Memory: Floods and Flows

December 9, 2009

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has been collecting and analysing data on the question, “What is the good life?” since 1967. He explores issues such as the structure of everyday life, develops well-known concepts such as psychic entropy and challenge-skill ratio (CSR). MC’s flow model and the Experience Sampling Method blend the science of pyschology and folksy-self-help (1997) He reveals that the moments of flow where an individual experiences a good challenge-skill ratio, are likely to happen at work (2000:121-123) although they can also occur when an artist is at work in her studio, or a Nintendo players is up to her game.

Memory: Floods and Flows

“The American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written about the concept of flow, which is the feeling we have of being completely focused on and absorbed in the work we are doing. An artist painting a picture who is so engrossed in his work that he becomes unaware of himself and the passage of time is in a state of flow. Flow can also be attained when a surgeon performs a difficult operation in which she has to use all her abilities and skills. What Csikszentmihalyi has tried to do is identify the circumstances that elicit flow. He reasons that if we analyze situations in terms of the challenges they present and the skills of the person involved in them, we find that flow arises in contexts characterized by a high level of challenge and skill, in which capacity of the doer exactly matches the demands of the task being done (Klingberg 2009:167-8).”

“Considering Csikszentmihalyi’s diagram as a cognitive map with north at the top, it is in the northeast sector where we find the state of flow. When the challenge exceeds skill, we get stres. When skill exceeds challenge we get a sense of control, which becomes boredom as the level of challenge drops. Exchange “skill” for “working memory capacity” and “challenge” for “Information overload,” and perhaps we have a map illustrating the subjective side of the information demand. When this demand exceeds our capacity, we experience the relative attention deficit due north of the map. However, we should not simply avoid these demands, for when they are too low we become bored and apathetic. In other words, there is a reason for us to cater to our need for stimulation and information. It is when demand and capacity, or skill and challenge, are in a state of equilibrium that the situation is conducive to flow. And perhaps it is precisely here, where we exploit our full capacity, that we develop and train our abilities (Klingberg 2009:168)”

“While our working memory load exactly matches working memory capacity and we hover around the magical number seven, the training effect is its most powerful. Now that we know this, it is up to us to control our environments and reshape the work we do to our abilities. Let us hope that we can learn to perfect the compass that will show us where to find balance and help us navigate into the northeast corner of the map, where we can feel the flow and develop to our full capacity (Klingberg 2009:169).” Read the rest of this entry »

Honoré Jaxon

Honouring Honoré Jaxon (1861-1952) ocean.flynn (2009-12-03) Layered Images: PhotoShop CC 3.5

The life story of Honoré Joseph Jaxon born William Henry Jackson (1861-1952) is inextricably linked to the history of Canada, to the story of missing archives, to the history of the early North American Baha’is, the history of early social justice movements. Fragments of the “missing” archives have been partially restored through the work of countless historians, artists, social scientists, cultural workers and journalists. Jaxon adopted the cause of the Métis and worked tirelessly to build an archives that literally weighed three tons when he was evicted from his New York apartment in 1951 at the age of 90. His archives were almost completely destroyed and he died with a broken spirit three weeks later.

A timeline of selected events in the contextualized life of Honoré Joseph Jaxon born William Henry Jackson (1861-1952)

10,000 years ago or more The hunter-gatherer ancestors of Manitoba’s First Nations were already in the area at least 10,000 years ago. Even then the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers (where Winnipeg now stands) provided a natural major gathering place of different First Nations. All of Manitoba’s rivers—the Nelson, Churchill and Hayes—flow directly into Hudson Bay. The Saskatchewan River flows into Lake Winnipeg from the west, the Winnipeg River from the east, and the Red River from the south. The Assiniboine, joins the Red River at the Forks in Winnipeg.

1612 The first European reached present-day Manitoba.

1690 Henry Kelsey, traveled the northern part of the Manitoba. He was the first non-aboriginal to do so.

In 1738, Fort Rouge was built at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. The Forks, as the junction was called, became the centre of a the fur trade.

In 1811, Lord Selkirk, from Scotland established the Red River Settlement with plans to increase agricultural production at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers.

1817 Quebec Catholic missionaries arrived on the east side of the Red River.

1837 The Upper Canada Rebellion was led by William Lyon Mackenzie against the ruling oligarchy in York (now Toronto), Upper Canada.

1844 Louis Riel was born near modern Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the Red River Settlement, a community in Rupert’s Land nominally administered by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and largely inhabited by First Nations tribes and the Métis, an ethnic group of mixed Cree, Ojibwa, Saulteaux, French Canadian, Scottish, and English descent. Read the rest of this entry »

Overwhelmed that a photo of the Iqaluit cemetery taken from Happy Valley looking out over Koosejee Inlet in October 2002, can travel so far because of the initiative of Sep and Jonathan, two cyber citizens who have created Art 2.0: a collaborative art form linking (and hyperlinking) art, technology, consciousness . . .

