Museums: a Visual Anthropology

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Museums: A visual anthropology a

Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert a

Cyprus University of Technology Published online: 27 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert (2014) Museums: A visual anthropology, Visual Studies, 29:1, 110-112, DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2014.863024 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2014.863024

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present an opportunity rather than a threat’ (32). The following four chapters show how practitioners of everyday life innovate in their worlds, focusing respectively on self-managed health care (Kyle Kilbourn), hearing (Dennis Day), and moving through the streets (Griet Scheldeman) and designing joysticks for off-road construction vehicles (Max Rolfstam and Jacob Buur). Each chapter shows the experiential moments and contingencies of being part of these social, sensory and material environments. The contributors demonstrate how as a participant and practitioner in health care, hearing, urban movement and operation of construction vehicles, people continually move on, earn and become skilled within and in relation to persons, artefacts and environments. The ‘unfinishedness’ of the designed objects, experiences or services that are part of these environments and activities critiques the idea of designing to change discrete behaviours, in favour of designing to enable people to innovate in everyday life activity. Johan Redström introduces Part II with a critical reflection on the temporalities of design. He departs from assumptions that ‘first designers design, then users use’ (83) towards a ‘more relational understanding of designing and using’ (84). Contrasting the ongoingness of design in craft practices to how design is conceived as a series of fixed events in the context of mass production, he argues that ‘if we persist in keeping things static, objects will just appear as given out of nowhere in our accounts’ (95). The following chapters pursue these issues. Lesley McFayden draws on archaeological and architectural thinking to reconceptualise the temporal relationship between building and design, reordering the relationship between use and design to see use as inextricable from creativity. Donovan and Gunn challenge the linear processes associated with the design prototype, in favour of the unfinished, relational provotype, which people continue to shape. Henry Larsen and Claus Have argue that we need to account for how use emerges in and through interaction with others, through an autoethnographic example of the emergence of hearing aid use. Benedicte Brøgger adds another layer of complexity by conceptualising branding, the design of business concepts and service marketing as forms of ‘waremaking’, which require craftsmanship and are played out in sales environments, meaning purchase is also part of design. Part III is introduced by Peter-Paul Verbeek, who argues that because ‘designing objects implies designing human beings as well’, Design Anthropology should be based on a ‘thorough conceptualization of the relations between

humans and things’ (172). In the following chapters, Mette Kjaesgaard and Ton Otto argue for Design Anthropology to engage anthropological fieldwork practice that involves producing insights through creating interventions in everyday worlds. Nynke Tromp and Paul Hekkert discuss how design might change behaviour, reviewing psychological and sociological approaches to behaviour, which inform a series to potential designs that seek to change eating behaviour. Jamie Wallace suggests designers and anthropologists might attend to the materially mediated rather than discursive elements of the processes they work through, and Steven Dorrestijn focuses on the role of technical mediation in design. As with any edited volume, Design and Anthropology is not without its inconsistencies. I found Part III generally, and Tromp and Hekkert’s discussion of sociological and psychological techniques towards behaviour change particularly, less consistent with the project of Design Anthropology developed earlier in the book. I would also have liked to see a greater balance of theoretical, methodological and ethnographic scholarship across the chapters. However, these issues are not so much flaws to the book, than symptomatic of the status of Design Anthropology as an emergent field of practice. This book is a very welcome advance towards filling gaps I have found in design thinking and in social science approaches to rethinking design. Design and Anthropology reinforces the need to go beyond conventional design approaches by attending to people as everyday innovators, remaking their environments and engaging technologies and services in their worlds anew. It moreover advances the relationship between design and the social sciences by surpassing the limits of debates between approaches based on behaviour change psychology and sociological appropriations of social practice theory.

