Suggested references on memory work in museums, museology
Adorno, T. 1967. The Valéry Proust Museum. Adorno, Prisms, Samuel and Shierry Weber. London.
Alexander, E. P. 1979. Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Function of Museums. Nashville, Tenn.
Until the 1980s, most museum history was written by museum professionals and a few interested amateurs telling a story of progress—or so it seemed in the wake of the revisionism that followed.9 The newer museum studies were resolutely historical yet ambivalent about history, at once committed to treating museums as historical institutions and skeptical about histories of their development. As a result the history of an institution has given way to its multiple genealogies The most informed and thoughtful of the older works is Alma S. Wittlin, Museums: In Search of a Usable Future (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1970). Trained in museum studies in the 1930s in Vienna and Berlin, Wittlin emigrated to England and then to the United States, where she worked as a leading academic expert, organizer, and advocate in museum education; her 1970 book, expanding and updating her The Museum: Its History and Its Tasks in Education, International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction, Karl Mannheim, ed. (London, 1949) remains valuable for its experienced engagement with the past and the future prospects of museums. See, too, the books by Edward P. Alexander, a distinguished museum administrator who turned to museum history late in his career, esp. Museums in Motion: An Introduction to the History and Function of Museums (Nashville, Tenn., 1979 cited in Starn 2005).
American Association of Museums, A. 1992. "American Association of Museums Data Report." 9:29.
[This] should matter to historians. Museums and history are close kin, each with proprietary claims on gathering and interpreting materials from the past. By assembling objects outside everyday time and space, all museums are in some sense
historical. According to some estimates, history museums and historic sites account for two of every three museums in this country; they are also the most widespread and accessible museum type, from the great public collections down to the small town's roomful of memorabilia. It is no stretch, except perhaps for our professional egos, to suppose that museums actually deliver more history, more effectively, more of the time, to more people than historians do. My guess is that many historians first got the itch for history from museums, surely more than from the textbooks they read at school. In today's conflicts over the purposes and means of representing the past, the museum has become (sometimes literally) the battlefield of choice(Starn 2005).
Anderson, G. 2004. Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift, Altamira Press.
The fact remains that navigation aids to recent museum studies are few and far between.3 Sheer quantity is partly responsible for this, but so are the disconnects in the literature. Museum history is a case in point. Since the 1970s, history in the museum has become a thriving branch of public history, with publications and training programs aimed at museum work in public or corporate settings; academic historians, by and large more recently, have done important work on the cultural history of the museum. Even so, museum history is still written and taught primarily by museum professionals and people working in cultural and visual studies.4 There are good historical reasons, if not necessarily good excuses, for these divisions of labor. Since the late nineteenth century, museum work and historical scholarship, often overlapping and interconnected before then, have followed different professional tracks. The academic historians had their archives and documents, the museum curators their objects and aura. Discursive prose was history's main medium, the collection and the catalogue were the museum's. Although the monumental "temples," "palaces," or "castles" of the great nineteenth-century public museums towered over their seminar rooms, the historians outflanked the competition; from their newly won university positions they relegated museum specialists, archivists, and other "auxiliaries" or "amateurs" to subaltern status as occasionally useful technicians. These tribal divisions persist behind the smiling face of interdisciplinarity. It is a safe bet that museum workers are no more likely to read the AHR than academic historians are to read Museum News."5 (Starn 2005).
Angvik, M. and B. v. Borries 1997. Youth and History: A Comparative European Survey on Historical Consciousness and Political Attitudes among Adolescents. Hamburg.
Bali, J.-S. 1997. An Inquiry into the Status of the Racialized Other in the Institution of Art in Canada. School of Canadian Studies. Ottawa, ON, Canada, Carleton University. Canadian Studies: 157.
