What's in the Drawer?

ABSTRACT

Much current museum theory and practice emphasizes the importance of storytelling and the inclusion of multiple perspectives in richly layered museum interpretations, with a key objective being the elicitation of empathy for the lives and personal interactions of people in other times and places. Yet in the process museum objects themselves can often appear to recede in significance, appearing as little more than illustrations rather than the complex, material entities they actually are. This article explores the power of objects and of active ways of discovering them, in the setting of the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum. Visitors can open glass-topped drawers underneath a number of the display cases and find themselves gazing on artifacts in storage: some with museum labels visible and legible, others not. This discovery of the objects is actively performed and, while objects cannot be removed for handling, facilitates their imagined, non-visual exploration. It is also a process in which, the article suggests, proprioception is of particular interest. Overall the drawers offer, the article submits, the possibility for variously pleasing, alienating, surprising, or reassuring encounters with the potential to enhance the museum experience.     

Family touch practices and learning experiences in the museum

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates how family museum visitors crafted learning through interaction with one another and the touch objects of an exhibition. Through a case study of seven families’ interaction, we show how families used touch to bring their interests and resources into dialogue with museum expectations and resources. Using a multimodal approach to analyze observational data, we generate a fine-grained account of differently configured family touch practices and ways of experiencing and knowing objects through their material, sensory tactile and affective qualities. We conclude by highlighting how our findings can inform the design of touch exhibits to support family learning, with attention to engagement, narrative creation, and embodied learning, and point to the paper’s methodological contribution to the analysis of visitor situated real-time interaction and learning in museums.     

The senses at the National Gallery: art as sensory recreation and regulation in Victorian England

ABSTRACT

In 1850, the keeper of the National Gallery in London described the museum as being frequented by “school boys eating bread and cheese” and country folk who “drew their chairs round and sat down, and seemed to make themselves very comfortable”. As for the pictures on the walls, these were smeared with the fingerprints of inquiring gallery-goers. The tension between the National Gallery as an unfussy place of recreation, in which visitors could enjoy themselves at their ease, and as a prim site of regulation, in which visitors must learn to exercise tight control over their behavior, played itself out in elite nineteenth-century debates over the role of the Gallery as a public space. This article examines nineteenth-century representations of the ideal sensory role of the National Gallery and its problematic actual sensory life. This leads into a discussion of the ways in which the National Gallery and other public art institutions were imagined to function as the soft fingertips of the long arm of the law, transforming social disorder into social order and destructive sensuality into compliant sensitivity.     

Sensuous (Re)Collections: The Sight and Taste of Socialism at Grūtas Statue Park,Lithuania

ABSTRACT

The present paper is about Grūtas, a Lithuanian park—museum featuring recuperated Soviet-era artifacts. This museum is examined as a locus of public memory where the nation's socialist history is invoked through visual representations (recovered statuary) and by implicating the sense of taste (“Soviet” drinks and dishes served at the museum's café). The paper suggests that seeing the Socialist past at Grūtas activates memories of trauma and loss, while tasting that past summons up more nostalgic reminiscences. It is further argued that this museum constitutes a visual and gustatory critique of Lithuania's increasingly commodified and “modernized” present. It is also proposed that collective memory in today's Eastern Europe affords a productive ethnographic site in which to investigate the ongoing systemic transformations in the aftermath of communist rule.     

Sensing Through White Gloves: On Congolese Objects in Swedish Sceneries

ABSTRACT

The article discusses collectibles acquired by Swedish missionaries and military officers active within the ill-reputed Congo Free State (1885–1908). Objects are approached here not primarily as tokens of Congolese material culture but as traces of a transnational cultural history and as points of entry to a critical museology. Drawing on case studies of collections I discuss the ways in which artifacts have been selected, joined and charged with new functions and meanings on their voyage between hands, narratives and genres.

In focus are five examples of objects that, analytically, have worked as what Roland Barthes (1980) calls punctum: the detail that disturbs and fascinates by force of seeming ungrammatical in relation to the larger context of which it forms part. By adding material to the Barthian concept I want to stress that such analytical impulses may be evoked by all senses. During an inventory of Swedish Congolese collections, when the historical state of stored museum items as untouchables could temporarily be broken, their multisensory material presences proved able to challenge textual discourses, serve as alternative witnesses and demonstrate hidden significances of ethnographical museums and collections.     