Their methodology was impeccable, including dozens of collaborators through a series of courteous and informative emails that described the step-by-step process.

The final result is mind-boggling.

They provided the customized url for the image of pages on which the work of each contributor is shown:

They also provided a link to the Amazon site where the book itself is on sale at a very low price considering the high quality of the book design and its unique format which is a harbinger of a Art 2.0.

I am grateful they trawled Flickr and found a fragment of my own narrative . . .

Hi Maureen!

After nearly 3 years of hard work we are so very happy to announce that We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion is in stores starting today. You should all be receiving your books within the next few weeks, but we hope that you will take a sneak peek next time you’re at your local bookstore. Copies should be on the shelves of bookstores nationwide in the United States.
If you live within the Unites States, your complimentary copy of the book will be shipped out today or tomorrow. If you live outside of the US we will be shipping your book next week and it may take some extra time to get to you. Thank you all for being so patient and it shouldn’t be too much longer until you have it in your hands.

We also hope that you will spread the word and perhaps include the exciting news in your facebook status or on your blog. We will be posting the simple: “We Feel Fine book in stores today! http://bit.ly/wffbook)” in our facebook/twitter as well.

As we have said before we honestly couldn’t have done this without all of you and so on today of all days would like to send you all our sincerest gratitude. For me, personally, I have had an incredible time working on this book and a huge part of that has been reading your blogs. Thanks for everything. Best, Sep

http://wp.me/p1TTs-ju

150, 000 visits

November 27, 2009

Near Roche Miette on the Yellowhead Highway we get stopped by a “sheep-jam”, bighorn-induced traffic congestion [1] at about the same time that we interrupted a truly engaged activist, peace rider who was cycling to Alaska to raise awareness of climate change. Just after our second sheep-jam where a film crew member also caught in the same traffic jam, pulled over to catch some sleep behind the wheel of a powerful all-terrain vehicle(did he see that many bighorn already?), we stopped to film a pack of wolves. After we booked into a place to stay in Jasper, we drove up to the ski hill at Marmot. A huge raven guided us along the winding road to the lodge. This winter there is a record snow fall to the delight of snowboarders and skiiers. The tasks of downloading the day’s film clips and photos to Picasa, and reading Gadd to name peaks, etc, were again interrupted by Yellowhead wildlife. Wapitii surrounded the hotel attracting amateur photographers to the unbelievably fun shot of a wapiti posing in front of the Wapiti signage.

Later on the same day speechless hits reached 150, 000 perhaps at exactly the same time we were left speechless by the miyat.

Speechless began as the next step from “beached wail” a failed attempt to overcome serious creative blocks . . .

Speechless does not really require the author to write. Web 2.0 platforms are ideally designed for writers who cannot write. At least for writers who cannot write in a straight line. Rhizomic thinkers and learners can allow themselves to “get lost.” All we need to do is to mark the virtual trail with something more solid than breadcrumbs.

Speechless cannot imagine faces or stories of its visitors and would rather that for now at least, that the speechless face be faceless, ageless, genderless, not associated with any institution, or group, or ideology, or demographics . . .

Speechless shares resources using the Creative Commons,
for memory work,
for revisiting histories with an ethical dimension,
for virtual tourists,
travelers,
artists,
for the blogosphere,
for public policy,

Speechless has been a technological tool for mind-mapping . . .

Notes

1. See Ben Gadd 2008:408. Gadd explained that the bighorn sheep ovis canadensis, are plentiful in this area and female and young are often sighted here.

He claimed that the mountain named in the 1820s by voyageurs Roche Miette (Miette Rock) probably comes from the Cree word miyat (bighorn sheep). This tangible (very geological) link to the early (fur) trade routes is one way that the nonlinear learner can be pulled in so many directions that only web 2.0 platforms and applications could mind map it.

Gadd also notes a number of commonplace Canadian English misprononciations and/or mispellings of geological formations and place names in the Rocky Mountains with Spanish, French, Irish, Cree, Ojibwa etc origins.

Webliography and Bibliography

Gadd, Ben. 2008. Canadian Rockies: Geology Road Tours. Corax.

DRAFT

It started with a metaphor: The El-Zekkum is a thorny tree which symbolizes a very severe punishment and bitter remorse for those who lack spiritual discernment. By deceiving themselves and choosing an unhealthy path, they prefer an illusion of reality— a tree whose fruit resembles the almond but is extremely bitter– to the delicious, merciful and spiritual food of Divine Reality.

