September 25, 2016 - 20:22
On Friday, I noticed new things about the Creative Africa exhibit and I learned quite a bit about its background. To begin with, I took a closer look at the things that I skimmed, or just quickly glanced over on my first visit. The photography exhibit was the place I spent the most time in. I didn’t notice the music before and this time, I felt as if it added a different layer to the room. It warmed up the display and seemed to invite conversation. A panel told me that the photographers were asked to recommend songs for this exhibit’s playlist (find it online: http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/844.html) to give visitors an added sense of the cities. I appreciated that the artists had control over this aspect of the exhibit. I was struck by one particular photo by Akinbode Akinbiyi. It was a shot of Cairo, with a fence or enclosure in the foreground and the Pyramids of Giza in the background. It was a way of looking at the Pyramids that didn’t seem so flattering, and it didn’t play up the grandeur of the structures.
I also appreciated hearing John Vick put into his own words what some of the creative direction behind the exhibit was. His manner seemed casual and conversational, like Kris Graves, but I think Kris Graves had more to say about himself and Vick had more to say about his institution. Some things that he said caught me by surprise. He said that that part of curating was about “keeping your abilities in mind” and he said that while curating Creative Africa, “calling up Penn Museum” was sometimes necessary, especially because so many of us were disappointed in the Penn Museum. He also gave us an inside view of what it’s like to be a curator, how your social circle is somewhat determined by your occupation, how your curation is informed by your friends and colleagues. He told us that standards are very high for curators, and that once curators “make it” in the field, they don’t take risks for a few reasons: one, because of their training they might think that there is a certain way to display things; and two, because they need to impress their critics and peers. To me, this says that curation is political, and the inner workings of that negotiation of power happens in a way that is invisible to the public and coded in the exhibits (coded in its aesthetics? Are politics aesthetics? I’ll say more later). Going forward, I think it’d be interesting to critique exhibits as they are but also as products of a long collaborative process that involves many different people with distinct agendas.
A lot was said about contextualization…contextualization in different disciplines (anthropology, sociology, history) or different approaches (ethnography, art), putting objects “in different contexts” to “create profoundly different experiences.” I learned from John Vick that the Look Again exhibit was the center of the Creative Africa exhibit and that the rest of the exhibits are spinoffs on the Look Again display. This was interesting to me because I thought Look Again was kind of out of place among the contemporary exhibits. I thought that Look Again didn’t do the best job of putting the history in conversation with the present…which is my impression of what it Creative Africa was trying to accomplish with the choices in representation. I am reminded of what Professor Schlosser wrote in “Who Gives a Fuck About Tocqueville?” when he said “my instinct was to respond to any problem through genealogy: looking for points of origin, past responses, to a history that could offer new perspectives on the present.” I am thinking about how in my political theory classes, I often used ancient and contemporary texts to situate my argument. The goal was to have a dialogue with multiple interlocutors to form a cohesive argument. I see some of that in the task of curating an exhibit, carefully choosing artists and themes and art pieces to construct an experience. What my political philosophy papers lacked, however, was an aesthetic experience (actually not sure about this statement I haven’t explored the relationship between aesthetics and political philosophy but the connection hasn’t been explicitly made in any of my writing) and the specific responsibility museums have to secure funding and to please a wide audience. Which leads me to my next point: How do curators balance the theoretical, artistic thinking with the marketing strategies of the museum? Does a curator feel more bound to meeting financial goals or to creating a harmonious aesthetic experience?
Furthermore, what do aesthetic experiences have to do with pedagogy? While we were processing with Dani and Maeve, a comment was made about “contextualizing aesthetic itself” and I’d like to explore what that means and how that can be incorporated into pedagogy. Dani and Maeve mentioned that viewers were “drawn to the aesthetic” and that there was “an insistence on not learning” in the education department of the museum. I just want to know, what is the relationship between those two statements?
Revisiting the PMA gave me so much to think about. I appreciate how bluntly John, Dani, and Maeve spoke about their work and museum affairs. It made me worry about the way curating is conducted, and it absolutely complicated the way I look at a museum exhibit. It made me realize how fraught with assumptions the act of looking is.