A Way of Seeing

Svetlana Alpers wrote about museums as a way of seeing. In describing her first visit to a museum as a child, she writes while looking at an encased giant crab, how she marveled at its size, and how previous to her museum visit, “had therefore not imagined that it was possible” (pg 25). She explains that the museum had “transformed the crab—had heightened, by isolating, these aspects, had encouraged one to look at it in this way”. (pg25) Meaning, that the museum had opened her up to a new way of looking at crabs, had made what could have been considered a relatively normally object, and transformed it. By merely being present within a building that called itself a museum, an object is transformed into something else. It could have been the most ordinary of things, but simply by occupying museum space it was granted power, and meaning. In class we talked about this, how an object is given power, whether or not this power is deserved is beside the point. One classmate remembered hearing about an incident where a man moved signs from exhibits within an art museum to random, everyday objects within the museum. He moved the exhibit signs from the artwork to objects like a drinking fountain, a bench, a child’s discarded jacket, or the gum infested underside of a table. And this man would stand in astonished amusement as he watched people ooh and ah over these completely ordinary objects that had exhibit signs in front of them, sometimes completely ignoring the real artifact itself; “museums turn cultural materials into art objects” (pg 31). If those people had been in any other building, with any other social connotation attached to it, they wouldn’t have given those objects the time of day. They wouldn’t have given such items much though, or even a passing glance, let alone stand in front of them for an hour discussing the perceived intention of the artist with this or that piece. The social construct attached to the word, idea; of museum is one that changes a person’s perceptions and thoughts about an experience, item, or artifact. For example, I will discuss our class’s visit to the Conner Museum on Thursday. In any other place I would have regarded the skinning and stuffing and posing of dead animals in disgust. I would have cringed away and avoided looking at what I would have perceived as the mutilated remains of what were once live animals. It would not have been a pleasant experience, and I would have regarded the individual who collected such things as a cruel, sadistic, and certainly odd, person. But we were in a museum, and as such my thoughts and perceptions on the exhibit were completely different because of it. Before most of the class arrived I walked around, looking at the animals posed in life like positions, reading the information plaques, partaking in the learning of knowledge. Because of the implication of a museum, that if an item is within it, then it must something of importance, it must have been considered a positive by the museum to cultivate learning. We are taught to consider things within a glass case, or isolated from other things or within a museum as objects of importance and power. We give them power, and so they have the ability to sway and move us, where otherwise they might not have the ability to do so.