Museum of the Moving Image
I recently learned about a museum in Queens, New York called the Museum of the Moving Image. The museum opened in 1988 and since then has explored art, history, and technology of the moving image. The museum has a theatre that host a variety of events, and most of the exhibits are really fun and hands on such as their recent exhibition “Indie Essentials: 25 Must-Play Video Games”. Audience members could play a selection of 25 old school video games. The visitors call also create flip books by taking a video of themselves creating some form of motion. At the end of the visit, you can buy the flip book as a souvenir.
The museums mission statement:
Museum of the Moving Image advances the understanding, enjoyment, and appreciation of the art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media by presenting exhibitions, education programs, significant moving-image works, and interpretive programs, and collecting and preserving moving-image related artifacts.
participation, collaboration, & communication
I am working on a project for my digital art history class where the participation of other students makes up a huge part of the work itself. As I was gathering ideas for the project it dawned on me that participation is not individual, rather its a collaboration that connects you to a community of others. This collaboration allows for some communication. As a community we come together, insert our ideas, move towards something bigger. We need more of this participation, collaboration, and communication.
Are you a part of the community if you don’t participate? There is an art form within being part of this community. The NOMA in New Orleans is hosting a few outdoor screening series of films in the gardens. It will take place for the next few fridays. Check out the NOMA events page. There are a great deal of events that involve the community from showing films to offering yoga in the gardens.
http://noma.org/events/detail/792/Friday-Nights-at-NOMA-Classic-Cinema-in-the-Garden
An article from Museums 2.0 blog
Guest Post: A Shared Ethics for Museum Internships.
Is your museum running on interns? In this guest post, CUNY lecturer and former manager of the Guggenheim Internship program Michelle Millar Fisher makes a passionate argument for the end of unpaid internships. It is a strong, museum-focused complement to an excellent three-parter on Fractured Atlas about the ethics and future of unpaid arts internships.
One of the most poignant signs I saw waved during the OccupyMovement was held by a young woman who politely advised The System to “F**k your free internships.” Free intern labor wasn’t ever right, but it has become glaringly unethical in the current post-Lehman-crash era. That protest placard highlighted the unpaid internship as a simultaneous symptom and result of badly broken political and social systems.
If you’re reading this at work, you’re probably reading it within ten feet of an unpaid intern. It’s probably a path you had to navigate too. There’s a sense of “it worked for me….” And it does – it did work for me. I got my first real job in a museum (at the Guggenheim) after a life-changing internship. My supervisor was amazing, caring, and supportive. I worked so hard in those three unpaid months that I made myself indispensable and jumped ship from my home country (Scotland) and came to New York. My whole career path has been positively changed by that one internship experience.
However, my experience was an exception to the rule that internships increasingly prove: free labor contributes to the growing inequities of the non-profit labor system. Issues of class and economic status haunt the museum internship. You have to be able to afford to work for free in order to take an internship that will help you onto the career ladder. There are certainly excellent programs that try to circumvent this stereotype, and there are stipends to be had in some museums, but they are far from the norm.
My experience was exceptional for one simple reason: my internship at the Guggenheim was the only unpaid internship I ever did. It was the only one I could afford to do. It was made possible by a small, unexpected windfall. If I hadn’t had the windfall, it’s highly unlikely that as a first-gen college attendee I would have been exposed to the other opportunities it afforded me. (I have somewhat of a “control” in this social experiment in that my talented sister has plied a similar path to me, but was unable to afford the opportunity of one unpaid internship at a museum. Even though she worked just as hard as I did, it took her five years longer to get her foot on the arts employment ladder than it did for me.)
I have done my very fair share of perpetuating the cycle of unpaid internships. As an Associate Manager of Education, I coordinated internships at the Guggenheim museum for four years before I headed back to academia. I expanded the program from around seventy-five interns per year to over one hundred and thirty in almost every department of the museum. I loved my job, and I think many of the interns had amazing experiences at the museum because we tried to take care of them, introduce them to arts networks through a rich weekly seminar program, and encouraged supervisors to be the best mentors they could. But now, as I counsel my university students, I feel it unethical to recommend the same path I took. I have taken a firm stand. I will not forward unpaid internship postings that come my way and actively respond to the senders, even when I know them well as colleagues: “This is not ethical!”
