Reflections on Michael Rush: "Balance and Power"

During this curious week, perhaps the last week in which the Rose Art Museum will exist as a fully functioning public art museum, I've been reflecting on the many academic partnerships that Cultural Production faculty and staff had with the museum's director, Michael Rush. Our first such partnership emerged when Michael brought to campus the remarkable exhibition, "Balance and Power", on video surveillance in contemporary art, which he had organized the year before at the Krannert (University of Illinois). Michael encourage me and my colleague Andreas Teuber (Philosophy) to develop an academic symposium in conversation with the exhibition. Inspired by the happy coincidence that Justice Louis Brandeis, for whom this university is named, had invented the right to privacy in 1890, we called the conference, "Privacy Rites: Space, Surveillance and Power in Historical Perspective." Our colleagues' musings ranged across the toilets of Pompeii, the dynamics of subjection and surveillance in Elizabethan poetics, and post modern and post panoptic regimes of marketing and contemporary art practice. We concluded with a performance in the Rose of Dmitri Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony, evoking the terrifying knocks on the door of NKVD and its regime of constant surveillance.

In the Foster wing, Michael had curated a dizzying labriynth of video screens, juxtaposed at angles, displaying an array of contemporary video artists' engagement with the problem of surveillance.

As an anthropologist, I found his linked installations led me to new insights on my own research in rural southern Africa, on a topic seemingly remote from contemporary video art. In the late 1980s, I spent about a year following a mass witchfinding movement as it made its way across the impoverished rural communities of eastern Zambia. As had been the case with previous popular movements in southern and central Africa aimed at detecting and neutralizing suspected witches, spirit-possessed diviners held large ceremonies in which they directed small hand mirrors at each every villager, one at a time. The mirrors, which were frequently compared to “cameras” and “X-ray machines,“ were said to reveal to the witchfinder the otherwise secret amount of “witchcraft substance” inside each man and woman. Those accused hardly ever protested their innocence, and often stood by meekly as their house walls, roofs and personal possessions were ransacked by the youthful witchfinders seeking incriminating witchcraft horns, which were widely held to be definitive proof of mystical malfeasance.

When I asked the leading witchfinder, “Doctor Moses” why hardly anyone resisted these interrogations, he explained,

"When they stand in front of the mirror, they can’t resist, they can’t run away… It is like when somebody is in front of a television camera. They just want to be seen. Even if they have a secret they want to hide, they can’t resist the camera. They just want to be on the screen, they can’t say no... That is how we trap them, here in the Circle of Truth. No one can turn his face away from the camera, as much as might want to!"

Two decades later, encountering Michael Rush's exhibition, I began to understand how deeply prescient Doctor Moses’ words were. Surveillance is ever-more extensive, and yet, as suggested by the works of art in Balance and Power, as well as the ever growing popularity of American Idol and Reality TV, the lure of the camera is ever more irresistible.

The all-seeing camera, we are repeatedly told by those in authority has the capacity to safeguard the body politic of all that afflicts us, even as it renders us paralyzed in a stupefying hall of mirrors. For months even years after each witchfinding rite, communities were caught up in complex, painful debates over degrees of complicity in the violence of the ceremony, which caused them in various way to see themselves as the embodying both the gaze of the righteous as well as the subject and object of voyeuristic, licentious gazes.

Our title, “Privacy Rites” evoked these and many other ironies, so reminiscent of the core paradoxes at the heart of any ritual process: we are deeply attracted and flattered by the camera and the screen, even as we seek to flee or evade them. Yet privacy in its modern forms is not itself a ritual process as such, but rather seems born of the interruption of earlier ritual sequences, especially those oriented around the domestic realm. Consider for example the mythic crisis which supposedly gave birth to the modern “right to privacy”, as formulated in Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’ famous 1890 law review article. They were, it is said, inspired to write the essay due to the violation by a news photographer of the wedding breakfast party of Samuel Warren’s daughter.

