Me, giving allergicone a headache.

[gurdymonkey]

I love museums. I hate museums.

I’ve been visiting museums since before I can remember. Art museums, natural history, historical, you name it, my parents took me. I have spent long hours losing myself in paintings or peering at items behind glass. I have read snatches of the Miller’s Tale from the Ellesmere Manuscript at the Huntington. I formed a doomed crush upon the tomb effigy of a French knight who died seven hundred years before I was born.

Museums are storehouses of beauty and knowledge. They preserve, study and display art and artifacts that we might otherwise not get to see or know about. They tell us stories about who we are and who we might be and who we should pray we should never ever be again.

Guards, alarms, glass, interpretive placards. All of these separate the museum-goer from the object. The first three are physical barriers, the last is psychological. Should someone else be telling me how to react to what it is I see and is that a good or bad thing? Do I need the information to place it in context and understand what it is and where it came from?

You cannot hear a harpsichord when it stands silently behind glass. You cannot feel the texture of a garment. You cannot appreciate the weight of a tool and marvel at how well it fits the hand or smell the plant-y scent of a basket. You can only look at it and you can only do so from the angle the museum chooses to let you look at it. I got quizzical looks from a museum guard one day as I peered sideways into a case and fumed because the most interesting part of the garment on display was the part facing the wall.

These barriers are necessary and inevitable in most cases, but they change the context of the object. Instead of someone’s old doll or discarded shoe, it is An Important Artifact.

As a member of the SCA, I make things that I cannot get elsewhere, as our forebears did. It’s part of being medieval, even if my techniques, tools and materials involve modern compromises.

If I go to the trouble to construct something, it is because I want to wear it or use it in my SCA environment. Yet the SCA, or at least some elements within it (yes, Veronica, I’m writing this for you, dear), would have us museum-ize our objects of use. I can’t wear it if it’s hanging in a display. I can’t get to my tea bowl if the box I keep my tea things in is sitting on a table at the other side of the event for the sole and express purpose of someone looking at it.

But what about giri? Isn’t there a duty to educate the unwashed barbarian masses of the West by displaying these things?

Isn’t there a reciprocal duty of the populace to bestir itself and look beyond one’s own fireside? Actually walk around the event site and see what’s going on and who is wearing that stunning walked-out-of-a-painting outfit and where did they get that nifty table and what’s that amazing aroma coming from that pot and – and (gasp) TALK to them about it?

Anybody up for a game of sugoroku?

Comments

[sasha-khan.livejournal.com]

May I link to this in my LJ? This is something that my Roman group tries to explain to other reenactors ALL THE TIME.

It's armor - a TOOL. not something that goes on a pedestal.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

Knock yourself out, tomodachi.

BTW, I date this epiphany to a visit to the Museum of Northern Arizona back in 1993. It was a shard of Anasazi pottery with the 900 year old thumbprint of the maker looking as pristine as the day it was fired. I never looked at stuff behind glass the same way ever again.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

Don't mind me. I am proud of being the bane of desperate A&S officers in at least two kingdoms.

[czina.livejournal.com]

Heheheh - no no no! It's supposed to be in a heap in front of your (leather) conteburnium! Along with the giant caltrop thingies, of course :) Romans at home (or their home away from home - on the Wall)

And if you need that leather conteburnium ...

Of course, I say this, having a Roman chamfron hanging over my computer desk right now. But I don't have a horse, so the chamfron has no other place to go.

[maredudd1066.livejournal.com]

Coming from a "civilised" country, I have been struggling with the in-a-glass-case with-the-interesting-bits-hidden thing all my life. One way of dealing with it (at least as far as the reflections of the case are concerned) is to take a camera with a telephoto lens and a polarising filter - If necessary showing the security people that there is no film and that you CAN'T take any photos with it. I have no suggestions for getting at the bits that are totally hidden other than taking over the directorship of the museum.

[sasha-khan.livejournal.com]

Just a quick clarification - 'papilio' (butterfly) is the tent, conturbinium is the 8 lucky bastards that get to share it - think of the sounds! Think of the smells!

