Feminism and Curating. Live Blog - Smithsonian 2011
Live Blog
Opening Remarks:
Nancy Proctor (NP) to welcome everyone.
Griselda Pollock (GP) is our Keynote speaker.
GP explores the ideas and themes of her book, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and Archive (http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415413749/).
GP: The historian is a medium.
GP: Feminism is a network of relationships and ideas.
GP: There is nothing passive about looking at works of art.
GP: We have the ability to create technology, but we often lack the judgment to know when not to use it.
GP: The museum is important because it is the conserver of our cultural memory.
GP: The museum is an important resource that will acquire new functions beyond tourism.
GP: The Virtual Feminist Museum exists so far only in my books and lectures.
GP: Securing images for these projects can be bankrupting.
GP: How do we indeed create a feminist space in a museum that works towards improving the human condition?
Lara Perry (LP) & Margareta Gynning (MG) respond to Griselda Pollock (GP):
LP: What are the ethics involved with the process of judgment in relationship to technology?
GP: It is a question I am still making sense of for myself. Feminism will make something better through the process of critical thinking about the relationships between contemporary art, technology, innovation and the human condition. I want these ideas to play off each other.
GP: Technology should be focused on emancipatory projects.
LP: How does technology provide a transformative encounter in museums?
GP: Technology facilitates people learning from others experiences and view points. Technology distributes the sensible.
End of the keynote and response.
Claudine Brown (CB) now presents "Access and Inclusivity in the Museum.":
CB: Began my career in museums through the CETA program, which is akin to the WPA.
CB: Started my career at The Brooklyn Museum (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/).
CB: We sometimes make limitations that are not real. A lot of what we do is negotiation. It's about assessing the needs of our audiences and meeting in the middle.
CB: The public teaches us what they want. They help museum workers reshape our expectations.
CB: The museum is for everyone.
CB: How does the public capture their experience if they are not permitted to take pictures in museums?
CB: People see themselves as creating and curating their own experiences.
CB: We should try to help the public develop better curatorial skills, rather than tell them they are not curators without advanced degrees. This egg has already been scrambled.
CB: We have to let our audiences own what they see.
CB: The Smithsonian is the nation's museum.
CB: As the nation's museum, what is our responsibility to serve the people who will never come to the Smithsonian physically through technology?
CB: We want students to learn thinking skills and be problem solvers - not regurgitate facts and figures,
CB: Let the young lead us. They want to help us.
CB: The public is helping us augment knowledge of our collections through comments and social participation.
CB: We need to help people be part of our learning communities through technology.
CB: If you have good ideas, if you've seen good models, if you know promising projects - we are looking at learning together, but the education crisis in this country is so great. We know that we can't do it alone.
Kate Haley-Goldman (KHG) and Catharine McNally (CM) respond to Claudine Brown (CB):
CB: If women are not included in the authoritative voice of the museums, people won't believe they are part of the equation.
CM: People want an independent experience of museums through technology.
CM: Technology can be good and participatory in museums.
KHG: The barriers to accessibility are internal. It's not about cost or time. It's our world view.
End of the second presentation.
Start of the afternoon session.
Patrik Steorn (PS) presents "Queer in the Museum.":
PS: The mandate by institutions to collect art based on "aesthetic quality" has consequences for the social and cultural interpretations of images.
PS: There are commonalities between ideals of beauty with respect to our viewing the andrognous in artworks.
PS: Heterosexual privileges have biased aesthetic judgments and led to the exclusion of queer perspectives.
PS: Identifying works as queer with tagging in databases might lead to greater discovery by the public or exclude works from the public because of premature censorship.
PS: Artworks act as archives of feelings.
PS: The alternative archive should resist public space and be shared on the terms of the community.
PS. The queer eye will always collect visions of itself in the museum and see itself elsewhere.
PS. Museums should allow for queer presences to occur on their own terms.
PS: Museums should facilitate queer meaning in their collections by displays, ground breaking research and with subversive social events.
Sherri Wasserman (SW) and Margareta Gynning (MG) respond to Patrik Steorn (PS):
PS: Questions labeling identity through tagging as means to democratize the museum experience.
MG: We can reach concensus by grinding through the landscape of questions surrounding gender and queer perspectives.
PS: Museums need to show an honest and directed interest in bringing queer audiences into interactive relationships with museums.
PS: The museum should come out the closet!
Reesa Greenberg (RG) presents "Feminist curation and exhibitions online.":
RG: Knowledge is not finite. It is a process.
RG: Independent websites for exhibitions are important points of access for connecting and reconnecting to museum content.
RG: It is valuable to have installation images with audio online that give viewers a sense navigating the exhibition onsite.
RG: It is very difficulty to asses the impact of exhibitions as they move from different venues based on archival online content.
RG: Art on websites is to often presented as factoids.