So I tried to map the metaphor.

See My Google Map entitled Mapping Metaphors: Zeqqumhere. This map will be updated as I find new relevant links.


View Larger Map

Metaphor (metapherein Gr. meta: between phero:to bear) the description of one thing as something else, can be traced as far back as Ur. Since the 1960s and 1970s continental philosophers such as Derrida and Ricoeur have revisited the term.

A friend who has lived in Saudi Arabia has seen this plant which is also referred to in the Koran the as Tree of Zaqqum ( Surah 44 verse 43). And she found this photo of of a Zaqqum Tree in At Ta’if by Naseem Najd whose site includes great travel photos of Ta’if.

Then I found this photo of the similar Eltham Indian Fig, or Sweet Prickly Pear (Opuntia dillenii) with the fruits. Coastal semidesert altitude zone, Teno peninsula. North-west coast of the Tenerife Island, Canary Archipelago taken by Alexander Bogolyubov, January, 2008.

In wikipedia the reference claims that Zaqqum (Arabic: زقوم‎) is a tree that Muslims believe grows in Jahannam (hell). The Khati’un are compelled to eat Adh-Dhari, bitter fruit, to intensify their torment (Qur’an 69:36-37). The Khati’un may eat only the fruit or Ghislin (foul pus from the washing of their wounds) (Qur’an 69:36). Its fruits are shaped like devils’ heads (Qur’an 37:62-68). According to Shaykh Umar Sulayman Al-Ashqar, a professor at the University of Jordan, once the palate of the sinners is satiated, the fruit in their bellies churns like burning oil. Some Islamic scholars believe the fruit tears their bodies apart and releases bodily fluids. The Qur’an says: [44.43] Surely the tree of the Zaqqum, [44.44] Is the food of the sinful [44.45] Like dregs of oil; it shall boil in (their) bellies,
[44.46] Like the boiling of hot water.[1] The name zaqqum has been applied to the species Euphorbia abyssinica by the Beja people in eastern Sudan.[2] In Jordan, it is applied to the species Balanites aegyptiaca.[3]

“Is that better entertainment or the Tree of Zaqqum? For We have truly made it (as) a trial for the wrongdoers. For it is a tree that springs out of the bottom of Hellfire: The shoots of its fruit-stalks are like the heads of devils: Truly they will eat thereof and fill their bellies therewith. Then on top of that they will be given a mixture made of boiling water… (Surah Al-Saffat Those Ranged in Ranks Surah 37:Verse 62 – 67)”

“Verily the tree of Zaqqum will be the food of the sinful, -like molten brass; it will boil in their insides, like the boiling of scalding water. (Surah Al-Dukhan – Smoke – Surah 44:Verse 43 – 46)”

“Then will you truly, O you that go wrong, and treat (Truth) as falsehood! ‘You will surely taste of the Tree of Zaqqum. Then will you fill your insides there with. (Surah Al-Waqi’ah-The Inevitable Event-Surah 56:Verse 51 – 53)”

Zakkum is listed by L. J. Musselman (2003) in his publication entitled “Trees in the Koran and the Bible.” Of the 22 trees of the Bible, the date palm, fig, olive, pomegranate and tamarisk are also included in the Koran. Unique to the Koran are the talh (scholars are undecided as to whether this is the banana plant, which is not a tree, or a species of the widespread genus Acacia), the sidr (a thorn bush, probably Zizyphus spina-christi) and the mysterious and foul “tree of Hell”, or zaqqm (As-Saffat 37:65, Ad-Dukhn 44:49, Al-Waqi’a 56:51): “Is this not a better welcome than the zaqqm tree? We have made this tree a scourge for the unjust. It grows in the nethermost part of Hell, bearing fruit like devils’ heads: on it they shall feed, and with it they shall cram their bellies, together with draughts of scalding water. Then to Hell shall they return.” Musselman also noted that “Similarly, in eastern Sudan, the Beja people call the large, arborescent cactus Euphorbia abyssinica “zaqqm” after the tree of Hell mentioned in the Koran. It is unlikely that the conception of the zaqqm in the Koran was based on this succulent, since the zaqqm fruit was described as resembling a devil’s head, for instance. It is perhaps owing to its very bitter sap that Euphorbia abyssinica has been likened to the zaqqm.” He also added that, “In the Koran, trees are most frequently cited as gifts of a beneficent Creator, with the notable exception of the tree of Hell, zaqqm. In both scriptures, fruits from trees are highly valued (Musselman 2003:45-7) .”

