Miller, Man Ray, Georges Bataille, Robert
Desnos, Leonora Carrington, Roland Penrose, Jane Graverol, Joyce Mansour,
Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti and Gordon Onslow Ford. Desert landscapes
and hieroglyphic inscriptions are a recurrent theme in works by Leonor Fini,
Kay Sage, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, André
Breton, Victor Brauner and many other surrealists'works.
Egypt's significance for surrealism is also evident in Breton's display of
Egyptian ornaments on the famous mur of his studio. Surrealist reading
included books such as Antoine-Joseph Pernety's Les fables égyptiennes et
grecques (1758), Ludwig Achim von Arnim's Isabelle d’Égypte (1812), Émile
Soldi-Colbert de Beaulieu's La langue sacrée - La cosmoglypie (1902), and
Arthur Rimbaud's Lettres de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud: Égypte, Arabie, Éthiopie
(1899). Surrealists were highly interested in R. Falconnier's Egyptian tarot
and his writings on it. A recurring focus for surrealists and their
associates was the obelisk at the Place de la Concord. Described by Bataille
as "without a doubt the purest image of the head and the heavens", it was a
significant meeting place for Acéphale, and a repeated focus in Brassaï’s
photographs and Benjamin Péret’s writings. In turn, surrealism developed in
Egypt through the Egyptian Georges Henein, who joined the movement in 1936
and whose establishment of the movement Art et liberté in 1937, together
with Ramsès Younane, Fouad Kamel and Kamel el-Telmessany, marks the first
beginning of surrealism in Egypt. Art et liberté regarded surrealism as the
"means to create a new mythology reconciling reality and legend."
Egypt marks a nodal point for a range of surrealist investigations into
myth, colonial identity, cultural hybridity, and for the movement's
dialogues with science and pseudo-science including ethnography,
psychoanalysis, physics, cosmology, and natural history. Surrealist
adaptations, appropriations of and exchanges with Egypt and its signs,
symbols and philosophies open significant questions about surrealist
aesthetic representations and political critiques of the 'orient', the
'exotic', colonialism and ancient civilizations.
This special issue invites essays that explore the significance of the
multiple relations, points of contact, dialogues, engagements and exchanges
between surrealism and Egypt.
Please send a 250-word abstract, tentative title and brief CV to the guest
editors Patricia Allmer at p.allmer@mmu.ac.uk and Donna Roberts at
dmrobe@googlemail.com by October 16th, 2011. Completed essays will be due
February 13th 2011, and should be between 6000-8000 words. For queries
please contact Patricia Allmer and Donna Roberts at the email addresses
above. For further information on Dada/Surrealism please visit
http://ir.uiowa.edu/dadasur/ (Contact: Patricia Allmer and Donna Roberts)
Dada/Surrealism special journal issue:
"Wonderful Things" - Surrealism and Egypt
(http://ir.uiowa.edu/dadasur/)
In November 1922 Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt's
Valley of the Kings, the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th
century. This discovery triggered an enormous Egyptomanic craze in Europe
and America, evident across architecture, the arts and popular culture. This
special issue of Dada/Surrealism (http://ir.uiowa.edu/dadasur/) will mark
the 90th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb by evaluating
Egypt’s significant and diverse impact on surrealism.
This influence can be traced throughout surrealism’s diverse artistic
productions and manifestations, as Martine Antle notes: “among all the
countries of the Middle East, Egypt remained the country of predilection for
surrealism throughout the vanguard period” (2006). Sphinxes, pyramids, eyes
of Horus and other Egyptian figures and symbols play significant roles in
the artworks and writings of Lee Miller, Man Ray, Georges Bataille, Robert
Desnos, Leonora Carrington, Roland Penrose, Jane Graverol, Joyce Mansour,
Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti and Gordon Onslow Ford. Desert landscapes
and hieroglyphic inscriptions are a recurrent theme in works by Leonor Fini,
Kay Sage, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, André
Breton, Victor Brauner and many other surrealists'works.