We (Legio IX) have an importer we deal with for our leather. We've been importing goatskins from North Africa and have the panels for three skin tents already cut out.

The first tent is about 3/4 done - it's a great makework project - got nuttin' to do? Handsew tent panels together, bucko.

We're getting really snooty with #2 and #3 - the linen thread will all be handspun, made by group members. Being a textile geek, I insist that all of our soldiers know more than a bit about textiles, and their cost in the ancient world. That means the drop spindle and our warp-weighted loom are their wives at demos.... Heh heh heh.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

One accepts that there are things beyond one's control and is grateful to see them at all. And your country has some great museums of its own.

[kahnegabs.livejournal.com]

I learned my lesson of this sort when I was looking at the King Tut exhibit in San Francisco. I bent down low (not touching the glass, mind you) so that I could see the engravings INSIDE the hollow funerary mask. The guards were on me in a second and escorting me outside until I could convince them that I was an art teacher and was truly "just looking." They said I could have been planting a plastic bomb in the stand, for heaven's sake. This was 20 + years ago!

[layla-lilah.livejournal.com]

Back when i was Arts Minister of the Mists, i had a bunch of ideas for A&S stuff that did not involve competitions. But one cannot do them alone. There is the Sciences Minister. If one goes off by oneself running stuff NOT in harmony with the other officer, well, it's antagonistic. So many ideas never got tried out.

Now i am Sciences Minister of the Mists. I've been tossing ideas back and forth with our Seneschal, Geoffrey Matthias, who wants to encourage the Arts and Sciences, want to find ways to make them more visible at events, and wants to find alternate ways to do stuff. Huzzah! A kindred spirit.

But what i really get to do may depend on who steps up as Arts Minister at Mists Coronet or Investiture...

Back when i was Arts Minister, i wanted to try a year without competitions. IIRC, my Sciences officer was not enthusiastic about that. I still want to try it. Don't know if i'll be able to, but i'd love to give it a try...

I'd like to have more displays. Dispite your misgivings, some things are better in displays - things like calligraphy and illumination, for example, and many embroideries that people make but do not apply to garments, backs, cushions, etc., but are just exemplars.

And a display doesn't have to be 10 people showing off their inkle weaving. It can be an arrangement of multiple items that go together made by one person or several artisans working together... Some people make nice stuff, but there is no place to view it in their camp.

I want to revive an idea i had back when i was Arts Minister, that we never did - a walk though camp with certain households and camping groups participating, so visitors can walk into their camps, look at everything, see people doing stuff in camp, ask questions, and, i hope, get ideas to try out.

I want to have some sort of "Artisans' Village" (although i find that name a bit too coy), a place at an event - or people working under sunshades around the Erid - where artisans and craftspeople are doing stuff and people can watch, or ask questions, or maybe even get to join in, but not classes.

I want to have some music and dance performances - not just Pieds d'Argent competitions on Sunday mornings when a lot of people are sleeping in from Saturday night's alcoholic partying into the wee hours. I want music and dance on the Eric, the town square of our camping events, as if they matter.

I want to find ways to make the Arts and Sciences a vital part of our events - as important as the fighting. And not just relegated to a mildewed pavilion around a corner, and the unpleasant task of preparing for a competition and judgment day.

And I'm open to other suggestions.

Of course, what i am able to do will depend in part on who the next Arts Minister is and what they think about these ideas. That is, will it be someone very status quo, or someone willing to experiment, with some great ideas to add to the mix.

In any case, i'm confident that with Geoffrey Matthias's support and encouragement, i'm sure we'll get to try out at least some new ideas.

[callas-and-ivy.livejournal.com]

wonderful, a like minded person, thank you.

I am trying out this very idea at Estrella war this year. As A&S Collegium coordinator, with the help and idea of people from various Kingdoms there will be an "Artisan's Alley" alongside the classes. The official notices are coming out soon. Please consider coming by.

Dame Jennifer Trethewy