Notes:

1. Jean Léonard, whose work (1981-1992) entitled “Contribution à l’étude de la flore et de la végétation des déserts d’Iran (Dasht-e-Kavir, Dasht-e-Lut, Jaz Murian)” was published by the Jardin Botanique National de Belgique (The National Botanic Garden of Belgium) may have insight into the plant referred to be .

2. maps work on the basis of a totalizing classification (Anderson 1991 [1983]).

3. In her book entitled Naming Nature: the Clash between Instinct and Science, (2009) biologist, science writer (New York Times, Science, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times Carol Kaesuk Yoon calls for a reclamation of the scientific field of taxonomy, the ordering and naming of things. As science educator-consultant (Cornell University, Microsoft) she encourages critical thinking in biology.

4. “O thou who art partaking of the Heavenly Food! Know thou verily the Divine Food is descending from heaven, but only those taste thereof who are directed to the light of guidance, and only those can enjoy it who are endowed with a sound taste. Otherwise every diseased soul disliketh the delicious and merciful food and this is because of the sickness which hath seized him, whereby the El-Zekkum [1] is sweet (to his taste) while he fleeth from the ripe fruit of the Tree of the Living and Pre-existent God — and there is no wonder in that. [1 El-Zekkum -- a thorny tree so called, which bears fruit like an almond, but extremely bitter. Therefore the tree symbolizes a very severe punishment and bitter remorse for the unbelievers.] In a similar way, thou beholdest some women who have abandoned the Testament, and to them the bitterness of discord is sweet. They keep aloof from the Extended Shadow and dwell under the shade of a “black smoke.” Alas for them and grief for them! They will surely lament and find themselves in loss. Verily, this is but an evident truth! (Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of Abdu’l-Baha v1, p. 130-1).

5. “Yet I had planted thee, a noble vine, wholly a right seed. How then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto Me?” Jeremiah 2:21. 21st Century King James Version. Try <a href="“>also

 21Yet I had planted thee, a noble vine, wholly a right seed. How then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto Me?

   

6. For an image and botanical description of Euphorbia abyssinica [zaqqum]:“Montane vegetation of the Red Sea hills: Up to 2 260 m high, these hills are situated in the north-eastern edge of the Sudan. The seaward facing slopes of the hills have a winter rainfall, while those not facing the sea have a very low summer rainfall. Mist and clouds have an important effect on the vegetation. A few localities enjoy both summer and winter rains. Near the Eritrean border, forests of Juniperus procera are found, with a few well-stocked areas but most ravaged by fire and overgrazing. Associated with Juniperus is Olea chrysophylla. Characteristic plants of the drier parts of this range include Dracaena ombet and Euphorbia abyssinica [zaqqum].” (www.euphorbia.de/e_abyssinica).”

7. For a botanical illustration of Balanites aegyptiaca [zaqqum]

Paradeiooj Greek? – Garden


My Webliography and Bibliography

Tigay, Jeffrey Howard. Paradise.

Léonard, Jean. 1981-1992. “Contribution à l’étude de la flore et de la végétation des déserts d’Iran (Dasht-e-Kavir, Dasht-e-Lut, Jaz Murian). Jardin Botanique National de Belgique.

Jeffrey Howard Tigay’s Bibliography

J. Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament, 1 (1919), 45–77; Th. C. Vriezen, Orderzoek naar de paradijs-voorstelling bij de oude Semietische Volken (1937), incl. bibl.;

P. Humbert, Etudes sur le rMcit du paradis et de la chute dans la GenIse (1940), incl. bibl.; U. Cassuto, in: Studies in Memory of M. Schorr (1944), 248–58;

J. L. Mc-Kenzie, in: Theological Studies, 15 (1954), 541–72; E. A. Speiser, in: BASOR, 140 (1955), 9–11; idem, in: Festschrift Johannes Friedrich (1959), 473–85;

R. Gordis, in: JBL, 76 (1957), 123–38; B. S. Childs, Myth and Reality in the Old Testament (19622), 43–50; N. M. Sarna, Understanding Genesis (1966), 23–28;

T. H. Gaster, Myth, Legend and Custom in the Old Testament (1969), 6–50, 327–71; J. A. Bailey, in: JBL, 89 (1970), 137–50. See also Commentaries to Genesis 2:4–3.

R. H. Charles, Eschatology (19632); K. Kohler, Heaven and Hell in Comparative Religion (1923);

H. Strack and P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, 4 (1928), 1928), 1016–65.

http://wp.me/p1TTs-iV

Arctic Adventurer: We Feel Fine

Arctic Adventurer: We Feel Fine,
originally uploaded by ocean.flynn.