Egypt's significance for surrealism is also evident in Breton's display of
Egyptian ornaments on the famous mur of his studio. Surrealist reading
included books such as Antoine-Joseph Pernety's Les fables égyptiennes et
grecques (1758), Ludwig Achim von Arnim's Isabelle d’Égypte (1812), Émile
Soldi-Colbert de Beaulieu's La langue sacrée - La cosmoglypie (1902), and
Arthur Rimbaud's Lettres de Jean-Arthur Rimbaud: Égypte, Arabie, Éthiopie
(1899). Surrealists were highly interested in R. Falconnier's Egyptian tarot
and his writings on it. A recurring focus for surrealists and their
associates was the obelisk at the Place de la Concord. Described by Bataille
as "without a doubt the purest image of the head and the heavens", it was a
significant meeting place for Acéphale, and a repeated focus in Brassaï’s
photographs and Benjamin Péret’s writings. In turn, surrealism developed in
Egypt through the Egyptian Georges Henein, who joined the movement in 1936
and whose establishment of the movement Art et liberté in 1937, together
with Ramsès Younane, Fouad Kamel and Kamel el-Telmessany, marks the first
beginning of surrealism in Egypt. Art et liberté regarded surrealism as the
"means to create a new mythology reconciling reality and legend."
Egypt marks a nodal point for a range of surrealist investigations into
myth, colonial identity, cultural hybridity, and for the movement's
dialogues with science and pseudo-science including ethnography,
psychoanalysis, physics, cosmology, and natural history. Surrealist
adaptations, appropriations of and exchanges with Egypt and its signs,
symbols and philosophies open significant questions about surrealist
aesthetic representations and political critiques of the 'orient', the
'exotic', colonialism and ancient civilizations.
This special issue invites essays that explore the significance of the
multiple relations, points of contact, dialogues, engagements and exchanges
between surrealism and Egypt.
Please send a 250-word abstract, tentative title and brief CV to the guest
editors Patricia Allmer at p.allmer@mmu.ac.uk and Donna Roberts at
dmrobe@googlemail.com by October 16th, 2011. Completed essays will be due
February 13th 2011, and should be between 6000-8000 words. For queries
please contact Patricia Allmer and Donna Roberts at the email addresses
above. For further information on Dada/Surrealism please visit
http://ir.uiowa.edu/dadasur/ (Contact: Patricia Allmer and Donna Roberts)
luni, 12 septembrie 2011
CFP: Museum Utopias: Navigating the Imaginary, Ideal and Possible Museum
A Two Day Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Symposium at the School of
Museum Studies, University of Leicester Tuesday 27th and Wednesday
28th March 2012
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leicester
In everyday life, the chance to dream, to imagine, to explore the idea
of the museum is limited, leaving many museums reacting to change,
rather than being able to think about how the museum could be. This
Symposium will give museum researchers, students and practitioners the
opportunity to consider the changes that are taking place in the world
and how museums might respond to them, using the idea of Utopia as a
place for dreaming as well as thinking practically about how these
challenges might be addressed.
Despite the impossibility of building Utopia, we arguably retain our
need for what Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett (2004) has called ‘the
utopian imagination’. Utopia can inspire us to challenge the status
quo, and to transform our world for the better. From temples of the
Muses dedicated to the arts to today’s democratic forums of debate and
consumption, the concept and the realization of the museum have
changed dramatically during its long and varied history. Stepping into
the Utopian otherworld enables us to engage the past and present
incarnations of the museum, both real and imagined, and begin to
navigate its future.
Papers are invited to address the following key themes, but we welcome
and encourage any creative or imaginative ideas that correspond with
the aims of the Symposium.
