Lowenthal: Fabricating Heritage

1. Lowenthal: Fabricating Heritage

2. Discussion 1. Lowenthal gives a case study as an example of 'fabricating heritage'. Give comparable examples from your knowledge and discuss the following: • the heritage myth itself • the occasion at which its origin can be traced • infer the purposes • what individuals/institutions are promulgating this myth • what are the mechanisms by which this myth is recycled within popular imagination • the changes that it has undergone over time • your sources

3. Discussion 2. If heritage today has the nature of popular cult, with unwavering public devotion in spite of realities that show its contradictions, what are the vehicles by which it is maintained? How does this process differ from say medieval cults of relics (of which Lowenthal gives an example)?

4. Discussion 3. What are the benefits of heritage myths for societies? What are the dangers? Who are the potential myth debunkers in the society? 4. What is the role of the memory institutions in relation to myth-building (fabrication)? Give examples that show how the worship of the past may become a secular religion in the society and the role of these institutions in maintaining such legacies. Is it possible for memory institutions to avoid "morality" in interpreting the past?

5. Discussion 5. "Heritage thrives on historical error!" // "Tribulations are crucial to identity" // (Lowenthal, p. 11). Explain these paradoxes! 6. "We want the Smithsonian to reflect real America and not something that a historian dreamed up." (Lowenthal, 11). How does this statement relate to building library collections, archival practices, and the museum work.

6. Discussion 7. "Time makes liars of all of us!" (Lowenthal, 16). Do you agree? How does this statement relate to the role of memory institutions in society? How does this relate to how they manage the relation of records and memory access to written past? 8. Heritage and history are both built upon the knowledge of the past. The readings and misreadings of the past, the correct and the false knowledge of the past are integral to both, but what is the difference in the process? You may use the example of Biblical textual tradition / scholarship to discuss this distinction, or use a comparable example.

7. Discussion 9. Lowenthal identifies six points that distinguish heritage as a phenomenon: • HERITAGE IS NOT HISTORY (how heritage differs from history) • FABRICATION ESSENTIAL TO FEALTY (why heritage needs error and invention) • MODES OF FABRICATION (how heritage reshapes the past: upgrades, updates, jumbles, selectively forgets, contrives genealogies, claims precedence) • PUBLIC ENDORSEMENT (public approval of fabrication) • HERITAGE AND LIFE HISTORY (autobiographical analogies) • WHY HERITAGE MUST BE 'OURS' (need to own our own heritage) Briefly explain each of these aspects of 'heritage' and give your own examples that either agree or contradict Lowenthal's position.

8. Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art(Maleuvre 1999)

9. The Outline

10. Introduction main argument of the book

11. Introduction • The theory of museums and displays that affected how museums were redesigned over time (changing practices of presenting and apprehending art). • Official inception of the museum at the turn of the 19th century starts the Golden Age of the Museum. Museographic debates over the role of the museum, relationship of art to life (praxis), authenticity (art in context). • Louvre, The British Museum (examples)

12. Introduction Formative stages in the development of museum displays: • cabinet of paintings (cabinets de curiosités / Wunderkammer) 16/17th century • The Revolutionary Museum (1790s+) • The Golden Age of Museums (19th century) • modernista museum (1890s+ by 1930s) • escape from museum (serialization) (1960s) • the revised museum (ecomuseum) (1980s+)

13. Introduction Why study museums? History of museums reflect the history of reinvention of the past: how society relates to its cultural tradition Museums are manufacturing history by offering an image of history by collecting past artifacts; give shape and presence to history, inventing it, in effect, by defining the space of a ritual encounter with the past.

14. Introduction Why museums are problematic ? Museums are purposive, and powerful institutions shaping identity of groups (national identity). What point of view do they represent? Debates over authenticity: The museum endangers artistic and cultural authenticity by removing artworks and artifacts from original locations and placing them in galleries where they can be gawked at, and never, so to speak, lived with.

15. Introduction Should museum be viewed as production or as conservation (of culture)? Museum champions / Museum detractors

16. Introduction Separation (museification of art) / reconciliation of art with existence theorized by: Hegel (the spirituality / the immanence of art) Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy (antimuseum critique) Nietzsche, Dewey, Heidegger, Marinetti & the first historical avant-garde

17. 1. Museum Times authenticity of art / authenticity of experience

18. History Lab Pointing Fingers Authenticity Hegel’s Guide to the Museum Art of Misplacement The Art Police The Origin of Museums The Avant-Garde Attacks Monumental Time The Caesura of Art The Caesura of the Image Proust’s Museum The Experience of Art Art in Ruins Framework The Decline of Subject Estheticizing the Bourgeois The Identity in Question 1. Museum Times

19. 1. Museum Times History Lab Museums emerge in the beginning of the 19th century in the process of cultural secularization of history (art becomes ‘public’, pedagogical tool for the people) Art institutes established: France (Louvre) 1793; Spain 1820; Britain (National Gallery) 1824; Berlin (Die Altes Museum) 1830 Museums participate in the production of history and become protectors of the art.

20. 1. Museum Times Pointing Fingers First response to the phenomenon of museums. Quatremère’s Considerations morales … (1815), protests against museums (the principle of cultural authenticity): criticizes creators of museums (Louvre) for de-contextualizing art; for making art a spectacle objectively removed from the context of creation. Art should be expression of vital culture of the present. Instead, culture is interpreted to pertain to a glorious past.