DRAFT
Photos of Iqaluit cemetery taken October 2002; Uploaded to Flickr, Trawled by wefeelfine, Linked to wordpress, wefeelfine.org

American artist, Jonathan Harris describes his work on his website:

“I make (mostly) online projects that reimagine how we relate to our machines and to each other. I use computer science, statistics, storytelling, and visual art as tools. I believe in technology, but I think we need to make it more human. I believe that the Internet is becoming a planetary meta-organism, but that it is up to us to guide its evolution, and to shape it into a space we actually want to inhabit—one that can understand and honor both the individual human and the human collective, just like real life does (Harris).”

“Sep Kamvar is a consulting professor of Computational Mathematics at Stanford University. His research focuses on data mining and information retrieval in large-scale networks. He also is interested in using large amounts of data and accessible media in the study of human nature through art. [Among his other areas of interest he includes] probabilistic models for classification where there is little labeled data (Sep Kamvar’s blog profile).”

Glossary of Terms

Nonlinearity: “At the beginning of Chapter 5 in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim finds himself in jail on the planet of Tralfamadore. Billys captors give him some Tralfamadorian books to pass the time, and while Billy can’t read Tralfamadorian, he does notice that the books are laid out in brief clumps of text, separated by stars. “Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message — discribing a situation, a scene,” explained one of his captors. “We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any relationship between all the mssages, except that the author has chosen then carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” Harris and Kamvar aimed to write Almanac of Human Emotions in the telegraphic, schizophrenic manner of tales from Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers are.”

Open Platforms: “The power of open platforms in enabling the easy generation of consumable content has been demonstrated repeatedly on the internet, not only with the web itself, but also with sub-platforms like Facebook, Flickr, Google Gadgets, among others. I am interested in platforms that easily enable high-quality content creation for developers and provide a straightforward content consumption and navigation experience for users.”

Open Sub-platforms Open Sub-platforms like Facebook, Flickr, Google Gadgets, among others, facilitate the generation-creation of high-quality consumable content while providing easier access and consumption for users.

Timeline

Webliography and Bibliography

http://wp.me/p1TTs-j6

A common strategy used by politicians is to subvert debates by simply claiming that their opponents’ world-views are based on ideology or utopia. Karl Mannheim (1929-31 [1997]) hoped to transcend the confusion and irrationality of empty arguments that he claims led to the crisis of mutual distrust, political poisoning and organized disorientation in Weimar Germany. He developed a Sociology of Knowledge to explore what was being done in the name of knowledge in political debates. Paul Krugman seems to be exploring similar themes in his New York Times Op-Ed article entitled “Paranoia Strikes Deep.”

“In its Mannheimian form, the concept of ideology juxtaposed situationally-contingent knowledge with situationally non-contingent knowledge. Where, if at all, that boundary could be drawn has been the subject of an ongoing debate within the discipline Karl Mannheim founded when he wrote Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (1929-31). The startling and subversive claim of his position was that knowledge has a sociology, that is, it is socially located and therefore contingent (pp. xxiii, 36,68-9, 185, 269). This undermined the notion that knowledge could be like natural science was supposed to be: neutral, objective, above the contending forces in society and culture. In the end, Mannheim believed that the sociologist of knowledge could find an interest-free vantage point. He adopted a position of ‘relationalism’ which eschewed the toughest epistemological questions (pp. 70, 71, 77, 166, 253). (cited in Young, Robert Cyborgs)”

“Mannheim developed his sociology of knowledge in a series of writings culminating in Ideology and Utopia, (1929, 1997) a volume of connected essays first published in Germany in 1929 (Mannheim 1929, 1936a). Through his sociology of knowledge, Mannheim attempts a social-scientific way of encountering and partly transcending the irrational elements in all thought bearing on social constitution. The hidden integrative force of such elements in structures of thinking, he argues, is evident from the disorientation effected by political strategies that expose the world-views of opponents as nothing but ideologies or utopias. While this subversive insight was first loosed on the political world by Marxism, it soon became common property among all parties in Weimar Germany, according to Mannheim, generating a crisis of mutual distrust and poisoning political processes dependent on self-confident reflection, inquiry, debate, and settlements that could be defended in public. The sociology of knowledge promises to break through the impasse by fostering among the parties a realistic assessment of the social situation common to all, paradoxically beginning with a sociological neutralization of the insight into ideology and utopia. If sociology can disinterestedly show how contrasting styles of practical social knowledge are without exception grounded in unacknowledged wishes derived from diverse social locations, the common consciousness among politically active strata about this piece of highly interesting theoretical social knowledge-itself based on a commitment to synthesis sociologically imputable to the intelligentsia as stratum-can gradually expand to grasp the wider social diagnosis that it implies. Universal awareness of ideology and utopia would undergo a decisive change in function, from a paralyzing political poison to organon for a knowledge-oriented but not conflict-free politics (Kettler).”

