The blog is quite scholarly and reads well; and the pictures are fantastic. The museum looks equally cool. The term "cultural art" is redundant in a telling way; I would agree that the term "ethnography" is offensive, so a fitting replacement is needed. And anthropologists would say that the focus of their study is more than objects, so "anthropology" is out of the picture. The problem with a term like "cultural art" is that it implies that there is non-cultural art. I'm not going to go further with this reasoning, other than to say I think that's a little problematic. Speaking of ethnography: there's a fascinating museum nestled among the abandoned buildings of north Philadelphia called the Wagner Free Institute of Science. The collection is a meticulous catalog of minerals, taxidermy, and skeletons in rows of horizontal wooden cases with the latin name of each object in calligraphy beside it. There's lots of cool stuff to see there, and the philosophy of the collection, the idea of cataloguing the universe, is very much outdated. There's an unsettling section near the end of the exhibit with African and Native American objects, with a creepy chart showing these ethnicities as a development towards white Europeans. This is obviously the society that gave us eugenics. The idea wasn't formed out of bigotry, per se, but out of poorly developed science and rampant histrionics. I think bigotry had a lot to do with the spread of eugenics as an idea and political tool, though. Anyway, this is the uncomfortable legacy of much of anthropology and art historians who deal with these objects. I can't think of any other discipline that has had to throw out entire centuries of scholarship as unreconcilable, maybe the closest example is chemistry's rejection of alchemy... I dunno.
I agree that this is a good web page. I like the idea of a museum using the web log format to show and explain objects that are hidden away in the archives. "Object of the Week" first sounded silly to me, but after reading the educational descriptions I think it is a great idea. Of coarse the reasoning is different, but Mr. Alex is doing something similar on his web site by posting a drawing every week.
Regarding Pete's comment about the problematic nature of terms such as "cultural art" or "ethnography" . . . I used to spend a lot of time at the Seattle Art Museum and they have a very strong collection of African art from the 19th century. Less surprising to discover is a solid collection of Native American art mostly from the same time period. With the old floor plan of the museum (they are currently doing a major reconstruction) you nearly had to walk through the 19th century collection of American paintings, which are almost exclusively about the romantic glory of the frontier landscape, to get between the two collections. My point is that Seattle (and its neighbours Portland and Vancouver) is the capital of political correctness. (The merits and faults of which I could rant about to great length.) Your dilemna regarding labelling art collections was here solved simply by not adding a special category or name because the works did not come from Europe or New England. The "cultural art" section about Africa is simply "African Art" and the same for "Native American Art" with further sub-categories going to region, nation, and tribe. Of course there arises other difficulties with such labels, primarily in the complexity that sometimes arises that quickly sounds a bit absurd. For example, I remember such mouthfuls as this approximately:
Pacific Northwest Native American Art "Nuhl'amhl" ca. 1840 Kwakwaka'wakw Tribe (Kwakiutl) Northern Vancouver Island and surrounding mainland, British Colombia.
The new web site appears to have simplified things a bit:
"Nuhl'amhl" Native American, Kwakwaka'wakw ca. 1840
In a relatively new city named as a mispronunciation of a Native chief, cultural identity and and the associated historical legacies becomes a much more confusing and sensitive topic than say in Boston or Philidelphia. Curators are timidly starting to challenge the conventions and legacies left to them by the Romantic age that wanted to create detailed catalog systems for EVERYTHING, by which these institutions started in the first place. The "controversey" that appears when a modern art collection is not organized chronologically being one example. I hope to see more of that as the role of museums is redefined.
2 comments:
The blog is quite scholarly and reads well; and the pictures are fantastic. The museum looks equally cool.
The term "cultural art" is redundant in a telling way; I would agree that the term "ethnography" is offensive, so a fitting replacement is needed. And anthropologists would say that the focus of their study is more than objects, so "anthropology" is out of the picture. The problem with a term like "cultural art" is that it implies that there is non-cultural art. I'm not going to go further with this reasoning, other than to say I think that's a little problematic.
Speaking of ethnography: there's a fascinating museum nestled among the abandoned buildings of north Philadelphia called the Wagner Free Institute of Science. The collection is a meticulous catalog of minerals, taxidermy, and skeletons in rows of horizontal wooden cases with the latin name of each object in calligraphy beside it. There's lots of cool stuff to see there, and the philosophy of the collection, the idea of cataloguing the universe, is very much outdated. There's an unsettling section near the end of the exhibit with African and Native American objects, with a creepy chart showing these ethnicities as a development towards white Europeans. This is obviously the society that gave us eugenics. The idea wasn't formed out of bigotry, per se, but out of poorly developed science and rampant histrionics. I think bigotry had a lot to do with the spread of eugenics as an idea and political tool, though.
Anyway, this is the uncomfortable legacy of much of anthropology and art historians who deal with these objects. I can't think of any other discipline that has had to throw out entire centuries of scholarship as unreconcilable, maybe the closest example is chemistry's rejection of alchemy... I dunno.
I agree that this is a good web page. I like the idea of a museum using the web log format to show and explain objects that are hidden away in the archives. "Object of the Week" first sounded silly to me, but after reading the educational descriptions I think it is a great idea. Of coarse the reasoning is different, but Mr. Alex is doing something similar on his web site by posting a drawing every week.
Regarding Pete's comment about the problematic nature of terms such as "cultural art" or "ethnography" . . .
I used to spend a lot of time at the Seattle Art Museum and they have a very strong collection of African art from the 19th century. Less surprising to discover is a solid collection of Native American art mostly from the same time period. With the old floor plan of the museum (they are currently doing a major reconstruction) you nearly had to walk through the 19th century collection of American paintings, which are almost exclusively about the romantic glory of the frontier landscape, to get between the two collections. My point is that Seattle (and its neighbours Portland and Vancouver) is the capital of political correctness. (The merits and faults of which I could rant about to great length.) Your dilemna regarding labelling art collections was here solved simply by not adding a special category or name because the works did not come from Europe or New England. The "cultural art" section about Africa is simply "African Art" and the same for "Native American Art" with further sub-categories going to region, nation, and tribe. Of course there arises other difficulties with such labels, primarily in the complexity that sometimes arises that quickly sounds a bit absurd. For example, I remember such mouthfuls as this approximately:
Pacific Northwest Native American Art
"Nuhl'amhl"
ca. 1840
Kwakwaka'wakw Tribe (Kwakiutl)
Northern Vancouver Island and surrounding mainland, British Colombia.
The new web site appears to have simplified things a bit:
"Nuhl'amhl"
Native American, Kwakwaka'wakw
ca. 1840
In a relatively new city named as a mispronunciation of a Native chief, cultural identity and and the associated historical legacies becomes a much more confusing and sensitive topic than say in Boston or Philidelphia. Curators are timidly starting to challenge the conventions and legacies left to them by the Romantic age that wanted to create detailed catalog systems for EVERYTHING, by which these institutions started in the first place. The "controversey" that appears when a modern art collection is not organized chronologically being one example. I hope to see more of that as the role of museums is redefined.
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