Touching the Deep Past

ABSTRACT

The nineteenth century was fascinated with the display of human remains in museums. The most celebrated of such exhibits was the Egyptian mummy, which served as the subject of a range of sensorial investigations. Museum mummies were gawked at and sometimes handled by museum goers. Outside of the museum, mummy unwrappings were popular public spectacles. Travelers to Egypt often brought back a mummy hand or foot as an essential tourist souvenir. Scientists, for their part endeavored to categorize mummies by their varying colors, textures, and aromas. These multisensory responses to the mummy were complemented by fictional accounts in which revivified mummies were depicted as exerting their own tactile power over their modern handlers. Such practices and stories point to a desire to physically connect with a bygone world in a modern age—a desire often accompanied by a fear of such contact with the past proving overwhelming. The fact that mummies might be regarded as trophies of conquest by imperialist Europeans suggests that the concern with touching and being touched by the mummy also represented a Western ambivalence towards colonial subjects.     

Animated Spaces

ABSTRACT

Recent exhibitions of interaction design have sought, and often struggled, to capture within the space of a traditional gallery the multisensorial, often performative nature of the user experience and the richness of the contexts within which that experience takes place. Similarly, many architecture exhibitions have attempted to reinvent the place of architecture in the modern museum—to portray architecture as a multimodal, multisensory shaper of the material landscape that impacts people's everyday lives. Yet, again, the “white cube” complicates curators' and exhibition designers' efforts to go beyond traditional materials—blueprints, renderings, models, and photographs—to convey the dimensionality and material richness of built space. This article will examine how interaction design and architecture, both experiential fields, present unique challenges to the exhibition designer. It will also consider how these fields, by virtue of the distinctive qualities of their designed objects, offer unique opportunities for us to rethink the relationships between the contexts and contents of exhibition. It will conclude with specific recommendations for ascertaining the limitations and affordances of—and critically negotiating between—the exhibition space, the exhibition's publics, and exhibition modes and media.     

Experiential design and religious publicity at D.C.’s Museum of the Bible

ABSTRACT

This article examines the sensory dimension of religious publicity, focused on the case of an evangelical museum in the United States. Washington D.C.’s Museum of the Bible (MOTB) was envisioned and funded primarily by conservative Protestants, and is a revealing case of religion in public life because most of the creative labor of design was conceived and executed by secular firms who do not typically work for faith-based clients. The professional expertise of these firms, “experiential design,” informs a sea change in contemporary museology and the expansion of the experience economy in late modernity. Ultimately, I argue that MOTB’s engagement with experiential design indexes the power of entertainment in late modern life, as the sensory repertoire at play operates with largely unquestioned legitimacy and presumed efficacy. By mobilizing the cultural capital of design, an evangelical museum makes a claim for diverse audiences in a deeply public setting.     

Seeing flowers through the mist: how social workers in disability services retrospectively view their educational experiences related to case management in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This article is principally designed to examine social workers’ retrospective views on their past educational experiences with case management in disability services to supply a deficiency that very little literature attention has been paid to how prior professional education shape their case management practice. Using qualitative methods, 13 social workers selected by purposive sampling were invited to participate in in-depth interviews. The qualitative data were analysed to generate some themes. Three themes found are “from ‘rarely heard of it’ to ‘remember it being referred to’”; “buy a lottery ticket before starting a field placement”; and “Ambiguity”. These themes indicate that social work education related to case management was lagging behind, which may exacerbate social work’s polarisation and lead to social workers’ confusion about their professionality. As a result, an urgent need for greater knowledge of case management in university education and in-service training should be addressed in Hong Kong.     

John Coltrane and Me

Abstract

In this essay, I consider the role that cultural objects play in one's personal development by taking a closer look at the relationship between people and the creative products of their fellows. As a launching point to this study, I examine my own relationship with the music of two jazz icons, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, viewing the differences in my reactions to, and uses of, their musical offerings over times as a reflection of my own personal growth. My contention is that under the right conditions people can use cultural objects to reconnect with disavowed aspects of their experiences.     

