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

Thesis Prep #1

I’ve had a general idea of what I wanted to do for my thesis since the end of the first year. An obnoxious and disturbing incident in the last session for one of my classes got me thinking a lot about Clinton Hill, my neighborhood of 2.5 years, and what a strange swirl of history and confusion it is.

I’m Brooklyn born (and mostly raised) and lived in Prospect Heights, another neighborhood transformed (curiously version #1 of this said: getting ripped apart) by gentrification and transformation before my very eyes for 3.5 years before moving to my present area in 2008. Clinton Hill is a lot more visually stable than that was since most of the neighborhood is covered in a historic district, but there’s various out of place/scale building popping up around the edges. Much of the neighborhood real estate is taken up by the Pratt Institute. The buildings sprawl from Willoughby to Lafayette and St. James to Grand with the students living all around. The incident from class involved a Pratt alum who reflected much of the entitlement and disdain for the other residents I suspected and had chatted about with neighbors. My neighborhood experience is varied: a nice comraderie with the elderly on my street and similar aged friends I’ve met in Rope, a local bar; annoyance when the Pratt kids go marauding through my street drunkenly late at night; and frustration at some stores/people who still treat some black residents as if they wandered over from the projects in Fort Greene and Bed Stuy and are suspect. I left class that day very angry and contemplative and definitely thought all of it much of the summer while I studying abroad for 2 months.

Over the summer being a tourist, I visited a lot of museums and galleries and noted how the art/materials in most reflected a wide variety of experiences and people, as well as the cross section of visitors that would pass through. I started to imagine in my mind how something like that could be scaled to a community and serve the same purpose as a place to explore and learn. My idea is to create a Clinton Hill Community Museum with locally sourced artwork, exhibits, and displays.

The main things I hope to work out in Thesis Prep are the viability of the idea and the logistics of getting a space and curating the content to make it as interesting as I imagine in my mind. I want it to be challenging and reflexive of the community experience. I want the place to be welcoming and visited by everyone. I also want to figure out if this is something I can keep going beyond May and if I can get community partnerships to foster its growth. I really hope I’m up for the challenge because right now it feels hugely overwhelming.

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: