Ambivalent pasts: colonial history and the theatricalities of ethnographic display

In the twenty-first century, museums holding ethnographic collections have come under scrutiny for their implication in colonial history, and many have started to address this problematic legacy, often in conscious attempts to move beyond the colonial as “post-ethnographic” spaces and forums for intercultural dialogue. This essay uses a contemporary artwork, Peggy Buth’s installation “The Warrior as Multiple, “exhibited at the Frankfurt Museum of World Cultures in 2014, as a starting point to develop a taxonomy of dominant curatorial strategies at work in ethnographic museums today: self-reflexive contextualization, inversion or reversal, indigenous curation, visible storage, and the turn to live performance—all of which are used to address colonial history. Approaching these strategies from the perspective of theatre and performance studies, the essay analyzes their “theatricalities” of display—the “doing” of ethnographic objects, as well as the “spectacularity” of dioramic settings—through a series of case studies, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut, and the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. It argues that despite their critical potential, these strategies run the danger of being complicit in a working through (in the Freudian sense of the term) of colonial history, which might ultimately “liberate” ethnographic museums from their problematic legacy. Instead, the essay proposes an insistence on ambivalence, understood as the simultaneous co-existence of at least two conflicting meanings, in order to resist such an erasure

Making Bricks Without Straws: The Development of the Korean War Exhibit at the Canadian War Museum

Established a scant half century ago, the Canadian War Museum has a mandate to document, examine and present our national military heritage to the people of Canada, about 200,000 of whom grace its halls annually. If the Museum is to be anything more than a collection of trophies or a veterans’ touchstone, this story must be interestingly told with historical balance, accuracy and dignity. It is hoped that the following brief account of a recent exhibit will illustrate how this goal is sought and, occasionally, accomplished. The lack of a Korea Gallery in the national military museum was not an intentional slight against those 25,000 Canadians who served in the United Nations police action. The exhibit “philosophy” prior to the 1980s tended to focus on commanders and technology of the world wars, at the expense of later events like peacekeeping and the Cold War. Allusions to Koera were found in art shows and weapons displays, but a didactic exhibit on the Canadian experience in Korea had to wait until forty years after the conflict. The primary reason for building the Korea Gallery was to fulfil the Museum’s mandate and complete the chronological storyline of Canada’s military experience. The guiding precepts were to present an attractive, historically-balanced exhibit that would also link the existing Second World War Gallery with the proposed permanent exhibit, “Canada’s Peacekeepers” (oepning in June 1996). The timing of the project was fortuitous in that it immediately preceded government cutbacks which reduced the staff by nearly 30 per cent

In the halls of history: the making and unmaking of the life-casts at the ethnography galleries of the Iziko South African Museum

This mini-dissertation is a study of the phenomenon of life-casting and the display of these in the museum space. It looks specifically at the practice as it came into use at the turn of the twentieth century at the South African Museum in the Western Cape. The research aims to place the practice in context with the historical triggers and larger perspectives of the subject of indigenous races. A focus on particular life-casts and its display in designed productions allows the reader insight into knowledge production. I point to this to unpack a loaded history informing deeply seated identity constructs and prejudices. A trajectory of the use of the life-casts is supported by visual records included in this text. The museum's archive also affords a plethora of correspondence and research giving context and insight. A close analysis of the archive exposes the museum's processes and the exchange in consumption and production by museum visitors and related institutions both private and state supported. The making and unmaking of the life-casts acts as proxy for peoples brutally subjugated

Culture of illusion : landscape gardens, fabricated ruins, and the diorama, c. 1750 - 1850

