Our knowledge of the past acts as a backdrop to our present existence. It is a legacy left, our story. It is also the present that acts as a framework, which allows us to interpret this legacy, creating a potentially malleable history through a process of knowledge production, reception and interpretation. It is here the museum becomes a site providing a particular structure for looking at “culture”, a view of our past though the lens of the present. In the collaborative works of Perth artists, Lia McKnight and Steven Armitstead, their joint practices explore these notions of perception and representation. Focusing on the ways we explain and understand the world as journey of discovery, this body of work at the Subiaco Museum site encourages us to question the ways in which we reflect back on our histories and the nature of finding meaning in our past.
The artists engagingly bring into focus and question what a museum is and what its role is in contemporary society. The hovering, glowing statements light up the surrounding walls and ask us to contemplate the ways in which museums function to tell our stories. They ask us to think about the role of the museum in the production and storage of cultural and personal knowledge, how it acts to document and reflect social changes and how, as an institutional site, it mediates the relationship between personal and collective memories.
It is perhaps through this act of mediation, between personal memories and shared collective experiences, that the museum becomes a site of possibility, of imagination and invention. At this point of encounter our past becomes meaningful through an imagined relationship between our own repositories of knowledge and what becomes captured in the museum art...
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... process. Significantly, through this process, the museum itself becomes its own artifact of the society it is embedded within.
The process of constructing and interpreting our past into a documented history becomes a revealing framework describing our cultural inclinations. The artists aptly bring to the forefront the complexities of this process, highlighting the transient and flexible nature of the ways in which we see, interpret and transform the world around us. Our desires to capture our past stories, feelings and emotions become apparent through the embodiment of meaning in objects and through a creative and culturally significant process of re-imagining and recollection. McKnight and Armitstead's work celebrates this process through a series of wonderfully playful and delicate gestures that shed light on the complex ways we make sense of the world.
Kent Monkman is an artist of ‘Aboriginal and Irish descent’ (Filgiano) who was commissioned to create a large scale Acrylic on canvas, measuring 72” x 108”.“The Academy” is a parody piece which makes reference to art created in the European tradition, alongside Aboriginal art and artifacts. It hangs in the Museum Gallery alongside some of the very pieces that are featured within it. It’s as though Monkman is playfully gossiping about his neighbors in the Gallery, both figuratively and literally. While his work is significant enough to hang in the Gallery alongside these other masterworks, Monkman makes a tongue-in-cheek observation that Academy work has historically been regarded as the only legitimate Fine Art. Traditionally, Aboriginal Art and Artifacts have been confined to separate exhibits or ancillary displays, but never alongside classical European pieces. The piece makes reference to a vast...
The East Kimberly region of Western Australia has been depict as a place of ‘grinding poverty, violence and racist exclusion in which so many Aboriginal people in the east Kimberley live, and yet at the same time through art it communicate the beauty and grandeur of their lives. ‘For those trying to communicate through art with the issue of death, harsh, pain and even compassion, were seen as necessary to maintain memories and record of Aboriginal historical events. The thirst for telling such companionate story is not easily interpreted, however, if we look at history we could see the influence of real tradition of aboriginal art emerge.
Unlike Gordon Bennett, who grew up struggling from his Aboriginal heritage, Tony Albert, a founding member of Queensland's Indigenous art collective proppaNOW explores political, social and cultural issues that are relevant to Indigenous Australian in today’s society. Albert’s artistic practice has a range of media and applications producing 2D wall art, sculpture and installation based works. According to Albert, he began to see the ‘problematic representations of his identity’ (Art Monthly Australia, 2015, p.55) after discovering the work of contemporary Aboriginal artists Tracey Moffat and Gordon
Aboriginal art is widely associated with the primitive and primordial nature of the Australian Indigenous culture. However, as it has become more popular globally, one must consider the authenticity of the Aboriginal art sold on the contemporary market. Eric Michaels essay, ‘Bad Aboriginal Art’ (Michaels, 1988) exposes his concerns with how we define certain art as being genuinely ‘Aboriginal’ and questions what external influences exploit and influence the validity and authenticity of Aboriginal art. The essay summons readers to question what they identify with Australian culture and whether or not White Australians have disordered the meaning of Indigenous art.
The Tampa Museum of Art was not always the same museum that we see today. It went through multiple stages throughout the years. The works vary, creating a large spectrum from the old to the new. The social angles change with the exhibits in the museum, combining to create the diversity we see today. Visiting this museum in person helped me to appreciate it even more than I would have thought possible. Observing and analyzing the other visitors helped me to understand the museum’s impact on the community more than I would have been able to just by reading about it. This museum is much different from others than I have visited.
In the article of “Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects”, the author, Michael Baxandall mainly discussed interrelationship within the group of three agents upon their influence and reflect of the artifacts in the museum, and the understanding of culture elements behind the display. In the first part of this paper, I will identify the points of view of the author. In the second part, I will analyze the layout of the gallery, “Imagining the Underground” in Earth Matters in Fowler Museum in UCLA. Several discussion related to the settings of the museum and the article will be discussed interactively. In general, this paper tries to show the robustness and the weakness of Baxandall’s model, which will specified.