© 2014 Sarah Pink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2014.863023 Museums: A visual anthropology by Mary Bouquet London, New York: Berg, 2012, 243 pages ISBN-13: 978-1845208127 (paperback) Price: US$29.95 Reviewed by Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, Cyprus University of Technology Using diverse interdisciplinary literature from anthropology, sociology, museum studies and art history,

Reviews

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Museums: A Visual Anthropology explores the complex histories and practices of collecting, archiving, exhibiting and displaying with a special emphasis on the visual. Bouquet touches upon a variety of topics which are considered ‘hot issues’ in museum studies and anthropology nowadays, including power, representation, commemoration, identity and repatriation. She skillfully merges the most important developments in literature with personal investigation, observation and reflection. Her main points are reinforced with the use of representative case studies from various parts of the world. From the Teylers Museum (Netherlands) to the Louvre Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates) and the Pitt Rivers Museum (United Kingdom), the author explores the diverse motivations of collectors, reveals museum back stages, discusses disputes over ownership, and investigates national narratives constructed through material culture and exhibition displays. This is the second book in the series Key Texts in the Anthropology of Visual and Material Culture edited by Marcus Banks, which focuses on studies of visual anthropology and material culture from an anthropological perspective. Museums: A Visual Anthropology aims at providing accessible texts for students and is advertised as an essential reading for students of anthropology and museum studies. Perhaps for this reason, each chapter concludes with three useful boxes containing: (1) key concepts explored in the text, (2) exercises for students in the form of questions and (3) key readings for further independent study. Nevertheless, I believe that the main contribution of this book is its special emphasis on the visual. A number of books have already dealt in depth with the anthropology and history of museums. Bouquet mentions several of these books and highlights their contribution to the field of museum studies. However, not many books about museums place their emphasis on the visual aspects of museum practices. The author makes explicit efforts to isolate visual elements inside (and outside) museums and to discuss their narratives and meanings. For example, Bouquet explores the relationship between museum websites and the museums they represent (Chapter 1), how the architecture of new or renovated museums become national symbols (Chapter 2), how national museums and highly visible masterpieces (such as the Nightwatch and the Mona Lisa) are thought to represent a nation as well as constitute ritual places or objects (Chapter 2), how object classifications and displays influence narratives (Chapters 3 and 5), and how the repatriation of objects and images succeed in

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reinterpreting museum collections and producing new stories and relationships (Chapter 6). The book includes 27 black and white illustrations. Even though general views of the case study museums are necessary, more images would have been welcomed, especially where specific visual elements, such as displays, are discussed. The title of the book indicates that the reader will acquaint himself/herself with museums through the approach of visual anthropology. While reading the book, however, I struggled to understand what the author means by visual anthropology in this context. Does visual anthropology involve using visual methods such as observation, photography, video, etc. for anthropological research? Or does it mean investigating the visual aspects of museums (such as architecture, displays, arrangements, photographs and objects) in order to explore certain issues? That is, does visual anthropology in the context of museums place an emphasis on visual research methods or on the visual manifestations of museums? One can claim that the two cannot be separated, but in reality these are two quite different modes of enquiry. The first one uses visual enquiry methods in order to understand a process and the second one uses the material and visual manifestations of something in order to understand its meaning. Answers to how the author views visual ethnography in museums can be pieced together from various parts of the book. According to the author, the role of ethnographic analysis is to attend ‘to the context of the museum’s setting, the sense of being there, routes through the museum, issues of visibility and invisibility, boundaries between private and public, and the complex interactions between personhood and possessions’ (27). Furthermore, the author explains that: As visual anthropology has expanded its scope from an earlier-almost exclusive-association with ethnographic film and photography, it has come to include, via the materialities of these media, a range of visual and material culture: from art, landscape, technology, architecture and consumption to heritage-and hence, museums and their particular ways of materializing culture. (8) This last statement clearly steers away from an emphasis on visual methods to the actual visual elements of objects, buildings and technologies. Despite this, this ambitious book attempts to tackle both modes of enquiry. It uses visual methods to understand processes and visual manifestations to provide an informed understanding of the workings of museums. For example, Chapter 3 deals with the history of ethnographic museums and, through visual documentation/observation, shows how various histories influence the visual arrangement of the objects

