(no subject)
Hello, dear LJ.
It has been a nice few days. Despite the fact that I hate and despise Amsterdam, and miss London every waking moment, it is quite a nice life here. The weather has been balmy, the tulips are cheap, and the tree outside my window that I assumed was dead has just this second sprouted buds. Better late to Spring than never.
Today I went to the Amsterdam Historical Museum shamefully for the first time, on holiday-research for Disclosures IV, me and Anna's next project. More on that in a mo. I bought a small reproduction tile with a ship on it, because I can't refuse a museum shop and because I am that predictable.
Amsterdam museums are very strange. They are either bonkers, of the cats-on-boats ilk. Or they're just dated and seedy, such as the sex museum, or the Beurs van Beurlingen. However, if they've had a bit of money thrown at them lately, they're entirely strange. They get updated with technology and new systems of display, but also keep the older faddish display items so they're a sort of late 20th century palimpsest of museology. For example, the AHM has a whole room of things beautifully but rather pointlessly displayed in dramatically lit perspex cases (regardless of whether it's an actual painting or it's a piece of ship's timber), with a projected frieze of atmospheric images complete with soundtrack; yet it also hangs onto one of those old 1980s maps where you press a button and an LED lights up within a laminated, Star-Trek-instrument-panel type of surface. As a curator, I am always a bit bewildered also by the cavalier treatment of paintings, which get treated in the same way as any other artefact - which ok, I can be pragmatist about - and when you see a grubby info sign saying something like 'very few examples by XX painter exist' and you see they've put the painting on a painted woodchip wall, perilously close to a bright red fire alarm - you do feel for those poor paintings that end up in historical rather than art museums.
It's their status somewhere between artefact, document, and imagery that makes them suffer. In some ways it makes me more and more convinced of the tautologically sanctified space of the gallery. Anyway, it gets even weirder in the Amsterdam Jewish Museum.
I'm still convinced that someone got hold of a fortune and just went bonkers. There's so much interactivity, pressy-buttons, dramatically-hung signage, and audio exhibits that the actual collection barely gets a look. Which is fine as half the exhibits are facsimiles anyway.
That was really interesting to me: at what point does the museum stop being the display of a collection and start being a heavily mediated cultural and historical 'experience'? There are a ton of writing about this but I really think of Dieter Roelstraete's 'On Thingness' which outlines, in relation to the dematerialisation of the art object, political representation, and, well, everything, a strange return to objects as things of fascination; no longer read purely as the exotic spoils of some colonial campaign or other (which is the basis for the origination of the museum in the first place); but as vessels that historical narratives and social significance clings to and which, overall, can be 'read'. It is a strange quality to attach to materiality, but I GUESS THIS IS WHY WE SHOULD ALL BE READING DANIEL MILLER'S THE COMFORT OF THINGS and coming back to the AJM, you suddenly feel the gap: this priceless Jewish ceremonial plate of some kind is diluted by the plethora of light, sound, and I have to say, information. As conservative as it sounds I do find myself yearning a bit for the old-fashioned, sober and reserved information tag next to an object, assuming an intelligent and imaginative audience. But this doesn't take us very far: in fact I really like all these audio testimonies and new media exhibits. The problem is, though, that taken as a whole, the objects cease to be objects in a documentary framework, and simply jump to documentation. In these new museums, they exist on exactly the same level as what was once supplementary. We don't expect to be surprised by objects any more, and besides, half the western world's collections are far too colonial to take on their object value alone, as that would exoticise and represent all the bad things that museums evidence so we often need these layers and layers of context and explanation and framing.
So I'm standing there and there is a portrait of some 18th-C Dutch Jew, he's a bit cross-eyed, it's behind perspex in this odd box directly above a flat vitrine which contains some contemporaneous but otherwise unrelated documentation (facsimile). I learn something about the facsimile, that it is something to do with rents in the Jordaan, and next to it is a coin, because we are talking about money or something. The next little unit tells us about the arrival of Napoleon in 1795 (my favourite bit in any given Dutch museum: screw you boring Calvinists and Protestants, here comes the weirdly bug-eyed Louis Napoleon and his fuck off army! But don't worry, the British will sort them out in 20 years time, so sit tight). Yet try as I might I can't find any information regarding under what circumstances the Dutch capitulated. Was there a battle? Did they simply cave? Was there diplomacy? Ah well, it's only the capitulation of an entire state to a foreign power. We'll never know. But they do have a print (facsimile) of Louis arriving in the Dam Square.
Star exhibit of the AHM today: well, aside from the adorable models of various styles and phases of Dutch interiors - that was totally cool - were the cargo boat paintings that hung in the guildhall of sailors. Every captain had one, these roughly-painted panels with a picture of his ship, and some verse below hoping that God would look after her and all that. That's a lovely thing.
