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Random Thursday: Museum Roundup
Nov. 26th, 2015 12:11 pmI usually hit a few NYC museums while here, especially if there are interesting special exhibits. We'd tried to get together a textile geek group to go see the display on Fashion and Virtue: Textile Patterns and the Print Revolution, 1520–1620 but the group plan fell apart and I ended up going by myself while L was taking care of the matinee on Sunday.
The exhibition title isn't exactly descriptive. The basis of the show is how the rise of popularly available printed motif books for needlework and lace affected and encouraged domestic production, as well as promulgating the image of home needlework as a womanly virtue. The display includes a number of actual printed motif books, showing the types of designs that were included as well as how the users interacted with them (e.g., painting in color ideas where a duplicate outline had been included for that purpose). There are textiles on display showing the same types of decorative motifs in use, in some cases the exact ones in the books, but more often simply very similar ones. (And it was noted in the explanatory material that the motifs were not generally intended to be copied exactly, but rather to be used as inspiration, or to be combined in novel ways.)
One particularly interesting section comes from a private collection of types of lace that combines pattern books images (not the originals in this case) with examples of the result. (Most of the lace examples were small fragments only, which made me wonder if they had come out of the often-descructive textile antiquity trade at some point.)
The second museum from this trip was the Natural History Museum, which is just a short walk up the west side of Central Park from L's apartment. In some ways, it's a bit retro in terms of the collection: the big dioramas of mounted wildlife collected when one went out on safaris to collect museum specimens, the very distancing/othering displays of historic cultures of non-European locations that create the image of a frozen "primitive" past with possibly some passing reference at the end to the introduction of new artistic motifs via colonialism.
It always bothers me when artifacts that most likely were collected in the 19th century are presented as representing an undifferentiated ancient past. There's also the problematic aspect of including certain human societies in a "natural history" museum, rather than in the context of a more universal human anthropology collection. There are, of course, logistical problems even with simply updating the context and presentation of a collection like this. But I can't help thinking it could use some prominent meta-commentary on the messages given by juxtaposing the diorama of "animals of the African veldt" with a diorama of "tribal life on the African veldt". Fortunately, I was able to enjoy the display of gems and minerals with fewer twinges, though at L's preference we avoided the special display on spiders.
Then yesterday we went down to the Brooklyn Museum which is the permanent home of Judy Chicago's massive installation The Dinner Party, which I had never seen before. It's definitely worth a visit if you haven't and have the slightest interest. The needlework alone is worth a great deal of appreciation, though it's unfortunate that the back drapes of the table runners are essentially impossible to examine. I confess I found the table runners more interesting visually than the plates, many of which were too abstract to be able to connect with their designated guests.
The reference display giving brief bios of the featured guests and even briefer listings of the secondary names was intriguing from two angles. The more frivolous one was "how many of these women am I familiar with?" (I'd estimate something over 50% in my case, but I didn't make an actual count). The other angle was to note how much the choice and contextualization is a product of the particular time and place of creation. One can view the romanticized unhistoricity of the supposed transition from woman-centered goddess culture to patriarchy as symbolic myth-making rather than literal misrepresentation.
I found it a little harder to ignore the uneven geographic/cultural distribution of dinner guests. The primary focus is undeniably on Western/Mediterranean culture and history (including, of course, European-derived US culture/history), with solid (if numerically minor) representation by native cultures of the Americas and at least a few nods to non-white figures who participated in Western culture. Glaringly absent is any substantial representation from non-Mediterranean Africa, from Asia, or from Australia and the Pacific, with the exception of the occasional mythic figure such as the goddess Kali. This criticism is valid only to the extent that the work is presented as universal. If one receives it as specifically examining the place of women in Western culture, the oversights are fewer. And it might be more validly viewed as a personal response of the artist to the influences on her own history and worldview. (As I type this, I start thinking about the long tradition of criticizing women's art for not meeting some impossible standard that is not imposed on men's art.)
The exhibition title isn't exactly descriptive. The basis of the show is how the rise of popularly available printed motif books for needlework and lace affected and encouraged domestic production, as well as promulgating the image of home needlework as a womanly virtue. The display includes a number of actual printed motif books, showing the types of designs that were included as well as how the users interacted with them (e.g., painting in color ideas where a duplicate outline had been included for that purpose). There are textiles on display showing the same types of decorative motifs in use, in some cases the exact ones in the books, but more often simply very similar ones. (And it was noted in the explanatory material that the motifs were not generally intended to be copied exactly, but rather to be used as inspiration, or to be combined in novel ways.)
One particularly interesting section comes from a private collection of types of lace that combines pattern books images (not the originals in this case) with examples of the result. (Most of the lace examples were small fragments only, which made me wonder if they had come out of the often-descructive textile antiquity trade at some point.)
The second museum from this trip was the Natural History Museum, which is just a short walk up the west side of Central Park from L's apartment. In some ways, it's a bit retro in terms of the collection: the big dioramas of mounted wildlife collected when one went out on safaris to collect museum specimens, the very distancing/othering displays of historic cultures of non-European locations that create the image of a frozen "primitive" past with possibly some passing reference at the end to the introduction of new artistic motifs via colonialism.
It always bothers me when artifacts that most likely were collected in the 19th century are presented as representing an undifferentiated ancient past. There's also the problematic aspect of including certain human societies in a "natural history" museum, rather than in the context of a more universal human anthropology collection. There are, of course, logistical problems even with simply updating the context and presentation of a collection like this. But I can't help thinking it could use some prominent meta-commentary on the messages given by juxtaposing the diorama of "animals of the African veldt" with a diorama of "tribal life on the African veldt". Fortunately, I was able to enjoy the display of gems and minerals with fewer twinges, though at L's preference we avoided the special display on spiders.
Then yesterday we went down to the Brooklyn Museum which is the permanent home of Judy Chicago's massive installation The Dinner Party, which I had never seen before. It's definitely worth a visit if you haven't and have the slightest interest. The needlework alone is worth a great deal of appreciation, though it's unfortunate that the back drapes of the table runners are essentially impossible to examine. I confess I found the table runners more interesting visually than the plates, many of which were too abstract to be able to connect with their designated guests.
The reference display giving brief bios of the featured guests and even briefer listings of the secondary names was intriguing from two angles. The more frivolous one was "how many of these women am I familiar with?" (I'd estimate something over 50% in my case, but I didn't make an actual count). The other angle was to note how much the choice and contextualization is a product of the particular time and place of creation. One can view the romanticized unhistoricity of the supposed transition from woman-centered goddess culture to patriarchy as symbolic myth-making rather than literal misrepresentation.
I found it a little harder to ignore the uneven geographic/cultural distribution of dinner guests. The primary focus is undeniably on Western/Mediterranean culture and history (including, of course, European-derived US culture/history), with solid (if numerically minor) representation by native cultures of the Americas and at least a few nods to non-white figures who participated in Western culture. Glaringly absent is any substantial representation from non-Mediterranean Africa, from Asia, or from Australia and the Pacific, with the exception of the occasional mythic figure such as the goddess Kali. This criticism is valid only to the extent that the work is presented as universal. If one receives it as specifically examining the place of women in Western culture, the oversights are fewer. And it might be more validly viewed as a personal response of the artist to the influences on her own history and worldview. (As I type this, I start thinking about the long tradition of criticizing women's art for not meeting some impossible standard that is not imposed on men's art.)
