Archive for the 'Exhibitions' Category
Visual Velcro and Interpretation in the Museum
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
In an article in the November/December 2007 issue of Museum News published by the American Association of Museums (p 57-62, 68-73) entitled “Visual Velcro: Hooking the Visitor”, Peter Samis, associate curator of interpretation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) develops a very interesting metaphor to describe the way visitors to museums engage with art. The article contains an excellent summary of the latest thinking about interpretation, especially the use of electronic devices such as audio guides, PDA’s and mobile phones.
A Velcro patch (originally inspired by a burr caught in dog fur or velvet’s fuzzy surface) consists of a strip of tiny loops. Samis asks us to imagine that the visual impression an artwork creates is like Velcro. Unless “it has a hook that can fit into one of the loops on your specific Long Term Memory (LTM) “patch,” it will glide right by and be forever forgotten. If there is something in the artwork, however, that strikes you—a figure, a vivid color, a bodily sensation resulting from the artwork’s massive or minuscule scale, a memory trigger or implied narrative connection—then we can say that artwork has “Visual Velcro.” It has hooked into your cognitive structure and stands a chance of remaining in your memory.”
Samis goes on to summarize how technologies can help the hooks of artworks engage with the loops of our LTM. It is well understood that interpretive plans have to acknowledge not just who the visitors are – their identity – in terms of background and entrance narratives. In using the increasingly common analog and digital devices it is essential to understand what each kind of device delivers and what the visitor expects. (As he says in his concluding comments, this does not mean that text on the wall is not useful.)
Samis sets out to answer the questions about state-of –the-art interpretation, to what end various devices would be used, how visitors respond and how the visiting experience can be augmented most meaningfully and at the same time least intrusively. Very interesting examples are given from many different art museums. According to Samis, the watchword in planning would be “Design for Experience, Not for Hardware”.
Continue to article.
New publications
Thursday, August 9th, 2007
Two new publications have appeared in the last few months.
2007: With Janette Griffin, Lynn Baum, Jane Blankman-Hetrick, Julie I Johnson, Christine A. Reich and Shawn Roe, Optimizing Learning Opportunities in Museums: The Role of Organizational Culture. Pp 153-165 In John H. Falk, Lyn D. Dierking and Susan Foutz (editors) In Principle, In Practice. Lanham MD: Altamira Press. (Go to Publisher’s site.)
This chapter, in a volume which comes from a conference organised by the Institute for Learning Innovation in Annapolis MD, explores the relationship between successful exhibitions and the culture of the museum, the proposition that a cohesive organisation is significantly more likely to produce better exhibitions. The proposition is almost naïve yet not frequently explored and not an approach to which much attention seems to be paid in museums themselves.
There has been great attention recently to exhibitions however. One of the more interesting is the volume “Are we there yet? Conversations about Best Practices in Science Exhibition Development” (K. McLean and C. EcEver (eds). San Francisco, CA: The Exploratorium). When the Exploratorium brought people together to discuss “best practice” in science exhibition development, Kathleen McLean made the point that while various items could be identified which characterised good exhibition development, ones which promoted good outcomes for the visitor, these could not be considered a checklist for success or a panacea for exhibition development. Jay Rounds (University of Missouri, St Louis) pointed out, “a rigid standardisation of practice is a recipe for disaster. What worked yesterday probably will not work tomorrow and we have no reliable way of predicting what will. Such times call for experiments and innovations that might work well in the new environment we need strategies that can counter these initial tendencies and foster innovation, exploration and discovery of new possibilities”.
2007: with M. Abraham, The Effective Management of Museums: Cohesive Leadership and Visitor Focused Public Programming Chapter 7 in Richard Sandell & Robert R. Janes (editors), Museum Management and Marketing. Leicester: Routledge. (Reprinted from Museum Management and Curatorship 18 (4), 335-368 (2000): go to Publisher’s site.)
This paper was the final paper in the series dealing with the study of some 30 museums around the world which aimed to find what characterised the “most effective museums”. The study is summarised elsewhere on this site.
Quality, Where do you Get it?
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
Everyone has their own idea of whether a particular musical performance, play, exhibition, artwork or organisation or enterprise is good, bad or indifferent. Some argue that it is not worthwhile trying to work out what criteria one would use to judge something. Particularly jazz: some performers have been heard to say that if you have to analyse a performance there is something wrong with you, you shouldn’t be listening to it at all. Others will talk not of reading a book but of “experiencing” it. But there are outstanding performances and so on, ones of supreme, even sublime, quality.
The fact is then that quality is a very difficult issue to come to grips with. Our own personal preferences are to an extent a part of our identity. The arts management writer Paul DiMaggio put it well when he said that differences in quality, in both execution and presentation, “are apparent to almost everyone; discerning others is better left to experts… nearly everyone agrees support … should encourage excellence.” He made the point strongly that a diversity of sources of funding is essential where the audience is part of a pluralistic society.
Critics are people who seek to define quality. They are frequently reviled. Oscar Wilde observed. “Once upon a time man had the lash, now he has the pen.” Emily Bronte, in a recently discovered letter of 9 November 1849 to W[illiam] S[mith] Williams, wrote that while allowing that the critics writing for the Spectator and Athenaeum (about the recently published Shirley) are ‘acute men in their way’, she feels that ‘when called on to criticise works of imagination — they stand in the position of deaf men required to listen to music — or blind men to judge of painting. The Practical their minds can grasp — of the Ideal they know nothing.’” (The Telegraph). Cate Blanchett, Oscar winning Australian actor and now co-artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company (and Australian Museum Trustee) recently observed that she ceased reading critics’ reviews five years ago!
Continue to the essay.
One example of high quality performance is the Australian Youth Orchestra, currently on tour in Europe. A link specifically to an extract from a report about its first concert in Paris in July 2007 is here.