Why was this so terribly heinous? After all, a picture of the bride and groom taken that afternoon after the wedding ceremony would presumably have been viewed as an entirely appropriate addition to the Society page. During an afternoon visit to Balance and Power, looking at the various filmic penetrations of bodily space and ostensibly "private: domains it occured to me that the key violation in the Warren case seems to lie in the (premature) interruption of the processual structure of the wedding rite. As anthropologists Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner note, rites of passage are structured in three phases: (a) separation of the principals from everyday life,(b) the liminal or "betwixt and between" phase, in which the principals stand outside of conventional categories and experiential coordinates, and (c) re-integration or re-aggregation, in which the principals re-enter ordinary life, usually at a higher or altered social level or status. At the Warren breakfast wedding party, the photographer seems to have invaded the first phase, of separation, from which even the groom would have been excluded, as the bride's immediate family celebrate their solidarity with one another through commonsality just as they are about suffer their impending partial dissolutoin, that is to say the 'loss' of their daughter. The unauthorized photograph in this sense punctures the restricted ritual domain of the separation phase, thus imperiling the overall logic of the entire wedding ceremony, the quintessential rite of bourgeois social reproduction that celebrates the birth of the ethereal transcendental adult selfhood. The modern concept of “privacy”, in other words, is born of a truncated or perverted ritual process.

This theme, of a captivating violation of ritual, a rupture that is itself constitutive of new modes of personhood, ran through the many presentations we heard at the Privacy Rites symposium, as well as the many works of art displayed in Balance and Power. Tim Hyde’s Untitled Bus allowed the viewer to partake of a dreamscape of nocturnal travel, the reverie of the mind’s blankness on the ride home at day’s end, which only bursts when a passenger spies the camera and in turn locks our gaze in his gaze. We were propelled into a sudden awareness of of private space only at the moment when the normally secure wall of the screen has been punctured. In Jill Magid’s Lobby the artist’s willfull violation of conventional bodily and public/private boundaries, hijacking a public video screen to reveal her bodily orifices while standing in full and open sight of passers by, inspired multiple reflections by viewers of the nature of voyeurism: we are not only taken on a microcosmic fantastic journey though under her clothes but also, from the commanding heights of the lobby atrium, gaze upon the faces of astonished onlookers, whose public privacy we now violate. In turn, in Mirror Site, Kevin Hamilton skillfully presented us with a fractured vision of contemporary media-mediated public space. We are strangely exposed on screen, even more so than we are in normal public space, precisely because conventional relations of self-other are inverted and subverted in such puzzling ways.

There is thus, I gradually realized, a thread of continuity across twelve decades from Warren and Brandeis’ wall climbing photographer to these recent works of video art, each of which, paradoxically, helps birth a new awareness of the private through acts of rupture, violation and transgression.

More subtle violated boundaries characterized Jim Cambell’s Library (2004) in which the shadows move in and out of of the New York Public Library. Libraries are, in the best sense of the term, deeply haunted places, in which the presences of those who have come (and left) before us are continuously sensed if not quite immediately graspable. The monochramatic schema of the piece nicely evokes the black and white textual media through which, in effect, the living and the dead encounter one another in the library. His evocation of photogravure also moves us back and forth across generational time: are we seeing the library staircase as it was yesterday, last year, or a century ago? Are all the city's dwellers, the living and the dead, passing by one another in a great, shadowy parade? Might we sense a mournful, elegiac tone that obliquely references the losses and the legacies of September 11, 2001? (And might we also read the work as a commentary on the Patriot Act and the increasingly routine surveillance of libraries and their patrons that has followed in the wake of that tragic day?)

As I hope this example suggests, Michael's exhibitions, substantial works of scholarship in and of themsleves, have stimulated and propelled further works of scholarly reflection and critique. I've loved that his shows push us to see the political and the aesthetic in new, unexpected ways that they simultaneously engage our intellectual and artistic faculties, that they are conversation with classical and contemporary works of scholarship and encourage us to re-read these works with new eyes. Michael's relentless curiosity, his rigorous standards for analysis and presentation, have constantly pushed me as a scholar of ritual to rediscover the enigmatic dynamics of symbolic action lodged in the interstices of late capitalist social worlds. For that, I remain deeply grateful.

Waterfall projection project...moves indoors!

