On Tue, 30 Aug 1994 11:06:45 EDT, Barbara Weitbrecht, Smithsonian wrote:
>Leaving aside for the moment the question of how well the creation of
>the gallery script for the Enola Gay exhibit ("The Last Act") was
>handled (and I understand that few critics have seen the actual
>gallery script, and that most of the copies of the script in circulation
>are obsolete), there is an interesting larger question here for
>museum professionals.
>
>Given that you own a really "hot" artifact -- the Enola Gay, for
>instance -- around which controversy still gathers, how do you as
>a museum handle it? Do you 1) leave it in deep storage accessible
>only to researchers, 2) mount it without contextual information (as
>I understand "Boxcar", the Nagasaki bomber, is displayed,) or 3)
>provide interpretive material to put the object in its historical
>context?
>
>And if you choose to interpret, do you try to present all possible
>points of view equally, or do you adopt an institutional viewpoint?
>Who decides what that viewpoint should be? What kinds of community
>input and review do you solicit while planning the exhibit? How do
>you present viewpoints that differ from the one you choose to present
>as the institutional perspective?
>
>"Enola" is an especially tricky artifact because there *are* opposing
>viewpoints regarding it, and emotions are still hot after fifty years.
>Most infamous objects one might display have only one currently
>acceptable viewpoint -- one would not, for instance, present a
>"balanced" interpretation of Nazi memorabilia or a slave ship,
>because these things, though once approved by many, are no longer
>acceptable in our society. But the horrors of Hiroshima, as well
>as the horrors of Japanese aggression that led to the destruction
>of Hiroshima, are still painful parts of living memory. Anyone who
>doubts this should talk to the survivors, and the children and
>grandchildren of the survivors, of both sets of horrors.
>
>"Enola" presents us with the problem of representing moral ambiguity --
>the idea that something can be simultaneously horrible and necessary --
>in a museum exhibit. This is not a comfortable concept for most people,
>who would rather have all things be right or wrong. And it's an
>especially difficult concept to represent in an exhibit space, where
>people steer their own course among artifacts and explanatory text.
>I frankly doubt that most people can make the necessary moral synthesis
>after an hour or less in an exhibit, however well designed and presented.
>
>Reading the articles in the papers, I find myself wondering how other
>museums have faced this kind of challenge, and how successful their
>efforts have been.
>
>The above are my own opinions, despite my institutional affiliation.
>My colleagues, and NASM administration, will have their own points
>of view.
>
> +------------------------------+------------------------+
> | Barbara Weitbrecht | [log in to unmask] |
> | National Air & Space Museum | [log in to unmask] |
> | Smithsonian Institution | (202) 357-4162 |
> +------------------------------+------------------------+
I was going to stay out of this one, but okay. I don't think the
problem is that people -- or museums -- have difficulty with moral
ambiguity. I think it is that people don't recognize that "history" is a
construct, an intellectual artifice that is different from "the past,"
which, if it means anything, is the uninterpreted sum total of human
experience, recorded or not, up until the moment you read this. History,
to put it another way, is the sense we make of the past and what we are
talking about here is not MORAL AMBIGUITY but CONFLICT over how to
interpret, that is, what meaning to derive from, what happened.
To put it another way, the conflict is at least as much over issues such
as,
* whose story is this?
* where does the story rightfully begin?
* what do you have to know to make the story intelligible?
* what assumptions, if any, can we make about what people already know
or think, if anything? (This is the country that, after all, had to be
reminded by Ken Burns that we had a Civil War in which real people,
Americans, killed each other in huge numbers systematically for more
than four years. I have yet to hear whether anything like a formative
evaluation or visitor study has been conducted in conjunction with this
exhibit; everyone seems to be going on gut feelings and visceral, reflex
responses, but that's a separate question.)
* And, by the way, which people, that is, visitors, are we talking
about anyway?
as about which acts are moral or under what circumstances they might
become moral.
If we learned anything from "Mining the Museum" and "The West as America,
" -- or, for that matter, the Vietnam Memorial -- it is that
interpretation is EVERYTHING, that, unless you work very hard to lay the
groundwork and offer opportunities to respond, visitors will resist and
even not allow museums to offer revisionist, tendentious, or playful
historical points of view, that visitors take the authority of museums
VERY seriously, much more seriously than we do. And, as absent-minded
about their national experience as they are, Americans, like most
peoples, take their history very seriously, since our history is our
national statement of who we think we are and what we are trying to be.
And, I will say yet again, there is no such thing as no context;
everything we do or fail to do is a statement. It may or may not be
appropriate to say nothing about Boxcar, but that is a DECISION and it
should be informed by SOMETHING. Maybe I'm simpleminded but when you
exhibit something it is for one of two reasons: People know about it and
want to see it, or people don't know about it and either ought to see it
for some reason or would want to see it, for some reason, if they knew
about it. Which is the case with Boxcar? When you exhibit Boxcar without
saying something, or saying very little, you are saying that people
already know what they need to know or can figure out from the setting
what they need to know about it or what sense to make of it or, perhaps,
most charitably, will be made curious enough by what they see to seek out
more understanding later. Is any of those statements true and, if we
think so, how do we know?
If we are not more introspective or self-reflexive about what we are
doing, episodes like the Enola Gay are going to happen over and over
again. We have been given the responsibility, albeit semi-consciously
and not, of course, single-handedly, of helping people structure their
understanding of the world, the universe, the human experience. If we
bungle it, they have a right to get upset.
Ken Yellis
Assistant Director for Public Programs
Peabody Museum of Natural History
170 Whitney Avenue
Box 208118
New Haven, CT 06520-8118
[log in to unmask]
(203) 432-9891/9816(fax)
|
