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To watch people being prepared for a surgical operation, and to see the fear in their eyes, is quite unsettling, even in a museum environment. But nothing compares to witnessing the sheer agony of a person who is tormented by actual and accute pain, either physical or mental. However, this is exactly what the organizers of the Schmerz (Pain) exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Berliner Medizinhistorische Museum der Charité want visitors to experience. The exhibition explores the manifold expressions of pain and to achieve this goal it combines and confronts artistic works and medical, folk-art, religious and everyday objects. Depictions of the crucifixtion of Christ are presented together with recordings of Bach’s Matthäus-Passion, while in the next room a modern interpreation of human suffering is being given by Nathalie Djurberg in an animated film that shows the bloody beating of a submissive man. Thanks to these unique combinations and juxtapositions the show succesfuly traces the boundaries between art, medicine and cultural history.

But the exhibition also manages to cross the physical boundaries of both museums as it spills out onto the streets that link the Hanburger Bahnhof and the Medizinhistorische Museum. Referring to the Stations of the Cross numerous billboards depict the works that are shown in the museums together with pictograms that symbolize various causes (i.e. a razorblade) of pain are being placed along the route. Visitors are free to choose which museum to begin their tour with.

Go to website exhibition Schmertz/Pain
Go to website Hamburger Bahnhof

[photopress:skor.jpg,full,pp_image]Tonight at 11, the top floor of the Post CS building, the Stedelijk Museum hosts the fourth annual SKOR-lecture. This time the topics will be intellectual property and free public space. The publication of the book (Open 12) was mentioned here before.

Speakers are McKenzie Wark (AUS), Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at the Eugene Lang College and the New School for Social Research in New York, author of A Hacker Manifesto (2004) and Gamer Theory (2006), and Stephen Wright (UK), researcher at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris.

More information on the SMCS website.

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The New York Times reported on the opening of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, the creationists alternative for the traditional natural history museum. The review concludes that “for a visitor steeped in the scientific world view, the impact of the museum is a disorienting mix of faith and reason, the exotic and the familiar”. Other news sources also emphasize the weirdness of this new institution calling it “a museum of the creation story, not of creation” (San Francisco Chronicle), making a mockery of it by suggesting that “(the) creationist museum brings dinosaurs on board Noah’s Ark” (The Times) or simply denouncing it by critizing the museum’s effort to challenge Darwinism (Northwest Herald).

Read full article (The New York Times, May 25, 2007)

Archaeologists and historians agree. Museums, educators and others are increasingly using video, animation, graphics and other technology to depict historical sites beyond what text, maps and drawings offer. Virtual heritage exhibits and projects - considered novel a decade ago - have become popular in Europe and parts of Asia, where there has been more national funding. Virtual heritage projects are found in several countries including Italy, Germany and Japan.

Read full article (Seattle Post Intelligencer, May 27, 2007)

On the Net:
http://www.earthworks.uc.edu
http://www.learningsites.com
http://onaslant.ndsu.edu

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Throughout the world a growing number of historic inner cities is sealed off from everyday live as they are turned into open-air museums where buildings become part of the permanent collection and people are treated as visitors. The heritage value of cityscapes, the need for their conservation, an increasing dependency on the tourist industry and the loss of traditional sources of income force many of them to isolate, conserve and package their built heritage for mass consumption. Especially in Europe, the old continent, numerous cities are being fixed in time. Economic forces are slowly colonizing the social habitat, from Lisbon to Stockholm and from Krakow to Bath. These cities are neither booming nor shrinking, but are simply in a state of paralysis and try to turn their inertia into a unique selling point.

Today I visited the so-called Old Town in Warsaw. While crossing the main square and walking down crowded backstreets I had a first hand experience of the ’scripting’ of cities or what some critics tend to call ‘the museumization of public space’. Apart from the many characteristic facades I found myself surrounded by a plethora of commemorative plaques, monuments and other reminders of the tragic events that occured in this city more than sixty years ago. During World War II, after the courageous uprising of the besieged citizens, almost 80 percent of Warsaw was completely destroyed by the occupying forces of that time. But right after the war Poland’s capital arose from the ashes and many of the historic streets, buildings, and churches were restored to their original form. In 1980, Warsaw’s historic Old Town (that is, the copy of the original) was even added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list. This is highly remarkeable for a historic urban centre which is in fact only six decades old. And this youthfulness doesn’t bother tourists either, as the thousands of visitors per day clearly show.

