Reading Blog -- Oct. 8th

When people try to exhibit something in the museum, the history will be detached into pieces and we use the ethnographic way to retell the story. In “Objects of Ethnography,” Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett mentioned: There are two ways of exhibiting objects. One is In Situ and the other is In Context. The In Situ method creates a simulated environment to describe the surrounding of the object. The goal is to duplicate a full or part of the real life of the exhibiting subject. When the object is exhibited through an in context method, other arrangements such as labels, charts, diagrams, and commentary will be used in the exhibition. Different than In Situ method, using an in context approach should contain more information along the object.

There are many different ways of making an exhibition. For example, the In Situ and In Context method are not in conflict. The point is to send the message to the viewer clearly. Is doesn’t matter how people classified the objects. What matters is how to give a straight and meaningful story to the visitors. If the fragments of the history are not connected successfully, the story will not make sense and viewer will not understand the exhibition completely.

Museums need to cut the history into pieces in order to exhibit the object easier. These detachments sometimes are limited to only smaller objects because things such as performances and big event are impossible to be recreated indoors or described through words.

In late nineteen century, museums shift their focus in an exhibition onto labels. This is the result of giving most of the attention into object studying. Even in today’s museum, I still found out that the exhibition is surrounded with explanations and labels. The objects in the museum are basically served as the evidence for the literal setups in the exhibition.

Ken Yellis takes two famous but controversy exhibitions in the history and tries to seek what visitors experienced in the museum. He starts with three reasons to do exhibitions in a museum,” you have a new story to tell or you have a new way of telling an old story, or our culture has changed so dramatically that the memory of the story has been lost or hopelessly corrupted.

The museum needs to balance all the visual and non-visual materials used in the exhibition because every visitor experience these senses differently. In all these senses, most people access deep emotions more through sound, taste, touch, and smell. But these senses are particularly hard to deploy in the museum.

Museums are the educator and the communicator of the present and past. Museums teach us “how do we know how to think about the past, the present, the future? How do we know how to think about the world, about others, about ourselves? “ All the stories, methods for classifying and analyzing help us to understand the history piece by piece and rethink about the current events and maybe think more about the future. The goal of a great museum is to send the message to the visitors, to answer their questions and even raise better thoughts that are related to the topic.

Our society is moving forward and so does the history. Museums need to renew the exhibition once a while. But only renewing the content is not enough, the future museum, as John W. Durel suggests, should add more new innovations to the exhibitions. One of the purposes of the museum will be giving nationally recognition for the children emphasizing the greater good that serves the public interest. The exhibitions will be no longer only indoors. There will be more historic site tours and living history experience programming. The point is to give visitors an easier way of understanding history rather than just theory and explanation on the label. By using new technologies and method, museums should be able to give a more flexible and experimental approaches such as sharing collections through internet. By sharing documents and images through internet, visitors can access to the information that are related to the topic. All in all, museums should find a way to help the public develop a more complex and subtle understanding of history.

After finishing this week’s reading, I start to think about how to exhibit my object (the man’s top hat). Maybe the top hat will be surrounded by pictures of man that wears similar hat in 1900s.