For the last couple of years my dad has been working on a project in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Despite being the largest town in Svalbard, Longyearbyen is tiny with around 2060 inhabitants! In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people came to Svalbard to hunt whales and seals, and the islands teemed with Dutch, British, Russian and Scandinavian whalers. Since the early twentieth century, coal has been Svalbard's gold and a lot of people have made a fortune from this industry (not my dad...) Think of it as the Norwegian equivalent of Jersey...
On his last trip over my dad managed to visit the Svalbard Museum, which just so happens to be the northernmost museum in the world! The museum first opened in 1979, and until December 2005 it was located in the oldest part of Longyearbyen. The new Svalbard Museum opened on 26th April 2006 in the Svalbard Science Centre, together with The University Centre in Svalbard, The Norwegian Polar Institute and The Governor of Svalbard's environalmental information. The main aim of the museum is 'to impart knowledge and understanding of the relations between nature, culture, landscape, human activity, technology and the environment in the Arctic.' The museum also engages in research to discover new ways of life and standard of living through 400 years of human activity in Svalbard. More museum orientated tasks include the coordination of all of the museum collections in Svalbard into a common record, providing access for all to the historical material and records. The photo collection is being uploaded onto the museum website at the moment....
http://karmatrendz.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/svalbard_science_centre_05.jpg Check out the external architecture of the museum....postmodern architect meets curator?
Check out the website and let me know what you think to the museum...there is a virtual tour type thing (not too dissimilar to The Talking Walls application I mentioned in my earlier post!) which allows you to look at the exhibitions more closely...
http://www.svalbardmuseum.no/eindex.php?kategori=1
Her talk built on her chapter on William Beckford and the market for antique French furniture in the period c.1789-c.1845 published in the exhibition catalogue 'William Beckford: an eye for the magnificent', edited by Derek Ostergard (2001), which was associated with the exhibition staged at the Bard Graduate Center in New York in 2001 and Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2002 (I went along, it was fantastic!)
we also considered the City of Manchester itself as a 'Museum'; rather sadly, my 'surprise' visit on the tour of Manchester as a city of Radicalism (the site of the Peterloo Massacre/Women's Suffrage/Birth of Marxism)..........(here's the commemorative
......one could say, (if one adopted a Scrooge-like position) that one is a signifier of resistance (albeit now somewhat denuded of its power through its 'heritization'), the other a potent signifier of blissful apathy.....but then that would be just be churlish!
the display and interpretation....here's a few of the students relaxing in the Great Court at the British Museum after some hard thinking!
iversity........
ome very interesting narratives, directing attention to the sculptural, the painterly and the functionality of 18th century ceramics and highlighting their social and cultural use......There was some considerable deliberation on the aesthetics of display (as you can see!) but I think the results are quite striking (and informative)....do take a look and let us know what you think!
....Looks like the Blue Peter Studio!............there's more to come (when I get the pics) on the CERAMICS GROUP Exhibition project....
In my personal quest to visit every last museum in Paris (fail), I went to the Musee de la Chasse et de la Nature last year. I am not normally a fan of hunting, but I think that man -and woman-was meant to be an omnivore and that the world has become very hypocritical about it’s food. How many children these days realise or even care where their hamburger started life?
This Museum has an incredibly ‘personal’ feel to it. It’s quite new, having been created by the Francois and Jaqueline Sommer Foundation in 1964 and is housed in the Hotel Guénégaud - a mid 1600s building which has had a major face lift in the past few years. Because this is a privately funded institution, it has had the freedom to create a very individual layout and design beyond it's doors.
The artist Saint Clair Cemin was commissioned to design chandeliers, door handles and banisters in keeping with the theme of the museum and indeed, these are what first strikes the visitor. Cast in bronze, they take the form of plants, antlers and other aspects of the hunt setting the scene for the rest of the museum. Walking up the stairs holding the scaly banister sends a shiver down the spine. Cemin also cast bronze panels showing many aspects of the hunt–heads, shotguns, birds-dreamlike or nighmarish depending on your perceptions.
The museum is set out as a series of cabinets, each dedicated to one or two aspects of the hunt. The Cabinet Rubens, with it’s spooky feathered ceiling, 
the Cabinet de la Lincorne, with it’s curiosities. The overall feel is that of a Victorian collector’s house, all creaky floorboards and ticking clocks. Yet this museum has much modern art too. Jeff Koons’ ‘Puppy’ is here, and many other pieces relevant to the museum theme. It has an installation room on the ground floor which was, at the time of my visit, quite frightening, showing Tania Mouraud’s ‘Roaming’-a dramatic, noisy black and white depiction of violence, death and dying.
I really didn’t expect to find much to my taste in this museum, only wanting to add it to my ‘collection’, but I was surprised and amazed to find so much to be excited about there. I will return-soon.
Obviously it's not quite as good as this blog, but Curious Expeditions is really worth a look.
A new book by Chris Anderson was published last month called 'Free', or in it's full unwieldy glory, Free: the future of a radical price: the economics of abundance and why zero pricing is changing the face of business. I read an article Anderson wrote on this subject last year (you can find it here, yes I've pilfered the picture) and thought it might offer some interesting ways to think about museum admission charges. The Great Depression and the Second World War changed what was expected of the arts; Alan Yentob asks if this recession could see the next transformation.
Artist Chuck Close talks about the New Deal in America in the 30s, when the government paid artists to work, while actor Simon Callow tells how thrilled actors were to feel their work mattered.
Since this is the second (or is it even the third?) month in a row that the Museums Journal has featured a piece about the possibility of reintroducing admission charges, I thought it might be time to have a discussion about it.
idermy blog...which also has some more contenders for the 'daft taxidermy' thread...maybe we should leave that theme alone now, it's being done to death (pun x2)......anyway, another 'specimen' of taxidermy by Waterton, and also on display at Wakefield Museum, is this one rep
resenting, 'John Bull and the National Debt'.....very apt given the current financial climate...............Waterton's imagination is obviously locked into his own visual culture (I'm thinking of Punch here).....but even so, they are certainly worth a look.......as is the exhibition at Wakefield Museum.......
ed to read about Tate Modern's recent recreation of the Robert Morris installation bodyspacemotionthings of 1971. It's been widely reported that the first incarnation was closed early after damage to the piece by a public without the socio-behavioral framework for participatory encounters with art, as if the idea of damage was not a legitimate form of engagement. Post-Relational Aesthetics it seems as though we, as a trained public, might have a clearer idea of what is required of us in this context, but does this interactive familiarity serve as a limiting device for our actions? Well, Micheal Fried would say it was all just theatricality anyway.
(also an EH property....shown here..)
.........I agree that as a building it is kind of sublime, but as the residents suggested, it's also rather a pain in the butt as an experiment in social engineering.........what do you think....
We are currently witnessing the rapid development of a museums culture across the Gulf and specifically in Qatar. Michael Rice, who worked at the Qatar National Museum between 1972 to 1974, recalls the attitude to history and heritage amongst the young in Qatar at that time:
I have a fine example of daft taxidermy from Bologna University but I don't know hw to import pic, how sad is that?