Please see the complete Call for Papers here: http://www.tinyurl.com/mutopia
Patrick Cox
Editor, H-MATERIAL CULTURE
http://camden-rutgers.academia.edu/PatrickCox
PhD Student
http://facultyexperts.blogs.rutgers.edu/
Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University
http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/
https://email.rutgers.edu/mailman/listinfo/exploring_childhood_studies
Museum Studies, University of Leicester Tuesday 27th and Wednesday
28th March 2012
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leicester
In everyday life, the chance to dream, to imagine, to explore the idea
of the museum is limited, leaving many museums reacting to change,
rather than being able to think about how the museum could be. This
Symposium will give museum researchers, students and practitioners the
opportunity to consider the changes that are taking place in the world
and how museums might respond to them, using the idea of Utopia as a
place for dreaming as well as thinking practically about how these
challenges might be addressed.
Despite the impossibility of building Utopia, we arguably retain our
need for what Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett (2004) has called ‘the
utopian imagination’. Utopia can inspire us to challenge the status
quo, and to transform our world for the better. From temples of the
Muses dedicated to the arts to today’s democratic forums of debate and
consumption, the concept and the realization of the museum have
changed dramatically during its long and varied history. Stepping into
the Utopian otherworld enables us to engage the past and present
incarnations of the museum, both real and imagined, and begin to
navigate its future.
Papers are invited to address the following key themes, but we welcome
and encourage any creative or imaginative ideas that correspond with
the aims of the Symposium.
Please see the complete Call for Papers here: http://www.tinyurl.com/mutopia
Patrick Cox
Editor, H-MATERIAL CULTURE
http://camden-rutgers.academia.edu/PatrickCox
PhD Student
http://facultyexperts.blogs.rutgers.edu/
Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University
http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/
https://email.rutgers.edu/mailman/listinfo/exploring_childhood_studies
marți, 21 iunie 2011
CFP: Challenging History conference
Deadline 30 June 2011
Call for conference participation:
Challenging History: understanding aims, audiences and outcomes in work with difficult and sensitive heritages
The Challenging History project steering group invites proposals for contributions to the International Challenging History conference to be held at City University London, Feb 23-25th 2012.
Since 2009, the Challenging History group has been working with heritage professionals, practitioners and academics in order to explore and interrogate issues raised in work with difficult, contested and sensitive heritages in a range of museum contexts, within and beyond the UK. The project acknowledges that all history is – to a greater or lesser degree – challenging, and encourages practitioners to consider how heritage interpretation can better acknowledge this complexity at its core.
In 2012, we wish to bring together those working in disparate and diverse locations and disciplines to help explore the practicalities, limitations and ethical implications of work in this knotty area of heritage interpretation. The programme will foster collaboration and shared understanding between academia and the heritage sector, and offer opportunities for networking, demonstrating approaches and practice, and presenting empirical research. We anticipate a vibrant and vital range of discussions and keynotes.
You are invited to submit a proposal along one or more of the following thematics related to challenging histories in Europe and beyond:
*Ethics, ownership and responsibility
*The role and positionality of audiences (including their entry narratives)
*Recognising complexity and multiplicity in heritage interpretation
*Definitions of learning, meaning making and understanding in challenging history work
*The role of empathy and personal resonance
*Framing, space and place of activity
*The role of memorialisation and commemoration
*Exploring symbols and their meanings
*Collaboration and co-production
*Methodological approaches
*Using new media to extend the museum walls
*Translating challenging histories across cultures and contexts
We welcome abstracts of 300 words along the following lines:
- 20 minute paper presentation
- 90 minute workshop
- 90 minute panel presentation with discussion
- Performance/storytelling
Abstracts should be sent to jenny.kidd.1@city.ac.uk by June 30th. We welcome international contributions and EU colleagues will be able to apply for a Grundtvig Visits and Exchanges grant. The programme will be confirmed by mid July and registration will open in August.
The Challenging History conference is the culmination of a two year project funded by Grundtvig and supported by the MLA. The project includes partners in the UK (Historic Royal Palaces, the Tower of London, the Imperial War Museum, Orleans House Gallery, MLA and City University), Germany (the Forum for Contemporary History) and the Czech Republic (Lidice Memorial).
