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2010; Wiley; Volume: 53; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.2151-6952.2009.00003.x

2151-6952

Kay Larson,

Museums and Cultural Heritage

I was 11 years old and had been sprawling on the green summer lawns of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, waiting for my father, who was off elsewhere, doing something mysterious. Then memory makes a leap—a transition that simply no longer exists—and I am wandering aimlessly by myself, without intention, across the cool, hard floors of the university’s Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, past paintings that I now don’t remember, not even in the merest shred of recollection. This scene begins as I enter the next room and . . . . The instant is complete, top to bottom. My feet have stopped moving. Perhaps I’ve stopped breathing. The camera in my mind has just opened its eye. There is nothing but me and a floating vaporous void pulsing with burgundy and tangerine light. My life in museums began at that moment. And has not yet ended. Now, of course, I round a corner and hear myself saying, “Yes, just another Rothko.” But I always remember to thank him. This issue of Curator: The Museum Journal marks a transition that has been captured in the editorials by Zahava D. Doering and John Fraser. Zahava and I have often noticed the curious self-sorting mechanism by which issues are put together. Articles come in one at a time and, by some mysterious means—including more than a little matchmaking—they sometimes gather like shining little fish into schools and swim together, so to speak. This issue put itself in place as though by magic (which is always materialized by hard work). The “swimming together” clusters around two themes, one intentional and one not. As for the intentional: Curator is in a vector of change—from one publisher to another, and from what you might call its classical period to another (postmodern) one. Many laborers (and their labors) have contributed invisibly and selflessly to the process of opening up the future to new potentialities. Intentional action can effect new prospects, and new forms by which to realize them. We don’t know what will happen, but we do know that the mechanisms are now in place to position Curator within the virtual conversations that are illuminating our interconnected universe. Some of this dialogue is occurring within this issue. Zahava has introduced you to the Curator editorial staff, and has invited them to open a porthole on the worlds they occupy. She has encouraged Curator editors to speak their minds, and they have happily taken her up on the invitation. These occasions for self-reflection and analysis are foregrounded in the order of the articles. First, Peter Linett muses on the new bookshelves he has had to add in his seven years as Books Editor, and the museum literature that crowds his thoughts and calls for attention. Nancy Proctor has canvassed the Internet and cheerfully reports back on the unexpected tactics that curators are coming up with as they ponder the digital age and their visitors’ increasing sophistication with information networks. Tom Freudenheim visits an exhibition (a Sol LeWitt installation) on view till 2033, and wonders what sort of “not-a-museum” can support such a timeframe. As for the rest of the issue: The silvery shining fish have decided, in their collective wisdom, to “school” around the question of the non-intentional. Tom Hennes—discussed out of order here, but so be it—asks himself about the mystery of the collision (he uses the word “encounter”) between ourselves and others, and between ourselves and illumination, which can send light through the mind’s murky waters and alter the vector of a visitor’s life. The word “encounter,” he writes, is “redolent with the unexpected, the unpredictable, the unplanned.” When regarded in this way, he says, exhibitions “are platforms for experiences.” They are staging grounds for mind, emotion, and being. Dave Carr gives us an example. In 1984, in New York, he saw masterworks by the Māori at the Metropolitan, and these culturally rich objects gave him, as he says, “one of the leading themes” of his life as an observer of cultural institutions. He began to see museum objects not as existentially opaque artifacts, but rather as signifiers of the people and cultures who made them. The masterwork can compel silence: an “inability to articulate [that] reflects a larger dimension—an aspect of the infinite—residing in the object.” Elaine Heumann Gurian writes that the failure to observe that every action or non-action contains both explicit and implicit values—moral, aesthetic, humanitarian—leads museums to undervalue the other half of the object = visitor encounter. Objects are given priority; visitors are counted as numbers at the gate. But who are the people coming through the gate, and how may they be served? They want more than existentially opaque objects. They want encounters—sometimes just with the computers in the library or the benches where children may play. Museums need not give up their objects, but they could reconsider what they are able to give people, and how to go about it. Ken Yellis circles to the same conclusion from a different direction. Exhibitions are a transformational medium, he writes, and yet museums seem not to be paying attention to visitors’ feelings. Emotions are stirred in and by museums, provided that visitors know how to stage their own journeys. How about extending the same theatrical potential to visitors who don’t know how? Have visitors been asking for these “aha moments?” And have museums failed to listen? Andrew J. Pekarik asks museum exhibition designers and evaluators what their values are. “Outcome-based evaluation”—a favorite tool of the National Science Foundation and other large funding sources—intentionally categorizes visitor responses in advance of the survey and confines the answers to eight (or six, or ten) outcome categories. But what about people who come to museums to find something new and personally meaningful? Something unexpected? Something off-message? How can museum professionals cultivate “not knowing” in order to support museum visitors who seek their own path? And finally, under Curator’s “Museums” heading, Alice Greenwald considers the complex rationale for planning the National September 11 Memorial Museum—a momentously difficult task of remembrance, confronting a tragedy that literally flew in from the blue. During the decades I have spent in museums—thanks in part to Mark Rothko—I have had lots of opportunities to notice the non-alignment of experiences and the words we use to describe them. Here’s a story, and it’s not a metaphor: Before dawn on the day I wrote this, I was idly watching the night through a skylight that, in twenty years in this house, has always contained either stars or clouds, and occasionally a moon. Then— Black sky. Streaking white flame. Black sky. In the light’s wake is a sharp lull, a sort of gasp, a silence in mental space—like the recoil from a rifle. Then the moment shifts, the words take form, and the conscious mind begins telling itself what it just saw: a fireball slicing across four square feet of skylight; a blazing messenger from infinity. I don’t know what happens to people in museums, but I’ve been there myself, in the midst of the “gasp,” when my inner chatter—the mindstream, as it’s been called—drops away into silence and I am now more present with something other. In my own awareness, that’s the locus of transformation. The contents of the experience are not irrelevant, because they offer their qualities to me, and I hear them speak. But the frame of the experience is as vast as we are. Whenever I get the chance, I seek it out, and it restores me. And that, to paraphrase Robert Frost, has made all the difference.