The Lighting History Museum

My work in progress final for Cabinet of Wonders is a museum of lighting history. I ended up coming to this topic after being really inspired by a book we read for the Sound and Light class called Disenchanted Night. It’s an awesome book all about the historical developments and inventions in lighting. Insanely fascinating and a good read.

My original idea for the final project was way too broad, focusing on electric and electronic innovation in general from lighting history to instruments like the theremin. The feedback from the class presentation of that was: information overload and I decided to pick something more bite sized that I could really throw a lot of passion into. And voila, there was lighting history.

My walkthrough leading up to next week’s final presentation:
Lighting Museum Walkthrough

Museum Manifesto

Here’s the museum manifesto I wrote for Cabinets that’s going to be launch pad for my thesis project (whatever it ends up being):

The museum should be an open, informative, and welcoming space with a cohesive thematic vision and mixed media presentations. It should be connected to its surrounding community and engaged in a continuing dialogue with the outside via the exhibitions and outreach programming. The content should be thought-provoking, surprising, engaging, and fluid. The visual presentation should be modern and concise, while while grounding the artifacts in a historical and/or contemporary context. The display area should give enough room to consider and explore yet not be too overwhelming with information.

I’ve been wrestling the past couple of days with the idea of a location for my project. My original vision was to do projections and site-specific pieces, but I ended up moving more to the idea of curating a space as I visited museums this semester. With managing a space comes vast costs and I’ve mentioned before that I’m currently anxious about the idea of being tied to a location if/when I move next year.

Talking with my mother last night about the PACC sponsored bar crawl (post to come soon!), I started thinking of being a curator for a show that could be spread over many local locations. Something I liked about the event was how they used signs to link the different spaces into the evening’s plans. It could be an interesting way to have all the different community groups I’m keeping a running list of involved and save me the eternal aggravation of finding/securing/running a space. Just a thought at the moment.

Museums Galore

Despite my summer pictures, I’m not a big museum goer. It mostly boils down to being cheap and lazy because going tends to be a big undertaking. They’re usually prohibitively expensive and just wandering around a museum doesn’t immediately strike me as something to do. Even if you go to the free days, then you have contend with hordes of people making the experience tough to deal with. But still, I enjoy them once I get there.

One of my classes this semester is Cabinet of Wonders and I chose it because the focus is more about the experience and creation of museum exhibitions. I’d rather find out what makes it happen and what could be done better than just live with my mental aversion.

I took a field trip a few weeks ago to MoMA and the Whitney looking for an exhibit we had to visit for another class, Anecdotal History of Sound and Light. We were assigned to see the Christian Marclay retrospective. I’d been to MoMA in high school for art class assignments, but this was my first time exploring it since the renovation a few years ago. I immediately felt overwhelmed walking through the door there. I went on a Friday afternoon and it seemed like every tourist in New York was there, alternating between power walking through and standing in front of the big placards to read every letter. I was looking for a piece that I thought was there (was at The Whitney I realized halfway through) and interacted a lot with the staff trying to find it. They were really helpful and rightfully confused about what I was looking for. The one thing the museum did really well for me was the emphasis on people flow. I never felt cramped walking around — unless it was at the entrance/text explanation of something. They had always had bottlenecks. It definitely seemed to me that more people were reading the placards then looking at the actual artwork and my typical museum behavior is the opposite. The only ones that seemed to be taking their time were students or a few people sitting with sketchbooks. My favorite part was the side room exhibition on the photography of sculpture that had the description texts pasted on to the wall instead of on a card. I liked the way it forced you to look at the pictures first since it was on a lower plane.

The Whitney was an immediately different experience, feeling way less crowded and open than MoMA had. I was there to explore the Christian Marclay exhibit and set up was interesting. Most of the main space was given over to seating for the live performances with video pieces and a chalk board with music notation lines that you were encouraged to write on lining the walls. Further video pieces were hidden behind the musicians, making it easy for you to miss that there were more rooms to check out. There was also a room for artifacts (clothing, books, records) and one to listen to the recorded music pieces with comfortable couches. I later went downstairs to the main galleries and found myself drawn to the way the piece descriptions were pasted onto the walls. The general feeling I left with was the Whitney seemed way less formal than MoMA and I enjoyed it a lot more.

Some crappy phone camera Whitney pics: