Academic Sessions: London 2008
Pluralisms and The Museum Effect
Session Convenors:
Michaela Giebelhausen, Department of Art History & Theory, University of Essex mgiebel@essex.ac.uk
Matthew Poole, Department of Art History & Theory, University of Essex poolem@essex.ac.uk
Speakers:
Susanna Pettersson (Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki) Reflections on Museum Narratives: A Nordic perspective
Caterina Albano (Artakt, Innovation Centre, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) Intersections and the Pleasure of Narrative
Sarah Ganz (MoMA) Mind the Gap: Intention and experience in MoMA ‘s Galleries
Line Hjorth Christensen (Aarhus University, Denmark) Reflections on the Language of Display: Between museum, city and daily life
Session Abstract:
W. V. O. Quine’s 1969 ‘Ontological Relativity’, uses the pejorative analogy ‘the museum effect’ to describe the power of normative languages and their force over us. He describes the ‘fantasy of the gallery of ideas’, where ideas are like exhibits and words operate as captions or labels. This fantasy and its effect, Quine declares, establishes the core problem in the political: the belief that we can represent truth. Although ‘the museum effect’ is a useful metaphor to capture the problems of institutional language, it reminds us that the museum itself has embodied the problems of authority and power that in many ways are anathema to democracy and egalitarianism.
Similar discourses and ‘institutional critiques’ of the museum have been longstanding in art history, visual culture and museology. These easily connect up with Quine’s diagnosis, where the museum is now ever more concerned and critical of its own assertions and of how it produces itself as a public realm. This has generated a sea change in museology, to the extent that museums can be said to have assumed the task set by their critics – claiming to have created increasingly successfully non-universalist, egalitarian and democratic spaces.
It is here that this panel will explore a new problem: namely, whether the museum can and should escape the museum effect? This question is underscored when what we understand as the self-reflexive auto-critical museum has not lost its status as an authoritative institution, a trusted pedagogical tool, an avatar of liberalism and an arbiter of taste. To what extent can this ‘anti-institutional’ institution generate new conditions for knowledge production, interpretation, and curation? If we accept the relativism of the 'truths' that museums produce, how do these rhetorics take effect politically in the social sphere?
Michaela Giebelhausen, Department of Art History & Theory, University of Essex mgiebel@essex.ac.uk
Matthew Poole, Department of Art History & Theory, University of Essex poolem@essex.ac.uk
Speakers:
Susanna Pettersson (Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki) Reflections on Museum Narratives: A Nordic perspective
Caterina Albano (Artakt, Innovation Centre, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) Intersections and the Pleasure of Narrative
Sarah Ganz (MoMA) Mind the Gap: Intention and experience in MoMA ‘s Galleries
Line Hjorth Christensen (Aarhus University, Denmark) Reflections on the Language of Display: Between museum, city and daily life
Session Abstract:
W. V. O. Quine’s 1969 ‘Ontological Relativity’, uses the pejorative analogy ‘the museum effect’ to describe the power of normative languages and their force over us. He describes the ‘fantasy of the gallery of ideas’, where ideas are like exhibits and words operate as captions or labels. This fantasy and its effect, Quine declares, establishes the core problem in the political: the belief that we can represent truth. Although ‘the museum effect’ is a useful metaphor to capture the problems of institutional language, it reminds us that the museum itself has embodied the problems of authority and power that in many ways are anathema to democracy and egalitarianism.
Similar discourses and ‘institutional critiques’ of the museum have been longstanding in art history, visual culture and museology. These easily connect up with Quine’s diagnosis, where the museum is now ever more concerned and critical of its own assertions and of how it produces itself as a public realm. This has generated a sea change in museology, to the extent that museums can be said to have assumed the task set by their critics – claiming to have created increasingly successfully non-universalist, egalitarian and democratic spaces.
It is here that this panel will explore a new problem: namely, whether the museum can and should escape the museum effect? This question is underscored when what we understand as the self-reflexive auto-critical museum has not lost its status as an authoritative institution, a trusted pedagogical tool, an avatar of liberalism and an arbiter of taste. To what extent can this ‘anti-institutional’ institution generate new conditions for knowledge production, interpretation, and curation? If we accept the relativism of the 'truths' that museums produce, how do these rhetorics take effect politically in the social sphere?