Applied History

I love museums, and as an art history minor, I was required to read several institutional critiques similar to Luke’s. While I have never felt personally assaulted by this wave of political overture during any visit to any museum, I am aware that these political threads do indeed run deep. When you start to pick apart the pieces of any institution, such as the Heard Museum in Phoenix, we can begin to understand the subtle nature of the normalization, discursive persuasion, and commodification of cultural heritage.

Strange that as Mrs. Heard and Mr. Harvey were busy gathering “authentic” native artifacts, which were supposed to represent an authentic past, they were also requiring that these artifacts accommodate a new end, the tourists of the American Southwest. These objects, then, no longer represent their previous utility, yet they continue to define the “authentic” works produced by Native Americans.

It makes me think, how should I represent the history that I want to tell? Are there any political ‘land mines’ that I should be aware of? Will my representation neutralize, expand, or explain any particular perspective over another? Should it?

Timothy Luke’s book, Museum Politics, intellectually pushed me this week. Despite having a love for museums and attending them across the US and Europe, I never thought or viewed them through a political ideological lens. While Luke’s stylistic approach was rather combative, he brings up relevant questions and issues in regards to museums, culture representation and history.

The two readings that resonated with me were chapter one, “Politics at the Exhibition” and chapter two, “Nuclear Reactions.” These chapters prompted me to ponder how one could successfully balance a national narrative of celebration with a new social history methodology that brings forth untold or formerly unwanted stories. Luke provided ample examples of where exhibitions were unsuccessful at this bridging, but I wonder if there are instances where this was successfully done. And if so, what were their strategies or techniques? More than anything these readings encouraged me to think about what kind of methods have previously been employed and what can be learned from them. It seems more than anything both sides of the cultural spectrum need to be open to opposing interpretations, and energy should be put forth toward solving the problem, not running farther to the left or the right.

A side thought of mine this week was about history in our public school education. Chapters one and two made think about whether or not our education system is facilitating a variety of historical perspectives, e.g. Japanese WWII perspective. Surely introduction of historical diversity would foster the ability to cognitively understand the importance of coupling celebrative and realist perspectives. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

The theme I found interesting for this week’s reading was that museums are places that perpetuate political and ideological agendas of particular people and institutions. According to Luke, their exhibits, and sometimes their entire collection, portray one set  of values. This came as a surprise to me, since I figured museums were objective, and picked exhibits that would appeal to the widest audience.

The other part of this reading that I found interesting was about the exhibit that explored the West and the various ways that it has been romanticized. The dichotomy of the real western frontier and the hollywood version are concepts that I have come across before, but that helped me read this book because I understood better how the museum was criticizing the inherent view of the West. It also reminded me of the West as a place, and as a concept. That’s where the Virginian comes in comparison to this reading, where an Eastern writer portrays “western” values and the epitome of a man, and how that gets perpetuated through time. I honestly want to keep my inherited visions of the West, while at the same time understanding the truth and how the preconception I have was started.

In addition, I am very interested on the role museums play to create the “ideal” citizen by what they display and the values that the artifact/artwork perpetuates. The concept of museums as  places that sterilize and purify the versions of history or values they want to portray intrigued me. This is just a side note, and not a fully developed concept in my mind that I can express eloquently. I have come across schools as places that create the “ideal” citizen, so I am intrigued how both work together since school children visit museums (or did at one time) to tag team the creation of responsible citizens.

I agree with LauriAnn that Luke (what a wonderful name!!) somewhat overstates the case for the importance of museums. Rather than being “venues where many key cultural realities are first defined,” museums seem to reflect cultural realities that have long since been defined and integrated into the dominant forms of power. Instead of being an engine at the forefront of cultural reality definition museums could be better understood as the cultural caboose.

This is seen in both of the controversial exhibits Luke provides as evidence. The revisionist interpretations in both “The West as America,” and the proposed Hiroshima exhibit had long been created and defined by such popular discourses as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and by social history in our own profession. The reason for the controversy associated with these exhibits was that each side had substantial power behind it-the conservatives so just happened to be running congress at the time of the Hiroshima exhibit.

Luke also appears wide of the mark on the nature of entertainmentality and its relationship to museums. Entertainmentality-which Luke defines as practices that keep us held in some mutually prespecified manners- likely is much different in a democratic and free market society-where institutions must compete for people’s time, votes, or money, than it is described by Luke. The voluntary and competitive nature of American entertainmentality is anything but confinement/containment/occupation. Because of the democratic-in the political sphere-and the competitive-in the economic and temporal spheres-museums have to provide historical narratives and cultural artifacts that reflect the ways patrons want to spend their time, votes, and money. Museums have to be both democratic and competitive to succeed in a politically and economically free society.

On a final note: The usefulness of Foucault needs to be reexamined by academics in the humanities and social sciences. I realize he can help us justify our social value when confronted by the natural sciences-discourse anyone-but otherwise using Foucault seems little more than profoundly self-serving.

I struggled to accept the original premise of this book that Americans’ derive their understanding of history from museums.  Most of the examples given about controversial museum exhibits seemed to predate the rise of easy access to information via the internet.  I love history and I cannot remember the last time I went to a museum.  I feel like most Americans derive their understandings of history from high school or college experiences, political versions of history, and television/internet.

I found the chapter about the Fred Harvey Museum fascinating.  It seemed to encompass the problem that faces public history of all kinds.  History must be marketed, commodified, and sold to a general audience in order to justify funding it.  In the case of the Harvey Museum, Native Americans of the Southwest had their diverse cultures condensed into one compelling story of turquoise jewelery, pottery, and kachinas that favors the traditions and material culture of some tribes over others.  The controversial exhibit of “The West as America” shows that a “wrong” interpretation of history can be just as bad as trying to tell a more nuanced and diverse story of the Southwest.  The stories behind why we need these narratives of rugged western artists and mysterious Indian basket weavers can be as compelling as the truth.  I would be interested to see a positive example of a museum exhibit that was able to convey a more accurate or reflective version of history that appealed to the public; Timothy Luke did not really give any examples in the chapters we looked at.