The Museum for African Art peels back layers of museum practices
to reveal what goes on behind the scenes in its latest effort,
"Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art." Its curators have
taken an entertaining look at how conventional exhibitions
influence - and may even limit - the viewer's museum experience.
The show poses questions such as: What shapes our experience of
art: the work itself or its setting and display? How do museums
provide - or deny - access to artworks through their presentation?
This terrain of thought is particularly poignant to those
involved with African art. "Exhibition-ism" reflects on issues
close to the heart: the problematic conventions of museum
exhibitions that restrict the understanding of non-Western art.
Despite the potentially unexciting subject matter, the Museum
for African Art succeeds in providing a witty, theatrical forum to
think about the possibilities, restrictions, influences, and
responsibilities in presenting art.
A viewer can get through the exhibit quickly and come away with
a broadened sense of the challenges in mounting exhbitions.
Take, for example, a ceremonial mask - which by definition is
authentic only when it is "in use." Museums generally display
such an object in a Plexiglas case to preserve it and keep people
from handling it, which is not at all what the mask's creators
Ancient masks were not meant to be seen and studied at eye
level. And sometimes it is taboo to divulge the mask's history.
Often African objects have a defined purpose and their use is
expected to change over time.
African art has been exhibited as art in the United States for
80 years. But up until the late 1960s, it suffered from being
labeled as artifact, trophy, or souvenir. As anthropologists and
art historians started doing field work and research in Africa -
immersing themselves in its cultures - they began to realize that
treating African art as inert and static was totally inappropriate.
Gallery one of "Exhibition-ism" employs video and sound to add
context and disprove the myth that "Museums Are Silent Places for
Looking." Here one gains a multisensory experience of a ceremony -
with all its movement, sound, and color.
Snippets of text also help: "In Africa, an object's meaning is
never absolute and its use may evolve with the needs of its
owners... artworks are continually changed, renewed, adorned, and
moved about. The museum preserves the object; in Africa, owners are
often more concerned with preserving the object's powers. …