Since rain was predicted for over the weekend, we reluctantly decided to move the waterfall projection project ("My hands were busy/my mind could wander: Creative Economies on the Charles River") indoors, as our contribution to the 10th Boston CyberArts Festival. So Sunday night (May 3) we gathered in the main hall of the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation, and projected the eight minute video loop on the redbrick interior wall of the hall, immediately down river from the waterfall itself. Bryce Peake, the class TA, and I were assisted in this by Howard Phillips, Associate Director and video instructor at the Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Art (CDIA), his student Mike, a film and video student at CDIA and Elln Hagney, the Museum's Director of Education and Development. The video work itself was developed by students in the Museums and Public Memory (Anth 159a) course--Casey Golomski, Jesse Cates, Theresa Barbaro, Mao Matsuda, and Shai Dobrusin--along with Bryce Peake and our undergraduate Community Engaged Fellow, Anna-Lisa Macon.

Earlier in the day Bryce realized that if we were going to move to within the Museum space, it made sense to re-edit the audio of the piece, taking out the industrial machinery noise, and putting in background audio of the Moody Street waterall. Bryce also effectively superimposed the video on a background of the moving water of the waterfall, so that the viewer had some sense of what the piece would look like projected on the falls. (Bryce's intention was that we would some of the Museum's machinery in the background during the screening; as it happened, we found the actual machinery noises made it difficult to make out the recorded audio, so in the end we ran the work without live machine sound.)

We had been toying with projecting the work straight upwards, onto a fabric scrim that we would trig between the upper gallery and the large boiler, but as we looked around the space, we realized it would be a shame to enclose the marvelous open gallery of the main exhibition hall, with its evocative, looming machinery and distant vaulted ceiling. Howard kindly brought over a couple of CDIA video projectors and a splitter. (In theory, this should have allowed us to project the video work through three different projectors, but for some reason we were only able to get this work through two projectors). We aimed one projector at the great red brick upper wall of the gallery; we mounted a second projector on a music stand and tited it downward so that it would project onto gallery's main floor. This would have been a really interesting effect, but for some reason, after a minute or so the tilted projector begin to project a strange "spiderweb" effect, which made it very difficult to discern the actual video work. (We realized later in thee evening that we could have overcome the effect of tilting by using a mirror system to angle the projected image downwards...which we might try next time.)

In any event, we ended up projecting the second image straight out, on the far right brick wall of the gallery, as a kind of elongated, fainter echo of the first image.

We were quite pleased with the overall effect of the installation. With the lights lowered, the marvelous machinery assembled within the museum took on uncanny qualities, a little reminiscent of the gaslight or oil lamps that might once have illuminated the Victorian interior. Although we lost a good deal of resolution in the projected moving images, the redbrick background, in between the grand arcing windows of the gallery, did summon up the sense of a portal into the past--the very effect we had been hoping from the waterfall projection. Even the reduced color saturation and resolution of the elongated far left projection (near the looming shadowy, massive hulk of the old boiler and heating ventwork) worked nicely, summoning up associations with the early days of black and white film, fading back, as the eye continued left, to an evocation of the magic lantern era that preceded film itself.

As the piece looped for the next 90 minutes or so, I found myself discovering new aspects of the video work in this particular environment. Lined up between the grand interior windows on the main hall's inner wall, the three frames of the video's triptych manifested themselves as a line of windows, opening up to different moments in the city's industrial and post-industrial history. The Francis Cabot Lowell factory buildings had initially depended on the energies of the Charles River, channelled through sluices, turbines and conveyor belts, and it was marvelous to view the video montage of the legacies of those translated energies (of mechanical and human labor) surrounded by the mechanical looms and converyor belts of the early industrial revolution. The central segment with Barbara Zeles (from which the work takes its title) worked especially well within the industrial hall; her work with yarn and fabric seemed a kind of living memorial to the generations of women who labored in this space, between flowing water and pounding machinery, to transform fibers into fabric. Even the soundtrack, building towards a cacophny of voices and water power, took on evocative effects within the factory hall, summoning up, to my mind at least, spectres of the workers and machinery that had for so long labored and cycled inside this cavernous space.