21. 1. Museum Times Authenticity His argument reflects a desire for authenticity that in fact is prompted by the contemporary social process in which the restructuring of thought, and society occurs (18/19 cent.). Ever since, authenticity is an embattled concept because industrialization started liquidating the genuine and the perennial, producing the inauthenticity of experience. The role of art is to restore that bond.

22. 1. Museum Times Hegel’s Guide to the Museum Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) offers a different interpretation of the museum in which objects are decontextualized and preserved. Because he promotes contemplation rather than action, he considers the idealized museum a positive development because it frees objects of their context and allows contemplation of their spiritual nature. He considers that the cultural context of creation of art is incidental.

23. 1. Museum Times Art of Misplacement By uprooting art from the run of existence, the museum makes room for the restless drive of culture -- the museum uproots culture in order to create new forms. Without forgetting, and that culture is always (anyways), the museum is true to a natural process. There is no continuity just re-creation of culture. The museum can be an active participant in the process.

24. 1. Museum Times The Art Police Society locks away those elements that are deemed either too dangerous or too precious to move freely in the public domain. Museum aestheticizes art. It protects art (in a neutral context) from the forces of the social and those who would manipulate art because it is perceived as dangerous.

25. 1. Museum Times The Origin of Museums The museums are contemporary with the emergence of aesthetics as meditation on art, as being able to speak about art in words rather than sensuously experiencing it without making it external to the subject. Art (in the museum) becomes object for contemplation (18th / 19th century)

26. 1. Museum Times The Avant-Garde Attacks Attacks by avant-garde (Futurists, Surrealists) because of the esthetic exclusion of art from praxis. Duchamp’s ready-mades were made to mock the art’s freedom from life as established by the museums. Duchamp’s urinal (Fountain by R. Mutt) is a statement about art; but, outside the gallery, it is simply a urinal.

27. 1. Museum Times Monumental Time Museums are historical because they exhibit artworks according to historiographic principles (criteria of period, style, chronological markers, technique). They are also ahistorical because they raise artworks above the flow of historical becoming. They are engaged in producing monumental time. Museums provide contact with reality in the modern world (ecomuseum transforms a real thing into heritage).

28. 1. Museum Times The Caesura of Art The Caesura of the Image Museums present art as historical monument but they can never preserve it fully. For example, they disengage the object from use-value (e.g. objects in ecomuseum) and make the thing become an image of what it used to be. This is not historical because historical deals with the realm of use, of how this was used as historical object.

29. 1. Museum Times Proust’s Museum The Experience of Art Proust’s description of the museum in A la recherche du temps perdu, shows it as a place of memory where object exists as an image, and produces pleasure in continuous contemplation that is always aware of previous contemplation of that object. The mental event of contemplation singles art out as experience of itself, not mere documentation.

30. 1. Museum Times Art in Ruins The increasingly historiographic nature of the museum, that collecting should be scientific, is the product of the Golden Age of Museums (19th century). Kunstkammer (16/17 century) was reorganized into a museum, a place of study and contemplation, and work of art is stamped as having historically documentary character belonging to a rational and coherent history of artistic development.

31. 1. Museum Times

32. 1. Museum Times

33. 1. Museum Times

34. 1. Museum Times Art in Ruins Changing role of museum and styles of displays (styles of hanging paintings) from Wunderkammer through Revolutionary through Restoration (Louvre) Salon (until the end of the 19th century): frame to frame, floor to ceiling, regimented according to stylistic regroupings and explanatory labels (national pigeonholing)

35. 1. Museum Times Framework Changing styles of displays (styles of hanging paintings) Modern museum (20th century) sanitizes the works. In the Salon display, the works vie for attention, in their heavy frames in a tightly packed exhibition space. The exhibition space becomes sparse. The transition from the gilded frame to the modern self-effacing frame.

36. 1. Museum Times Framework Changing styles of displays (styles of hanging paintings) Modern museum (20th century) Implications for viewing and activity of subject in processing art. The previous activity of viewing (salon display) was in appropriation of work and experiencing it as distinct from others. The modern museum provides a packaged experience, and viewing that is not a negotiation.

37. 1. Museum Times The Decline of Subject Estheticizing the Bourgeois The process of viewing from Wunderkammer in which there was no viewing order and the only unifying principle was the collector’s persona and the personal principle of collection. In the modern museum there is an increasing alienation in the consumption of art. The collector is mere manager of resources; art as resource is objectively defined by market value.

38. 1. Museum Times The Decline of Subject Estheticizing the Bourgeois Art seeks to escape from the rarefied atmosphere of the modern museum. For example, the works of Andy Warhol, embracing serialization, and multiplicity, in their very substance. The modern work of art favors series, and openly manifests its belonging to a sequence of other artistic works.

39. 1. Museum Times The Identity in Question The museum is a political resource whereby national identities are constructed. The creation of museums in the nineteenth century is tied to rise of nationalism and the forced identification of individuals with a civic, national character. That process makes museums a fascinating object of study of group identities.

40. 2. Bringing the Museum Home the social context (bourgeois interior, decorative objects), positivism in scholarship, naturalism in literature

41. 3. Balzacana Le peau de chagrin (Balzac)

42. Global Culture, Modern Heritage: Remembering the Chinese Imperial Collections(Hamlish 2000)