Keywords: Karl Mannheim, Robert Young, Marxism, liberalism:crisis of, ideology, utopia, world-views, sociology, consciousness, mutual distrust, Weimar Germany, transparent public inquiry, transparent public debate, political strategies, social constitution, social cohesion, situationally-contingent knowledge, situationally non-contingent knowledge, Sociology of Knowledge, Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, SSK, Sociology:Knowledge, society and culture, knowledge and power, power and everyday life,

Webliography and Bibliography

Kettler, David. Karl Mannheim and the crisis of liberalism: the secret of these new times.

Krugman, Paul. 2009-11-9. “Paranoia Strikes Deep.” New York Times.

Young, Robert. Cyborgs

http://wp.me/p1TTs-j3

Castilleja affinis

October 17, 2009

Castilleja affinis, Indian paintbrush, East Sooke Regional park 11:40 am

ocean.flynn.

This photo of Indian paintbrush, Castilleja affinis [1] was taken on June 18, 2007, just off the trail on the eastern slope of Creyke Point, East Sooke Regional Park looking out towards Campbell Cove (48°19′34.17 N, 123°37′50.38). The bright orange, showy parts of Indian paintbrush, Castilleja affinis, are actually bracts (modified leaves), with a flower inside each bract. Many members of the Orobanchaceae are photosynthetic root parasites (hemiparasites), such as Indian paintbrush. Paintbrushes Castilleja along with the rare Henderson’s checker-mallow (Sidalcea hendersonii), sweet gale (Myrica gale), sedges (Carex sp) and shooting stars (Dodecatheon sp) are among the rare plants of the tidal area of Metchosin.

Kingdom: Plantae > Subkingdom: Tracheobionta – Vascular plants > Superdivision: Spermatophyta – Seed plants > Division: Magnoliophyta – Flowering plants > Class: Magnoliopsida – Dicotyledons > Subclass: Asteridae > Order: Scrophulariales > Family: Scrophulariaceae – Figwort family > Genus: Castilleja Mutis ex L. f. – Indian paintbrush > Species: Castilleja affinis Hook. & Arn. – coast Indian paintbrush > Subspecies Castilleja affinis Hook. & Arn. > ssp affinis

Notes

1. Thank you to Mark J. Egger from the Herbarium at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle for drawing my attention to my errors in classification which I have hopefully corrected. As an enthusiast – not a professional – I am always grateful to learn more about plant taxonomy.

Chuang, T. I. ; L. R. Heckard. 1991. “Generic realignment and synopsis of subtribe Castillejinae (Scrophulariaceae – Tribe Pediculareae).” Systematic Botany 16: 644–666.

Tank, David C.; Egger, J. Mark; Olmstead, Richard G. 2009. “Phylogenetic Classification of Subtribe Castillejinae (Orobanchaceae).” Systematic Botany. 34:1:182-197.

Egger, Mark J. 2009-03-13. “A New Species of Castilleja (Orobanchaceae) from Trujillo, Venezuela.” Brittonia. 61:1:44-5. Biomedical and Life Sciences. www.springerlink.com/content/n36p945m508747nl

see http://calphotos.berkeley.edu/cgi/reviewers_query?one=T&name=Mark+Egger

Mark Egger says:
This is not C. coccinea (which is not found west of the Rocky Mountains), but rather the somewhat similar west coast species, Castilleja affinis. This is the nominate form, var. affinis. C. affinis has a much longer corolla and especially corolla beak, and the secondary calyx clefts are relatively deep in C. affinis, rather than very shallow to non-existant in C. coccinea. Also, as you may have heard, Castilleja and other root-hemiparasitic Scrophs are now classified in the Orobanchaceae, based on both morphology and numerous recent molecular studies.

Genus: Castilleja; Family: Scrophulariaceae; Castilleja coccinea; bright orange; Indian paintbrush; snapdragon family; 3-lobed, scarlet tipped bracks all but hide the small 2-lipped greenish-yellow flowers;

Uploaded by ocean.flynn on 18 Jun 07, 3.17PM MDT.

