Peanut butter and jelly, Simon and Garfunkel, Yin and Yang, Wine and Theory Reading (you know who you are!), Curators and Museum Educators—together they embody the legendary words of Jerry Maguire, “You…complete me.” Latching on to the latter coupling, last week’s seminar with Debora Gaston from NMWA prodded me to keenly consider the interrelationship of the curatorial and the educational affairs in a museum. Both grapple with appealing to wide varieties of audiences, both advocate “non-traditional learning” through material encounters, both vacillate with regard to constructed meanings and environments, and both dwell on the visitor experience. In particular, one question—one posed to curators and educators alike—jotted in my notes leaps out from the page, and with impending exhibition proposals, the question reverberates during turbulent stretch of research for the project. “What do you want people,” the note reads, “to take away from an exhibition?”
My first reaction: oh EVERYTHING! I want them to grasp the theoretical concepts, the aesthetic and didactic meanings, and the historical, contextual, and ongoing narratives while surveying and considering the objects, the design, and the artists! However, such goals in actual exhibition designs—accordingly, the meanings visitors acquire from the exhibition—are, I have found, a bit lofty. Through the investigation and measurement of the profusion of artworks from East Germany (GDR) prior to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, I found that making thematic and temporal fetters, narrowing down images and events, and just simply offering narratives through visual arts actually proves quite the task! The Obamas just showered the White House with works loaned from various Washington museums, one of which is an Ed Ruscha piece that brings to mind my current state: indecisiveness. I cannot help but wonder: what is the art in the White House meant to communicate, if anything at all?
Further, my heart goes out to Jeff Koons, who, in his upcoming stint as guest curator at the New Museum, faces the challenge of sifting through and coherently exhibiting thousands of artworks from the collection of industrialist Dakis Joannou. And how do exhibition giants like MoMA manage to fit and focus fourteen years of Bauhaus (exhibition: Nov. 8 to Jan. 25, 2010) works? The more I apprentice in and learn about the museum, the more I marvel the profession and its undertakings (not to toot our horns our anything!).
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/07/arts/design/07borrow.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/arts/design/25vogel.html?ref=design
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