What museums do with objects (original) (raw)
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The Center for 21st Century Studies, a UW System Center of Excellence at the University of Wisconsin -Milwaukee campus, is a postdoctoral research institute founded in 1968 to foster cross-disciplinary research in the humanities. This series of occasional, online Working Papers provides a forum for rapid distribution of ideas in texts that are not yet ready or suitable for publication in more formal academic publications, but still offer valuable content. Usually the authors of Center Working Papers will be Center fellows, invited speakers, or others with significant ties to the Center, although we reserve the right to make exceptions. We regret that we are unable to consider unsolicited submissions.
The Object Matter of Museums: designing otherwise
DESIGN OBJECTS: MUSEALIZATION, DOCUMENTATION AND INTERPRETATION, 2023
The theoretical and ethical debate fostered by the reflexive turn of the last decades is increasingly guided by the concern to recover a sphere of political action of the museum: activist and decolonial in nature, deeply entangled in the world and built from an intraactive engagement with it. As a consequence, the museum tends to address the emergent and the urgent through situated practices that collectively analyse and respond to circumstances in the world. In doing so, the contemporary museum seeks to create conditions for visitor engagement by empowering their unmediated voices to be heard. This text aims to explore the critical space between the apparent decolonial vitality of the museum and how diffractive practices may be designed in a postcritical and postrepresentational context, arguing that approaches based on artistic and design processes of speculative fabulation (as Design Culture) are helpful for thinking and acting in these spaces of experience, acting as a tool of philosophical enquiry, which promotes responsiveness to «know» and «do» differently in the present. Pragmatically, it highlights three modes of speculative (moderated) design engagement with the present and the future to help museums to break out of their ontological blindness and fulfil their critical and transformative potential.
Things are Changing: Museums and the Material Turn
Museological Review, 2014
This article offers one of the many possible answers to the question of what changes museums. It is argued that changing knowledge about museum things has, and has had, enormous influence on the approaches museums adapt to display their collections. A new relationship between things and people has developed since the 1970s. This change in epistemology that became known as material turn was mirrored in changing approaches to exhibition design in museums. To trace these interrelated changes, the article focuses on two German museums of history (Historical Museum Frankfurt and Werkbund-Archive/museum of things in Berlin) and follows their shifts in exhibition design during the last 50 years. In reacting to the latest developments in knowledge about museum objects, they firstly replaced their glass cases with text-book-exhibitions, and then they installed stage-like combinations of objects (scenographies), simply to reinstall glass showcases at the end of the century. Keywords: museum object, history of epistemology, exhibition design, German museums
History and Theory of Exhibition Design
2014
This course explores a range of museological and popular cultural exhibition practices through case studies including fine arts, ethnography, (natural) history, science and technology, national, memorial and children's museums. Throughout the semester we will focus on investigating how contemporary (primarily American) museums and heritage sites have evolved from princely collections, curiosity cabinets, circuses and amusement parks. The overarching theme of the course is to trace the development of modern museological practice in relation to economic, social, technological, scientific, cultural and political changes and how these transformations affected various "cultures of display." Studying the metamorphosis of museums necessarily entails discussion of empowered public audiences, invention and discovery, education as a means to train citizens in morality and the importance of solidifying national, regional, local as well as class and ethno-cultural identities. The growth of commerce and trade in the aftermath of the first and second industrial evolutions in conjunction with widespread European colonialism resulted in new models and venues for the exhibition of new technologies, art, architecture, anthropology, history as well as living and dead human and animal remains. During the course of the semester, we will look at objects, buildings, people, animals and landscapes to think about how their contexts of display have told three-dimensional stories over the course of several centuries, drawing mainly on examples in the United States. We will examine issues such as the relationship of collections and landscapes to identity; the intersection of commerce and culture; and the influence that evolving educational and entertainment practices have had upon museological institutions. We will consider the role of museums and exhibitions in preserving a view of the past and developing an image of progress; and we will discuss how they change in response to the various contexts in which and for which they exist. The basic objectives of this course are: • To become familiar with the origins of the modern museum, from early collecting activities to the development of the museum in the 19th and 20th centuries and into the postmodern present • To explore the relationships between museums and evolutionary theory, ethnology/ethnography, anthropological theories of cultural relativism, archaeology, natural history • To investigate the cultural and political contexts of building ethnographic collections and displays; as well as the relationship between museums and imperialist/colonialist plunder • Analyzing the emergence of the museum as a focus of anthropological and theoretical inquiry and as a subject of ethnography itself • Examining the contemporary role(s) of museums, notably as the museum has become part of the culture industry (e.g., blockbuster exhibitions); political reassessments of museums' "use" and marketing in
The short history of the musealization of design mirrors a number of contradictions and limitations, but also the potential of a practice and discipline that continues to suffer the paradox of being a pervasive, yet misunderstood, presence, a voice neglected in communities and forums in various fields, and by the general public and society as a whole. Within an interpretive framework that understands design as a “total social phenomenon” and as modern material culture, this paper reconsiders the cultural and social meanings that can push for its musealization. Shifting from the issue of “the design museum” to “design in museums”, the aim is to disclose a more varied panorama of references to examine and explore, with the intention of developing new hypotheses for a museology and museography of design. In doing so, a primary expectation, and concern, is to stress how a proper design discourse within social and educational institutions such as museums could contribute to closing the above-mentioned gap, providing a better and wider understanding of its social and cultural relevance.
Collecting Plastics is Collecting Design History
Docomomo Journal
From the 1950’s onward, the myriad qualities of all plastic objects were praised without a second thought. This enthusiasm significantly delayed the awareness of their enormous impact and it took almost half a century to consider these objects a part of post-war culture. This essay aims to sketch the history of the appreciation of the relevance of plastics in the museum world, specifically as a part of design heritage, seen from the viewpoint of the collector and the conservator-restorer. The case of the Design Museum Brussels, established in 2015, shows how a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach on conservation can be developed to the benefit of our plastics heritage.
EXHIBITION MAKING AS AESTHETIC ENQUIRY
Exhibitions As Research: Experimental Methods in Museums, 2020
If exhibitions are research what kind of scientifi c thinking do they make space for? And what are the eff ects of this kind of research?