Loose Endings

Today was a day of tying up loose ends and endings. I started the day with retrieving my keys and going up to the galleries to look around, on my own, behind locked doors, one more time. I went through each gallery, recognizing many of the pieces and knowing their histories now from my label writing stint, looking at some of my favorites. But mainly it was to bookend my experiences, and take advantage of a privilege I hope to have in the future, but probably will not for some time.

The rest of my time was spent in finishing up the research on trade and cleaning up my findings so that they were actually intelligible. In the end, I had information on the anthropological categorizations of trade, general patterns (mainly direct and indirect), and separate histories of lapis lazuli and the Silk Road. I sorted out my other documents and research, went through some of it, and sent all of my work from Winterim to Adam for him to look at. Hopefully, this will not be the last that I see of that work and the museum, but it is still an ending, at least until January when I will potentially start an internship up and continue work on Global|Local. 

The experiences I've had and the skills I've learned, not to mention the ability and opportunity I've had to produce my own work, has made this a fantastic Winterim experience. Not only was I able to experience, on a very small scale of course, the workings and life of an art museum, and the duties and obligations of an art historian working in such an institution. I not only had a fantastic time within the boundaries of the three weeks, but also will likely continue work outside of Winterim, and so make it a lasting and comprehensive project not limited to the wonderful time window we have in November. 

Penultimate

I spent the first hour of this morning doing more research on trade background, more so on there anthropology of it and it's patterns and less about specific items like lapis lazuli that I did yesterday. At 10 I met with Mr. Griffith and Adam to go over my independent study, just to make sure that both sides of my supervision connected and could communicate. After discussing my performance, we spoke a little bit about Winterim as a program, what could be improved, and how to make a lasting relationship between TMA and MV through Winterim and beyond. I think that my experience at TMA has been very valuable and might be counted as a successful Independent Study due to my fulfillment of a tangible project with  applicable goals that have assisted in a broader sense in my education, along with giving my the opportunity to explore a field I am theoretically interested in working in in the future. Overall, I think I managed to have the luck to find a situation that I could make into an experience that fit my needs with a level of involvement and experience suited to my situation and interest.

Now, this also leads into the fact that I could potentially continue work on Global|Local outside of Winterim, as a rather non-intensive internship with TMA throughout next semester. Now, I hope that I will be able to balance that out and work with it, and I am very excited by the prospect, but it also leads into another aspect of Winterim in that, however amazing the experience is, and I do think it is fantastic, it is by nature very insular and almost always limited to a 3 week experience. Though a wonderful life event perhaps, three weeks, at least in the Independent Study I have done, does not give a huge range of time for improvement. Yes, I have done so in the scope of things, but not nearly as much as I potentially could due to temporal limitations. So, more food for thought I suppose. 

After that meeting, I went to Visitor Engagement. Adam is the current head, but more as an interim who will step down once a permanent head may be found. As a result, today's meeting was focused on outlining what the group wants and does not want in a new head, particularly in regards to Adam's own performance, though there was not nearly as much direct commentary as he seemed to invite. It seems this lack of criticism might be a Midwestern thing, but I have not tested this hypothesis, just an observation. Anyways, it was interesting to hear what people wanted in a leader, and although pretty standard, there were some ideas, such as experience in museums, that sparked a slight interest because of how those present held the museum to be a different entity. I suppose to a certain extent this is true of any group, and can be seen even at MV. 

I spent the rest of the day researching trade, finally blocking out much of the stock jargon that had cluttered up my search yesterday through focusing on the anthropological study of trade. This yielded some interesting results, but if haven't done it in a clean version yet and only have my rather haphazard notes, so I'll have to make all of that pretty tomorrow. 