RG: The absence of installation photographs determines what questions about exhibition practices are raised.
RG: The acceptance of user generated content on exhibition websites is essential.
RG: I urge training for art historians, curators and students in web design and analysis.
Time for another break.
Kathrine Ott (KO) and Beth Ziebarth (BZ) respond to Reesa Greenberg (RG):
KO: We need to produce what we know in range of ways that people can access it.
KO: New media must not become another "old boys" club. New media can be outright exclusionary.
KO: The diminishment of the sensual is a result of consumer capitalism.
RG: Nothing substitutes the intellectual and sensual pleasure of seeing an exhibition in the gallery.
RG: We need a distributed museum via social media rather than a master to slave dictation of information.
BZ: How do you (RG) envision using crowdsourced mobile content from visitors in exhibition histories?
RG: This type of content is already out there in the form of Flickr and blog comments. The question is how to bring that material together so that it can be used?
Now we have Peter Samis (PSSF) from SFMOMA presenting "New Media as Counter-Narrative and Corrective.":
PSSF: Presents examples of SFMOMA interactive media projects (http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/interactive_features).
PSSF: In the old days of oral history, people used recordings to produce a transcript and then the tapes were erased.
PSSF: Modern art - like all the objects we exhibit - exists in a framework of meanings.
PSSF: The white cube of the gallery removes the framework of meanings.
PSSF: There is a continuum between experts and novices. Somewhere along the line, that leaves us to restore context.
PSSF: Bring the voice of the museum to the archiving of incidents and actions subversive of the museum's own paradigm.
Respondents to Peter Samis (PSSF) are Nancy Proctor (NP) and Nicky Bird (NB):
PSSF: The place where experimentation with interface continues is France. American websites are a bit more blog based. There is a trade off with accessibility and longevity. Archival practice is also an issue.
PSSF: So many of the early CD-ROMs were artistic expressions unto themselves.
PSSF: In the past, websites were considered finished.
NB: What is the viewer's relationship with a particular work in a particular space? How do images document that relationship?
PSSF: The web works in different space. Artworks are in relation to other works on the web beyond the gallery space.
NP: If your museum is not videoing artists interviews, you are making a big mistake.
PSSF: In the gallery, video is no longer a preferred medium. You want people to look at the art, not at their screens.
NP: It is always the artists who show us how to use new technologies. Art is key to innovation.
NP: People tend to be fascinated by biographies of artists. Why are we so drawn to that? That question allows us to pick away at other assumptions. Who do we assume an artist to be? This very question is influenced by the cannon of art history whether we recognize this or not.
PSSF: It is not just art that has a limitations of understanding. It is objects in history museums. It is lots of things.
PSSF: We are humans. We relate more easily to humans than we do to objects. A human is an easy path into an object.
End of discussion.
Now we will create the agenda for tomorrow's workshops.
Workshop Ideas:
Digitized artifacts as acts of generosity
Being an artist and how to fit into the intellectual cannon or not. (theory and practice: whose?)
Relationships of web design and content
Putting theory into practice using technological design
Politics of knowledge and how it's acquired , eg. the experiences: what is museum's responsibility online and onsite? (knowing, thinking, feeling: avoiding reducing those to "enhancing...")
Pivotal images that "turn the mind"
Feminism's interventions...Queering the museum...Challenging people to shift their centers to recognizing others desires * Not just an alternative view; allowing yourself to be challenged, as a feminist and queer theorist
Redundancy as a positive value - problematic mass-market/ blockbuster economics and thinking
*The Market and utilitarianism: different kinds of economics beyond global profit
Challenging the sacredness of the object
Writing art's histories - also applied to archives and more...(the wiki)
Problematizing tags & metadata
Forum
Today I also commented on a thought-provoking blog post on "Pictures of Pictures: A Response to Edward Winkleman’s 'What Has Art Become to Us?'” http://museumnerd.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/response-to-edward-winklemans-blog-post/#comment-85 The discussion of the role of photography in the hands of the "amateur" (with all of its French double-entendre) made me think again about Griselda's commentary on the role of photography in the construction of Art History (see my notes page in this wiki: http://feminismandcurating.pbworks.com/w/page/44133408/Nancy%20Proctor)
There are many layers to the politics here: on the one hand the panopticon effect of the Museum and how its anti-photography conventions (among others) police the movements and gaze of the visitor; on the other hand, the way the management of reproductions of its images is both a capitalist revenue stream (albeit a relatively insignificant one) for the museum, and a way of constructing and directing the market for those images by using them to create the Canon of Art (i.e. photos of acknowledged "masterpieces" command higher reproduction fees than those of "B-rate" and lesser artworks). Scarcity creates value in capitalist and 20th century economies - see Chris Anderson on the Long Tail for how he contrasts this with the "abundance" of the Internet age - and is also the effect of curation and the art market, which selects only a few artists and artworks for exhibition and collection. I am inspired by fantasies of the guerrilla visitor in the gallery, not only undermining monopolistic copyrights but also the very notion and constitution of the "Canon" by flooding Flickr with amateur photos of what s/he wants to look at...
