An Antidote to "Seeing"? (Part 2)

In my last post, I set to work deconstructing the depression-inducing claims of Tony Bennett’s article “Civic Seeing.” I argued that Tammy Stone-Gordon’s typology of the community exhibit challenges the Fouccoultean notions of control and manipulation that Bennett claims are inherent in the contemporary museum.

By the time I finished writing the last post, I’d almost recovered from my Bennett-borne depression. But not so fast!

As I finished reading Private History in Public, I began to realize that there was a different reason to feel depressed: many of the places in which the public encounters the past are spaces of economic exchange. (My colleague Bayard Miller notes that, in such institutions, "history is business.”) Stone-Gordon makes claims about the “corporate exhibit” in the final three chapters of her book. Her focus on Cracker Barrel is particularly gloom-inducing. Channeling Jerry Herron, she concludes that “corporately produced history-as-marketing often to a sanitized version of the past, a version that is divorced from the problems of the present" (p. 77). No wonder so many people yearn for the Norman Rockwell-ian America of “yore.”

Add to this glut of mythologized, capitalist-driven museums the claims of Whitcomb in Beyond the Mausoleum: Museums and the Media. Tying her work to Bennett, she advances the idea that government-sponsored museum spaces make not only cultural claims, but also economic ones. In other words, government museums -- in placing priority focus on material objects -- invite visitors to embrace capitalism. Thus, even in spaces supposedly liberated from the consumerist impulse, “history as commodity” reigns.

For the average museum-goer, I would assume, these academia-born typologies have little meaning. People obviously know the difference between a Cracker Barrel and the Philadelphia History Museum, but do they parse the ways in which they absorb history (i.e., arguments about the past) in these varied institutions? Are they cognizant of the diverse epistemologies at work in these spaces, the intellectual strategies of curation deployed to “convince” and “educate”?

I ask such questions only because we don’t have a The Presence of the Past that answers questions of public agency in the museum. We do, however, know -- courtesy of Rosenzweig and Thelen -- that the public trusts museums more than they trust any other source of knowledge about the past.

Boy, is that depressing.

An Antidote to "Seeing"? (Part 1)

Tony Bennett’s “Civic Seeing: Museums and the Organization of Vision” is probably the bleakest, scariest, most depression-inducing article I’ve read as a graduate student. This probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise, since it rises out of that “great” Fouccoultean tradition that depicts the museum as a big, scary, manipulative mega-monster intent on rendering a Stepford citizenry under the guise of “civic virtue.”

Here’s a basic example of what I'm talking about, one of many that could be culled from Bennett's article: In a section discussing the exhibition of difference in the museum space, Bennett contends that museums have “been places for making differences – whether natural, social, or cultural – visible.” He deflates the implicit (liberal) optimism of that assertion with a sudden reversal: “They have done so, however, mainly to and for a controlling point of view which, while theoretically universal, has, in fact . . . been restricted to” (p. 278) a privileged few--usually heterosexual, middle-class, white men.

Ugh.

Why, then, should we public historians even engage in the act of museum exhibition? If contemporary museum culture is controlled by this Fouccoultean carceral manipulation, shouldn’t we just give up on museums? Or is there an antidote to “seeing”?

Tammy Stone-Gordon offers one possible solution in her book Private History in Public: the community exhibit. Described by Stone-Gordon as exhibits that "provide individualized perspectives not only on the history of the local community but also on community views of the larger world" (p. 23), community exhibits are "indigenous" projects that provide the curating community with a form of agency. Claims Stone-Gordon: the community "is active in its construction of its history."

Stone-Gordon buttresses her descriptive claims with an example from the Homewood Historical Society. She quotes Elain Egdorf, one of the historical society's founding members, who claims that she didn't like history in school, because it was all about memorization. But as she became involved in "local history," she "realized that history is you and me; history is all of us, is what's happening today. . . . Everyone is important in some way to the fabric of their town. [We need to] wake up people to the diversity we have here, in ethnicity, economics, housing, architecture" (p. 40). In crafting this simple methodology of inclusion and interpretation for her local museum, Egdorf counters the claims made by Bennett and, perhaps, provides an antidote for "Seeing."

Take that, Tony Bennett!