Teenagers' Multisensory Routes for Learning in the Museum

ABSTRACT

In this article I draw on a study of sensory aspects of teenagers' use of digital media, how these sensory aspects are incorporated in emerging learning strategies, and the implications of this for the same teenagers' engagement in museums. My focus is on how an ethnographic approach that attends to the senses may enable a critical review of prevailing pedagogical ideas in museums. Recent developments in museum education have led to large investments in state-of-the-art technology to produce interactive, multisensory exhibits. However, the question of how teenagers respond to these campaigns remains rather under-researched. This article shows how habitual use of digital media in teenage everyday practice incorporates learning to appropriate other people's experiences and ideas through a configuration of vision, touch, motion, and imagination, thereby enhancing non-representational learning qualities such as affect and sensation. The implications of this sensory approach open up routes to differentiate pedagogical settings in museums that on a superficial level apply the same educational technologies, but since they are based in different sensorial belief systems, different conditions for learning unfold in their use. In developing this analysis I argue that through ethnographic attention to the senses we might advance theories of learning within museum education.     

Sensory Orientations and Sensory Designs in the American Deafworld

ABSTRACT

In order to understand the meaning of deafness, one needs to understand the role of senses in culture. The DeafWorld is a sensory world. People who are d/Deaf create their own sensory profile. There are three principal sensory orientations among d/Deaf people in the American DeafWorld: visual, auditory, and tactile. These orientations have led to the invention of visual, tactile, and auditory sensible objects and architectures to fit the d/Deaf world and d/Deaf subjects' needs. These objects are also partly generated through interaction with the audist sensory orientation of the hearing world and thus constitute a kind of bridge between the two worlds while at the same time contributing to their distinctive contours.     

Where Publics May Touch

ABSTRACT

In response to the unique sensory modes of blind and partially sighted communities, tactile and multisensory tours and exhibition components of museum collections are gradually becoming more common in North America and Europe. Such initiatives are often intended to give equal forms of access for diverse participating publics. This article provides an auto-ethnographic report on the tactile tours offered by The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) program “Stimulating the Senses,” and gives context for sensorial models at play in Western museums today. Museum strategies that encourage intersensorial awareness and access are also discussed. Attention is given to the performative properties of these tours, and the variety of encounter they encourage between publics. This article also includes accounts of the program by its supervisor and coordinator, as well as from a participant. Key questions this article explores are: do such tours in fact give equal access; what motivates the development of such programs in Canadian institutions; and what outcomes are realized through these programs?     

Incorporating the Period Eye

ABSTRACT

In recent years, museums have staged a number of “exhibitions of exhibitions.” These experiments in institutional, curatorial, and artistic revivalism have ranged from allusions to and quotations from past installations to full-scale re-enactments and reconstructions. The motivations of the curators and artists responsible for these diverse projects have included the desire to recuperate both famous and forgotten shows and also to reproduce past modalities of display and spectatorship, and thus build an archive of the immaterial through retrospective and performance practices. Some of the most interesting “exhibitions of exhibitions” have focused on the historical conditions and institutional conventions of spectatorship, with the objective of alerting the contemporary viewer to differences in the performativity of spectatorship, past and present. By evoking former practices of looking, walking, and touching, these exhibitions also remind us that techniques of the museum visitor are both embodied and acquired. They require the contemporary viewer to recalibrate their choreography of their looking and moving; put another way, they activate what Michael Baxandall termed the “period eye” in order to decode the visual effects of the exhibition and to relocate oneself in the position of the historical spectator. This article explores how a number of recent exhibitions have redrawn attention to the corporeality of museum visiting and viewing, as well as to the historical acquisition of competences and attitudes that we take for granted today.     

Determinants of Income Generation and Financial Performance Through Self-Help Groups

ABSTRACT

This study examines the efficacy of a microcredit-linked self-help group (SHG) program in identifying the problems faced by group members such as income generation and financial performance. To examine this, 120 members in each of three selected blocks in Birbhum District in West Bengal, India, were invited to participate. A multiple regression equation focused on identifying the contributing factors toward explaining SHG income. Results indicated that income generation for all the blocks together was significantly influenced by factors like loan amount, amount of saving, years of existence of SHG, education level of the group leader, and availability of the training facility. However, SHG-wise efficiency scores varied across the blocks that might be related to different sociocultural dimensions. Implications of the analytical findings for future research are discussed at the end of the article.     