(hitting the 2000 character limit for comments here!) ... But of course, it's not that easy. What visitors see in the gallery has already been the subject of curation, and we do not necessarily immediately respond to that which we have never seen before - to art that is alien to our unschooled eyes - so many visitors are probably most likely to reinforce the Canon by admiring and photographing that which they have been taught is "good art". But perhaps in combination with efforts to digitize and put online all of the museum's or gallery's holdings, some "citizen curators" can start to unravel the confines of the Canon's Baudrillardian territory. It is critical that we who hold the keys to those online datasets think very carefully about how to make those images accessible - all of them - and discoverable so the online experience is not just another repetition of Art History's greatest hits.
African American women - feminist art - Carrie Mae Weems - my exploration this morning - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WabrgaaRTj8 | http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2009/01/23/burning-down-the-house-artist-focus-carrie-mae-weems/ | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/g-roger-denson/relaying-feminine-codes-c_b_934177.html
Great reference, James! I really loved "The Museum Project" series presented in this video - work of hers that I'd not seen before - and Weems' discussion around it from 44:45 in the video. Here is the transcript and I'll try to add one image I found online at http://theswitchboard.wordpress.com/2009/03/:
The museum project, who's in, who's out? Who's in, who's out? Who's in, who's out? So, I started standing in front of museums, right? So, this little woman then is, you know, sort of again, she's like my witness. She's my witness. You know, I go to all these amazing places and I realize that there are very few women and certainly very few people of color represented in any of them. Even though we're all doing better, there's still, you know, there's pretty poor representation, generally speaking. Just bearing witness; allowing the audience to sort of come along with me, to stand behind me. To stand with me in order to bear witness too. I often think how do you get into these spaces, who invites us in? What are the powers and the authorities in museums that tell us that this has very little value and that this is of extraordinary value?What is that system? How does that system work? Why does it nurture certain kinds of artists? Certain kinds of artists from certain kinds of places, from certain paths and positions and histories and classes. How does that work, actually? I'm really interested in how that works, and in some way I'm trying to use my little body to stand in for all that that's somehow left out. That is absolutely devalued. That has no substantial worth. And so, can therefore be, for the most part, dismissed.
Because my new book is called Education (one of the Whitechapel/MIT Documents of Contemporary Art series) it might not seem relevant to people in this Forum, so I thought I'd let you know that one of my aims has been to include representations of feminist contributions to discussions about art education as it applies to formal and informal education, art practice and curatorship. In this, I think, it is a little different from many other recent publications about art education. If you're in or near London, do come to the launch at the Whitechapel on 23 September when I'll be giving a talk http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/1/product_id/1036
Thanks - our event is considerably more modest, and I wish I could come to yours. I've just seen Nicky Bird's proposed paper which looks really interesting - she might want to see my paper Situating Gallery Education, originally published as part of the Tate Encounters e-journal, which can be found at http://felicityallen.co.uk/library This paper argues that the development of gallery education in the UK (distinguished here from museum education) had strong links to feminist criticism of conventional curating, and gallery education (which was originally inclusive and ranged across age and knowledge base) had strong links to the impulse for access. I'm heading off to the Getty in a couple of weeks to research and write more about the cross cultural and international mutual learning programmes that have been developed out of gallery education in recent years, sometimes leading to exhibitions, considering them in the context of cross cultural and international curation. So let's keep in touch.
Many thanks Felicity for drawing my attention to your work and your website - this is very pertinent! It is interesting for me as someone who spent mid 1980s to 1992 in arts community education, before I studied with Griselda Pollock on the MA in Feminism & the Visual Arts - both experiences continue to be influential, and I am obviously hoping that the workshop will broaden out beyond the specifics of my practice - so your response is most helpful - and yes let's keep in touch
Nancy Proctor said
at 1:20 pm on Sep 7, 2011
I enjoyed reading this speech to the UK's Information Assurance Advisory Council (IAAC) by by Ben Hammersley, 7 Sept 2011: http://www.benhammersley.com/2011/09/my-speech-to-the-iaac/ But was also struck by the redefinition of "modernity" (at least as I had understood the term) as, along with technology, an unmitigated good (as well as inevitable). Although I agree with much of what Hammersley says, I also think we need to interrogate tautological, un-self-critical assertions such as:
"We can bitch about it, but Facebook, Twitter, Google and all the rest are, in many ways the very definition of modern life in the democratic west. For many, a functioning internet with freedom of speech, and a good connection to the social networks of our choice is a sign not just of modernity, but of civilisation itself."