Letting Go?

Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World

Bill Adair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780983480303, 9781138405134
• eBook ISBN: 9781000673203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Letting Go? investigates path-breaking public history practices at a time when the traditional expertise of museums seems challenged at every turn-by the Web and digital media, by community-based programming, by new trends in oral history and by contemporary art. In this anthology of 19 thought pieces, case studies, conversations and commissioned art, almost 30 leading practitioners such as Michael Frisch, Jack Tchen, Liz Sevcenko, Kathleen McLean, Nina Simon, Otabenga Jones and Associates, and Fred Wilson explore the implications of letting audiences create, not just receive, historical content. Drawing on examples from history, art, and science museums, Letting Go? offers concrete examples and models that will spark innovative work at institutions of all sizes and budgets. This engaging new collection will serve as an introductory text for those newly grappling with a changing field and, for those already pursuing the goal of "letting go, " a tool for taking stock and pushing ahead.

Constructing Perspectives

Artists andHistorical Authority

What happens when artists step into the arena of historical interpretation? Perhaps more than any other exhibition in the last quarter century, Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society (1992-93) changed the way museum professionals see their work and themselves. Collections ceased to be neutral assem blages of objects and were revealed to be freighted with cultural and political baggage; curators and museums were shown com plicit in an often insidious power structure. In the two decades since, artists have worked with historical collections and content in projects ranging from site-specific installations to illustrated rock operas, with many lively variants in between. Artists can be engaged to play many roles: interpreter and storyteller, providing access to untold stories and alternative narratives; provocateur, challenging the existing narratives; or critic of the institution and of the history-making process itself. The resulting work can offer new interpretive pathways for audiences and can challenge pub lic history professionals to reexamine their own practice. But can collaborating with artists change organizations or the practice of public history more broadly? Reflecting on Mining the Museum and its legacy in his interview here, artist Fred Wilson himself says, “My artworks don’t change museums, they change individuals.”

Can artists be “trusted” to tell these stories? Should historical organizations embrace the power that art can have to create meaningful, resonant experiences for audiences, or does an art ist de-constructing history leave it in shambles? Does the museum abdicate responsibility for interpreting certain histories when it invites an artist to address them?

What happens when this practice exposes difficult or controver sial information about the founders, the organization, or the ways in which stories are being told (or not told)? After the artist leaves, and these issues have been laid bare, what is the next step?

Is there reason to continue this work, and, if so, what will move the practice forward? Could history organizations and artists learn more from one another by learning more about the other?

Peering Behind the Curtain: Artists and Questioning Historical Authority

Melissa Rachlejf

A BACKGROUND SKETCH

The editors of this volume invited me to consider the ways artists have engaged with history and history museums over the past twenty years, positing artist Fred Wilsons project Mining the Museum, which opened at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992, as a starting point. What, they asked, has the history community accomplished with artists in the intervening period? The question is challenging to answer because there is no single repository for information about or records of artist-history projects. As I began to explore art produced since 1992, I was intrigued by the underlying issue of why artists would be drawn to history, history museums, and historic sites in the first place. What, if any, role did the history community play in fostering such exchanges? Why has the art community reaped so much of the credit for history-infused artist projects?

Artist-history projects like Wilsons tend to be critically analyzed by the art press and art historians, and the reception of an artists work in a historical site becomes part of the art historical canon. Thus, although a project may have originated as an exchange with history, it ultimately resides in (and as) art. Academic and public historians may not grasp the significance of artist projects to their field because far less analysis has been published from their perspective. Therefore, a meaningful overview of artist-history museum interactions must begin with an understanding of the fundamental differences between the disciplines of art and history and of how their collaborations often result in critically significant projects. There have been huge shifts in artist-history interactions over the past two decades, in particular a turn toward audience and, sometimes, a move away from aesthetic concerns; as we shall see, we are in a post-aesthetic epoch. The changes in part reflect generational shifts. Whether the projects can be called successful or not also depends on a variety of conditions. What might be a critical success for an artist might have other, perhaps unanticipated consequences, positive and negative, for the historical site. This essay suggests that we put aside concepts of success (and its opposite) to focus on deeper questions regarding historical content, audiences, and installation-based art practices.¹ My intent is to outline areas where art and history intersect and highlight places for historians to situate themselves and their institutions within this complex terrain.

Pedestals with globe. Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson. Maryland Historical Society, 1992-93 (MTM 022). All images courtesy of Maryland Historical Society.