I found myself thinking that taken as a whole, the installation in this particular site also summoned up a anticipatory sense of the cyborg, the enigmatic bio-mechanical figure that functions as a kind of totemic emblem of our era (yet another Terminator film is set to be released this summer.) As Anselm Rabinbach argues in The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity, a defining obsession of the 19th century was the tableau of the human body as a complex mechanical engine, simultaneously liberated and enslaved by the mechanical devices fashioned by its own hands. Watching the varied hands projected on the factory's interior brick walls, engaged in diverse forms of mechanically-mediated labor (from setting linotype to bicycle-making) I had a visceral sense of what the transitional moments to industrial labor just might have been like, as human creative energies were simultaneously magnified and alienated, intensified and dissipated, liberated and re-imprisoned.

To our delight, at least forty-five community members, a number of them digital artists associated with the Boston CyberArts festival, attended the production. We had a range of fascinating conversations, and were left excited at the prospect of future collaborations down the road, including in the next CyberArts festival in 2011. I should mention that the other new media works in the museum, including installations by Claudia Bucher, Chris Abrahms, Tim Hickey's students, and others, looked great, and it was fun to see our work, in effect, in conversation, in conversation with theirs.

We're still eager to project the work on the Moody Street waterfall, and may try to do this for the upcoming Charles River festival in June or Historic Waltham days in July, and perhaps once school is back in session in September. But for now we're delighted with this chance to collaborate with Elln Hagney and the CMRI, in their continuing explorations of the shadowlands between the mechanical and the digital--and between, to paraphrase Barbara Zeles, the labor of human hands and the labor of the human imagination.

By any other name exhibition

I was delighted Thursday evening by the opening of the exhibition, "By any other name: A social and cultural history of the Rose Art Museum," organized by eight of my students in the Museums and Public Memory class (Anth 159a). The show, tracing the history of the Museum from 1961 to the present moment, is cleverly organized around a large graph of the Dow Jones Industrial average, showing its upticks and downticks over nearly five decades. Interspersed along the way are documentary materials and commentaries on the museum's successive directors, exhibitions, and moments of triumph and peril. In contrast to the common tendency in the art world to relegate matters of finance to the shadowy background, this show puts economic matters front and center; when the market was bullish, we see, art prices were elevated and accession funds soared; in turn, in bear markets university administrations have looked covetously at their collections and pursued, with various degrees of success, deaccession policies. The Museum lent the students catalogues of diverse Museum shows over the decades, which hover above and below the stock market graph line.

Drawing on their archival research, the organizers frame this timeline in terms of student protests: the October 1961 opening of the Rose Museum building, they show, was occassioned by student complaints that the funds expended on it could better have been spent on scholarships or faculty salaries; in the past three months of course the campus has seen multiple student protests calling for the preservation of the museum in the face of administration attempts to close it. A monitor plays looped videos of protests by students, faculty, staff and others calling for the museum's preservation. The red line of the stock market culminates in a splotch of red splashed across a "Save the Rose" T-shirt.

At the opening reception, Cultural Production grad student Claire Mauro provocatively suggested that the red line of the Dow Jones could be read as a "blood line," tracing out the varied forms of symbolic kinship and descent associated with the museum, from the founding bequest by Edward and Bertha Rose, to the labor of successive directors, curators, artists, donors, and art lovers over these many years. I was put in mind of Francis Perket's extraordinary commentary at the recent Museum symposium, "Preserving Trust: Art and the Art Museum amidst Financial Crisis." Francis, a Rose family member, noted that Edward and Bertha did not have children of their own, that the paintings were in a sense their offspring and that each moment of artistic revelation within the museum could be understood as their "Jahrzeit" celebrating Kaddish, a prayer of life. [Her commentary is available on YouTube.] Claire's reading perhaps helps account for the deep sense of anguish felt by so many in face of the Museum's current predicament; the Museum is more than the sum of the contents of its extraordinary collection; it has emerged as the embodiment of a vast extended family, and its current crisis can be interpreted as a life or death struggle for lineage and for its posterity. (One student compared the jagged ups and downs of the red stock market line to the sputtering EKG lines of a patient on life support.)

