Architecture & the Newseum

During the last couple of weeks, we have discussed the significance of architecture in relation to Washington D.C. and more generally, American history. As Dell Upton discusses in the chapter “Architecture in the United States,” a lot of information can be discerned about America examining architecture and the values that are held within a domestic space. For example, Jefferson’s Monticello stressed the division of private and public space, signifying that while the president wanted to maintain a neighborly, Republican social position with the community, he also valued solitude and reflection.
The Newseum, located just off the Mall in Washington D.C. also uses architecture to express its values. The Newseum is dedicated to providing visitors with five centuries of news. The museum is roughly 250,000 square feet, and is home to fifteen permanent exhibits, as well as seven rotating guest galleries that explore how news and media act as a tool of communication and knowledge throughout the world. The Berlin Wall Gallery examines how news, via word of mouth, filtered through the concrete barrier of East Germany when no other person of thing was allowed to enter.
When designing the Newseum, architects wanted to create a large open space that expressed the idea that news can be used as a tool to exploit secrets, reveal the truth, and gain a better understanding of the world. The exterior of the museum features a marble engraving of the 1st amendment and a large front wall of glass that exposes the inner-workings of the museum to passersby, and further plays upon the notion that news uncovers the truth.

Expectations and Museums

People go to museums with pre-conceived expectations. A museum-goer, before visiting the Louvre, knows what he/she expects to see, and carefully plans which parts of the museum he will for sure not miss and which parts can be skipped if time runs out. This is a carefully constructed journey through art and history, one which this particular museum-goer had a large part, not to mention stake, in completing.

One of the traditional manners in which museums are viewed is as a teacher of facts, a conveyer of lessons, a preacher of ideals. People go to museums with an idea of what they will get out of the visit, because they are following society's expectations of museums as providers of "crisp lessons." However, the NMAI doesn't follow traditional museum conventions and therefore is not a place one can go and already have an idea of what one will find. This museum functions as a different space; a place where the Native American can both claim sovereignty and to engage in a conversation with other Native American peoples and non-Native peoples. Many early visitors weren't prepared for this, and some felt the museum failed them; their expectations, informed by the traditional museum concept, weren't met.

It seems simple to believe we would be able to visit a museum with an open mind and no expectations, however, this doesn't seem to be the case. In an article about museums and identity, the point is made that visitors don't passively "receive museum experiences, but rather actively construct their own personal meanings." So, this should be good news for the NMAI, right? If people take an active role in engaging with their museum, then entering into a conversation with the museum shouldn't be a difficult concept, right? However, I believe that part of constructing personal meaning for oneself at the museum is a product of the traditional museum concept; it's the need to find personal meaning in the impersonal, the traditional. The NMAI isn't supposed to be impersonal or traditional. It's supposed to be a conversation, a spiritual immersion in the past, present and future of the Native American people. It is supposed to be experienced in a different manner from other museums, and so going to this space with pre-conceived notions of the experience will only serve to hinder the visitor and block them from experiencing all that is possible.

This is a link I found to an article about identity and museums, and visiting museums with starting goals for the experience:

http://www.aam-us.org/pubs/mn/spiritual.cfm

Newseum

The Newseum, in DC, was created just like the NMAI in the spirit of creating a space that asks the visitor to not simply look at the past and walk through, but allows the audience to question and feel. Many museums contain exhibits that pull at our heartstrings and create emotion, but the Newseum (like the NMAI) aims to show how the past is still alive today and everything around us is interrelated. One exhibit that sticks in the mind is the huge room containing front pages from newspapers yearly since before the Civil War. Walking through the room forces the visitor to realize that the news and problems of the past do not stay in the past; many of the problems that were in the US in previous times have come back up and reshaped themselves.

Notorious in many people’s minds from a bit before our time is the “Unabomber,” who sent out bombs through the mail from the seventies until the mid-nineties. Brought to fame through television and written journalism, the man lived in a little wooden shack for over 20 years, where he made his own bombs and wrote a manifesto about the deteriorating state of the US. The Newseum allows visitors to see a lot of the press surrounding him at the time but also goes a step further: it features the actual cabin that the Unabomber lived in. His original, lived-in shack is on display for you to look in, and you get a creepy view of how a crazed man lived by himself for over 20 years.

Another great exhibit (probably the most memorable) is the memorial to September 11. A wall hundreds of feet high displays front pages from all over the world after news spread about the terrorist attacks. The words (bold headlines like “Bastards!” and “Unthinkable!” and “Our Nation Saw Evil”) and pictures that pop out grab one’s attention, and it’s impossible to remember that you’re in a museum at that moment; it’s like being right back in 2001, on September 12, wondering what is going on in the world. In front of the wall, maybe one of the most spectacular things to see, is the 360-foot antenna taken from the top of the North Tower. It is burnt, rusty, bent and in terrible condition, but it is there. Once thousands of feet above New York City, it is there, right in front of you, an eerie reminder of the damage caused on the fateful day.