A fundamental question has occupied critical history and art practices for twenty years: who possesses historical authority? Seemingly, the staff at a history museum would have the ultimate interpretive authority. However, the “culture wars” and the “history wars” of the 1990s demonstrated that the “public”—constituents with special interests—actually possess a great deal of power to define history and its meanings, and their views can shape museums’ approaches, particularly in exhibition projects. Unlike at art museums, where battles about what to present and how have centered upon conceptions of “decency,” the locus of history struggles has been interpretation. The apparent victors are the agitated stakeholders (the public), and the losers in this war scenario are the museum staff and their academic advisors.² Interpretation is a subjective process, connected to memory, and it has become a contested field, particularly as it has morphed into the core activity of public history institutions.³

These often very public debates, sometimes shrill, place interpretive staff at history museums in an unenviable position. When art museums have faced public discontent, they have asserted an authoritative institutional power in the name of free speech. At history institutions, though, interpretive authority is mediated via specific relationships to a given subject, including (sometimes) the perspective of academic historians. And whereas art museum curatorial and senior education staff must be academically credentialed, history institutions have always supported non-expert voices, including those of artists. There is a tacit understanding that the mission of history institutions is to tell and preserve community histories, and those histories are living, responsive to changing conditions and relations. Collections and archives preserve objects, largely donated by local residents, that document private and social experiences of the community. Staffs often include members of the community, particularly volunteer docents and retired school teachers. Such community ties further bind the history institution to local sensibilities. A breach of trust can shatter the credibility of the institution.

This essay attempts to “peer behind the curtain” (using the visual metaphor in Charles Willson Peale’s iconic 1822 painting The Artist in His Museum) to reveal the intellectual issues that govern challenging interpretive projects from the perspective of the history museum field and from the perspective of artists, so as to better understand how artists have engaged with audiences conceptions about historical interpretation. Artists, like a public constituency, operate outside of professional historical inquiry; history museum staff members know that an invited artist is not credentialed in their field. Yet there is likewise an “artist pedagogy” that embraces history, informed by issues of representation and attendant theories of memory. Public historians are usually not engaged in the pedagogies that inform contemporary artistic practice, but are invested in memory as a legitimate mode of inquiry. Academic historians tend to be antagonistic to memory’s role in historical inquiry, and for many years largely avoided scrutinizing history institution projects. Bringing these three pedagogies—art, academic history, and public history—together, and acknowledging that they sometimes bump against one another, helps expand the possibilities for historical interpretation through collaborative work with artists. The viability of a partnership with an artist depends on the strength of the collaboration process. Rather than suggest that artists be engaged to add “creativity” to an interpretive project (a sentiment that drifts into positing a “creative” artist and an “uncreative” institution), I suggest that history institutions begin these partnerships by engaging with the methodologies that underlie the interpretive practices of the different fields that are mingling under the broad tent called “history.”

The first half of this essay concerns why artists became interested in museums as a subject for their work—examining the influential project Places with a Past, an art exhibition that was held throughout the city of Charleston, South Carolina, not in a museum—and how socially situated projects led to new curatorial practices outside traditional art institutions. Concurrently with this development in contemporary art, history museums debated similar social concerns, particularly during the 1980s and ′90s. This leads into a review of the impact of European cultural theory on the American academy beginning in the 1980s, and how theory has transformed art-making and the study of history since then. The second half of the essay focuses on the audience, as the public has become a greater focus for institutions and artists alike. Speaking on this trend, contemporary art curator Nato Thompson spoke dismissively of the practice in which “artists fly in, have about a week to react to a site, bang out a project, and move on”⁴ Rather, curators and museums have learned that “reacting” is not enough. From this perspective, Wilsons Mining the Museum was prescient about community response to socially pointed work.

Audience is complex, and the public, which includes the staff at collaborating institutions, is a crucial element in the realization of art projects. This focus on the public by artists necessarily complicates existing relationships for cultural organizations. Nato Thompson suggests that “a lot of artists are even ambivalent about using the word art.” How did we get to this point? To understand the utter collapse of traditional artistic disciplines and how this situation impacts artist-history projects, the essay looks at socially-pointed work.⁵ Looking forward, I conclude with a rationale as to why, intellectually and administratively, artist projects in history institutions must be structured as institutional collaborations, and with an exploration of the benefits of mounting them.

ART AND HISTORY

On a practical level, what do American history museums gain from involving artists in their interpretive projects, and why is this question worth thinking about? One si...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Virtually Breaking Down Authority and the Web
• Throwing Open the Doors Communities as Curators
• Hearing Voices Sharing Authority through Oral History
• The Question of Evaluation Understanding the Visitors' Response
• Constructing Perspectives Artists and Historical Authority
• Contributors
• Ackowledgments
• Index