The show is also framed by students' artistic responses to the current crisis, including a large painting by graduating senior Danielle Friedman based on multiple iterations of the word "Rose." Students energetically mined, as well, the university archives and the public record to chronicle, in displayed materials, the twists and turns of the Museum's fate over the years, with particular attention to media coverage since January 26 of this year.

The exhibition concludes with a lovely children's book, "Beatrice visits the Rose Art Museum," created by Gail Goldspiel in happier times, when she took Robin Dash's course, "Looking with the Learner." The book chronicles the visit to the Rose by Stanley School elementary school students in the company of Brandeis undergraduates, pondering contemporary art and engaging in art making of their own. (One of the joys of the Rose under Michael Rush's leadership has been the Museum's willingness to allow visitors of all ages, on special occassions to make art in the Foster wing and the Museum's stairwell.) The children are accompanied by "Beatrice the Butterfly" who delicately floats above the proceedings and tries her hand (wings?) at making art as well. I was put in mind of the daemons in Phillip Pullman's The Golden Compass, the animal avatars of the human characters, who embody their human's dreams and anxieties; Beatrice registers the children's excitement and fear over engaging with the art and in that respects is a stand in for the children themselves; but I also read the butterfly as an embodiment of the museum itself which similarly seems to float and flitter delicately over the campus: beautiful, playful, intensely curious, and terribly vulnerable.

Exhibition organizers: Ronya Gordon, Yarden Abukasis. Brian Friedberg, Emily Leifer, Sarah Stephenson. Penelope Taylor, Igor Zhukovsky, Will Burnett/

The exhibition is in the Shapiro campus center student art gallery (third floor) through Wednesday, April 28 I believe.

Please share your comments in the space below, and please follow the exhibition Twitter at http://twitter.com/_byanyothername

Slavery and Universities: Possible Conference?

We had a fascinating roundtable panel at the Organization of American Historians annual meetings in Seattle on March 28 on legacies of slavery and the slave trade at American universities.

Jim Campbell (Stanford) discussed the project he'd headed at Brown University, exploring the university's complex historical relationship to the trans Atlantic slave trade. See his presentation on line on the History News Network at:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/71802.html

nb. The Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, which Jim chaired, has a fascinating website at:
http://www.brown.edu/Research/Slavery_Justice/

Al Brophy (UNC) talked about the historical role of American colleges and universities in providing intellectual legtimation for slavery, especially in law and theology, with particular reference to the University of Alabama case. See his videoed presentation:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/71801.html

Leslie Harris (Emory) discussed the Transforming Community Project, a multiyear project of racial, ethnic and class based initiative of reconciliation at Emory, which emerged largely in response to a disturbinging racial incident at Emory several years ago. See her presentation at:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/71806.html

My presentation, on the work my students and I did "excavating" memories and histories of slavery at Emory University, primarily in Oxford, Georgia(the original site of Emory College) is also on line on the History News Network at:
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/71803.html
Among other things, I talked about the obelisk (pictured above) in the Oxford, GA City Cemetery to Bishop James O. Andrew (first president of the Emory College Board of Trustees) whose slaveowning status in 1844 catalyzed the great national schism in the Methodist Church; and about my students' work developing exhibitions on slavery in Emory's history.

We then moved into a lively discussion with audience members about the many tangled ways in which the historical legacies of enslavement continute to structure (or perhaps haunt) the "buried lives" of American institutions of higher education. The conversation among other things touched on:

• Dr. Felix Armfield (Buffalo State College) mentioned his work with colleagues on a "slaves on campus" project, tracing the experiences of enslaved persons brought as "servants" to American colleges and universities by slaveowning students: what impact did the experience of being on college campuses have on these enslaved individuals?
  
• Possible forms of restorative justice being explored by some schools; about the impact of such projects of historical research and reflection on faculty, students, staff and community members;
  
• ways of sharing documentary histories of slavery and the slave trade (something the Brown University Committee in particular has done on its repository website);
  
• the at times banal nature of non-specific blanket apologies for slavery(as at the University of Viriginia and the University of Alabama several years ago); the politics of apology is the topic of a recent book by Melissa Nobles, one of the roundtable's organizers.
  
