For this assignment, I visited the Hickory Museum of Art (HMA) in Hickory, North Carolina. Their major exhibition was “Unexpected Beauty,” a collection of photographs by photojournalist Steve McCurry. I observed several ways in which the HMA replicated historic museums practices, especially in regards to the museum effect, princely galleries, and above all, reinforcing an emphasis on the visual. By visiting the HMA I gained a firsthand experience of what these practices look like and the impacts they can have on viewers. The “museum effect” certainly came into play (Alpers 1991). McCurry is a photojournalist. When his work is placed in an art museum, the formal elements and visual attraction of his work outstrip the cultural meanings
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The HMA went so far as to place an image of a world map on a wall to reinforce this concept. I found the world map to be an overstatement of the exhibition’s globalness, because McCurry’s work has a specific geographical focus on South Asia and the Middle East. There are global aspects to his work, but it would have been much more appropriate to place a map of the Middle East on that wall instead of a world map. As I discussed earlier, there was a lack of cultural education regarding these images, which might have helped place them in a global context. Without the appropriate knowledge, it seemed to me that this was a very shallow way to showcase the HMA’s global focus. The museum provided viewers with the more abstract theme of a shared global human experience, which privileges conceptual reasoning over knowledge based on the lived experience (Chakrabarty 2013, …show more content…
Poetry readings might be the HMA’s way of trying to incorporate this into their practices. While the actual reading of poetry engages with the auditory sense, that engagement is lost after the performance when the poems are placed as text on a wall. At this point, the poems cease to create a multisensory experience. Hooper-Greenhill claims that objects and texts are different because “textual meaning is located within the words themselves … for the most part in the realm of ideas” (Hooper-Greenhill 2000, 114). This may be true in some cases; however, when the object is a photograph and the text is a poem, the two are interpreted in much the same way. Both get their meaning through being analyzed visually. Reading and looking are different processes, but they both involve viewing and constructing a meaning based on what is seen. Hooper-Greenhill further differentiates objects from texts in that objects require physical interaction (2000, 115). Again, this distinction does not apply when the object is photograph hung on the wall. Objects in a typical art museum setting, such as the HMA’s do not typically invite a multisensory experience. Thus the act of viewing artwork is often just as rooted in visual experience as reading is. The addition of poetry could have made this experience multisensory. One way in which this could be achieved is through
The HMA went so far as to place an image of a world map on a wall to reinforce this concept. I found the world map to be an overstatement of the exhibition’s globalness, because McCurry’s work has a specific geographical focus on South Asia and the Middle East. There are global aspects to his work, but it would have been much more appropriate to place a map of the Middle East on that wall instead of a world map. As I discussed earlier, there was a lack of cultural education regarding these images, which might have helped place them in a global context. Without the appropriate knowledge, it seemed to me that this was a very shallow way to showcase the HMA’s global focus. The museum provided viewers with the more abstract theme of a shared global human experience, which privileges conceptual reasoning over knowledge based on the lived experience (Chakrabarty 2013, …show more content…
Poetry readings might be the HMA’s way of trying to incorporate this into their practices. While the actual reading of poetry engages with the auditory sense, that engagement is lost after the performance when the poems are placed as text on a wall. At this point, the poems cease to create a multisensory experience. Hooper-Greenhill claims that objects and texts are different because “textual meaning is located within the words themselves … for the most part in the realm of ideas” (Hooper-Greenhill 2000, 114). This may be true in some cases; however, when the object is a photograph and the text is a poem, the two are interpreted in much the same way. Both get their meaning through being analyzed visually. Reading and looking are different processes, but they both involve viewing and constructing a meaning based on what is seen. Hooper-Greenhill further differentiates objects from texts in that objects require physical interaction (2000, 115). Again, this distinction does not apply when the object is photograph hung on the wall. Objects in a typical art museum setting, such as the HMA’s do not typically invite a multisensory experience. Thus the act of viewing artwork is often just as rooted in visual experience as reading is. The addition of poetry could have made this experience multisensory. One way in which this could be achieved is through