Charles Wilson Peale, "Self Portrait of the Artist in His Museum," 1822 (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)

Reading

You are expected to do the reading, and to complete it in a timely manner (i.e., prior to the meeting of the class). There is a substantial reading load and so I strongly recommend that you form into 3-4 person reading-groups. You are welcome and encouraged to split up the reading within the group as long as each reader has an opportunity to report back to the group of the material that he/she has read.

Museum Visits

Museum visits are planned around many weekly assignments and will usually happen on a day other than the day of the class. We will discuss at the first class how we will schedule off-campus visits. It is possible that not everyone will be able to visit every site, but the expectation is that you will make most of the visits. (Please contact me if you think you will have a problem with this.) Museum visits and information related to the visits will be posted under the "Announcements" section of Blackboard. All museum visits listed in this syllabus are tentative -- finalized visits will be announced with sufficient time so that you can plan around it.

Requirements and Grading

(1) Weekly Assignments:

Three students (approximately -- the number can change depending on the number of people in the class) will be in charge of each class session. Each of the three will write a short (3-5 page) paper on any analytic or historiographic issue raised in the readings assigned for that week. The work of focusing on the reading assignments should be divided among the three, so that all the reading assignments are covered. These papers will be posted to the Blackboard "Discussion Board" by the Tuesday afternoon (no later than 6:00 PM) prior to each Wednesday evening's class at which point we will all discuss the readings and the three papers. The three will also be in charge of organizing and beginning the discussion. I highly recommend that the group meets prior to the class meeting so as to plan the class.

(2) Museum Critiques (two) Information on the writing of museum critiques will be handed out at the start of class and will be based on "Museum Critiques - Visiting the Museum." The first critique is due March 9; the second critique is due April 6.

(3) Final Project [Click on "Final Project" for full description]

A final museum-design project (don't worry - technical expertise not required). Proposal due April 13; Bibliography/resources due April 27; Final project due by May 19 at 9:00 AM. No extensions beyond that date without an official incomplete.

(4) Participation. Class participation is essential and will be reflected in your grade. I understand that not everyone finds it as easy to participate actively, but this is a small class with a lot of interesting things happening. As you are very bright people, I'm confident that you'll all have wonderful things to contribute to the course. If you feel that something is preventing your full and eager participation in the course, please see me and we will try to sort it out.

Presentations: First = 10%; Second = 15%	25%
Museum Critiques: First = 10%; Second = 15%	25%
Final Project	25%
Participation	25%

It is very important that presentation papers are posted on time so that everyone will have a chance to read them prior to class. Papers which are late will be graded down. If you know you will have trouble getting your paper posted on time, please let me know as soon as possible.

Museum critiques that are late will be graded down one grade step (e.g. from a "B" to a "B-" for each day that it is late).

 A Note on the Readings:

 All books recommended for purchase should be available at the Oberlin College bookstore (or through on-line booksellers). These books will also be on reserve in the library. All the articles WHICH ARE NOT IN ONE OF THE BOOKS RECOMMENDED FOR PURCHASE are available in the Reserve room and on the Electronic Reserve (ERes) system. Please let me know if a specific article or book is not available.

 Museum Sites on the Web

There are literally hundreds of museum sites on the web. I have listed a few sites devoted to museum associations, meta-sites on museums, local area museums, and a brief list of a few of my favorites. Virtual visits do not replace "real" visits, but they can be interesting, and some sites are quite superior to others. You might make note of what it is that makes a virtual museum site good.

Books Recommended for Purchase:

Bettina Bessias Carbonell, Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.), 2004.

Timothy W. Luke, Museum Politics : Power Plays at the Exhibition (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press), 2002.

Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder. Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (New York: Vintage Books), 1996.

Buchenwald Museum (Weimar, Germany)

PART I: MUSEOLOGY: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PAST AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF NARRATIVE STRUCTURES

February 9: "The Primary Function of Any Museum Is…" Introduction. What is a Museum?

*Sharon Macdonald, "Introduction," in Theorizing Museums. Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, ed. Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 1-18. [* means that the article is on Electronic Reserve -- ERes]

*Carol Duncan, "The Art Museum as Ritual," in Civilizing Rituals. Inside Public Art Museums (London and NY: Routledge, 1995), pp. 7-20. [ERes]

*Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, "What is a Museum?" in Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1-22. [ERes]

Theodore Low, "What Is a Museum?" [1942] in Gail Anderson, ed., Reinventing the Museum: Historian and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), pp. 30-43.

Duncan F. Cameron, "The Museum, A Temple or the Forum" [1971], in Anderson, ed., Reinventing the Museum, pp. 61-73. [ERes]

James A. Boon, "Why Museums Make Me Sad," in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington and London: Smithsonian Press, 1991), pp. 255-277. [NOTE: This is a good essay to read both at the beginning and the ending of the course. In its style, almost more than in its content, it mimics the museum and the process of museum going. Read it first, without stopping to figure everything out. Then return to it at the end of the course and see what you make of it.][ERes]

ICM's definition of the Museum

Stephen Greenblatt, "Resonance and Wonder," in Bettina Messias Carbonell, ed., Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), Ch. 51 (pp. 541-555). [NOTE: Hereafter "MS"]

*Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 68-81. [ERes]

*D.H. Lawrence, "Things," The Complete Short Stories, Vol. III (London: Heinemann, 1955), pp. 844-853. [ERes]

From the "Banana Museum" (Auburn, Washington)

February 23: Museums, the Rise of Modernity, and the Creation of the Public Sphere

In this section we will explore the relationship of the museum to modernity - in particular we want to explore the relationship of museums to the notion of public space, both its historical creation and its specific location in the late-18th and early 19th century. We will focus on department stores, the press, fairs, and circuses. We also want to examine the promise of museums as related to their location in political modernity: democratic representation (both in the museum and in terms of museum goers).

Paula Findlen, "The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy," in MS, Ch. 2 (pp. 23-50).

Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, "The Universal Survey Museum," in MS, Ch. 3 (pp. 51-70).
Donald Preziosi, "Brain of the Earth's Body: Museums and the Framing of Modernity," in MS, Ch. 4 (pp. 71-84).

*Kevin Walsh, "The Idea of Modernity," The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 7-38. [ERes]

*Tony Bennett, "Museums and Progress. Narrative, Ideology, Performance," in The Birth of the Museum. History, Theory, Politics (London and NY: Routledge, 1995), pp. 177-209. [ERes]

March 2: Lecture: James Young, 4:30 PM, Classroom One (Art Building). Young is one of the world's leading critics and scholars of memorial sites and Holocaust sites in particular. A professor of English and Jewish Studies, his texts, including the Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (Yale, 1993) and At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (Yale, 2000), among others, are among the most important in the field of the "architecture of loss." In 1997, Young was invited to join a German commission appointed to find an appropriate design for a national memorial in Berlin to the European Jews killed in World War II. As the only foreigner and only Jew on the panel, Young gained a unique perspective on Germany’s fraught efforts to memorialize the Holocaust.

March 2: The Museum as Reflection of a "Natural Aesthetic" - Museum Design - Ways of Narrating, Ways of Seeing

Two main issues need to be discussed in this section, both of which build on the idea of the museum as a product of modernity: (1) The idea of the museum as a narrative structure (Roberts). Much like a novel (itself a 19th century phenomenon) or a nation, the museum is a narrative structure which is fundamentally implicated in interpretation. (2) The design and space of the (modern) museum is bound up with its existence as a public space (Bennett). In that sense it is expected to be open to publics at the same time that it is concerned both with how the publics will behave in museums and how they will use the museum. We will explore these issues in terms of the design of the interior museum space (rather than its external architecture), and as relates to the transmission of certain "privileged" forms of knowledge, science (Macdonald).