• the challenges of integrating materials on on-campus slavery into the curriculum
• Jim Crow era loyal slave memorials
• the difficult cultural politics of "postcolonial" monuments and memorials around slavery and Jim Crow on campus.

Of course, numerous colleagues elsewhere have worked with their students to unearth histories of slavery at their respective institutions. This semester, for instance, Ira Berlin and his students have worked to document slaveowning patterns among founding figures in the history of the University of Maryland. Julie Richter has done comparable work with her students on slavery in the history the College of William and Mary. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Library in 2005 developed on exhibition on the roles of enslaved persons in the making of the school.
We're interested in learning of the many other teaching and research projects along these lines that are surely going on.

It has occured to us that it would be worthwhile holding an academic conference on the topic of slavery and universities. (As Jim notes, this wouldn't necessarily be limited to the United States.) One of the many fascinating problems to explore is the way in which universities have so long been imagined as utopian spaces, yet these spaces (like many other institutions and discursive undertakings associated with early modern, Enlightenment, and Romantic progressivist thought) rested in so many respects upon the structurally invisible labor of the enslaved and the vast profits of the global slave trade.

We're not sure yet who might host the conference. It would be interesting to bring together a wide range of participants, including faculty, students, and college staff members, as well as community partners and family members (descended both from slaveowners and enslaved persons) for critical conversations about research strategies, community engaged learning, and restorative justice on a great range of campuses as we all grapple with the legacies of enslavement, the slave trade, and related forms of racial injustice.

If you have ideas about the conference, or care to share reports on work that has been done at other schools around remembering enslavement on campus, please post a comment in the space below!

Twilight:The enigmatic Native American presence

I've just seen the film "Twilight," which I know Rhonda Hammer and her students at UCLA have been contemplating for some time. I'm especially intrigued by the ways in which the film is framed in terms of an imputed Native American presence. The father-son pair of Quileute indians, Billy and Jacob Black, in their relatively brief appearances, seem to mediate the Anglo-American characters' relations with nature and with the supernatural, and to function as largely invisible protectors for the white heroine. (I understand thes themes are more extensively develop in the book/movie's sequel, New Moon).

In the film, the Quileuete are presented as descendants of wolves (with the hint that they may still be able to transmogrify into wolves). In a scene on a reservation beach (itself an interstitital space) Jacob tells the white heroine Bella that his people know the secret of the Cullen clan (the non-blood-drinking vampires) who have agreed to stay off of their land for generations, ever since they were discovered (evidently feasting on the blood of a deer they had run to ground). Towards the film's end, Jacob is sent by his father Billy to warn Bella of her romance with the vampire hero and to let her know that the Quileute will be watching her (evidently watching over her protectively).

All of these motifis are consistent with Renee Bergland's analysis in the The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (2000); as Native American communities were violently annihilated and displaced they were refigured in white literary imaginations as numinous guardian presences for the colonizing Anglo-American majority, ambiguously moving across the shadowlands between conventional and alternate realities. As Twilight suggests, this 19th century mythography has endured as a persistent white fantasy, that Native Americans, in spite of white America's long genocidal history, will still benevolently look over Anglo-Americans, as living guardian spirits intimately linked to the land.

I wonder if in this respect Twilight can be read as a new kind of American nationalist post-9/11 text; threatened by the chilling dangers of a rogue terrorist cell-like coven of al-Queda style "bad" vampires, the white American young heroine is protected by an alliance of Native Americans and "good" vampires (the latter perhaps stand-ins for the extraordinary violence and torture unleashed by U.S. intelligence services in the "War on Terror".)

Twitter, Museums, and the "Unthinking Television" conference

In my Museums and Public Memory class this morning, we talked over why our class experiments with YouTube this semester have been running kind of stale. ( See some of the student class postings at:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=MuseumsPublicMemory&view=favorites

Students mentioned that producing YouTube is labor intensive and demands access to technology, which is a hassle, especially to make the work look good. Bryce was a little skeptical about this; he noted that some of the most successful vlogging is done in a very informal mode with decidely low production values. Looking at some recent popular YouTube posts, we wondered why it has been hard for students to "punch up" their YouTube postings with humor? Are museums and exhibitions as cultural sites particularly resistant to humor, perhaps? Or is it that the whole campus has been so exhausted by our ongoing financial crisis and the Rose controversy that a sense of humor has been hard to muster?

