a151 Book 3 Afterlives Flashcards
Objects in museums can be said to have:-
Authenticity (provenance)
Rarity, uniqueness
Beauty (depending on taste)
Explanatory value (what it tells us about the past)
Contextual value (how objects fit/interface into a display
Museums
Most museums are archeological - fragment of civilisations
Holocaust (Shoah) dispense with objects (mainly) imagination and abstract ideas used to fill the gaps
Curators struggle with:-
Preserving and conserving
Satisfy political aims
Need to attract and educate the public
Tend to privilege criteria based on personal aesthetic judgement
Under pressure a need to tell a story - satisfy the tourist gaze
Affirm people’s beliefs that they are cultivated, their culture is distinctive a social elite
Objects of antiquity and importance may need;-
considerable explanation and publicity to highlight their true value - the relics in the Topkapi Museum
Highlighting the exhibit’s aura makes it easy for viewers to take pleasure in art
Non-authentic objects can nevertheless exhibit the past e.g. Models, dioramas, reconstructions etc.
Holocaust items as ‘Silent Witnesses’ or cause us to reflect 1) :-
Counter monuments
Shoes on the Danube Budapest - loss, people gone
Rusted milk churn Warsaw ghetto, Ringelbaum, Washington Holocaust Museum
Tower of faces US are they the victims or were we the victims
Paris - memorial to the Shoah, boxes of card files, Drancy, Rafles,
Poland Trblinka II 17000 roughly shaped stones - Sa’adthua - witness pile of stones
Austria Mauthausen carpet of rough stones - quarry work
Holocaust items as ‘Silent Witnesses’ or cause us to reflect 2) :-
Counter monuments young delighted at confusion in Berlin, they refuse to play the game of emotional release
Jewish museum Berlin shriven, German national
Memorial long, balls aching ended up as 2800 (4000) pillars 3m (5) high
Ullman’s bibliothek memorial Bebelpletz, 1933 book burning, buried empty bookshelves window in ground ‘where books are burned, in the end people will burn’ Heinrich Heine 19th C
Kassel, destroyed upside down fountain
Harburg sinking column covered in lead graffiti
Paris - memorial des Martyrs de la deportation Paris - Norte Adam - symbology, shapes colours, golden lights, dark constricted spaces
Memories
All memories including personal ones are social memories, without exchange and rehearsal they quickly fade away
Collective memory - social
Communities share - collective myths, stories, war catastrophe
The absence of Jews is portrayed by architectural and abstract sculptural means
Counter Monuments testify to the ambigious responses of the guilty/unschriven
BODIES
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