*Lisa C. Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative. Educators and the Changing Museum (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), pp. 56-67, 131-150. [ERes]

*Svetlana Alpers, "The Museum as a Way of Seeing," in Karp and Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures, pp. 25-32. [ERes]

*Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," in David Boswell and Jessica Evans, Representing the Nation: A Reader. Histories, Heritage and Museums (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 332-361. [First published in New Formations 4 (1988): 73-102]. [ERes]

*Susan M. Pearce, "Meaningful Exhibition: Knowledge Displayed," in Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1992), pp. 136-143. [ERes]

*Sharon Macdonald, "Exhibitions of Power and Powers of Exhibition. An Introduction to the Politics of Display," in Sharon Macdonald, ed., The Politics of Display: Museums, Sciences, Culture (London & NY: Routledge, 1998), pp. 1-17 (only). [ERes]

Museum Visit: Cleveland Museum of Art

First Museum Critique Due March 9 (turn in during class)

PART II: THE MUSEUM AND THE SHAPING OF HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDINGS

March 9: The Museum as a Reflection of the "Natural Order" - Natural History Museums

From Museum Studies: Part II: States of "Nature" in the Museum: Natural History, Anthropology, Ethnology, Chs. 10-20 (pp. 129-224).

Museum Visit: Cleveland Museum of Natural History

March 16: Material Culture and the Production of Historical Narratives: Locating Authenticity in the Museum

A particular modernist assumption is that museums, by providing their visitors with the artifact, present them not just with "the real thing," but with the truth. Thus, the museum is about "truthful" objects and "accurate" messages. Weschler (and David Wilson) remind us that museums do not always serve these purposes… or do they? Wallach suggests that authenticity and originality are not always the same thing.

Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder. Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (New York: Pantheon), 1995.

*Alan Wallach, "The American Cast Museum: An Episode in the History of the Institutional Definition of Art," in Exhibiting Contradiction. Essays on the Art Museum in the United States, pp. 38-56. [ERes]

*Spencer R. Crew and James E. Sims, "Locating Authenticity: Fragments of a Dialogue," in Karp and Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures, pp. 159-175. [ERes]

NOTE: For those intrigued by the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the MJT has just published its own "Jubilee Catalog," The Museum of Jurassic Technology, listed as authored by "The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information" in 2002. The slim book describes (but doesn't analyze) the exhibits in the museum. This is not the "real" story of the museum (which is encountered in Weschler), but the museum's own presentation.

Recommended:

*Susan A. Crane, "Curious Cabinets and Imaginary Museums," in Museums and Memory, Susan A. Crane, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 60-80. [ERes]

The Museum of Jurassic Technology, "Geoffrey Sonnabend: Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter: An Encapsulation by Valentine Worth," in Crane, ed., Museums and Memory, pp. 81-90. [ERes]

Miles Orvell, The Real Thing : Imitation and Authenticity in American culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press), 1989.

The British Museum

Museum Visit: To be announced.

March 22: LECTURE - Pepón Osorio. 4:30 PM, Classroom One (Art Building). Osorio is an installation/video artist who deals with memory, social injustrices, Latino/a identity. Born in Puerto Rico in 1955, Osorio has stated that “My principal commitment as an artist is to return art to the community.”

March 23: Museums, Memory and History: Locating History in the Museum

In general, the objects preserved in museums are solid (i.e., three dimensional) and originate in the past, so that the observer experiencing them in three-dimensional space must somehow also cross a temporal barrier. In this sense alone, museums are not the same as, say, illustrated books. But if we recognize this difference, we also need to raise some basic questions about how museums (non-art museums, in this context) work. We have already confronted some questions of the relationship between "real" and "authentic," and how we are expected to relate to "historical" artifacts. Here we want to turn to the role museums have in terms of shaping larger historical narratives. To do that, we will explore the relationship of material culture (the artifact) to "truth," "reality," or "authenticity," and the specific set of questions which are raised for institutions which choose to preserve and promote material culture. The Mamet script is a playful approach to all the questions of "reality" within a museum context.