In any event, the students expressed a great deal more energetic excitment over the possibilities of Twitter, for rapidfire communication and exchange of ideas (each text message limited to 140 characters). So we decided that I would, right there in class, create a Twitter account (the students patiently walked me through how to do this) and that the students would 'follow' my brand new Twitter micro-blog, "MuseumMark" which is at:

http://twitter.com/MuseumMark

I promised to twitter from the "Unthinking Television" conference on Thursday at George Mason University, at which Bryce and I are presenting on our class experiment with YouTube. The students will twitter back to us, so we can at least all be linked together, in effect, during the conference. I'm curious what kind of conversation will ensue.

In class, we noticed the rather dynamic twitter sites for MOMA

http://twitter.com/MuseumModernArt

and for the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

http://twitter.com/metmuseum

and speculated about what kind of cultural (and economic) work these micro-blogs are doing. The consensus was that they probably aren't attracting first time visitors to the museums. Perhaps they getting infrequent visitors to return to the museum more often, by letting them know about interesting exhibitions, highlighted 'art works of the day' and lectures. And perhaps the twitter links help to build a kind of personal relationship with the institution, which might translates into a greater likelihood of membership.

We speculated as well about the interactive possibilities of Twitter in museum and gallery contexts. Is Twitter only a good way to push content out to museum patrons, as a form of "outreach." Alternately, could twitter afford a good way for museum-goers to 'talk back' to the curators, to artists, and to one another about their reflections on art installations, as they roam through art spaces? Is this sort of thing already going on at some museums, I wonder?

The Rose Museum and the Souls of the Dead

At the recent symposium at the Rose Art Museum, "Preserving Trust: Art and the Art Museum amidst Financial Crisis," (March 16, 2009) I was moved and surprised that repeated references were made to the souls of the dead. Poet-laureate Robert Pinsky introduced the theme in his allusions to Keat's poem on the nightingale: only we, who are born to death (that is to say, to the knowledge of our deaths) are compelled to engage in creative aesthetic practice. We do not simply repeat the songs which have been handed down from previous generations, we are compelled to seek forms of symbolic immortality through innovation, through rupture, through alteration. This impulse is embedded in the practices of contemporary art and celebrated in the contemporary art museum as an institution. Paradoxically, in entering into a contemporary art museum such as the Rose, we simultaneously celebrate novelty and the past, the promise of new life amidst reverence for those who have come before us and who are no longer present.

We deny the lingering presence of the dead at our peril. Graduate student Brian Friedberg argued in his commentary that if those of us in the university community do not attend to our responsibilities vis a vis the museum, the building will be "haunted" by the uncanny presences of those who have been neglected, be they benefactors or artists.

This theme was developed in a most remarkable way by Ms. Joyce Perkin, a great-niece of Edward and Bertha Rose about what the Rose Museum has meant to her. She noted that Edward and Bertha did not leave children behind, and thus there were none to see Kaddish, the prayer of life, for them. Yet she has felt that each time a visitor to the museum engages with a great work of art, that is a meaningful act of Kaddish, a prayer of life, a kind of Yahrzeit (annual memorial for the dead.) See her remarkable two and a half minute commentary at the start of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqaUjcPnJO0

followed a little later by an exploration of this theme by Robert Pinsky.

It occurs to me that these dynamics of ancestral presence (and absence) are especially true for an institution such as the Rose, which emerges primarily out of Jewish collections in the postwar period. Inevitably, such collections are assembled in the shadow of the Holocaust and memories of the violent expropriation of Jewish art collections in Nazi-occupied Europe. To be sure, contemporary art is not an exclusively Jewish phenomenon, but one can argue that Jews, as collectors, dealers and artists have played a profound (perhaps even leading) role in the history of contemporary art. This particular art collection is thus, for many, a kind of enduring memorial to the survival of Jewish philanthropy and Jewish aesthetic impulses. Hence, in part, the intense physical and spiritual anguish experienced by many as they ponder the impending close of the institution as a public art museum and the threatened sale of its major works.