Funding and costs
Non UK European participants can apply for a Grundtvig Visits and Exchanges grant to attend the conference http://ec.europa.eu/education/grundtvig/doc980_en.htm. The conference will be listed on the Grundtvig catalogue. If you require a letter of invitation to apply for your Grundtvig grant please email Alex.Drago@hrp.org.uk
UK based colleagues will be unable to apply for a Grundtvig grant for the conference fee and will be offered concessionary rates to attend the conference.
More on Challenging History…
Challenging History is at once a community of like-minded individuals, a forum for discussion, a programme of ongoing professional development for practitioners and teachers and an advocate for change in the way our audiences engage with our shared history. It originated with the Challenging History series of seminars in 2009, held at Historic Royal Palaces - Tower of London. The programme was conceived to explore the role, aims and outcomes of heritage and museum learning programmes in relation to difficult and controversial subjects (see www.city.ac.uk/cpm/challenginghistory for more on the continuing work of the project).
A challenging history is any history that is contested, or difficult and upsetting to know about.
Challenging History believes the museum and heritage sector has an important role to play covering these histories in their spaces and programmes, and must do this work to stay relevant. It also believes at a personal and societal level it is important to acknowledge and learn about these histories that contribute to our understanding of the world and how we want to live in it.
Call for conference participation:
Challenging History: understanding aims, audiences and outcomes in work with difficult and sensitive heritages
The Challenging History project steering group invites proposals for contributions to the International Challenging History conference to be held at City University London, Feb 23-25th 2012.
Since 2009, the Challenging History group has been working with heritage professionals, practitioners and academics in order to explore and interrogate issues raised in work with difficult, contested and sensitive heritages in a range of museum contexts, within and beyond the UK. The project acknowledges that all history is – to a greater or lesser degree – challenging, and encourages practitioners to consider how heritage interpretation can better acknowledge this complexity at its core.
In 2012, we wish to bring together those working in disparate and diverse locations and disciplines to help explore the practicalities, limitations and ethical implications of work in this knotty area of heritage interpretation. The programme will foster collaboration and shared understanding between academia and the heritage sector, and offer opportunities for networking, demonstrating approaches and practice, and presenting empirical research. We anticipate a vibrant and vital range of discussions and keynotes.
You are invited to submit a proposal along one or more of the following thematics related to challenging histories in Europe and beyond:
*Ethics, ownership and responsibility
*The role and positionality of audiences (including their entry narratives)
*Recognising complexity and multiplicity in heritage interpretation
*Definitions of learning, meaning making and understanding in challenging history work
*The role of empathy and personal resonance
*Framing, space and place of activity
*The role of memorialisation and commemoration
*Exploring symbols and their meanings
*Collaboration and co-production
*Methodological approaches
*Using new media to extend the museum walls
*Translating challenging histories across cultures and contexts
We welcome abstracts of 300 words along the following lines:
- 20 minute paper presentation
- 90 minute workshop
- 90 minute panel presentation with discussion
- Performance/storytelling
Abstracts should be sent to jenny.kidd.1@city.ac.uk by June 30th. We welcome international contributions and EU colleagues will be able to apply for a Grundtvig Visits and Exchanges grant. The programme will be confirmed by mid July and registration will open in August.
The Challenging History conference is the culmination of a two year project funded by Grundtvig and supported by the MLA. The project includes partners in the UK (Historic Royal Palaces, the Tower of London, the Imperial War Museum, Orleans House Gallery, MLA and City University), Germany (the Forum for Contemporary History) and the Czech Republic (Lidice Memorial).
Funding and costs
Non UK European participants can apply for a Grundtvig Visits and Exchanges grant to attend the conference http://ec.europa.eu/education/grundtvig/doc980_en.htm. The conference will be listed on the Grundtvig catalogue. If you require a letter of invitation to apply for your Grundtvig grant please email Alex.Drago@hrp.org.uk
UK based colleagues will be unable to apply for a Grundtvig grant for the conference fee and will be offered concessionary rates to attend the conference.