The Newseum, with its share of typical displays behind glass, is nevertheless an attempt like the NMAI to allow the visitors to do much more than view history.

The link doesn't really do the 9/11 exhibit justice, but you can see part of it. http://lh6.ggpht.com/_BSKixE7lgo8/SPJuF8GUsNI/AAAAAAAAAbI/f8TB0NKKHTk/PA121836.JPG

Links related to West as America and NMAI

Here is the link to a site with more resources on West As America:
http://people.virginia.edu/~mmw3v/west/home.htm

Here is a link to the current exhibit at the NMAI:
http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/indivisible/introduction.html

And here is the website for the National Museum of African American History and Culture (opening 2015):
http://nmaahc.si.edu/

The Role of Museums

An interesting theme of this chapter of the course seems to focus on the significance of museums and preserved historical sites and objects in order to better understand American history. In one way, the reading on the National Museum of the American Indian by Amanda Cobb emphasized the importance of transforming a traditional understanding of a museum into a more interactive encounter that allows Native American visitors to gather in a shared history of past knowledge and experience and to celebrate the living Native American cultures. In another way, “An American Icon” by Dell Upton offered a perspective on Monticello that stresses the opportunity to learn about Jefferson and his time through the architecture and relics at Monticello. In this sense, Monticello serves as a kind of museum. Cobb and Upton seem to stress different understandings of what a museum should be as Upton maintains the preserved aspects of Monticello that places visitors in a more observatory position while Cobb argues that the unique approach of the NMAI situates museum goers in a more participatory role as contributors to the continuing Native American experience.

With this in mind, I found an interesting article in The Washington Post pointing out changes to the Monticello tour. The writer, Anne Applebaum, suggests that the Monticello tour has recently undergone some changes to make it a more interactive experience. For example, she says that her son was able to actually use a replica of Jefferson’s polygraph machine as opposed to just look at it, as she had done thirty years ago. In this way, Applebaum argues that the Monticello experience now allows visitors to explore and learn in a participatory way that encourages them to engage as active members of this cultural history. To me, this development highlights Cobb’s idea that while this form of museum experience differs from past museum organization, it allows visitors to integrate themselves more fully in the encounter with history.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/13/AR2009041301950.html

Art & Empire

I found this article had many similarities of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which further justifies the notion that the United States is an empire, as expressed in the first article we read for this class. The thesis of this week’s article, "much of the sculpture and painting in the U.S. Capitol forms an iconographic program that outlines the course of North American empire by promoting and legitimizing the subjugation of the Native Americans," (Fryd 3) directly parallels Said’s notion that Western European ideologies created the term, “oriental”, and further dominates these people who were considered oriental by creating a body of knowledge on the subject. For example, Said suggests that only Westerners study the East and that because Westerners create the books and artwork on the subject, the subject inherently implies that Westerners are dominate to those who they study. Furthermore, Orientalism as a subject in both book and art is used as a justification for European imperialism and political gains. This mirrors the use of art in the U.S. Capitol to shape the perception of the Native American and to support their eventual relocation of tribes to reservations.

Citizen Restaurant and Stuff White People Like

I was struck by a contradiction brought up by Ruiz in her article Citizen Restaurant. In the article, two contrasting perspectives on multiethnic dining are offered; Donna R. Gabaccia states that “our multi-ethnic eating daily proclaims our satisfied sense of affiliation with one another… [while Christine Yano believes] eating another social group’s food does not mean that one possesses particular knowledge or appreciation of their culture, fraternizes with them, or supports their political or economic positions” (Ruiz p. 5-6).

I realized that, oddly enough, the satirical website Stuff White People Like (stuffwhitepeoplelike.com)explains to its audience how both of these views, though seemingly paradoxical, can be true. The website, essentially a numbered list of young, liberal white stereotypes, states that “white people love ethnic diversity, but only as it relates to restaurants.” People view eating ethnic food such as sushi (#42) or hummus (#112) as an adventure, immersing themselves in new customs akin to “cultural pioneers,” for the thrill of exploring the foreign and the unknown (#71: Being the only white person around). However, treating these trips to Chinatown on Canal Street like expeditions into the heart of the Dark Continent robs people of any opportunity to form cultural connections any deeper than colonial explorers created with the indigenous societies they met. The discovery of diversity through food is nothing more than a cultural safari, distilling the ethnic food from their parent societies that offer much more than a loaf of bread. Like Ruiz, Stuff White People Like teaches us through stereotypes and dry humor is that appreciation for other cultures must go deeper than the bottom of the soup bowl.