From Museum Studies, Part IV: Locating History in the Museum, Chapters 31-39 (pp. 315-413).

*David Mamet, "The Museum of Science and Industry Story," in Five Television Plays (New York Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), pp. 91-125. [ERes]

Museum Visit: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

"La Belle Hottentot," French Print

March 30: Spring Vacation

April 6: The Museum and the Nation

From Museum Studies, Part III: The Status of Nations and the Museum, Chs. 21-30 (pp. 225-314).

Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, "The Universal Survey Museum," MS, Ch. 3 [first published in Art History 3:4 (December 1980): 448-469].

Second Museum Critique and Proposal for Final Project Due April 13 (turn in during class)

April 13: Museum Politics/Culture Wars: The Battle to Shape Social Memory

The authority of museums to create interpretations is challenged today as never before both by the visiting public and museum professionals. Because museums are central public institutions that mediate culture for growing numbers of people, they have become ground zero of "culture wars" in many countries, particularly the United States. Museum curators, museologists, and students of museum practice now read the names of specific exhibits as if they were battles sites from major wars: "Harlem on My Mind" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1969), "The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920" (National Museum of American Art, 1991); "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture" (Library of Congress, 1998), "Birth and Breeding: the Politics of Reproduction in Modern Britain" (Wellcome Institute, 1993-4). For most observers, the most impressive battle of this war was the Enola Gay exhibit (originally titled "The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War") that was to open at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in the mid-1990s. All our readings this week concern the battles that have broken out over museum exhibitions, and we will want to examine a number of issues. Why are museums becoming such critical spaces for "culture wars"? What is the museum's obligations of interpretation or, as one curator puts it: "Why not take sides? Why not be partial? How can we possibly understand the issues involved, when the whole point of history is being systematically denied?" A reasonable assessment, but how does this play out at publicly funded museums, particularly those thought to be representative of the "nation" as a whole? How can museum curators prepare their defenses for seemingly inevitable attacks?

Timothy Luke, Museum Politics: Power Plays at the Exhibition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2002. Everyone should read the Introduction and Conclusion, and Chapters 1, 2, and 3, and then you can select any three additional chapters, whichever you choose.

Terence M. Duffy, "Museums of 'Human Suffering' and the Struggle for Human Rights," in Museum Studies, Ch. 8 (pp. 117-122).

Alice Friman, "At the Holocaust Museum," in Museum Studies, Ch. 9 (pp. 123-124).

For a spectacular web site on the Enola Gay controversy, consult Edward J. Gallagher, Lehigh University, "The Enola Gay Controversy: How Do We Remember a War That We Won?"

Remains of the "Enola Gay," National Space and Air Museum, Smithsonian

PART III: LEARNING FROM/IN THE MUSEUM

April 20: Visit to Great Lakes Science Museum (Depart 2:30 PM from Rice lot - return in time for class)

April 20: Learning Theory and the Museum

We have defined three broad purposes for the museum (used here in its widest context): (1) education; (2) aesthetic/visual enjoyment and pleasure; and (3) entertainment. In its modern context, the vast majority of museums see their primary task as educational. This week we will explore questions of learning theory -- how we expect learning actually to take place at museums -- and how new theories of learning have impacted the design of museums.

*Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, "Learning from Learning Theory in Museums," The Educational Role of the Museum, ed. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 137-145. [ERes]

*George E. Hein, "Educational Theory," in Learning in the Museum (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 14-40. [ERes]

*Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Kim Hermanson, "Intrinsic Motivation in Museums: Why Does One Want to Learn?" in Hooper-Greenhill, The Educational Role of the Museum, pp. 146-160. [ERes]

*Helen Coxall, "Museum Text as Mediated Message," in Hooper-Greenhill, The Educational Role of the Museum, pp. 215-222. [ERes]

Other resources (For future work - not required reading)

John H. Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press), 2000.

Gaea Leinhardt, Kevin Crowley, and Karen Knutson, eds., Learning Conversations in Museums (Mahwah, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), 2002.

