Month: March 2011

This week I opted for skimming the week’s chapters in Museum Politics. I read the parts that interested me about the history of each museum’s inception and about the exhibits. When Luke started sounding too forceful or negative I quickly jumped ahead. Last week I felt like Luke was a movie critic. He purports to love museums but certainly makes one wonder.  I realized this week I was choosing to approach Luke’s museum choices my way. I want to visit them and have my own experience and make my own decisions about what I think of them. I understand that what I get to see and experience often has a political backstory, but I can choose if that curbs my interest or not. I wonder what Luke would think if he knew that this week I only wanted to glean the entertaining parts of his writing.

In  1979 I took a course at my college in Portland taught by a Rabbi about the Holocaust. In the summer of 1983 when I visited a friend who lived in Munich we went to the Dachau concentration camp site. When I lived in New York City in the 1980s I knew a woman who was working with a group on the beginning ideas for the Museum of Jewish Heritage. I haven’t had a chance to see the Holocaust Museum in D.C. or the Museum of Tolerance, but they are of great interest to me. I am grateful for their websites and am annoyed by Luke’s description of a “theme park about genocide”

I have been to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum on a few occasions. I visited with my uncle and cousin who are both biologists. I cherish my time with them seeing things through their eyes and their passion for the beauty of the desert. I visited the Mitchell Park Conservatory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where the Botanical Garden is housed in 3 geodesic domes each with a different climate. How cool for people to be able to visit a desert or the tropics in the crazy cold northern U.S.  The New York and Brooklyn Botanical Gardens were oases for me from the concrete of the city. The Missouri Botanical Garden sounds no less spectacular. Hurray for florapower!

Timothy Luke’s Museum Politics brought back a lot of memories for me from my time in the political arena of Idaho.  As a history teacher elected to three terms in the Idaho House of Representatives, I was afforded both the historical and political perspectives.  As Luke described in his book, any school, agency or museum that received any taxpayer dollars was subject to the scrutiny of the political leaders.  If a museum was found to have a display that could be seen as offensive to any one group in Idaho and that museum was receiving state funding, you can be rest assured that a legislator would get involved.  All it would take was one call, email or letter from a constituent complaining about an offensive display at BSU or the Idaho Historical Society or any other museum in Idaho and that constituents legislator would be on the phone to the director of that museum asking for the display to be removed. 

I was also heavily involved in the Idaho Historical Society’s attempt to strengthen the process for identifying historical landmarks and/or buildings.  The proposed law would have allowed the Historical Society a chance to review any plans for the demolition of any  city, county or state owned buildings to see if there was any possible historical value.  Although this seems somewhat innocuous, I found out from my fellow legislators that it was NOT!  They were sure this would give the Historical Society enormous amounts of power that they would use to eventually take over Idaho and the rest of the world.  I had to pull the bill back to committee or face a public flogging of some sort!  Thanks Timothy for the stroll down memory lane!!

The chapter that resonated the most with me this week was chapter 8, “Southwestern Environments as Hyperreality: The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.” Luke brings up a valid and important point when he discusses the dangers of romanticized (or hyperreality) landscapes and how it can encourage the destruction of authentic nature. While Luke seems to think the very idea or attempt to preserve a natural landscape is ludicrous, I think it’s admirable. Perhaps I’m naive but I can’t imagine Arthur Park and William Carr set out for the result that the museum would perpetrate a false image of the Sonora Desert and thus result in widespread development and urban sprawl. Like last week, Luke’s dissection of this particular example, like a 3-2 zone in basketball, only made me want him to concede just a little and provide an example where this type of preservation was successful.

Going back to Park and Carr and the development of the museum, the fact that the museum was built in close respect to a park made me wonder if park politics were at play. Park management and administrators can sometimes wear “park goggles” (like tunnel vision) and can concentrate on issues they deem supremely  important e.g. picnic tables. It would have been interesting if this impeded the original vision Park and Carr had for the Desert Museum.

On a completely different note, I think Museum Politics as a whole could have greatly benefited from the use of photographs to supplement the text. In describing the Desert Museum and the Holocaust Museum it would have behooved Luke to include some visual evidence instead of relying solely on his unique turn of phrase.