Is unpaid participation in the life and operations of a museum always a bad thing? No. Are the worst offenders larger museums who know they can get away with asking people to work for free? Yes. Is it unethical to ask college juniors and seniors, graduate students, and recently qualified degree holders to undertake multiple free internships? Absolutely. Making small changes and offering some kind of basic compensation for interns in the arts would benefit us all. If the lowest wage on the ladder is zero, entry-level wages don’t have to be much higher, and this affects the whole pay scale for the majority of those who work in non-director positions.
Would some form of universal museum internship standard mitigate this? How about a national Museum Internship Ethics Charter that would make three core promises to any museum intern:
- a stipend
- a clear written statement of expectations given at the beginning of their internship
- a final face-to-face evaluation with the internship mentor at the end of the internship
I’m constantly surprised at how many students I speak with, even those who are working for college credit where this is meant to be regulated, do not receive any of these three components. A shared ethics on the subject of internships means a shared ethics for human resources in museum more generally. This type of shared ethics can only be a positive thing for both individuals at all levels, and the institution – and thus its visitors. Happy employees (yes, even interns!) mean greater productivity, creativity, and accountability.
The students I teach in undergrad classrooms in New York are about a decade younger than me. They’re the Internship Generation. The more I am faced with their predicament when they ask me about how to balance work experience that won’t pay them with study and (especially at the city college where I teach) the jobs that are paying their tuition, or to write them letters of recommendation for unpaid labor, the more uncomfortable I have become.
How could we all better address this issue? Could museum managers agree to hire interns who need the work experience rather than those with a resume already the length of the Nile? Could they agree to put aside a small part of their yearly budget to compensate interns in some way? Could university instructors (especially those with tenure and a voice) steer their interns in the direction of paid opportunities, and campaign within their own departments to end the cycle of internships for credit? Could we all agree to a universal standard under the auspices of a body like the AAM? Are there already internship models out there that do this that we could learn from and offer as examples?
Interview with the Curator: Mike Hearn (From the Metropolitan Museum blog)
Nadja Hansen, Editorial Assistant, Editorial Department
Posted: Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, by Maxwell K. Hearn with an essay by Wu Hung, features 250 illustrations in full color and is available in The Met Store.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Mike Hearn—the Met’s Douglas Dillon Curator in Charge of the Department of Asian Art—about his work in authoring the catalogue accompanying the upcoming exhibitionInk Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, his inspiration for incorporating modern works into his department, and the role of the Chinese artist in today’s art world.
Nadja Hansen: Your past books have focused on traditional ancient Chinese art and culture. What compelled you to write, for the first time, about contemporary art for the Ink Art catalogue? Was there a particular artwork, book, exhibition, or conversation that inspired you?
Mike Hearn: The first piece of contemporary art [the Met’s Department of Asian Art] purchased was a scholar’s rock made of stainless steel by Zhan Wang. I had admired a similar piece at a friend’s home in Beijing. It struck me as an interesting juxtaposition to our collection of other traditional scholar’s rocks, and would have the effect of bringing the past into the present.
Wu Shanzhuan (Chinese, b. 1960). Red Humour Series—Today No Water; also known as The Big Characters (dazibao), 1986. Multimedia installation; dimensions variable. Installation view at the artist’s studio and Institute for Mass Culture, Zhoushan
Then in 2006 I went to the first auction of contemporary Chinese art at Sotheby’s, and was struck by the diversity and quality of some of the pieces. I realized that there were contemporary works of Chinese art that resonated with me, but I wasn’t sure that they would have had the same effect on my colleagues in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Prior to that time, I had always thought that modern and contemporary art was their responsibility, but this experience made me realize that there are fantastic contemporary Asian works that would resonate more meaningfully in our galleries than in a Western modern-and-contemporary gallery space.
That same year I borrowed a piece by an artist named Wang Dongling that had been sold in the Sotheby’s auction. I put it in an exhibition of Chinese calligraphy with much older art, realizing that while Westerners can’t read Chinese calligraphy, they can read conceptual art. The tools for appreciating calligraphy aesthetically—seeing it as gestural art with dynamic figure-ground relationships and contrasts of positive and negative line and space—was already in people’s repertoire, they just needed permission to use them. So I put this piece from 1999 next to calligraphy from 1099. I loved the reaction. I had a Chinese reporter come in and say, “How can Westerners appreciate this? They can’t read it!” I then took him to the contemporary piece and explained that it is not necessary to be able to read something in order to appreciate it.
That experience gave me the idea that while ink art is something that is uniquely Chinese, the same skills and vocabulary are used to look at both Abstract Expressionism and Chinese calligraphy. There was this wonderful crossover.
Left: Wang Dongling (Chinese, b. 1945). Canon, 1991. Ink on paper; 39 1/2 x 26 7/8 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Friends of Asian Art Gifts (2012.320)
Nadja Hansen: Did you collaborate with the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art on this exhibition? Do you see that being a trend in the future?
Mike Hearn: I haven’t really collaborated with the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art yet, but now I hope to in the future—especially when it comes to acquisitions. I want to continue to collect works of art that will elucidate and extend our collection of Asian masterworks, but I don’t ever want to transgress on initiatives that are being taken by our Modern and Contemporary curators. I want their buy-in, and I respect their opinions; they bring an international perspective to contemporary artwork, while I bring the Asian perspective.
A work of art is like great literature: You may be able to translate it into another language, but the indigenous language is where its spirit is expressed most clearly. The language of art is its style, and when it comes to Chinese artworks, I can read that style in its original language. That is what I bring to the table, which is something that Modern and Contemporary can’t do in the same way. They speak a global stylistic language, while I speak the language of tradition. The only way to truly appreciate art is to see it in different contexts. That is what having an encyclopedic collection at the Met enables us to do: see art from varied perspectives—global and specific. There are no specialists in modern art in the Asian art department, but we have the capacity to get excited when we see something contemporary that makes sense to us. It is this diversity of points of view that gives the Met a unique capability to put contemporary art into varied historical and geographical contexts.
Song Dong (Chinese, b. 1966). Printing on Water (Performance in the Lhasa River, Tibet, 1996), 1996. Thirty-six chromogenic prints; each 23 3/4 x 15 3/4 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised Gift of Cynthia Hazen Polsky (L. 2011.70.6)
Nadja Hansen: Were you afraid of push back or criticism from traditional Asian art scholars, or from fellow colleagues in Modern and Contemporary Art?
Mike Hearn: I was so excited about the project that I didn’t think of it as taking a risk. It was more that I was stretching myself. This exhibition is simply my response to what is happening in the contemporary art world. I wanted to look at modern Chinese art from my traditional perspective, but I didn’t want to include artists who are merely continuing traditional idioms; I wanted to discover artists who are extending, challenging, or subverting tradition. So I began to look beyond works of ink on paper, expanding to photography, video, oil on canvas—really anything that retained what I call the “ink aesthetic.”
For example, I have been thinking for a long time of doing an exhibition on the Guo Xi tradition—Guo Xi being an artist who lived from around 1000 to 1090. I had encountered a nearly white canvas by the contemporary painter Qiu Shihua, with only the faintest hint of a landscape veiled in mist, and I immediately felt a connection between this work and the atmospheric paintings of the Guo Xi tradition. Qiu works in oil on canvas, Guo Xi worked in ink on silk, but for me there was an unmistakable spiritual resonance between the modern artist and the ancient master.
Top: Yang Yongliang (Chinese, b. 1980). View of Tide, 2008. Inkjet print; 17 3/4 in. x 32 ft. 9 3/4 in. M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. Bottom: Zhao Mengfu (Chinese, 1254–1322). Ten Thousand Li of Yangzi River, Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279). Ink on paper; 17 3/4 in. x 32 ft. 6 3/4 in. The Palace Museum, Beijing
Nadja Hansen: You label the exhibition and catalogue Ink Art, even though it covers so many other mediums. Why do you specifically emphasize the ink-art tradition?
Mike Hearn: Today’s Chinese art is unprecedented in its diversity, but this exhibition only seeks to illuminate one segment of what’s being produced—the portion that seems to be meaningfully informed by China’s history of artistic traditions. There is no other culture with the same artistic continuity as the Chinese, and ink art, particularly calligraphy, has a lot to do with this phenomenon. There is really nothing equivalent in the West.
For centuries, a person was judged by his skill as a calligrapher. The same writing instrument, a supple-tipped brush, was also used to create paintings. In both cases, the text or imagery was often deemed secondary to the expressive power of the brushwork, and a key component of good brushwork was the ability to incorporate and creatively transform references to earlier stylistic models—the way a musician might riff on an earlier melody.
Today, everyone uses computer keyboards or ballpoint pens; there has been an enormous loss of something that was fundamental only one hundred years ago. And while millions of Chinese do calligraphy as a hobby in the same way as Winston Churchill painted watercolors, calligraphy for these people is no longer a vocation but an avocation. I’m not interested in practitioners who merely sustain a traditional practice. Rather, I am excited by those artists that grapple with finding new expressive content in these ancient traditions.
In their scale and gestural dynamism, Wang Dongling’s contemporary pieces are surely inspired in part by the example of Abstract Expressionist works, but Wang has a calligraphic technique that Kline or Motherwell did not. His abstraction comes from a totally different place: two thousand years of brush writing techniques. Every turn and twist of the brush represents a technical facility that can still be appreciated from a traditional perspective.
Top: Keith Macgregor (British, b. 1947?). Neon Fantasy, Nathan Road (detail), 2002. Archival pigment print; 30 x 30 in. Bottom: Zhang Zeduan (Chinese, 1085–1145). Spring Festival along the River (detail), Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), 12th century. Handscroll, ink and color on silk; 9 3/4 in. x 17 ft. 4 1/8 in. The Palace Museum, Beijing
Nadja Hansen: In the catalogue, you compare the recent Chinese absorption and reinterpretation of Western philosophies and methodologies to what is also happening in the arts. Can you talk about some of the ways this is playing out artistically?
Mike Hearn: China is undergoing a sea change in economics, politics, and society. On the surface, it is embracing the culture of the West, whether it be in the form of Marxism, capitalism, consumerism, or commercialism. Artists are inevitably responding to these social changes by exploring earlier Western stylistic movements—Dada and Surrealism—that reacted to similar cultural and philosophical shifts in Europe and America. Such movements have now become as relevant to them as they were relevant here almost one hundred years ago.
So there is an exciting discovery by the Chinese of Western responses to changes in Western society. At the same time, there is an identity crisis: What is China? It may look Western, but scratch the surface and underneath you will find a tradition of philosophy and social norms that is completely different. It is inevitable that artists will rebel at some point against the imposition of a whole array of cultural influences—clothing styles, music, and consumerism—in order to seek out what is genuinely their own.
As Chinese artists become more sophisticated and knowledgeable about Western art, they seem to be increasingly comfortable about returning to their traditional roots. Artists who are discovering Western philosophy are also rediscovering Zen Buddhism and Daoism because their own ancient philosophies are part of what has influenced Western contemporary culture.
So “borrowing” is the wrong term—it is more about finding what is useful. We have to assume that Chinese artists are using both their own and Western traditions to solve new problems that they are posing for themselves. Truly great artists find a new way of thinking about a problem that is in front of them. In the future, we will see artists using a variety of cultural sources to solve the problems they are dealing with.
Yang Jiechang (Chinese, b. 1956). Crying Landscape LONDON, 2002. Triptych, ink and color on paper; 9 ft. 10 1/8 in. x 16 ft. 4 7/8 in. New York, private collection
Nadja Hansen: Contemporary Chinese art is relatively new to the global art market. Can you talk a little about the art world’s reaction to this, and the new role of the “Chinese contemporary artist” within it?
Mike Hearn: Contemporary Chinese art has become a big business because certain styles appeal to Western tastes. The market really began in the West, and the Chinese artists that have been “discovered” now have to think about their “brand,” and the most creative artists have to struggle with how to escape that box.
When a Chinese person comes to the West, they are labeled as Chinese. What does that mean? Each of these artists in their own way has to be asking that question: What does it mean to be Chinese? Am I a Chinese artist, or an artist who happens to be Chinese? Both are correct.
For me, it is an enormously moving opportunity to show the “Chinese-ness” of these artists. At the same time, I never want to negate that they are, first and foremost, artists. The works of art in this exhibition express a Chinese identity that needs to be appreciated and realized. That is what this is about.
Source: http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/now-at-the-met/features/2013/mike-hearn-interview
PLAN YOUR VISIT (and your life)
I started to look through websites dedicated to art for inspiration on this post. I was looking for an original topic; I was looking for some serious inspiration. First place I looked was on the website Juxtapose. After skimming around the site (albeit it’s a cool site), I felt as though I wasn’t satisfied with what it was giving me, so I hopped over to The New York Times art section. Again, I caught myself flipping from article to article with no vision. “I am an art history major, so why am I finding this so difficult” I ask myself. Before I knew it, I was clicking on the museum advertisements in sudden despair for something interesting to say. Curiously, it turned out that I wasn’t just looking for a blog entry topic, but I was creating a long list of museums I needed to plan my visit to. I noticed from these various advertisements and journal entries that there are so many museums I have never been – so many places I want to go! It seems like I am missing out on everything (The Whitney in New York, The Louvre in Paris, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston… just to name a few) Most importantly, It reminded me why I enjoy the major I chose.
Since I have decided to focus my undergraduate degree on Art History, I have received a ton of support as well as the dreaded, “well, what are you going to do with that major? … “your brother’s going into business, don’t you want to do something like that?” Sometimes I find myself not giving myself any credit for what I am doing, which is studying something I am passionate about. I am fortunate enough to say that I have had my fair share of trips to galleries and because of my persistence I’ve probably vistited more than most young adults my age. This I am thankful for, and I am thankful I am not forcing myself to study business just because others think its a good idea. I find that taking this class opens up a totally new insight on the life of a museum as well as what I am going to do with “that major” (aka the rest of my life). I don’t know if it will place me working in museums per say, but my respect and infatuation for museums only has room to grow. There is no doubt in my mind I will be planning trips to museums for the rest of my life.
Thoughts on Self Interpretation & the Museum
I have always adored the experience of visiting a museum. Clean, fascinating, organized, and inspiring. It’s not for everyone, in fact many people find it boring, but I myself have always enjoyed the rush behind the visualization of history. I’ve always trusted, and even admired the brains behind the museums. It never occurred to me maybe the way we see art in a museum isn’t the way we are suppose to be viewing it at all.
Do museums generate a certain angle on its product? I think in some respect there is no way around it, however the purpose of the museum is to display, not define.
When it comes to placement, I’d like to believe there is some sort of formulated placing done, but I cannot say for sure. With that being said I don’t think it’s the museums fault if we walk in to the museum with absolutely no background knowledge of the subject matter. If that is the case, then you have the opportunity to learn something, but it is less likely you will walk out an expert on art, or even the theme of the museum.
Are museums institutions of authority and in which we trust? Yes, we trust the museums to properly care for the objects as well as handle these artifacts delicately. It the history behind what you are looking at that tells the viewers this is bigger than you are. If it weren’t important it wouldn’t be placed on a pedestal for viewers. It is the viewer’s job to interpret whatever is being presented, but the museums job to keep the objects in good condition.
ceciliabroussard 