Duncan’s (1991) analysis of western museums is defined through the theme of “durable objects” as a criterion to judge the heritage of American and European art as a ritual of the modern state. In this manner western art museums are built like “temples” as a symbolic and figurative representation of greatness of western culture throughout the world: “[They] are more like the traditional ceremonial monuments that museum buildings often emulate—classical temples” (Duncan 90). This interpretation of American/European museums defines a dominant source of cultural heritage that ritualizes
Rosie Gascoigne, is an artist who has aspired an appreciation for undiserable remnants and utilised with them in purpose to produce an assemblage of work that sees into a reflection of the past and present landscape of Australian society. Her growing motivation has taken further interest and development as the founding layers of her work through her deliberate perception, subject to the preservation of the environment and surrounding landscape. Gascoigne’s work offers an insight into deep country outback life of an Australian individual and introduces conceptualities that mirror a focus situated about ‘re-using’, ‘ recycling’ and understanding the insightful meaning present within everyday remnants. Her work is a collective gathering of selected materials to form a composition or an
One pleasant afternoon, my classmates and I decided to visit the Houston Museum of Fine Arts to begin on our museum assignment in world literature class. According to Houston Museum of Fine Art’s staff, MFAH considers as one of the largest museums in the nation and it contains many variety forms of art with more than several thousand years of unique history. Also, I have never been in a museum in a very long time especially as big as MFAH, and my experience about the museum was unique and pleasant. Although I have observed many great types and forms of art in the museum, there were few that interested me the most.
...f structure, a museum. The one contradiction in the contemporary design theory that Libeskind dares to fight is that to work in the upcoming century means to work with reduced means. His works pose optimism in the sense that architecture, if filled with a satisfactory amount of reasoning, and justification with the help of the advancement in material technology, and the foremost, creativity, will be able to address the profound of any project seeking for poetic embodiment. While modern architects have tried hard to eradicate the traces of history from the forms, postmodern architects like Liberskind would embody the traces of history in between the forms. In Lisbeskind’s Jewish Museum, the invisibility, the implication, and the embodiment come first, then the advancement of material methodology assists the build of the visibility, and the physical infrastructure.
New museology is the modernisation of museums. New museums are made to be more interactive and more interesting for the visitors. Displays in the museums are no longer covered in glass and people are encouraged to look more closely and interact with displays. The museums are brighter are the displays...
‘Savage Beauty’ was an exhibition that pushed the boundaries of museology, in its artistic, social and critical undertakings. The questions brought to bear by the exhibition of contemporary art and culture in various situations is something I am interested in researching further with a degree in curating.
Knowledge is gained through a myriad of personal experiences through a variety of ways that shapes a person’s understanding. The knowledge we obtain is the culmination of our experiences as we learn what our brain interprets from our senses. Knowledge is the transmission of information that shapes a person’s understanding on a particular topic using a way of knowing. The language used by others to formulate our own ideas and thoughts produce knowledge. The knowledge obtained can either be objective and subjective. The two areas of knowledge, history and arts, are both typically at fault for being inaccurate or bias. The role of history is to study, interpret and analyse the events of the past and relay these findings through language. Language communicates thoughts and ideas through a verbal or written broadcast, thus allowing knowledge to be conveyed. The arts are a broad area of knowledge that communicate knowledge through the manipulation of our sense perceptions that allow us to experience sensations through any of our five senses. The inaccuracies and biases of these areas of knowledge and ways of knowing is due to the pre-set beliefs and values that affect how an artist or a historian chooses to express a particular message to others. Each historian belongs to a school of historiography that holds the belief that an event was due to a specific set of factors and the language used supports this claim. Similarly, artists utilize our sense perceptions to convey a message through a painting. Arts are a broad area of knowledge to i...
Museum defines as an institution housing collections of objects of artistic, historic, or scientific interest conserved and displayed for the educational and enjoyment of the public. Museums are places of memory that provides the link of distant past to the present generation which also help the society to know the path their forebears trod. The main purpose of museum is neither to educate nor entertain but rather creates a memory bank would remind us of the past. No wonder most societies in different parts of the world traced their origin through the works of arts history. There are many types of museum includes museum of Antiquities-in which are housed ancient pieces of furniture or objects of art such as sculptures, paintings, ceramics, textiles and other crafts. Public record office museum serving as collection centre for famous documents, War museum containing relics of national wars, Maritime museum for maritime history, museum for architecture, with types, structures and styles of building, etc., Museum for Local/Indigenous Technologies, Science Museum, with objects depicting history of science and engineering and Natural History Museum. However, all types of these have their own roles of information institutions in national development. The main roles are to identify, acquire, preserve, and exhibit unique, collectible, or representative objects. The role of museum in the life of a nation involves conducting research into the vast natural history heritage and biodiversity of the country, serving as a repository, of natural objects, source materials and taxonomists in that country, creating scientific awareness, on natural history resources of the nation through annotated exhibitions for public enlightenment in display ga...
The works presented by Danie Mellor in one of his previous exhibitions was quite patented. Escorted by gold mosaic kangaroos and colourful porcelain dogs the devilish grin of the smiling skull in Piccaninny Paradise greets, rounding a corner. Likewise, the Aboriginal men in Bayi Minyjirral stare out from their peaceful rainforest setting. Witty installations such as Hundreds & Thousands and Take my Bones and Paint Them draw on themes in international contemporary art with their crystal and glass encrusted skulls, while Red Blue and White and Exotic Lies Sacred Ties amplify Mellor’s concerns about our blindness to history and lies of the past. The show screams softly of injustices, Indigenous displacement and carnage, cultural war, environmental degradation and other horrors – all the time hiding behind glitzy mosaic skins and shiny disguises.