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Me, giving allergicone a headache.
Aug. 21st, 2008 03:51 pmI 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?
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?
