I also have a bias in favor of "exploratoriums," places where you can fool
around with stuff. It is true I think that many museums remain stuck in the
"don't touch--don't do" mode but, depending on what is on display, there
could certainly be good reasons for that. Just for the fun of it though, I
tracked down quotes from some notables who, for one reason or another, had
become exasperated with the preservation of things (or the way they were
preserved) and thought I'd share them for the amusement of xmca.
"Museums, museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the
unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get
into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-
ordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? . .
. A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And
what one wants is the actual vital touch." -D. H. Lawrence
"Individually, museums are fine institutions, dedicated to the high values
of preservation, education and truth; collectively, their growth in numbers
points to the imaginative death of this country." -Robert Hewison
"Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business
are mostly impostors. . . . We have infected the pictures in museums with
all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have
turned them into petty and ridiculous things." -Pablo Picasso
"The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends." -Jean
Cocteau
"a Dada exhibition. Another one! What's the matter with everyone wanting to
make a museum piece out of Dada? Dada was a bomb . . . can you imagine
anyone, around half a century after a bomb explodes, wanting to collect the
pieces, sticking it together and displaying it?" -Max Ernst
Rolfe Windward
UCLA GSE&IS
ibalwin who-is-at mvs.oac.ucla.edu
rwindwar who-is-at ucla.edu (Eudora)
"Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not
just of youth but of the world we were young in." -Sir Peter Medawar
------------------------------TEXT-OF-YOUR-MAIL--------------------------------
> Resent-Date: Tue, 7 Nov 1995 19:39:51 -0800 (PST)
> Date: Tue, 07 Nov 95 22:39:07 EST
> From: Jay Lemke <JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
> Subject: museums of practice
> To: X-MCA Discussion List Group <xmca who-is-at WEBER.UCSD.EDU>
> Resent-Message-ID: <"VNGod3.0.O_5.6Q2em" who-is-at weber>
> Resent-From: xmca who-is-at WEBER.UCSD.EDU
> Reply-To: xmca who-is-at WEBER.UCSD.EDU
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>
>
> I was rather struck by the idea of 'museums of practice'.
>
> There seem to be so many interesting contradictions between the
> idea of a museum and a concern with the preservation of forms of
> human practice that are no longer current.
>
> To preserve a practice, we need not a glass display case, but a
> living practicing person. Someone's _life_ must be dedicated, in
> some part, to maintaining a practice.
>
> Of course this does happen. And a great deal more than perhaps
> Edouard initially recognized. Many of the craft skills of the
> last century or so are being 'revived', from quilting to the
> making and playing of traditional musical instruments. And
> curiously, these 'anachronistic' practices fairly readily form
> links to the present social ecology, and economy. Perhaps because
> our social surpluses are sufficient to indulge these activities
> as 'pastimes' (for some of us); perhaps because it is a myth that
> there is any irreversible evolution of social practices. Perhaps
> any, or at least many, systems of interdependent social practices
> are possible, and they do not need to be ones that arose
> contemporaneously, nor does each one need to be maximally
> efficient (if it is not in fact in competition with alternative
> practices). Perhaps we overestimate the degree to which
> competition for efficiency or scarce resources drives out the old
> and forces acceptance of the new. Perhaps the new is not in fact
> necessary, but only what is politically dominant.
>
> One of the earliest tenets of postmodernism, in architecture, was
> that the classical styles can harmoniously mix with modernist
> ones, just as a city like Rome can mix, in a fractal mosaic,
> patches of different ages and styles into a unified landscape (or
> anyway one that we can learn to see a certain unity in).
>
> We don't need to turn to 'living fossils' to find our past -- in
> fact I rather doubt in most cases that there are such living
> fossils: they are not fossils in their own ecology, and they are
> probably not operating in the same way that comparable practices
> did in the history of our own.
>
> We do create sometimes 'living museums' as at Colonial
> Williamsburg, where the practices and the artifacts are preserved
> together. I have not been there, but I rather doubt that the
> whole ecology is preserved, including the diseases, the slops,
> etc. And I would be skeptical that one can gain much insight into
> the functions of the practices that are preserved if they are
> divorced from the complete ecology.
>
> Whence the impulse to 'musee-ify'? Museums seem to be a very
> culture-specific phenomenon, and a rather recent one. They are
> not ecologically very much like the preservation of holy relics
> or the keeping of sacred bundles. Museums radically de-
> contextualize their contents; they are almost
> institutionalizations of modern alienation. They may have begun
> as displays of conspicuous ownership by wealthy eccentrics, and
> have acquired some rational camouflage as scientific collections,
> but are they not also a rather horrifying art-form? ripping
> objects from the activity contexts that give them meaning, so
> that they can be regarded as pure 'commodities' (I always expect
> to see price tags attached to museum displays!), pure isolated
> 'objets' of the art of our century, the art of fragmentation and
> reduction ...?
>
> To the extent that this can happen to a living practice, it
> represents a contradiction, since a practice cannot actually be
> living except in integral relationship to a human social ecology.
> But we are taught not to see the new ecological links that
> support 'quaint revivals' of oldtime practices (as we do not
> focus on the economics of museums). Perhaps that is coming to its
> end. One step beyond modernism may be to stop fetishizing
> isolated objects and practices and begin to consider how they
> combine and interact, however heterogeneously, making whatever
> impossible mixes and monstrosities. JAY.
>
> ------------------
>
>
> JAY LEMKE.
> City University of New York.
> BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
> INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
>