This project examines questions of fabrication and authenticity in landscape garden design and the Diorama, bridging England and continental Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, proposing that certain sites rely on illusion and the interpretative value of fabrication. As a space characterized as ‘natural’, the English Landscape Garden was also highly designed; a paradox that manifests in the form of the fabricated ruin. Through four case studies, this project examines a variety of uses and values of illusion in the formation of the landscape and its visual representation. The first half of the project focuses on the design and experience of illusion in the eighteenth-century landscape garden. In England, Wimpole and Wrest Park include fabrications as participatory elements that instill the landscape with an imagined history. Illusion and theatricality are essential elements of the English landscape style as it was translated to the continent. At Schwetzingen, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century landscape attached to Elector’s palace relies on illusion to frame the experience of the ‘natural’ in the ‘English’ style part of the landscape. Representation is the focus of the second half of the project. Theatrical effects and illusion were arguably implicit in the landscape experience, forming the basis for the ‘theatrical’ images in Humphry Repton’s Red Books. The reception of those images further connected the landscape garden with forms of theater in the wider visual culture. By the early nineteenth century, landscape scenes featuring ruins became a common feature of the theater without actors called the Diorama. The illusion of this spectacle derived from experiential expectations established in the landscape garden, which then became a framework for viewing Daguerre’s garden designs at Bry-sur-Marne in the mid-nineteenth century. In these studies, fabricated structures in the garden generate and participate in a culture of fiction and theatrical illusion that is an integral part of the landscape experience and its representation. As fictional and experiential spaces, landscapes with fabricated ruins and their representations create a space where the roles of historical authenticity, illusion, and imagination are negotiated, throwing into question the very nature of fabrication and our relation to history.Art Histor

Simulacra : constructing narrative in the studio tableau

Bibliography: pages 61-63.The content and form of the work completed for this degree is intended as a narrative. This narrative is constructed to tell stories of my family, and of myself, in a way that openly stresses the playful, mythical, and fictional nature of such narratives in the family and in history. These narratives are not always easily recognisable, believable, or unified, and are read through an arrangement of details. Initially, I intended my tableaux to function as 'emblematic' portraits. In other words, I intended to describe the members of my family by distilling their essential characteristics into a descriptive arrangement of symbolic objects. Although I became aware of the limitations of symbolism, and became more interested in narrative and display, the content of my work has remained personal and descriptive, even though I have emphasised the fictional over the elegiac. My family is not really one of collectors - my grandmother tore up and burnt many of our family photographs when my grandfather died, before she went into an old-age home. She wanted to 'travel light'. What we have left are the stories, the anecdotes and the proverbs: an oral history, or a ·postmemory'. These inherited tales are told through the snapshots that did survive, as they are in all families who take pictures. I have retold and reconstructed my own narratives, because this is the nature of the family romance for everyone - it resides in a world of images, incidental details, and surfaces

The Powell-Cotton Dioramas and the Re-interpretation of an Idyll

This research examines the natural habitat dioramas created by Major P.H.G. Powell-Cotton, in doing so it affects a remembering of a sense of place where a diorama reflects in Mieke Bal's view a three-dimensionality that draws on architectural space; it then considers the three dimensional representation of the landscape within the diorama itself; the two-dimensional illusion of a trompe l'oeil landscape painting; and the exterior space occupied by the viewer. The Powell-Cotton natural habitat dioramas exist behind large glass screens their purpose follows an aesthetic relationship with the emergence of the natural habitat diorama and the ability to transfix perception through the re-interpretation of an idyll. The potential for this practice-based research was to explore the possibility of developing an aesthetic for sculpture and architectural space. However in focussing on the Powell-Cotton dioramas the notion of aesthetic attitude would lose ground due to their idiosyncratic, artificial, and extraordinary nature, it then prepared the basis of interpretation in establishing 'theatres of landscape' as an open concept. With landscape, a sense of place anticipates various positions and numerous delays; it recollects the cognitive knowledge brought to the prospect that involves aspects in, of and about landscape. Regarding the studio-based project, the diorama was placed between the real and the unreal, challenging Bal's rationale of the cognitive relationship of a diorama to the concept of a discursive space. Where both artist and viewer 'activates' this space with their presence, they bring their own recollection of landscape and by assigning landscape with memory the potentiality is where cognition becomes accentuated. Whereas the unknown and uncharted can refute reality, memory is dependent on what is known both formally and informally, it places the natural habitat diorama in a visual system that is both constructive and destructive. Therefore the research methodology examines the historical context of the diorama through a doctoral thesis by Karen Wonders and an analysis of Louis Daguerre's diorama by Richard Altick. Following Bal's analysis of the diorama, this created a dilemma - in what ways are the perceptions of the observer determined, and how are they undermined? Jonathan Crary and Giuliana Bruno considered the diorama's position in relation to film and film archaeology, which ultimately the diorama and natural habitat diorama could not compete with. In asking what has Powell-Cotton's museum to offer in the 21st century, this thesis examines the concept of a diorama, its objectives and correspondingly its failings. As the dioramas in the Powell-Cotton Museum were undocumented, these dioramas and their written, visual and architectural relationship to Louis Daguerre offer a contribution to knowledge concurrent with the relationship of this practice based research project. Whereupon the research diary forms the basis of a contribution to new knowledge in the construction of small and large-scale dioramas, sculpture and installations. By challenging Bal's analysis this research practice would investigate natural and projected light and the visual language of transparency, translucency and opacity in the representation of landscape and landscape as motif, and progressing to the structural implications of 2D and 3D work