While the art institution in Canada may have expressed a desire to become inclusive of the nonewhite Other, this desire is limited to the revision of curatorial practices in ethnographic exhibits rather than in expanding the collection of contemporary art by nonowhite artists. In the last few years the National Gallery of Canada has held a gallery tour called the Absence of Presence i n recognition of Black History Month. The tour's primary purpose seems to be to show visitors where
the artwork of tf Black-or African-Canadian artists isn't. Footnoted (I have taken this tour which was hosted by Maureen Flynn-Burhoe who has done an exceptional amount of research into the history of Canadians of African Ancestry from the Empire Loyalists to the present. Although the tour was educational in many respects the number of works by African-Canadian artists was almost non-existent.(Bali 1997:105)"
Bell, C. 1958. Art. New York, Capricon Books.
Benjamin, W. 1982. Das Passagen-Werk. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp.
Bourdieu, P. 1984 [1979]. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Bourdieu, Pierre, La distinction: critique sociale du jugement. (Ed. de Minuit, 1979).
Buren, D. 1973. "Function of the Museum." Artforum 13:2: 52.
Burrett, D. 2004. Censorship, Controversy and Situated Knowledges. Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject. B. Gabriel and S. Ilcan. Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press: 125-148.
Cameron, D. F. 1971. "The Museum: A Temple or the Forum." Journal of World History 14:1: 201,197.
Cameron, D. F. 1992. "A Change of Heart." Museum Management and Curatorship 11: 375-386.
For "almost forty years the Canadian Duncan F. Cameron has been a critical voice in the museum world. He has promoted the view that museums must engage in the social, political, environmental and philosophical issues of the contemporary world. His well-known paper "The Museum, a Temple or the Forum," presented to the ICOM General Conference of 1971 has echoed through the museum debate of the ensuing decades. In 1992 he wrote: "Too often we believe we know the origins of our institutions when what we have come to know are the myths and legends of convenience that masquerade as hallowed traditions(Cameron 1992: 379-380 cited in Gjestrum 1995).
As the standard museum history has been constructed on contemporary myths and legends, research into the early history of our museums is urgently needed. Teather as well as Cameron offers a challenge to museology to take on this task. If their opinion that current museum history is based on myths - the myths must be unmasked! Evidently the statement by Professor Hohler that the collection-linked university disciplines form the genuine roots of museums might belong to the category of produced myths (Gjestrum 1995).
Conard, R. 2002. Benjamin Shambaugh and the Intellectual Foundations of Public History. Iowa City.
Crimp, D. 1993. On the Museum's Ruins. Cambridge, Mass.
Art critic Douglas Crimp condemned the modern art museum as one more "institution of confinement"; for having insulated art from the material conditions and creative ferment of its making, the modern temple of art deserves its postmodern fate as a lifeless ruin.19 I) p.287?
The Museum of Modern Art held a controversial exhibition entitled 'Eight Contemporary Artists' including the highly politicized Conceptual and Minimalist work. Minimalist artist and museum critic Daniel Buren cynically argued that works of art might as well be locked up in vaults to protect them since they are already so isolated from the world framed, encased in glass in museums. Burin's contribution to the exhibition was striped panels and fragments representing these frames affixed to nearby corridor and garden walls. Vogue magazine's Barbara Rose vented her anger against this complicity between the dominant bourgeouis cultural institutions and politically-motivated critics of these institutions. She argued that artists like Buren were disenchanted and demoralized artists who sabotaged museums of prestigious museums like the MoMA. focused their aggression against art greater than their own. See Crimp (Museum Ruins:85). William Rubin responded to Rose in Artforum explaining that 'museums are essentially compromise institutions invented by bourgeois democracies to reconcile the larger public with art conceived within the compass of elite private patronage'. Rubin predicted are perhaps becoming irrelevant to the practices of contemporary art. He predicted that the end of the period of modern art (c.1850-1970) which for over a century focused on the 'easel painting concept with its connection to bourgeois democratic life and concurrently the development of private collections as well as the museum concept. See Crimp (Museum Ruins:87).
The exemplary aesthetic mode of the 1970s according to Crimp was performance art. Performance works are produced for a specific situation and a specific duration. A viewer-participant had to be present to experience the work. There was a privileging of the spectator over the viewer. See Crimp (OMR:109).
Elsner, J. and R. Cardinal "The Cultures of Collecting." <
Errington, S. 1998. The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress. Berkeley, University of California Press.