Regurgitated and Spewed

Today I transitioned out of straight writing for the exhibit and dabbled a little bit in more research and history aspects of huge exhibit. I'm still on trade, so likely will not branch out to any other sections of the exhibit in the next two days before my time is up. Today, since I finished the physical/artistic descriptions yesterday, I studied the history of trade, different types, and how certain commodities, like lapis lazuli, were transported from one place to another. I'm not sure where this will factor in, but it provides background information for the show. Now, I've done my fair share of research and paper writing, and thought myself fairly adept at combing through the internet for pertinent, and reliable, information. However, the problem that I ran into with types of trade was that it all wanted to focus on modern day trading and things like stock exchange, which isn't really want I'm interested in at all. In the end, I couldn't even find a source that would outline the differences of types of trading, like down-zither-line vs. direct, both of which I have a fairly sound idea of, let alone outline different and less common terms. All in all, decidedly rather frustrating and a bit of a time drain. In the end, I simply researched the history of lapis lazuli, and finding a few mentions of it traveling on the Silk Road (the only mentions of methods of trade I could find), also did some research on that. I'll probably continue tomorrow, but it was rather frustrating due to the lack of information. The internet is obviously a wonderful resource, but I often have a love hate relationship with it similar to this occasion. It's immensely difficult to find detailed information on even mildly obscure topics, and often all of the sites seem to have copied one another because each yields very little new information. For me, much of the internet is useful, but rarely have I found it capable of replacing the thoroughness of books in less well known areas, whether that be the Federal Writers' Project I the Great Depression for APUSH last year or lapis lazuli and ancient trade patterns today. 

Although looking for the background information today was interesting, it was a little bit more frustrating and disheartening than most of the work I had done so far. Obviously every job has its own less than pleasant aspects, that's only to be expected. However, I think that today only proved how important art is because it gives a first person peak into events, culture, and ideas in the past rather than relying on the regurgitated and spewed information that encounters many attempts to work with history today. Not to say history isn't lovely, I still adore it, but it does seem to lack a little bit of the flair of working with art, though first person documents might help and obviously I'm working with some very low level stuff here. Hopefully I'll have better luck next time. 

Routine

Becoming accustomed to something is a curious thing. When I first came to the museum, I never thought I would lose my wonder at being there, but with two and a half weeks patterns form and routines fall into place. I seem to start a lot of my blog posts with this morning, and so a routine becomes visible. Turning on my computer in the morning, fetching and flipping through doc files, saying "Good morning, how are you?" to others working in the office: it's all a part of the world I have entered. 

So, to keep that pattern alive, this morning I wrote a few more physical descriptions, then attended the weekly curatorial meeting. The items discussed included elevator decoration, a possible series called Encounters that focuses on the juxtapositions of pieces that would not generally be seen together, and the acquisition of a set of Japanese screens. Now these screens  caused some slight hilarity to those present, and I'm not sure this is in the minutes so this might be the only record, but there are some aspects of these screens that will likely not be emphasized with the general public. For instance, one shows a male brothel/tea house, which might cause some slight controversy. The other shows a theatre that also runs a female prostitution business. So  a little bit more racy than art at TMA might generally lean towards, but interesting nonetheless. Although the nature of the screens is certainly am using, their function as an addition to the collection is rather more instructional in that they will rotate with and Sistine screen to decrease damage from light, something the head of conservation has been hounding the curators about. 

On that note of preservation, I will also admit to wandering up to the Fresh Impressions exhibit after I had finished my work for the afternoon. This show is very unique because all of the pieces but five of them are from the permanent collection, but the majority have not been displayed since the 1930s due to their nature as prints. Pieces on paper are particularly susceptible to damage by light, so they can not remain on display for long, and the vividness of these Japanese woodcut prints show how brilliantly well preserved prints can shine eve a century later. They focus on the shin hanga movement, a new wave of Japanese print making in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The prints were gorgeous, many displaying an interesting mixture of western influence but still clinging to traditional Japanese design. This including more overt sensuality and modern landscapes, but also focused on traditional theatre characters as subjects. It really is an amazing show, and as something rarely accessible to the. Public (and free), I would urge you, who ever is out there, to go. You truly have no excuse not to. It's a round until January 1. It was interesting to see an exhibit now with the backstage knowledge I have of their production and planning, and I certainly saw the labels In a rather new light. 

Three more days and counting until the routine is broken.  

The Way I See It

This morning started out with talking to Adam about my labels, not to sound like a broken record or anything, and I think they're ready to be sent off to the head editor. Mainly there were some nitpicky and grammar mistakes, things about terminology and awkward phrasing. 

Now on to the next item of business, in which is hall be writing physical descriptions of objects. One problems with doing an academic show is that the labels tend to discuss less of the composition and   the appearance of the piece, and more about the importance of its form and materials, and how those illustrate the point we're trying to make. As a result, my next job is to write paragraphs on how the symbolism and composition of the objects do affect the meaning, such as why Lord Amherst looms over the Canton harbor in his portrait, which is likely to show the power that the British saw themselves as wielding over ther other nations, and their greater importance. This should take me through about Wednesday, and then I don't know what I'll be doing for the two remaining days. 