More on Challenging History…
Challenging History is at once a community of like-minded individuals, a forum for discussion, a programme of ongoing professional development for practitioners and teachers and an advocate for change in the way our audiences engage with our shared history. It originated with the Challenging History series of seminars in 2009, held at Historic Royal Palaces - Tower of London. The programme was conceived to explore the role, aims and outcomes of heritage and museum learning programmes in relation to difficult and controversial subjects (see www.city.ac.uk/cpm/challenginghistory for more on the continuing work of the project).
A challenging history is any history that is contested, or difficult and upsetting to know about.
Challenging History believes the museum and heritage sector has an important role to play covering these histories in their spaces and programmes, and must do this work to stay relevant. It also believes at a personal and societal level it is important to acknowledge and learn about these histories that contribute to our understanding of the world and how we want to live in it.
vineri, 10 iunie 2011
Odillon Redon la Grand Palais
E cald şi nu prea mai am chef de stat „înauntru”, chiar dacă este vorba de muzee...Dar expoziţia Odillon Redon (http://www.rmn.fr/english/les-musees-et-leurs-expositions-238/grand-palais-galeries-nationales-257/expositions-258/odilon-redon-2237) n-am putut s-o ratez... Şi bine am făcut!
Odillon Redon este un poet...desenele în cărbune au titluri lungi, fraze care stârnesc poveşti fantastice în capul privitorilor, iar pentru pastelurile viu colorate nici nu mai este nevoie de cuvinte, doar uitându-te la ele plonjezi într-un fel de Ţară a Minunilor...
Ca observaţie practică, ramele erau diferite! Nu toate standard, la fel, identice, xeroxate...Cred că e prima dată cand văd, într-o expoziţie, multe rame de multe feluri. Mi-a plăcut.
E cald şi n-are rost să insist ...Visul Odillon continuă.
luni, 30 mai 2011
Din depozite afară: 26 mai - 12 iunie, MȚR, Sala Irina Nicolau
Împreună cu o întreagă echipă de cercetători, muzeografi, voluntari, personal administrativ etc am creat o expoziție - concept: Legături. Obiecte în relație și context.
Expoziția pornește de la ideea de muzeu ca depozit și arhivă neexplorate și vrea să-i scoată de prin măruntaie și rafturi un număr de obiecte/ imagini/ linii melodice mai mult sau mai puțin convenționale. La unele nici prin gând nu v-ați putea gândi că fac parte din depozitele și arhivele MȚR.
Să vă dau un exemplu: pantaloni de băiat din Republica Populară Coreea.
Cum anume au ajuns in depozitele muzeului puteti afla mergand in expozitie. Un indiciu va pot da, totusi. Muzeul Taranului Roman (MTR) a fost intre 1952-1978 Muzeu de Arta Populara, aflat pe Calea Victoriei 107. In perioada mai sus amintita, statul Roman intreprindea vizite diplomatice in alte tari socialiste sau prietene. Expozitiile de arta populara erau un bun fel de imprietenire pajnica intre popoare si de legaturi simbolice. Asa se face ca muzeul primea colectii in dar, si facea la randul sau alte daruri. Asta e doar un singur obiect din peste cateva mii, aflat in momentul de fata in depozitul Tari Straine din MTR. In expozitie mai sunt si late asemenea obiecte, pe care, va spun sincer, nu toti le detecteaza ca fiind ne-romano-taranesti.
Mai sunt si alte obiecte interesante. De exemplu cele de la Arhiva Furnica/ Arhiva timpului Prezent - initiata de Irina Nicolau, carmen Huluta si alti cativa oameni: o balerina din portelan, devenita diva de expozitie de pe raftul unei vitrine cu portelanuri de sufragerie din Galati, un covor Basarabean cu flori, o traista Dobrogeana cu petice.
Mai exista si obiecte dintr-o Arhiva a Muzeului Partidului, cu obiecte ramase in depozitele de la subsol de pe vremea cand cladirea din Kiseleff 3 era Muzeul Lenin-Stalin.
Mai exista si arhive de imagine, text si film, si nu in ultimul rand una de muzica.