Curriculum Vitae 2009-10-14

October 14, 2009


C. V. (October 2009)

Maureen Flynn-Burhoe

SUMMARY

This thoroughly bilingual candidate offers unique skills in combining Web 2.0 technologies with visual arts, teaching and research. Successful teaching experiences in the fields of visual arts, sociology, Inuit studies, human rights, contemporary social theory and qualitative methodologies include seven years in R. P. Congo, ten years at the National Gallery of Canada as contract art educator and nine terms as contract lecturer for Carleton University. This includes contract lecturing in First Nations Education Authorities, Nunavut Arctic College and the National Gallery of Canada’s Education Division. At the National Gallery of Canada (1990-2000) she was frequently requested for VIP tours of the Gallery’s entire collection from European to contemporary with a specialty in Inuit art. This candidate has exceptional interpersonal skills with a natural and nurtured ability to spot, draw out and encourage skills and strengths in others. This highly creative individual has sustained visual arts production while working as educator and researcher and as graduate student. This candidate is passionate about the potential of visual arts to contribute to an inclusive public curriculum. She has been featured in CBC radio and television interviews and invited to give public talks, customized tours of museum exhibitions and slide shows in Ottawa, Vancouver, Toronto and Charlottetown. She has also been guest lecturer in university courses in Social Psychology, Sociology of Education, Anthropology, Canadian Studies and Art History at Carleton University, St. Paul’s University, University of Ottawa and the Inuit Art Foundation. An unswerving commitment to providing a forum for First Nations, Inuit and African-Canadian teachers, learners and researchers has led to the hosting of countless student-authored web sites offering cultural and/or generation specific local knowledge. These student-authored web pages are complemented by her shareable web-based resources. Her sophisticated use of technology which includes proficiency in Internet and Web 2.0 tools such as HTML, and software such as ToolBook authoring software, Adobe PhotoShop Creative Suite, EndNote bibliographic database, has facilitated the production and sharing of teaching, learning and research tools for the classroom and beyond. Years of teaching experience have led to the development of a radical but highly effective technology-intense, media-intense, student-centred participatory pedagogy. She is frequently asked by students for references for employment and graduate studies by former students who recognize her sincerity in encouraging students to reach their full potential. This candidate is a team player who encourages the sharing of knowledge-based resources. 

PERSONAL

Birthplace: Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; Citizenship: Canadian.

EDUCATION

Ph.D. Sociology, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON. “The missing archives of the Inuit art knowledge community” [Memory Work: A Critical Examination of How Distorted Histories of Benign Colonialism Shape-Shifted into Inuit Art History]. 1999-2005 Completed course work, two Comprehensive exams with distinction. Leave of absence/attrition since 2005.

M. A. Canadian Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, 1995.CD-ROM. Interactive Multimedia. “Symbols of womanhood in the work of Inuit artist, Jessie Oonark.” This was the first MA at Carleton submitted on a CD-ROM.
B. A. Visual Arts. Universite du Quebec a Chicoutimi. 1982.

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

2002-3 Sessional Lecturer: Nunavut Arctic College, Iqaluit, Nunavut. 2001 Sessional Lecturer: Off-Campus Aboriginal Program, Carleton University. Fort Frances Seven Generations Education Authority; Moose Cree Education Authority; Akwesasne Education Centre. 1995-2003 Facilitator with Cultural Industries Training Program, Bridging program for Inuit students offered by Inuit Art Foundation. Taught thirteen week introductory Inuit art courses to Inuit students. 1990-2000 Contract art educator with National Gallery of Canada. Gallery talks, designing and facilitating workshops, theme tours of collection. Developed an innovative, inclusive approach to the permanent collection by integrating African Canadian, First Nations, Inuit culture and history. 1998 Supervisor Directed Readings: Inuit Art. Carleton University.

2003-4  Contract Lecturer: Carleton University, Ottawa, ON. Power and Everyday Life.

2002-3 Sessional Lecturer: Nunavut Arctic College, Iqaluit, Nunavut.   This was a pilot project in which this candidate was the primary on-site Carleton connection responsible for preparing, promoting and presenting Nunavut-specific introductory Human Rights and Sociology courses. The success of this project led to an agreement signed between Nunavut Arctic College and Carleton University’s Centre for Initiatives in Education. Provided letters of recommendation for one Inuit student who consequently was accepted into the Kennedy School of Governance, Harvard University with a Fulbright scholarship and completed his MA in 2005. 

2001  Sessional Lecturer: Off-Campus Aboriginal Program, Carleton University.Fort Frances Seven Generations Education Authority; Moose Cree Education Authority; Akwesasne Education Centre. 1995-2003  Facilitator with Cultural Industries Training Program,Bridging program for Inuit students offered by Inuit Art Foundation. Taught thirteen week introductory Inuit art courses to Inuit students.

90-20  Contract art educator with National Gallery of CanadaGallery talks, designing and facilitating workshops, theme tours of collection. Developed an innovative, inclusive approach to the permanent collection by integrating African Canadian, First Nations, Inuit culture and history.