It's interesting to have met with such success on my first attempt at label writing because it holds the potential to inflate my belief in my abilities. That sounds a bit egotistical, but still entirely true. However, the other side of the coin is that is that even when just discussing mundane points of the exhibit, philosophical theories such as Cosmopolitanism come up, which I have little to no exposure to, or else cultural theories and history that I am faintly aware of but does not lend itself to the high school history text book, and so I am not well acquainted with it. This mixture of experiences has left me with the distinct impression of having much to learn, obviously, but even having conversations today feels easier, and I feel more informed, than I did two weeks ago. Obviously, I have not even approached becoming a true art historian, but that's what college is for, right? The way I see it, I have started a process of thinking like an art historian, if only ever so slightly, and had a taste of my future. A glimpse that leaves me ready for more. 

Oz

Today was a relatively calm day at the office, though I suppose things don't every really get crazy in regards to label writing. I went through the labels very carefully today, and will discuss all of them in detail with Adam on Tuesday.

In the afternoon, I had run out of things to do so I asked another curator, Tom Loeffler, the curator of paper pieces and books, if I could assist with anything. He gave me a list of objects to look up, which I spent the rest of my afternoon with. I haven't worked with prints or other paper pieces as much yet outside of the Liber Chronicarum, or Nuremberg Chronicle, that's included in the trade line as a book that includes a world "history" from creation to 1493, and so involves some fairly accurate prints of foreign cities. Although not pertaining to globalization in the least, these pieces will be going up in an exhibit that corresponds to the Tuileries exhibit scheduled to open in February. I have done a tiny bit of work for him before, and the interesting things is trying to see how patterns, methods, and subject matter in prints and etchings correspond to cultural movements and other artistic trends.

With the second week at an end, the feeling of time flying too quickly has only increased, and made me realize I am on the other side of the hump in regards to this project. Of course, I look forward to resuming normal classes, and Thanksgiving before that, but it feels slightly reminiscent of Dorothy waking up to realize it was all a dream, though of course that comes with the potential benefit of realizing "there's nowhere like home," or my routine life, as well. Sorry the post is so short, but I didn't have enough today to fill a long one.

The Trials of Success

Let's bask in these words for a few moments: all twenty labels are written.

Of course, what that leaves out is that they still need to be torn apart by Paula Reich, through whose skilled hands every label passes, generally leaving with more than a little red ink, but nonetheless, it feels like a mile stone. I still have work, and an overwhelming amount to learn that can never be accomplished in these three weeks, but it's a step. I looked over 6-8 with Adam today, who tore them apart a little bit, though happily not wide open, and he said I was on the right track, so hopefully the others won't face a gory death either.

Other than the slight excitement of labels, I also attended a Visitor Engagement meeting today, during which the discussion focused mainly on job description and communication within the museum. Although not necessarily pertaining to art history, it certainly shows an important facet of how the museum works, the behind the scenes that result in beautiful art in pristine galleries, and seamless, enjoyable exhibits for visitors to see. One concern raised was that those involved in projects would be volunteered without their knowledge, and so end up with much more work than they could handle, which obviously presents a valid concern. It seems that in the past (and possibly in the present), communication within the museum has been a problem. The museum has been transparent with the public, practically to fault (to quote someone else), yet, as always, people working together feel little desire to hurt each other's feelings or rock the boat. These are natural, human feelings, that almost anyone has fallen prey to, myself very much so included. However, that silence is at the expense of the institution at times, which presents the question of how to deal with these issues as they come up. These problems are practically universal: in almost any human situation, you must interact with social awareness and care, finding the line between overcompensating and rash disregard. In this way, the museum is like any other institution, a network of individuals who must work together in set positions, yet with a little bit of muddling, regardless of whether they're crunching baseball statistics or transporting and displaying priceless pieces of art. This also presents a difference between the museum world and academic art history world, where I would guess the power structure and goals are considerably different, though that is obviously simple conjecture and guess with little basis in reality.

All in all, today was a day like any other: one where I sat in a building with an elegant marble facade, beneath rooms that, in places, have more worth per square foot monetarily than Fort Knox, and more cultural capital than one could ever put a number on. So I would venture to say it was a success.