Museums and Memory
Will be published approx. on 1. July 2000
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-0-8047-3564-3 (ISBN)
Description
Museums today are more than familiar cultural institutions and showplaces of accumulated objects; they are the sites of interaction between personal and collective identities, between memory and history. The essays in this volume consider museums from personal experience and historical study, and from the memories of museum visitors, curators, and scholars.
Representing a variety of fields-history, anthropology, art history, and museum scholarship-the contributors discuss museums across disciplinary boundaries that have separated art museums from natural history museums or local history museums from national galleries. The essays range widely over time (from the Renaissance to the second half of the twentieth century), and place (China, Japan, the United States, and Germany), in exhibitions explored (photography, Native American history, and "Jurassic technology"), and institution (the Chinese Imperial Collection, Renaissance curiosity cabinets, and modern art museums).
Memory operates thematically among the essays in diverse and provocative ways. The papers are organized according to three suggestive themes: experimental ways of theorizing and designing contemporary museums with an explicit interest in history and memory; discussions of personal encounters with historical exhibits; and the professional risks at stake for collectors and curators who shape the institutional presentation of history and memory.
The contributors are Susan A. Crane, Wolfgang Ernst, Michael Fehr, Paula Findlen, Tamara Hamlish, Alexis Joachimides, Suzanne Marchand, Julia A. Thomas, and Diana Drake Wilson.
Representing a variety of fields-history, anthropology, art history, and museum scholarship-the contributors discuss museums across disciplinary boundaries that have separated art museums from natural history museums or local history museums from national galleries. The essays range widely over time (from the Renaissance to the second half of the twentieth century), and place (China, Japan, the United States, and Germany), in exhibitions explored (photography, Native American history, and "Jurassic technology"), and institution (the Chinese Imperial Collection, Renaissance curiosity cabinets, and modern art museums).
Memory operates thematically among the essays in diverse and provocative ways. The papers are organized according to three suggestive themes: experimental ways of theorizing and designing contemporary museums with an explicit interest in history and memory; discussions of personal encounters with historical exhibits; and the professional risks at stake for collectors and curators who shape the institutional presentation of history and memory.
The contributors are Susan A. Crane, Wolfgang Ernst, Michael Fehr, Paula Findlen, Tamara Hamlish, Alexis Joachimides, Suzanne Marchand, Julia A. Thomas, and Diana Drake Wilson.
More details
Series
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Palo Alto
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Cloth
Illustrations
31 illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-8047-3564-3 (9780804735643)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Susan A. Crane is Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of Arizona. She is the author of the forthcoming Collecting and Historical Consciousness.
Content
1. Introduction: of museums and memory Susan A. Crane; Part I. Thinking Through the Museum: 2. Archi(ve)textures of museology Wolfgang Ernst; 3. A museum and its memory: the art of recovering history Michael Fehr; 4. Curious cabinets and imaginary museums Susan A. Crane; 5. Geoffrey Sonnabend's 'obliscence: theories of forgetting and the problem of matter' An encapsulation courtesy of the Museum of Jurassic Technology; Part II. Memories in the Museum: 6. History and anti-history: photography exhibitions and Japanese national identity Julia Adeney Thomas; 7. Realizing memory, transforming history: Euro/American/Indians Diana Drake Wilson; 8. Global culture, modern heritage: re-membering the Chinese Imperial collections Tamara Hamlish; Part III. Collectors and Institutions: 9. The modern muses: Renaissance collecting and the cult of remembrance Paula Findlen; 10. The quarrel of the ancients and moderns in the German museums Suzanne Marchand; 11. The museum's discourse on art: the formation of curatorial art history in turn-of-the-century Berlin Alexis Joachimides; Notes; Index.