Achiam and Marandino focus on the 'exhibition' as a chief museum activity, but with a twist. Rather than adopting the traditional strategy of exploring the exhibition as a finished product, analysed and assessed in its effectiveness and reception, they seek a framework that discusses the process of putting together the exhibition as a conceptual and performative act. In other words, the accent is put not on the exhibition as a product, but rather as a process.
A process that, according to the authors, is far more complex, layered, and politically ambiguous than one would think. They note the 'diversity of the agents that are involved in the occasionally disorganised and sometimes opportunistic process of exhibition development'; additionally, being the creation of an exhibition a performative process, 'the science that goes into an exhibition undergoes a transformation process as it is appropriated from its origin, adapted to a museum context, and embodied in an exhibition'. Essentially, the exhibition is a medium - and, therefore, in its perfomativity it carries a message embedded and independent of its content. This morphing of the knowledge material through the exhibition medium is necessary and unavoidable: taking the cue from education studies, Achiam and Marandino argue that the transposition of knowledge from its disciplines to the local setting of delivery (such as th exhibition) is needed in order to make the material 'teachable'.
The question is, what are the agent that have a 'hand', so to speak, in such a process? In the context of the museum, they adopt a diagram that shows, in a vertical hierarchy, the chief agencies that either internally or externally, have a say in the form that knowledge takes within an exhibition. These go from rather wide external forces such as 'civilisation' and 'pedagogy' to others that are narrower in scope and internal to the museum, such as the 'cluster', the 'exhibit' and the 'task' that is performed within. Collectively, and negotiating agency from above and from below, these 'levels of didactic co-determination' essentially decide the form that knowledge will take within an exhibition.
The two authors, right at the outset, are very precise in defining their scope: within the article, by 'museum' the strictly mean 'science centres, natural history museums, zoos and aquaria', essentially confining their insights within a science education context. What strikes me, on the other hand, is that the very same levels of determination can and should be applied to the construction an art exhibit, be it historical or contemporary, albeit with a host of idiosyncratic issues.
The 'higher' four, more external and wider levels of civilisation, society, museum and pedagogy I would see as universals of any kind of educational enterprise, and are not difficult to see as key determinants in the creation of an art exhibit.
Things get, I would say, more complicated once we move into the internal levels of determination - exhibition, cluster, exhibit and task. These four entities are well defined in the context of a science exhibition, far less in the context of an art one: should each art work, each room, each group of rooms be considered an 'exhibit', a basic material unit the same way that a specimen or a science toy is? Can we really consider 'tasks' as a meaningful level of didactic co-determination, even if in art exhibitions usually all that's afforded the visitor is label reading? perhaps an audio tour is a task as well, even though it's likely to spawn the whole exhibition, which is to say multiple clusters and exhibits... The way in which these parts are conceptualised as agencies is likely to have an impact on the exhibition's overall structure and reception. One example: if, in a science exhibit, I play with and read about a device that generates static electricity, I have directly confronted an understandable chunk of scientific knowledge: actions that generate static electricity. Is it the same with a painting? have I learnt any chunk of art historical knowledge if I looked at a single painting? or, in an art context, is the collectivity of the exhibition experience that makes an identifiable increase to my knowledge of the discipline?
These ambiguities are, perhaps, symptoms of the difficulty that art, as a body of knowledge, has in 'sectioning itself' in discrete chunks of data, perhaps due to the lack of the strong organising force that 'tasks' bring into a science exhibit (where, widely generalising, one apparatus shows a specific set of phenomena or characteristics once the task upon it is completed). It is an interesting problem, that deserves more thought.
So far, what is clear to me is that Achiam and Marandino's insights into the agencies that shape science exhibitions can be translated into an art exhibition context on a macro-level only. At the micro-level of the inner workings of the respective museums, irreconciliable differences in the ways that knowledge is performed and absorbed by visitors in the two different contexts; and the radical difference in intercohesion between 'items' or 'exhibits' that art objects and science exhibits display, make a perfect coincidence impossible.
All quotes from:
Achiam, Marianne, and Martha Marandino. "A framework for understanding the conditions of science representation and dissemination in museums." Museum Management and Curatorship 29.1 (2014): 66-82.
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