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and Their Visitors (London: Routledge), 1994.

Baseball centers around the (seemingly) eternal struggle between pitcher and batter, and each uses physics, albeit intuitively, to gain a slim advantage over the other in determining the fate of the game's center of interest -- the ball. (From a current exhibit at the Exploratorium on the physics of baseball)

Museum Visit: Great Lakes Science Center

Virtual Visits

The Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute has a web site up that turns an importnat task of the curator --establishing the provenance of the works in their collections--into a game. Using a group of late 15th century Dutch paintings with an uncertain history that depict the Virgin Mary and Christ Child, the game attempts to answer four questions: What are the origins of the paintings? How do the paintings relate to each other? What did the paintings mean in the 15th century? Who was the Master of the Embroidered Foliage? (the paintings were attributed to the Master of the Embroidered Foliage in 1926 by a German art historian, Max Friedländer)

Exploratorium (San Francisco)

Children's Museum (Boston)

Museum of Science & Industry (Chicago)

National Museum of Science & Industry (London)

PART IV: LOOKING FORWARD

April 27: Visit to Rock and Roll Museum & Hall of Fame (Leave at 5:30 PM from Rice Parking Lot - visit will take the place of class; papers to be posted the night before as usual.)

Final Proposal for Final Project and Bibliography due April 27 (turn in during class)

April 27: Museums, Pluralism, and Democratic Engagement

Here we return to a theme raised briefly in Part I: The importance of the museum in its creation of a binary "Other." Now the question becomes one of assessing the challenging role of museums, museum objects and curators, and the public in creating a pluralistic environment, fulfilling the democratic promise of the museum itself. One case we will study here is the creation and opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in 2004, a topic which would as easily fit into the readings for April 13 -- which, in and of itself, forces us to question the placement or categorization of subject matter. We will also explore the ways in which "traditional" museum spaces can take up the democratic challenge.

*Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Objects of Ethnography," in Karp and Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures, pp. 386-416 (only). [ERes]

*Amalia Mesa-Bains, "The Real Multiculturalism: A Struggle for Authority and Power," in Anderson, ed., Reinventing the Museum, Ch. 7 (pp. 99-109). [ERes]

*Edmund Barry Gaither, " 'Hey! That's Mine': Thoughts on Pluralism and American Museums," in Anderson, ed., Reinventing the Museum, Ch. 8 (pp. 110-117). [ERes]

*Claudine K. Brown, "The Museum's Role in a Multicultural Society," in Anderson, ed., Reinventing the Museum, Ch. 11 (pp. 143-149). [ERes]

*Lisa G. Corrin, "Mining the Museum: An Installation Confronting History," in Anderson, ed., Reinventing the Museum, Ch. 20 (pp. 248-156). [ERes]

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Secrets of Encounter," in MS, Ch. 53 (pp. 576-580).

Thomas Hayden, "National Museum of the American Indian: By the People," Smithsonian (Sept. 2004).

Edward Rothstein, "Museum with an American Indian Voice," New York Times, September 21, 2004.

Edward Rothstein, "Who Should Tell History: The Tribes or the Museums?" New York Times, Dec. 21, 2004.

Marguerite Carroll, "We Are Still Here," American Indian Report (September 2004).

Additional reviews of the National Museum of the American Indian will be added as they appear.

"The Captive," Eanger Irving Couse (1891), Phoenix Art Museum

May 4 and May 11: Museum Projects Presentations: Making Museums Matter

To the extent that we have often focused on the "historic" museum, particularly in the 19th century, the moment of its formation and, some would argue, its greatest importance, it is not hard to critique them and museum practices in general in the way in which they solidify discourses about difference, hierarchy, and power. But the museum (or theme park or heritage site, etc.) remains an important, increasingly vibrant institution which can offer its visitors new insights and opportunities, and which can destabilize the very discourses that museums have created in the past. The articles this week offer suggestions as to how this can be accomplished, issues that should be important to you as you work on your own museum projects.

Optional: Museum Studies, Part V.