Lowenthal: Fabricating Heritage

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Lowenthal Fabricating Heritage
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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

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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)?

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Museum Memories History, Technology, Art
(Maleuvre 1999)
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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)

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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)

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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.

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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.

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Introduction

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

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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

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

• History Lab
• Pointing Fingers
• Authenticity
• Hegels 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
• Prousts Museum
• The Experience of Art
• Art in Ruins
• Framework
• The Decline of Subject
• Estheticizing the Bourgeois
• The Identity in Question

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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.

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1. Museum Times

• Pointing Fingers
• First response to the phenomenon of museums.
• Quatremères 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.

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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.

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1. Museum Times

• Hegels Guide to the Museum
• Hegels 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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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1. Museum Times

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

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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).

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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.

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1. Museum Times

• Prousts Museum
• The Experience of Art
• Prousts 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.

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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.

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1. Museum Times

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1. Museum Times
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1. Museum Times

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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 collectors 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.

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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.

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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.

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2. Bringing the Museum Home
the social context (bourgeois interior,
decorative objects), positivism in scholarship,
naturalism in literature
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3. Balzacana
Le peau de chagrin (Balzac)
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Global Culture, Modern Heritage Remembering the
Chinese Imperial Collections(Hamlish 2000)