Helen Rees Leahy

Seeing it for real...? Authenticity, theatre and learning in museums

This article reflects on the findings of a nationally-funded research project which investigated the practice and impact of museum theatre at two UK museums: the Imperial War Museum, London, and the Peoples History Museum, Manchester. The research team tracked the museum experiences of eight groups of primary school children, half of whom encountered a theatre event during their museum visits, while the other half followed alternative routes (including elements such as a guided tour, object-handling, role-play, and task-oriented workshops). The aim of the investigation was to assess the effectiveness of theatre within the education programmes of the respective museums, and to compare and contrast the different learning outcomes of theatre and non-theatre sessions, monitored over a period of two months. Although based on a small sample, the findings (which we consider under such headings as ‘active learning and ownership’ and ‘empathy and the making of connections’) suggest that, when well designed and sufficiently integrated into the museum experience as a whole, theatre can offer a significant enhancement to learning by children of this age. Far from being a distraction from the collections and themes of the museum, the incorporation of performance alongside other more traditional approaches, demonstrably improved childrens grasp of the personal stories associated with, but not always explicit in, the museum collections and displays, and created strong and memorable resonances still evident several months after the visit. We further consider some of the implications of the research for current museum theatre practice and, in particular, the questions it raised about the interplay between different notions of ‘authenticity’ in the museum displays and the performed narratives.

Museum Bodies : The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing

Contents: Introduction Making a social body Not just looking Walking the museum Performing the museum Bodies of protest Disquieting bodies Epilogue Bibliography Index.

New labour, old masters.

This paper explores the impact of extrinsic political policies on the National Gallerys practices of display, exhibition and interpretation through the lens of the purchase in 2004 of Raphaels ‘The Madonna of the Pinks’. It is recognised that since 1997 government policy and funding for museums and galleries has been primarily predicated on their current and potential function in the promotion of social inclusion, cultural access and diversity and, as a result, museum practice has been explicitly harnessed to the delivery of social policy objectives. Similarly, funding for acquisitions from the Heritage Lottery Fund has been harnessed to the objective of widening participation in both the production and consumption of heritage practices. Analysis of the historical and contemporary contexts for the purchase of ‘The Madonna of the Pinks’ reveals both continuities and disjunctions in the National Gallerys production of art history, the management of its interpretative regimes and its engagement with actual and target audiences. The resulting complexities characterise a site that today accommodates connoisseurship and populism, exclusivity and diversity, incongruity and contradiction.

The International Handbooks of Museum Studies

An edited collection of nearly 30 essays by international scholars, curators and designers on the role of media in museums and the relationship between museums and different kinds of media.

Incorporating the Period Eye: Spectators at Exhibitions of Exhibitions

ABSTRACT In recent years, museums have staged a number of “exhibitions of exhibitions.” These experiments in institutional, curatorial, and artistic revivalism have ranged from allusions to and quotations from past installations to full-scale re-enactments and reconstructions. The motivations of the curators and artists responsible for these diverse projects have included the desire to recuperate both famous and forgotten shows and also to reproduce past modalities of display and spectatorship, and thus build an archive of the immaterial through retrospective and performance practices. Some of the most interesting “exhibitions of exhibitions” have focused on the historical conditions and institutional conventions of spectatorship, with the objective of alerting the contemporary viewer to differences in the performativity of spectatorship, past and present. By evoking former practices of looking, walking, and touching, these exhibitions also remind us that techniques of the museum visitor are both embodied and acquired. They require the contemporary viewer to recalibrate their choreography of their looking and moving; put another way, they activate what Michael Baxandall termed the “period eye” in order to decode the visual effects of the exhibition and to relocate oneself in the position of the historical spectator. This article explores how a number of recent exhibitions have redrawn attention to the corporeality of museum visiting and viewing, as well as to the historical acquisition of competences and attitudes that we take for granted today.