Keeping Up Appearances: Analysis of the Look-At-Me Generation

My thesis consists of a series of mixed media sculptures exaggeratedly depicting the affects of technology that allows humans to instantly communicate with one another, such as the social networking tool, Facebook. My works deal with the idea of a preoccupation with creating an image of oneself to project to other people. I wanted to explore how now with the ability to instantly update one another on what is happening in our everyday lives, every mundane detail becomes important and more important situations we deal with become less so. My work is similar to that of the artist Red Grooms and reflects similar ideas to the work of Jim Henson. My sculptures are dioramas, a term originally coined by Jacques Louis Daguerre. Each diorama is either a computer or a television, the devices used for instantly communicating and projecting reflections of reality. I used crude materials such as cardboard and duct tape to create my dioramas. I believe that the impermanence of these materials sheds light on the brevity of our focus on any I don’t intend to cast any judgment. I believe that I take part in what is occurring in my generation, the Look-At-Me generation, as much as the next member. 1 want to pose questions such as, how are websites like Facebook and YouTube and the technological capabilities we have using iPhones, etc, affecting us? My hope is that my one issue. dioramas raise this question and more

Enhancing illusionism within the encased contemporary art diorama through the integration of screen-based animated film

In the late nineteen eighties artists started to create a highly illusionistic type of small scaled diorama, which I refer to as the encased contemporary art diorama. Such dioramas are typically presented encased in a box-like structure with a glazed viewing window situated at the front. Artifice such as realistically coloured and shaped miniature forms, strategically positioned mirrors and quantified atmospheric lighting are used to enhance the verisimilitude of the mimetic resemblance to life-sized reality. As a maker of animated films, I became curious about the ways in which illusionism within such dioramas might be enhanced through the integration of screen-based animated film. To pursue this line of enquiry, I first strove to understand how illusionism functions within encased contemporary art dioramas, and I travelled to Lyon, France to view an exhibition of such dioramas at the Musee Miniature et Cinema. As there is an apparent lack of text on how illusionism functions within such dioramas, I modelled my initial research on texts about illusionism in representational pictures, how artists create visual illusions and the role of the viewer in the formation and perception of illusions. I engaged the writing of Michael Fish to assist in identifying different illusion types. To fully view the interior of an encased contemporary art diorama, the viewer must alter the location of their eyes in relation to the diorama and its contents, concurrently the encasement prevents any tactile appraisal of the diorama’s contents. I refer to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment to account for the ways the viewer’s embodiment can influence their perception of dioramic illusions. The outcomes of my studio practice include animated films, and dioramas both with and without screen-based animated film integrated within them. The resulting illusions achieved are appraised and discussed, limitations are identified, and future potentials contemplated.Doctor of Philosoph

Infinite Horizons : Le Corbusier, the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau dioramas and the science of visual distance

The Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau was a building central to the development of Le Corbusier’s architecture and key to the role played by painting in his work. Significantly, as a prototype living space and as a setting for Purist art, it not only established Le Corbusier’s vision for contemporary architecture and urbanism, it also served as a demonstration of principles developed in collaboration with Amédée Ozenfant through their joint editorship of L’Esprit Nouveau. In the pages of the journal are numerous references to the nature of visual sensation and to the science of vision, but to what extent do the paintings and other material displayed in the pavilion reflect these ideas? Concentrating primarily on the panoramic images of the city displayed in the pavilion’s dioramas and on the contrasting nature of Le Corbusier’s paintings at this time, this paper considers the influence of nineteenth-century science and visual culture on his work