The Anthropology of Expeditions by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bard Graduate Center, Exhibitions Department

In other words, only by manipulating all these elements for effect, much as in an Impressionist painting or on a movie set, could one re-create the feeling of a distant land.

There was also a more deeply theoretical reason for Wissler’s enthusiasm for context over artifact. His enthusiasm for life groups with elaborate impressionistic backgrounds was derived from his approach to the artifactual embodiment of culture: “The Curator always felt that the important thing in the exhibit was to emphasize the people themselves, so that the objects should appear in their true secondary relation.” This could be best done with life-sized groups and miniature village dioramas. Such group cases, he believed, “seem to give the observer the feeling that we have here an exhibit of the life of the people, rather than an exhibit of curious objects made by some one.”39

Wissler’s theory of what we might call “realistic contextualism” was built on the idealism of Boas’s exhibition practice, which his mentor had announced as early as his 1887 debate with Otis Mason and which was extended in his 1907 article in Science (cf. Jacknis 1985, 1996). Going beyond his Boasian training, Wissler had his own reasons for proposing such an approach: he had actually earned his doctorate in psychology and before coming to the museum had taught in elementary and secondary schools. So Wissler was quite attuned to the ideational rather than material aspects of culture, and thus to managing the perceptions of the museum visitor.

Visually, each of the three dioramas was divided roughly in half, with a group of figures on either side of an open space, drawing the visitor’s eye toward the spreading landscape beyond. The Navajo was a special instance of this, being split into two separate vitrines.

A critical feature in creating a realistic illusion was in skillfully joining the three-dimensional foreground with the painted background. Building on decades of gallery experimentation in perspective, museum artists devised many visual tricks to obscure this transition (Wonders 1990, 1993; Quinn 2006: 153). Like the natural history dioramas, the painted backdrops of the three Southwest dioramas were curved, so that the perspective could be manipulated; and there was either a drop-off or a rocky ledge at the rear. Representations of the sky were finessed by covering the tops with house ceilings in the Hopi, Apache, and Navajo hogan scenes. All these groups also employed a diminishing scale as one moved toward the back, so that the plaster figures at the rear were smaller than those at the front.40 Another trick was to match some of the plaster figures to similar figures in the wall painting. And like some of the natural history displays (Quinn 2006: 67, 78), some of the figures were incomplete; the Apache woman, for example, is flat and unpainted on the side where she would have faced the wall.

For maximum illusion, the lighting had to be controlled. This was something of a challenge in the early halls, which were originally lit by side windows.41 Over time these were

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.