Assembling Art, Constructing Heritage

On 27 August 2008, the National Galleries in Edinburgh and London launched a campaign to raise £50 million in order to purchase jointly a painting by Titian that had been hanging in the Edinburgh gallery since 1945. The painting, Diana and Actaeon (1556--1559) was one of the ‘Sutherland pictures’: a collection of 29 paintings on loan from the Dukes of Sutherland that had formed the core of the gallerys old master displays for 63 years. The complex nexus of aesthetic, cultural, financial and political issues raised by this very public sale of private property provides a starting point for this paper which aims both to identify the entangled relationships forged between artworks, individuals and institutions through which both market and cultural value are produced. The aim of this paper is to analyse the 2008 sale of Diana and Actaeon in terms of an interaction, rather than an antipathy, between cultural and economic practices. Following Callons lead, the paper explores how the commoditization of the work of art involves its disentanglement from the numerous relationships and interdependencies in which it is enmeshed so that its market exchange becomes possible (Callon 1998). However, the underlying frame that makes the exchange possible can never be hermetically sealed: the ‘outside world’ of relationships and interdependencies is always present giving rise to ‘overflows’. Callons concept of ‘overflow’ from the commoditization of the artwork also seeps into what Bruno Latour has described as the ‘catchment’ (or trajectory) of a paintings journey through time and space. The trajectory of Diana and Acteaon provides a vivid illustration of a complex catchment acquired over 350 years and, specifically, how its commoditization first in 1798 and again in 2008 can be viewed through the lens of Callons perspective of disentanglement and re-entanglement.On 27 August 2008, the National Galleries in Edinburgh and London launched a campaign to raise £50 million in order to purchase jointly a painting by Titian that had been hanging in the Edinburgh gallery since 1945. The painting, Diana and Actaeon (1556–1559) was one of the ‘Sutherland pictures’: a collection of 29 paintings on loan from the Dukes of Sutherland that had formed the core of the gallerys old master displays for 63 years. The complex nexus of aesthetic, cultural, financial and political issues raised by this very public sale of private property provides a starting point for this paper which aims both to identify the entangled relationships forged between artworks, individuals and institutions through which both market and cultural value are produced. The aim of this paper is to analyse the 2008 sale of Diana and Actaeon in terms of an interaction, rather than an antipathy, between cultural and economic practices. Following Callons lead, the paper explores how the commoditization of the work of art involves its disentanglement from the numerous relationships and interdependencies in which it is enmeshed so that its market exchange becomes possible (Callon 1998). However, the underlying frame that makes the exchange possible can never be hermetically sealed: the ‘outside world’ of relationships and interdependencies is always present giving rise to ‘overflows’. Callons concept of ‘overflow’ from the commoditization of the artwork also seeps into what Bruno Latour has described as the ‘catchment’ (or trajectory) of a paintings journey through time and space. The trajectory of Diana and Acteaon provides a vivid illustration of a complex catchment acquired over 350 years and, specifically, how its commoditization first in 1798 and again in 2008 can be viewed through the lens of Callons perspective of disentanglement and re-entanglement.

Musée international de la réforme, geneva

252 the rich, white and privileged living in exclusive beach communities. A moving image is that of Yajahira, a transsexual sex-trade worker in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. At age twelve, she became a prostitute and a devotee of Santisima Muerte (Figure 3). Of that devotion, she says that: “All of humanity is afraid of death—100% of us. This is a preparation for death. More than anything, it’s about not being afraid to know that there will be something after my spiritual release.” Each night before leaving her apartment, she prays at the altar that she has constructed to her saint. In the picture, she is smoking a cigarette, dressing to get ready for work, an ordinary person doing an ordinary task. However, the photograph reminds us that she, like all of us, is extraordinary. In a state that is divided into several regions with a population larger than Canada’s, one of the greatest strengths of the exhibit is that there is coverage of the whole state. This is unusual, as local California media is incredibly parochial. If one were to watch, for example, television news coverage in Los Angeles, one would be hard pressed to know that Sacramento, San Francisco, or San Diego were also included in the same state. Moreover, Nahmias represents the state not just in its religious diversity, but in its geographical, ethnic, and socio-economic diversity as well. There are the elderly, the handicapped, the children, the ill, the prisoners, the dying, and the sex workers. These are the groups that are often highlighted in religious traditions, “the least of these” to use Christian