Reprezentanti in obiecte ai acestor arhive sunt adunati in expozitia de fata.
Vizitatorii sunt rugati sa faca legaturile dintre aceste obiecte - sub forma de magneti. Adica, fiecare obiect inclus in expozitie are un echivalent bidimensional, aproximativ la scala, pe care vizitatorul il poate lipi pe o trabla, sub forma de magnet. In felul asta, revalorizam depozitele si arhivele ascunse ale unei institutii de stat, cu istorie, trecut tumultuos si dorinta de inovatie!
va asteptam sa faceti legaturi si ne gandim, ca la un moment dat sa facem si un eveniment de proiectat film cu taranul zilelor noastre si, de ce nu, chiar cu refacerea expozitiei in functie d epropunerile si legaturile voastre.
Expoziția pornește de la ideea de muzeu ca depozit și arhivă neexplorate și vrea să-i scoată de prin măruntaie și rafturi un număr de obiecte/ imagini/ linii melodice mai mult sau mai puțin convenționale. La unele nici prin gând nu v-ați putea gândi că fac parte din depozitele și arhivele MȚR.
Cum anume au ajuns in depozitele muzeului puteti afla mergand in expozitie. Un indiciu va pot da, totusi. Muzeul Taranului Roman (MTR) a fost intre 1952-1978 Muzeu de Arta Populara, aflat pe Calea Victoriei 107. In perioada mai sus amintita, statul Roman intreprindea vizite diplomatice in alte tari socialiste sau prietene. Expozitiile de arta populara erau un bun fel de imprietenire pajnica intre popoare si de legaturi simbolice. Asa se face ca muzeul primea colectii in dar, si facea la randul sau alte daruri. Asta e doar un singur obiect din peste cateva mii, aflat in momentul de fata in depozitul Tari Straine din MTR. In expozitie mai sunt si late asemenea obiecte, pe care, va spun sincer, nu toti le detecteaza ca fiind ne-romano-taranesti.
Mai sunt si alte obiecte interesante. De exemplu cele de la Arhiva Furnica/ Arhiva timpului Prezent - initiata de Irina Nicolau, carmen Huluta si alti cativa oameni: o balerina din portelan, devenita diva de expozitie de pe raftul unei vitrine cu portelanuri de sufragerie din Galati, un covor Basarabean cu flori, o traista Dobrogeana cu petice.
Mai exista si obiecte dintr-o Arhiva a Muzeului Partidului, cu obiecte ramase in depozitele de la subsol de pe vremea cand cladirea din Kiseleff 3 era Muzeul Lenin-Stalin.
Mai exista si arhive de imagine, text si film, si nu in ultimul rand una de muzica.
Reprezentanti in obiecte ai acestor arhive sunt adunati in expozitia de fata.
va asteptam sa faceti legaturi si ne gandim, ca la un moment dat sa facem si un eveniment de proiectat film cu taranul zilelor noastre si, de ce nu, chiar cu refacerea expozitiei in functie d epropunerile si legaturile voastre.
luni, 11 aprilie 2011
1.Conference Voices in and around the Museum - London, May
I attach the link to a conference about museums held in UCL. Museums, as far as I understand, should be more than just collectors of objects; they should be also places of interpretation - that make more than just exhibit objects - but also to tell some of the datas and stories that are attached to these objects.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mellon-program/events/voices/
Me myself I have to preapare an exhibition to be opened on 1rst of June in Sala Irina Nicolau, in the Museum of the Romanian Peasant.
The theme/ title of the exhibition is: Big and Small. Ethnographic objects in their context. Initially I thought to chose this "simple"/ visual theme in order to manage to communicate my message to evererybody from the museum but also from the visitors' side. Now, after few months since the idea came to my mind, I realize it is not such simple as I initially thought...
Any way - these Big and small objects from the museum's deposits - I intend to exhibit them in different glass cases but also with different modalities of documenting them. The stories around the objects are to be taken out from the deposits and museum employees, archives and people's memories.
To be continued...
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/mellon-program/events/voices/
Me myself I have to preapare an exhibition to be opened on 1rst of June in Sala Irina Nicolau, in the Museum of the Romanian Peasant.
The theme/ title of the exhibition is: Big and Small. Ethnographic objects in their context. Initially I thought to chose this "simple"/ visual theme in order to manage to communicate my message to evererybody from the museum but also from the visitors' side. Now, after few months since the idea came to my mind, I realize it is not such simple as I initially thought...
Any way - these Big and small objects from the museum's deposits - I intend to exhibit them in different glass cases but also with different modalities of documenting them. The stories around the objects are to be taken out from the deposits and museum employees, archives and people's memories.
To be continued...
joi, 24 martie 2011
Musée du Quai Branly, instituţia muzeală şi interculturalitatea
Cu fericita ocazie a unui examen (şi nu numai, pentru că ,,păşisem’’ şi înainte pe acolo) am vizitat MUZEUL antropologic (cred că merită totuşi acest apelativ…hmmm…discutabil) Quai Branly din Paris, denumit şi Muzeul Artelor Primare (şi nu ,,Primitive’’ !!!). Cu aceeşi fericită ocazie am şi scris o mică-mică lucrare, pe care o redau mai jos în (semi) integralitate, şi (aproape) fără calcuri lingvistice…vine primăvara, merg să observ specia umană în mediul său contemporano – natural, asfaltul. Lectură placută !
Muzeul Quai Branly a suscitat polemici aprinse încă de la inaugurarea sa din 2006. Multe critici sunt bazate pe faptul că acest muzeu pune în evidenţă trecutul colonial al Franţei prin expunerea în colecţia permanentă a unui număr mare de obiecte care au fost ,,recuperate’’ în acea perioadă. Deşi faptul este real, acest aspect nu alterează, în sine, semnificaţia iniţială a acestor obiecte. Dar există alte elemente care dăunează înţelegerii semnificaţiei obiectelor.
Primul semn de întrebare face referire la însuşi numele muzeului : Muzeul Artelor Primare. Acest nume face implicit faptul că obiectele expuse au fost create ca opere de artă, dar acest fapt nu este, în majoritatea cazurilor, deloc adevărat. Deşi aceste obiecte au într-adevăr o valoare estetică incontestabilă, a sugera că funcţia lor primară er auna estetică reprezintă o trunchiere a realităţii. Făcând referire la funcţia obiectelor ajungem la definiţia deculturaţiei în viziunea etnopsihiatrul Georges Devereux [născut în Lugoj sub numele György Dobó de altfel !] : ,,Înţeleg prin deculturaţia unui element cultural procesul prin care acest element este ,,jumulit’’ de sensul pe care în are în cultura de origine. Astfel, dacă folosesc o vioară pe post de lemn de foc, o deculturalizez.’’.
Publicul Muzeului Quai Branly nu are întotdeauna instrumentele necesare înţelegerii utilizării iniţiale a obiectelor pe care le vede. Să citeşti ,,stâlp funerar’’ sau ,,mască dogon’’ nu înseamnă mare lucru şi nu are acelaşi impact vizual cu felul în care sunt ,,amenajate’’ vitrinele cu obiecte...se sugerează din nou că este vorba de o expoziţie artistică, şi nu de obiecte care au cu totul altă semnificaţie în cultura lor de origine decât semnificaţia pe care le-o ,,lipim’’ noi.
Într-un articol publicat în revista French Politics, Culture and Society[1], profesorul Herman Lebovics de la State University New Zork subliniază (şi) problemele de traducere: faptul că o parte a colecţiei permanente se numeşte Moştenirea africană (African Heritage) în engleză şi Americile Negre (Les Amériques Noires) în franceză nu sugerează aceleaşi implicaţii.
Nu sunt nici prima nici ultima care subliniază dispunerea scenografică exoticizantă de la Musée du Quai Branly. Ar fi totuşi util să ne punem întrebări şi asupra părţilor bune ale colecţiei. Deşi obiectele sunt scoase din context, se poate totuşi păstra vreo formă de aculturaţie ? După cum afirmă Herskovits, Linton şi Redfield, ,,aculturaţia reprezintă ansamblul de fenomene care rezultă dintr-un contact continuu şi direct între grupuri de indivizi provenind din culturi diferite şi care determină schimbări în modelul cultural iniţial al unui sau al ambelor grupuri’’[2]. Dacă e să ne raportăm la această definiţie, este imposibil să vorbim de aculturaţie în cazul acestui muzeu, şi de altfel în cazul oricărui muzeu în general, deoarece nu există contact între culturile grupurilor în prezenţă (sau mai degrabă în absenţă). Totuşi, dacă aplicăm definiţia într-un sens mai larg, se poate ajunge la un fel de ,,aculturaţie unilaterală’’, deoarece se produce (sau cel puţin sper că se produce) o conştientizare culturală, şi modelele comportamentale ale unei părţi a publicului se modifică în urma vizitei la Musée du Quai Branly.
Trecând de la acest exemplu la contextul mai larg al spaţiului muzeal şi instituţional pus în legătură cu interculturalitatea, trebuie să începem prin a sublinia faptul că în majoritatea cazurilor decizia de a construi, modifica sau subvenţiona un anumit spaţiu muzeal reprezintă o decizie politică, economică sau ambele.
Cum Statul (prin diferitele sale forme de reprezentare) este cel care decide de facto orientările de urmat pentru a menţine ceea ce se numeşte ,,coeziunea socială’’ [amintesc că mă refer a exemplul Franţei, în primul rând, dar nu numai], Statul va dori să prezinte o versiune oficială, unificatoare şi unică asupra temelor delicate, mai ales istoria, antropologia culturală şi alte aspecte care pot fi, în anumite cazuri, ,,deranjante’’. În consecinţă, în majoritatea cazurilor un spaţiu muzeal riscă să devină o sursă de polemică, cu atât mai mult Statul va încerca să-şi impună punctul de vedere. Putem presupune că în cazul Muzeului Quai Branly Statul a încercat să joace cartea neutralităţii şi esteticii artistice, dar rezultatul a fost contrar intenţiei.
Mă întreb dacă există muzee în care interculturalitatea este cu adevărat posibilă. Ceea ce vedem ne comunică informaţii care, în cazurile fericite, duc la ceea ce numeam ,,aculturaţie unilaterală’’ ; dar aceasta va rămâne întotdeauna unilaterală şi incompletă, pentru că în câteva ore nu vom reuşi să ,,privim’’ altfel decât tot prin prisma propriei culturi. După cum arăta Malinowski (şi se pare că avea dreptate, deşi unii l-ar putea invoca pe Augé şi teoria non-locurilor drept contra-argument), nimic nu poate înlocui observaţia participantă şi experienţa de teren.
[1] French Politics, Culture and Society, Vol 24, Nr 3, 2006, pg 96 – 110.
[2] Definiţie prezentată în Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation (1936).
Bibliografie – în diverse limbi :
- Augé, Marc (1992) Non-lieux, introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité Editions du Seuil : Paris / (1995) Non-places – introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity Bookmarque Ltd : Croydon.
- Clastres, Pierre De l’Ethnocide în L’Homme, iulie-dec 1974, XIV (3-4), copyright : Universalia, Encyclopaedia Universalis.
- Curs Anthropologie Intercuturelle – prof. Emmanuelle Savignac, Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III, 2010-2011.
- Curs Identitate, diversitate, comunicare - prof. Smaranda Vultur, Universitatea de Vest Timişoara, 2009-2010.
- Lebovics, Herman (2006) The Musée du Quai Branly: Art? Actifact? Spectacle! en French Politics, Culture and Society, Vol 24, Nr 3.
- Malinowski, Bronislaw (1922/2002) Argonauts of the Western Pacific Routledge : London.
- Mihăilescu, Vintilă (2009) Antropologie – cinci introduceri Polirom : Iaşi.
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