Fantasy Lands and Kinesthetic Thrills

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that Coney Island's enclosed amusement parks aided in the transformation of spectacle as total-body experience. By studying the ways that Coney Island's unique beachside resort produced entertainment that appealed to all of the senses, we seek to “make sense” of the amusement area in its historical and geographic specificity. Even in its early years of development the beachside resort was touted (and critiqued) in the popular press as a carnivalesque atmosphere that escalated the senses. With the opening of Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland Coney Island's enclosed amusement parks provided dream worlds of technological and architectural wonder that invited kinesthetic. Coney Island reconfigured the dizzying effects of urbanism, modernity and the capitalist machine as entertainment, inviting pleasure seekers to experience the shock of modernity as fun. Mechanical amusements celebrated and fostered thrill seekers as sensuous beings who experienced leisure not just through their eyes but with and through their entire bodies. Though the impossibilities of recreating the sensorial experiences of pleasure seekers at Coney Island remains a methodological limitation, this article contributes to literature that understands the senses as lived, embodied phenomena that are products of culture.     

Embracing Sculptural Ceramics: A Lived Experience of Touch in Art

ABSTRACT

Sculptural ceramic objects created by and for the body were made within the context of art-based research, in which theoretical explorations and studio practice were integrally interwoven. Studio explorations developed from theoretical knowledge gained from human physiology, and from the development of an understanding of the “lived experience” as expressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, through the experiences of the artist in making, and comments from visitors at exhibitions. The artworks challenge the visual hegemony of the art gallery by more fully engaging the body's sense of touch through the embrace. The sculptures, which were made by “casting hugs,” instinctively invite interaction, with soft curves that echo the human body, textures to visually entice individuals to touch, and a pleasurable weight that slows down responses. In public exhibition the artworks are enthusiastically embraced and held, broadening and articulating a tactile aesthetic for sculpture, and shifting focus from the sculptural objects themselves to one's physical and emotional experience of those objects.     

Body of knowledge: Sunderland Museum and Art Gallery and the blind imagination

ABSTRACT

This article examines the cultural and philosophical intersection between visual and tactile knowledge and the emergent aesthetics of modernism. In the September 1913 edition of The Museums Journal, J. A. Charlton Deas published a paper entitled “The Showing of Museums and Art Galleries to the Blind.” The text, exceptional in its historical context, complicated prevailing assumptions about acts of “visual” art and blindness. Deas details a series of experiments undertaken at Sunderland Museum and Art Gallery from 1906 to 1913 that consisted of making accessible exhibits, specimens and paintings for blind children to touch. Unprecedented at the time, these experiments recast the persistent Western belief that the eye has privileged access to knowledge, instead asserting that knowledge is embedded within material corporeality. The physical, creative and intellectual inclusion of blind people into the formerly inaccessible space of the museum was unique in its reach and offers a refreshing new perspective of what those (authoritatively visual) spaces could be. Sunderland, a region which tends to be discursively separated from the ambitions and experiments of modernism, was at the center of modernist discussions about knowledge, sight and touch; and, disrupts modernism’s silence with respect to acknowledging unprecedented regional developments such as those detailed in “Showing.”     

Rethinking the Soundscape

ABSTRACT

This article takes critical issue with the well-circulated but often misapplied term “soundscape.” Coined by Canadian composer Murray Schafer in his book “The Soundscape,” the term has become one of the keywords of sound studies, but in its wide circulation it has become disconnected from its original scholarly concept and used broadly to apply to nearly any sonic phenomenon. Scholars either misapply it or redefine it to suit their needs. This article is an attempt to trace an intellectual history or genealogy of the term, and to open a conversation about the term's use, application, and utility for scholars of sound. This article draws on Schafer's work in an attempt to ground the term in its own intellectual history, and then traces the use of the term in a variety of sound studies works. The term “soundscape” emerges as at once indispensable and elusive, provocative and limited. By calling attention to background sound, Schafer shaped the field in ways that exceeded his own contribution.