a151 Book 3 Afterlives

Question 0

Objects in museums can be said to have:-

Answer 0

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

Question 1

Museums

Answer 1

Most museums are archeological - fragment of civilisations

Holocaust (Shoah) dispense with objects (mainly) imagination and abstract ideas used to fill the gaps

Question 2

Curators struggle with:-

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Objects of antiquity and importance may need;-

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

Holocaust items as ‘Silent Witnesses’ or cause us to reflect 1) :-

Counter monuments

Answer 4

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

Question 5

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

Answer 5

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

Question 6

Memories

Answer 6

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

Question 7

BODIES

Answer 7

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