Readings for October 13th

The Decisive Moment - Henri Cartier-Bresson
On Collecting Art and Culture - James Clifford
In Richard Handler's discussion on an individual or a group having culture, he brings up the point that collections/presentations of an "authentic domain of identity" can't be natural or innocent as they are tied up with "nationalist politics, restrictive law and contested encodings of past and future". Clifford points out that the different types of collecting fulfill different purposes. Largely, in the West, strategies to deploy a possessive self culture and authenticity, a societal need to own to become your own person and navigate through a world-understanding, or in cultures that aren't controlled by capitalism (Baudrillard), collecting to redistribute a kind of open source sharing and building upon a collective culture. In Susan Stewart's studies of miniaturization versus gigantism and the souvenir versus the collection all create the illusion of an adequate representation of a world and explores how time-lines prevail over museum display eliminating the original social context. Clifford asks a very important question: Why has it seemed obvious until recently that non-Western objects should be preserved in European museums, even when this means that no fine specimens are visible in their country of origin? He also makes a fascinating semiotic square diagram illustrating the collection categories and their mutability. Later, he makes the point that the museum is itself a museum, and modernizing museums is defeating one layer of history - the history of that moment in collecting.
Visual Stories - Ann Reynolds
The discussion of the layout of space in the AMNH and why is a fascinating one. Reasons range, from the search for new funding to the invention of a modern story and a necessary adjustment because of how the modern visitor learns are acute perceptions to create the necessary "true illusion" but on the other hand these techniques train us to read visually in a formatted way. The dioramas themselves are distorted enough to make the viewer understand that this is a construction, a "landscape". Then, it is fascinatingly related to world peace by Albert Parr (not Alfred Parr as Ann Reynolds writes) who writes, "a total conception of the whole of nature as a balanced system," as a model for social cooperation which, when understood and 'cultivated' locally, could create a model for world peace.