Thesis Meetings: 1/28/14

Last week resulted in a lot of reading and reading, and a bit more reading. With my new shift/focussing one of the big to-dos was to define new luminaries and get into the scholarship around multi-sensory exhibits.

As a result, I am adding these four to my list of luminaries.

Amanda Cachia: Curator from Sydney, Australia. Currently completing her PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism at the UC San Diego. Former student at CCA.¹
Madeline Schwartzman: Author of See Yourself Sensing, a survey of artists and designers who explore relationships of the body, technology, and senses.
Georgina Kleege: Teaches creative writing and disability studies at UC Berkeley.
Juhani Pallasmaa: Finnish architect. Author of The Eyes of the Skin – Architecture and the Senses.

Last week I also made my list of CCA faculty I would like to reach out to for a discussion about what they think as artists or curators. So far I have met with one curator, and will reach out to others today.

Here are my discussion questions:

• What is the societal purpose of an art museum?
• Are art museums accessible to the general public? Should they be more or less accessible?
• What is the value of handling objects versus looking at objects?
• As a curator, how do you decide which stories to tell?
• As a historian, what do you do when you don't know the answer?
• In terms of displaying work and telling object stories, what are museums doing right?
• In terms of displaying work and telling object stories, where are museums falling short?

In terms of multi-sensory exhibits, there have been a number of them done and studies and luckily, the general feeling is that yes, they do indeed increase visitor enjoyment, retention, and understanding of the content of the exhibit. This was something that Scott and I spent a majority of our time discussing. If the multi-sensory museum exhibit is often done and accepted as  good, then why am I focusing on this? 

My work needs to be responding to something, or taking a stance; I need to define the motivation driving my experiments. 

Here is where my luminaries come in. In an article about her experience during a touch tour at MoMA, Georgina Kleege writes that vision is immediate and comprehensive, where as touch is additive and discovery happens a bit at a time.² This same point also came up during a discussion with my classmate, Tim Carpenter, and this is one of my driving forces. What would happen if vision were not comprehensive and immediate? A new way of seeing could make you slow down, notice new details, and come up with new questions. How might I make an experience that invites users to view art in an additive way?

Kleege also makes a point that "since everyone does not get to touch the art, as much as they might want to, there is a value in hearing what we—the privileged few—have to say about it.”³ This also feels like potential to become a driving force but I need to think on it for longer.

What else are my driving forces? Scott and I discussed a few options which sounded like there was potential. What does it mean to really experience something from a historical perspective? What about material or process immersion?

What is the experience I want people to walk away with? 

So far my language has been about seeing objects anew, in stages or layers, and finding nuance. I don't want my experiences to feel forced or contrived. This experience, like all museum experiences, should to be enticing. I also don't want to overwhelm people with views. I want increase access by means of creative multi-sensory views, but Scott cautioned against offering so many views that the visitor feels there is nothing left to discover.

What happens when I inevitably cannot display a masterpiece in the design MFA exhibition?
1) Too early to worry about this.

2) There is also the philosophical case to be made that the masterpieces we see today aren't the "original" anyway. There are countless mediation factors; the obvious factors (lighting, glass, museum crowds, velvet ropes) and the less obvious factors (discoloration, canvas modification, restoration, curator and museum perspective, forgeries).

With this in mind, perhaps there really is no genuine experience, in which case it doesn't matter whether the "original" is present. It is a big, bold point to make, but I like it.

To do

Start a running list of all the multi-sensory art exhibitions and related studies

Look into the Pilara Foundation Collection at the photography museum at Pier 24 in relation to the no genuine experience concept.

Come up with +/- six  "driving forces"
Contact more curators and artists
Finish my work plan and keep working

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1. Cachia, Amanda. “Talking Blind: Disability, Access, and the Discursive Turn.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33.3 (2013): n. pag. Web. 23 Jan. 2013.
2. Kleege, Georgina. "Some Touching Thoughts and Wishful Thinking" Disability Studies Quarterly 33.3 (2013): n. pag. Web. 6 Oct. 2013.
3. Ibid.

Thesis meetings: 1/21/14

The new semester is here (gulp) along with a narrowing and slight shift in my thesis direction.

In the most concise explanation, I am exploring visual art beyond the visual.

Basically, I mean that I am looking at the meaning of accessibility in art museums and using tactile and multi-sensory experiments to amplify and expose non-visual information. I want to create probes that explore tangible elements such as scale, weight, materiality, and less tangible elements such as process, and context.

Here are the notes from my first meeting with adviser Scott Minneman.

I could make the case that a lot of visual art is "inaccessible." 
Art on a wall of a museum, perhaps, is just a statement. Contextualization and interpretation is very limited.
What about audio tours and docents? Those are great! But they take planning and/or extra money; docents aren't always available and both audio tour and docent tour usually cost extra. With most audio tours, there is little room for interpretation.

Your original thesis topic was to improve the museum experience for visitors who are blind. What happened?
What I learned from my conversations and museum experiences with people who are blind is still guiding my direction. However, I realized that I wanted to look at "accessibility" in a broader sense. Rather than make a tool for one user group, I want to make a tool that will increase accessibility for anyone who uses it. Museum visitors who are blind are still an important user group for me, but are no longer the only user group.

Are multi-sensory art exhibits too extreme/unrealistic/impractical?
Well, museum are already weird and extreme. For example, historical pieces that were never meant to be seen in white walled rooms are seen in white walled rooms. Museums could be thought of as a particular historical "accident."
In the words of Thomas Thwaites from The Toaster Project*, "there’s not much point in imagining futures that are the same as the present. For one, it’s not very interesting, but it’s also not very useful, and can be dangerous" (176).
So there.

When a piece is sold, the owner gets to touch it as much as s/he wants.
But in public institutions, obviously this can't be done.

What do artists think? What stories, if any, do they want told?
Also, what do curators and historians thing? What do they want told? A multi-sensory exhibit also opens the door for a multi-story exhibit. It will vary from person to person, but I need to get some data points in terms of what artists and historians think about multiple object perspectives.

To do
Come up with new luminaries
Read scholarship around multi-sensory exhibits
Contact curators and artists to learn about sacred cows
Look at the Gardener museum in Boston
Read up on current language of Universal Design
Watch Understanding Art: Hidden Lives of Masterpieces

To answer
What are my guiding principles?
How do I qualify successful experiments?
Who am I in service of?
Whose story am I telling and will it be historically accurate?
How do curators deal with unanswered questions?


* Based on Thwaites's MFA design thesis project, very, very, very inspired and inspiring.