Mediated Exhibition

As I mentioned in my first blog post, my background is in media studies. Therefore I was excited to noticed references to Marshall McLuhan (via Ken Yellis' article) and Neil Postman; two seminal scholars within the media ecology field. More on these two to follow later in this week's post.

This week's articles hone in on what makes museum visits a unique experience for a visitor. Yellis (2009) notes that, in his experience, the visitor typically attends museum exhibits looking "not so much for information, but for insight" (p.  340). This distinction indicates that exhibit viewers are somewhat informed prior to their visit. For this reason, Yellis places a premium on discovering a "new way of telling an old story" (p. 334). Relating this to our class exhibit, it seems Yellis' advice would be to research an exhibition (or exhibitions) of similar objects and question if there's another angle from which a story can be told.

Meaningful stories, according to Beverly Serrell, require forethought about doing it well. To this end, Serrell applies Postman's "five new narratives for redefining the value of schools" (p. 15). Although Serrell uses these narratives because they're novel (at the time of this book's 1996 publication), I'd argue that Postman's narratives work because they're different--precisely echoing Yellis' earlier suggestion of finding a new way of telling an old story.

Kirsh-Gimblett (1998) gives wide ranging examples of the evolution of the exhibit. Although some seem a bit extreme (live subjects?), Kirsh-Gimblett's examples invite the reader to consider museum exhibits as a Goffmanian dramaturgic event, where the viewer is an audience member and the exhibit a performer. This metaphor, however, comes with some warnings. Most immediately is the negotiation between "front region" and "back region." Without getting too involved with Goffman (and resultantly less involved with Kirsh-GImblett), I'll briefly describe front region as the face or mask the audience sees before them and the back region as all the other possible masks the performer has as performance options.

Thinking about front/back in terms of our class exhibit, the "front" is how I arrange the exhibit, what words I use in the label, and how this communicates something about both my object and me. The "back," or unseen parts of my self, still influences my description and arraigment of the object and, therefore, influences the exhibit visitor's interaction with the object. To me, this necessitates our class (and any exhibit curator for that matter) to consider the advice provided by this weeks authors (Parmon not included above, but still helpful suggestions). I'd like to end with a particularly helpful piece of advice from Yellis:

"All other reasons leave us potentially open to the three devastating questions no museum visitor should ever have to ask and which, if they are asked, make it guaranteed that the visitor experience will be unsatisfying at best: Why are they doing this? What kind of exhibition is this? And my personal favorite: Have I seen this exhibition before?"