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exhibited. The author starts with the history in order to explain the visual. On the other hand, Chapter 5 starts with the visual, specifically with the way objects are displayed in museums, to explore the meanings of these arrangements. This book is an essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between museums and visual anthropology. The exploration of a variety of theoretical issues, the use of diverse methodological approaches as well as the introduction of international case studies makes this book relevant to any museum environment and a useful teaching tool. © 2014 Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2014.863024 What we made: Conversations on art and social cooperation by Tom Finkelpearl Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2013, 388 pages ISBN: 978-0-8223-5289-1 (paperback) Price: US$26.95 Reviewed by Maureen Mullinax, Xavier University What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation by Tom Finkelpearl is an insightful examination of artistic projects that strive to involve people in participatory practices. These projects attempt to deepen community ties, bridge social divides and cultivate sustainable tools for enacting meaningful engagement and reflection on diversity, power relationships and the potential for democracy. The book grew out of a 2003 conversation between Finkelpearl, the Executive Director of Queens Museum, and photographer Wendy Ewald about what Ewald perceived to be a widespread misunderstanding of the purpose and value of her thirty-plus years of collaborative photography projects with children across the globe. Over the years, others working in the community-based arts joined the conversations about the ethics and aesthetics of this work. These dialogues led to this publication of a series of dynamic conversations between social thinkers from a diversity of fields including artists, political scientists, urban planners, educators, philosophers and others about whether these projects are seen as art, the role of the artists and participants, and what makes a project a success. The interdisciplinary result is a rich exploration of what has been variously referred to as community cultural development, community-based arts and grassroots community arts practice. Before launching into the dialogues that make up the majority of the book, Finkelpearl orients the reader by

making two important conceptual points. First, while all of the projects included in the book share a participatory element, he defines a spectrum of activity that characterises the involvement of artists and project participants. He assesses the extent to which the work was a ‘scripted encounter’ in which the artist sets the structures for participation or if the interaction was more ‘de-authored’ and dialogical. Second, he makes a helpful refinement by favouring the term social cooperation over social collaboration, the term commonly used to describe this work. Making the point that collaboration insinuates coequal authorship between artists and participants, Finkelpearl argues that this is an overstatement. In all of these projects, rather, the artist is fundamentally the initiator and the framer of the work. The third accomplishment of his introduction is Finkelpearl’s contextualisation of the field of socially cooperative art within the historical framework of US social movements of the 1960s. Tracing the development of a philosophy of cooperation through the Alinsky-style community organising of the civil rights movement, the participatory democracy of Students for a Democratic Society, the political performance activities of the second wave feminist movement, and the international influence of intellectuals such as Guy DeBord, Joseph Beuys, and Paulo Friere, the author illuminates the influences that shaped the work of early actors in the cooperative art movement. These artists include participants in Fluxus, the international network that aimed to dismantle the egotistical role of the artist in favour of encouraging the view that everyone can be an artist. Finkelpearl also discusses the work of Allan Kaprow, a progressive arts educator, who heavily influenced a new generation of artists dedicated to socially cooperative art such as Suzanne Lacy, a current mentor to younger artists in the field. Because the chapters capture conversations between artists, participants, social theorists and Finkelpearl, the discussions are intensely descriptive, especially of the processes involved in carrying out these projects. Many of them also have an edginess to them as the artists respond to challenging questions such as whether the artistic value of the work or whether participants were manipulated or taken advantage of in some way by the artist. For readers interested in the visual, each chapter includes multiple photographs. Most images are of participants engaged in participatory arts activities such as marching in parades, collectively painting murals, or conducting arts workshops. Several chapters, including the one on Ewald’s Arabic Alphabet project, a collaboration with a group of 10 Arabic-speaking