The short article about the addition of Shepard Fairey’s portrait of Barack Obama to the National Portrait Gallery collection had a nice photo of Dale Hunt and Todd Gardner hanging the painting. That NPG link has information about the piece and the museum acquisition, the New York Times piece is here: “Outlaws at the Art Museum (and not for a heist).”
Tag Archives: museums
Primal Museum Archetypes
Husband and I went to visit the Buddhas today at the Sackler Museum of Art. We always stop and say hello to Ganesha. We also checked out the Southeast Asian Ceramics exhibit, which we hadn’t seen yet even though it’s been up for months.
The Sackler store was playing some sort of demonic j-pop Christmas/Dance music. We had to leave quickly, the music was blocking our qi.
In our wanderings we also meandered through the National Museum of African Art. I wanted to link to a couple of especially cool pieces in the Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection, but the site crashes Firefox and is giving me an error message in Safari. I’m too tired to figure out the problem. Searching google, I was able to get bypass the Museum website’s splash page and go directly to the section about the masks on display, but there’s no deep-linking. Let’s take that as a sign that you should just go browse the exhibit yourself and pick your own favorites. (Why can’t you go between the Sackler and African Art anymore without leaving the building?)
We also passed through the Freer Gallery of Art to visit their Buddhas. We made the obligatory stop into the Peacock Room on our way out. I’d never noticed it has sunflower-shaped fireplace doohickeys. (I don’t know what they’re called – are they part of the screen? I’m from Florida. We don’t have fireplaces. I could look it up, I suppose. But I probably won’t).
We’ve realized that at any given time, in any museum in the world, there are always five people there. Not the same five people, quit being so literal and/or paranoid. Five representatives of the basic museum-going archetypes. Perhaps they’re Museum Spirits who don’t exist outside the confines of institutional cultural presentations? Who can know. They are: Aging Hippie Woman Anthropology Professor, Woman Wearing Too Much Perfume, The Bickering Couple, and Random White Guy. The museums were all practically empty, yet at each one we kept bumping into incarnations of the Museum Spirits.
Husband pointed out that maybe to other museum goers he appeared to be The Random White Guy. He was smart enough not to point out I could play the role of the Aging Hippie Woman Anthropology Professor, otherwise we might have also found ourselves playing the role of The Bickering Couple.
Wack! or, Tracy and I go on a fieldtrip
Yesterday Tracy Lee and I went on a fieldtrip to the National Museum of Women in the Arts for an initial viewing of Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution. I need to do some reading and return to the exhibit because I didn’t recognize many of the artists or their work, and even with the pretty good explanatory labels I didn’t really understand a lot of the work or the curator’s thinking in including it in the show. On a sidenote, Barbara Pollack notes in her Washington Post review that there a difference between the show as it’s on display here as opposed to it’s debut at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A. is that now “…there are copious wall labels…”. That’s nice but I would argue that the show needs more labels and more context. Lots more context.
My biggest frustration with the exhibit (aside from the sub-arctic temperatures that left my aged and arthritic joints screaming in agony) is with the (artistic) media included in the exhibit.
I don’t have a problem with the accompanying audio files that you can call up with your cellphone. (You can also listen to them online by going to the highlights from the program link – probably not worksafe, unless you work somewhere where a woman talking about “vulvic space” is not going to be a problem). It’s very cool to stand in front of Carolee Schneemann’s “Interior Scroll” while looking at the action photos of her performing the piece while you listen to her explaining the origins of the work on your cellphone. I’m disappointed there aren’t more of these, actually, but that’s not my problem. My problem is with the display of the video pieces, and there are a delightfully large number of them presented. These are films or videos that are themselves the art pieces, to be clear these are not little explanatory pieces about the exhibit.
I know that presenting multi-media in a museum setting is a no-win proposition and so it’s hard for me to even decide how to frame this criticism. I’m certainly not certain how I’d solve the problem.
First of all, the museum seems to have heard Dr. Birdcage’s complaint that they display a lot of work too high for the average woman to view, because the monitors are probably at exactly the right height for viewers who are 5’2″ – anyone taller has to crane down to watch and anyone in a wheelchair is craning up.
There are very few monitors with chairs. Who wants to stand and watch videos that are 8 to 115 minutes long? If a video has sound, there’s one set of headphones available. I didn’t see jacks for additional personal headphones – although to be fair it didn’t occur to me to check until late in the exhibit so I didn’t look at every monitor.
Most monitors have 4 – 6 videos available. At each monitor they are numbered and labeled so it’s easy to make a selection, but that means only one video is available at a time. At one monitor you can choose between the work of 2 different artists. One documentary is 55:39 the other is 115. Either way, you have to stand, and only one person can listen.
If you put out more monitors and more seats, you take away room to display other artwork. If you move the monitors into seperate areas, are you marginalizing that work or taking it away from the context of the other work? How do you allow users to control where a piece starts, stops, pauses, rewinds, or fast forwards without messing around with the artist’s intent for the piece? Can the works be made available online as well as on the site – will the artists allow this?
It all makes your brain hurt, doesn’t it?
It’s a pretty big exhibit and I need to go back and have another go. We did swing through the exhibit of photos of Frida Kahlo, I thought I’d missed it entirely but it’s there until the 14th.
random tidbits from the DEA
I watched FOX news again tonight. It’s because they re-assure me that everything is ooookay. Usually they do stories that assure me we’re morally, politically, and militarily superior to the world, and god bless america, the sun never sets on the American Empire.
Sometimes, however, they do stories that open my eyes to the sad state of the world. For instance, tonight I learned that kids can learn about drugs on the internet. I presume that before the internet, no one did drugs. At the end of the story they told us that the best information about drugs was available from the DEA. Then they directed us to dea.gov. Now, I don’t know that this is the best drug information there is, but the DEA museum has certainly the best drug-enforcement related gift shop I’ve ever seen. It’s also the only drug-enforcement themed museum I’ve ever seen. Unless you count the museum in Florida with the guilletines and electric chairs, but that’s not really the same.
What do you think my sister-in-law would do to us if we got our niece a DEA teddy bear?
Some of the items, however, are a little strange:
Doesn’t that seem oddly specialized?