The main aspect of this week’s reading that intrigued me is still the claim from Timothy Luke that museums are places of power, that they can “fabricate a nation’s consciousness.” Perhaps I am finding it difficult to come to the same conclusions as Luke is because I have not visited very many large musuems, and have not witnessed exhibits that were controversial. I have visited mostly small museums, the largest being the Oregon Trail Center in Oregon. I can begin to see how such a large exhibit like the Oregon Trail one can begin to shape a nation’s consciousness, but what about exhibits in smaller musuems? I think I better go visit some more musuems with Luke’s conclusions in mind, and see for myself. What type of power plays become evident in a small museum?

The other interesting part of the reading hit me while I was reading about the United States Holocaust Museum.  Luke appears to value low-technology museums more than the high-technology ones, as far as the values participants could garner from those types of exhibits. What does this mean for museums trying to engage their audiences with a variety of technologies? Are participants getting the same value from an online exhibit as they would get in person? What if they are using a mobile device to explore the museum? Thinking about these issues, I started to wonder what it might mean for our digital projects, and whether or not we could expect our projects to serve as valuable learning experiences. I believe that they will, but taking into consideration what Luke said about the United States Holocaust Museum, could our technology fail to send our participants away with valuable information, or a significant moment of epitome? Knowing this, what can we do in our individual projects to help solve this and allow our audience to have a connection to our project/message? I feel that this week’s reading from Luke has left me with more questions than answers, and the desire to go explore the exhibits at the Idaho State Historial Museum and the Capitol to see what types of values that they are trying to instill in me.

The readings for this week question how museums use entertainment to draw in visitors. Timothy Luke questioned why people go to museums?  Is it to be “entertained” or to actually learn something and then analyze and reflect on the displays and information at the museum.  Luke is also critical of museums that use Disneyland like forms of entertainment to draw in patrons, and in this way the focus is heavily on the entertainment factor and not on the education experience.  He used Disneyland as a comparison to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., and called it a horror tour.  Luke was also critical of the museum because of its shock value, and he questioned whether the violent film footage of atrocities playing over and over, is overexposed.  He also had an issue with the museum’s focus on Jews, and the limited information about the millions of Roma(Gypsies), handicapped, Poles, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents who also suffered under Nazi rule.

There is also a comparison of the Holocaust Museum and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angles. Lukes is somewhat less critical of the Museum of Tolerance over the Holocaust Museum.  He said, “the Museum of Tolerance far outclasses the Holocaust museum in the scope and depth of its comparative analyses..” (pg.51)  In my opinion he preferred the Museum of Tolerance because of their choice of exhibits, as well as the balance and portrayal of racism in society, and extreme acts of violence by individual people as well as political figures.  One exhibit I found interesting, is in the Hall of Testimony, there is a section “…recounting forty-nine representative accounts of the eight thousand good souls recognized by Israel’s Yad Vashem as those who aided the Holocaust’s victims under Nazi rule.” (pg.53)

In Chapters 7 & 8 about the Missouri Botanical Gardens & the Sonora Desert Museum, I was thinking about them as treasures, and how great it is to live in communities that have gardens or “open habitat” zoos and museums.  However, here comes negative Lukes again….he sounds like a pessimist to me.  After completing those readings, it sounds as if Lukes is saying that because of places like the botanical gardens and desert museum people are less likely to be interested in nature in their own backyard, or preservation.  In my opinion, when you visit a local botanical garden you would learn more about native plants.  Then, you would likely plant more native plants in your yard or community because you would have learned about; which plants are drought resistant, which plants do well in what temperate zone, or which plants deter specific kinds of bugs or weeds.  To me that is a positive, however, Lukes seems to think if there is a designated “nature” area then people in cities may feel free to just go ahead and pour cement over everything.  He also referred to the botanical gardens and desert museum as “scientific simulations in the name of environmentalism.”(pg.164).

Lukes stated that much of nature is either dying or dead?  What is your opinion on this?  Do you think we have had more conservation efforts in the past 20 or 30 years or less?