It has been a nice few days. Despite the fact that I hate and despise Amsterdam, and miss London every waking moment, it is quite a nice life here. The weather has been balmy, the tulips are cheap, and the tree outside my window that I assumed was dead has just this second sprouted buds. Better late to Spring than never.
Today I went to the Amsterdam Historical Museum shamefully for the first time, on holiday-research for Disclosures IV, me and Anna's next project. More on that in a mo. I bought a small reproduction tile with a ship on it, because I can't refuse a museum shop and because I am that predictable.
Amsterdam museums are very strange. They are either bonkers, of the cats-on-boats ilk. Or they're just dated and seedy, such as the sex museum, or the Beurs van Beurlingen. However, if they've had a bit of money thrown at them lately, they're entirely strange. They get updated with technology and new systems of display, but also keep the older faddish display items so they're a sort of late 20th century palimpsest of museology. For example, the AHM has a whole room of things beautifully but rather pointlessly displayed in dramatically lit perspex cases (regardless of whether it's an actual painting or it's a piece of ship's timber), with a projected frieze of atmospheric images complete with soundtrack; yet it also hangs onto one of those old 1980s maps where you press a button and an LED lights up within a laminated, Star-Trek-instrument-panel type of surface. As a curator, I am always a bit bewildered also by the cavalier treatment of paintings, which get treated in the same way as any other artefact - which ok, I can be pragmatist about - and when you see a grubby info sign saying something like 'very few examples by XX painter exist' and you see they've put the painting on a painted woodchip wall, perilously close to a bright red fire alarm - you do feel for those poor paintings that end up in historical rather than art museums.
It's their status somewhere between artefact, document, and imagery that makes them suffer. In some ways it makes me more and more convinced of the tautologically sanctified space of the gallery. Anyway, it gets even weirder in the Amsterdam Jewish Museum.
I'm still convinced that someone got hold of a fortune and just went bonkers. There's so much interactivity, pressy-buttons, dramatically-hung signage, and audio exhibits that the actual collection barely gets a look. Which is fine as half the exhibits are facsimiles anyway.
That was really interesting to me: at what point does the museum stop being the display of a collection and start being a heavily mediated cultural and historical 'experience'? There are a ton of writing about this but I really think of Dieter Roelstraete's 'On Thingness' which outlines, in relation to the dematerialisation of the art object, political representation, and, well, everything, a strange return to objects as things of fascination; no longer read purely as the exotic spoils of some colonial campaign or other (which is the basis for the origination of the museum in the first place); but as vessels that historical narratives and social significance clings to and which, overall, can be 'read'. It is a strange quality to attach to materiality, but I GUESS THIS IS WHY WE SHOULD ALL BE READING DANIEL MILLER'S THE COMFORT OF THINGS and coming back to the AJM, you suddenly feel the gap: this priceless Jewish ceremonial plate of some kind is diluted by the plethora of light, sound, and I have to say, information. As conservative as it sounds I do find myself yearning a bit for the old-fashioned, sober and reserved information tag next to an object, assuming an intelligent and imaginative audience. But this doesn't take us very far: in fact I really like all these audio testimonies and new media exhibits. The problem is, though, that taken as a whole, the objects cease to be objects in a documentary framework, and simply jump to documentation. In these new museums, they exist on exactly the same level as what was once supplementary. We don't expect to be surprised by objects any more, and besides, half the western world's collections are far too colonial to take on their object value alone, as that would exoticise and represent all the bad things that museums evidence so we often need these layers and layers of context and explanation and framing.
So I'm standing there and there is a portrait of some 18th-C Dutch Jew, he's a bit cross-eyed, it's behind perspex in this odd box directly above a flat vitrine which contains some contemporaneous but otherwise unrelated documentation (facsimile). I learn something about the facsimile, that it is something to do with rents in the Jordaan, and next to it is a coin, because we are talking about money or something. The next little unit tells us about the arrival of Napoleon in 1795 (my favourite bit in any given Dutch museum: screw you boring Calvinists and Protestants, here comes the weirdly bug-eyed Louis Napoleon and his fuck off army! But don't worry, the British will sort them out in 20 years time, so sit tight). Yet try as I might I can't find any information regarding under what circumstances the Dutch capitulated. Was there a battle? Did they simply cave? Was there diplomacy? Ah well, it's only the capitulation of an entire state to a foreign power. We'll never know. But they do have a print (facsimile) of Louis arriving in the Dam Square.
Star exhibit of the AHM today: well, aside from the adorable models of various styles and phases of Dutch interiors - that was totally cool - were the cargo boat paintings that hung in the guildhall of sailors. Every captain had one, these roughly-painted panels with a picture of his ship, and some verse below hoping that God would look after her and all that. That's a lovely thing.