The people of Warsaw can only be admired for the determination and will-power that was needed to rebuild an entire city and one can easily understand the fact that they converted almost every house into a shrine and gradually turned their city into an open air museum. However, after spending an afternoon amidst the numerous monuments and reconstructed buildings in this cobblestoned city I was once again reminded of Marshall McLuhan (”the message is the medium”) who predicted that ‘the city no longer (will) exists, except as a cultural ghost for tourists’.

Go to official website of the City of Warsaw
Go to UNESCO’s World Heritage List

Newsweek’s annual European museum tour reveals some thoughtful and often surprising spins on the news. If news headlines bolster cultural stereotypes, art breaks them down. That’s, in part, the aim of “Persia, 30 Centuries of Art and Culture,” at the Hermitage Amsterdam (through Sept. 15), the Dutch satellite of the venerable St. Petersburg museum. Similar surprises await those expecting to see the Gaza familiar from the news in a show at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva. The stutter-stop love affair between Europe and Russia is on display at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow’s premier museum of Russian art. Other European shows also explore themes of cultural indentity.

Read full article (Newsweek International, June 4 2007 issue)

The Tourism Ministry of India has proposed that all government offices around India Gate, a war museum in New Delhi, be shifted out and the buildings converted into museums to turn the area into a bigger tourist destination. There are also plans to set up open-air theatres for music concerts and introduce laser and sound-and-light shows. The proposed new rail, war, space and earth museums among others would add to the existing clutch of edifices that house the National Museum, the National Gallery of Modern Art and the National Archives.

(At the same time) hundreds of beautiful museums across the country lie in various states of disrepair due to public and bureaucratic apathy. It might, therefore, be a better idea to spend money to make them more attractive to Indian and foreign tourists than to create new ones that too would eventually fall into disrepair in the years to come due to poor management and lack of expertise.

Read article ‘Imagine: a museum hub at India Gate’ (Hindustan Times, May 23, 2007)
Read editorial comment (Hindustan Times, May 24, 2007)

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Although this is a blog written in English, as Amsterdam residents we cannot help to occasionally post articles that address the Dutch. But, these projects should be of interest to the international community, and thus we write about these on museumlab.org.

The Amsterdam Hetveem Theater has just produced an audiotour with stories of change about the history, present and future of the IJ bank west of central station. In one hour of speech, sound and music, you get stories by residents, architects, children, artists and shop owners, about the change of this part in Amsterdam that has been under construction for some time now.

It is yet another interesting example of the use of new media and the appreciation of the ‘people’, to reveil a complete mosaic of stories about our heritage, architecture and culture. Hopefully they will improve the interface and the usability in the future (more on this - nachtgeluiden! - in the future)

Website Hetveem Theater

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From the Financial Times (May 22, 2007):

John Studzinski, the banker and philanthropist, has donated £5m to Tate Modern – the gallery’s largest private gift.

The money is earmarked for the building of the gallery’s new£215m extension, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the architects’ practice, which received planning permission in March.

Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate galleries, described the gift as “a magnificent act of faith in a project that will transform the building and provide improved facilities for the next generation of visitors”.

Read full article

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On the occasion of International Museum Day we visited one of the most traditional institutions on this planet, the Kunstkammer of Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg. The Kunstkammer or Kunstkamera was the first museum in Russia and it was established by Peter the Great on the Neva Riverfront facing the Winter Palace. Peter’s museum was dedicated to preserving “natural and human curiosities and rarities”.

The image above shows one of the displays that is part of the First Natural Science Collections of the Kunstkamera, a permanent exhibition that aims to show the enormous diversity of the fauna of the world. Besides skeletal materials and plaster casts of fossils it features a large assortment of human and animal fetuses with anatomical deficiencies, which Peter bought from the Dutch anatomist Frederick Ruysch and pharmacologist Albertus Seba. Some of the most gruesome exhibits are the specimens of children’s limbs with lace covering the the part that used to be attached to the rest of the body.

This horror show makes you wonder if the celebration of International Museum Day could also help to raise the awareness among museums that by preserving such things as human remains they also bare the responsibilty for informing the audience about the origins of these objects (subjects?) and what they are trying to achieve by showing them. Although the Kunstkamera gives an elaborate explanation of the history and current status of the exhibition and collaborates with renowned institutions in other countries, thousands of museums throughout the world could still learn from the focus on good governance during International Museum Day.

Go to website Kunstkamera
Go to the ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums, 2006 to read more about museums and how they should deal with human remains.