1998  Supervisor Directed Readings: Inuit Art. Carleton University.

1997-8  Consultant for Canadian Teachers Federation.Prepared extensive bibliographic resource list on African-Canadian history for 1996-7 Mathieu da Costa award project.

1997  Lecturer Carleton University’s Art History, teaching Inuit Art 11.314.

1990-5  Golden Lake First Nations: informal art classes.Provided material for and facilitated art classes at Golden Lake Makwa Centre c. 6 – 10 classes a year. Worked with community members to raise funds and organize bus trips to Ottawa to visit museums. Maintained contact and interest in Golden Lake activities particularly those organised through Addiction counsellor Irvin Sarasin.83-89  Art educator Lycée Charlemagne, Pointe-Noire, R.P.Congo.

86-89  Art educator Scuola Matteo, Pointe-Noire, R.P. Congo.

89-91  ESL facilitator. Caron Language School, Vanier, ON.

66-7  Animator/Interpretor. Confederation Centre Art Gallery. Charlottetown, PEI.Student Summer Employment.

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

2004-5  Research Assistant to Professor Donna Patrick, Carleton University. Urban Inuit Research Project

1994-5  Research Assistant to Professor Marion Jackson, Carleton University. African Canadian Visual Artists.

1994  (Summer) Practicum: Teaching and Learning Centre.Developed a model of how graduate students might assist instructors in the use of interactive multimedia applications. Focus: Preparation of material for an interactive multimedia application (CD-ROM) that could be used as support material for Professor Jackson’s Inuit Art Course (Art History 11.314).

1993  (Summer) Practicum: National Gallery Inuit Art Curatorial Section.Assisted Inuit Art Curator, Marie Routledge in preparation for exhibition From the Centre: The Drawings of Luke Anguhadluq.

1986  (Fall) Learning Problems. McGill University, Montreal.Focus: The learning process: reaching learners with various learning problems. (Selected field work and course work). 

PUBLICATIONS

Ejesiak, Kirt; Flynn-Burhoe, MaureenChapter 14: “Animal Rights” (2007:444-5) in Vaughn, Lewis. 2007. Doing Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary IssuesW.W. Norton & Company.

2005 Ejesiak, Kirt; Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen. “Animal rights vs. Inuit rights.” Boston Globe

2001  “Reviews: Saqiyuq.” Inuit Art Quarterly.16. no.3. (Fall).

1999  “Shape-shifting and other points of convergence: Inuit art and digital technologies.”Art Libraries Journal. London: Fall.

1999  “Jessie Oonark: Woman in the Centre.” Inuit Art Quarterly. 14. no. 2. (Summer).

1998  “Dance to the Drum: In Celebration.” Inuit Art Quarterly. 13. no. 3 (Fall).

1998  “CD Rom: The Process behind the Creation of “Woman in the Centre”womenspace. 34. (Fall). e-version: www.womenspace.ca/vol34k.html

1996  “Shamanism in Inuit Art”. Inuit Art Quarterly.11. no.1. (Spring).

INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIC CONFERENCES

2001  “Reflections from the field of cyberspace: practical, ethical and relational issues in Internet based research.” (co-presented with Andrea Doucet.) 18th Qualitatives Conference. McMaster University. May 17-9, 2001.

2000  “Risks and Rights: Imaging the Seal Hunt, a Web-based Project”.17th Qualitatives Conference. University of New Brunswick. May 18-21, 2000.

1998  “IMM: Oonark.” Women’s Studies, Women’s Equality and the NewCommunications Technology. Canadian Women’s Studies Association. Université d’Ottawa, May 30.

1996  “A study of the symbols of womanhood in the work of Jessie Oonarkusing interactive multimedia as a method of exploration,” 10th Inuit Studies Conference, Memorial University of Newfoundland, August 16, 1996.

OTHER PRESENTATIONS

2000  “Le rôle de l’art dans la société canadienne”. Mini-cours.Institut d’études canadiennes. Université d’Ottawa. 5 mai.

1996  “New Media and Inuit Art,” QAGGIT 1996, Inuit Art Foundation, Carleton University.

WWWS DEVELOPED

2000  “Risks and Rights: Imaging the Sealhunt.”"www.carleton.ca/~mflynnbu/nasiq. Launched 17th Qualitatives Conference. University of New Brunswick. May 18-21, 2000.

1999  “Inuitartwebliography.”www.carleton.ca/inuitartwebliography.Launched Fall Qaggit 1999. Inuit Art Foundation. Ottawa.

EXHIBITIONS

One-Woman Exhibitions:

1999  “Reflexivité: Double Vision”* July, 1999, Pilar Shepherd Gallery, Charlottetown, PEI.

1999  “Reflexivité: Double Vision”* March 18 – April 7, Baha’i Centre, Ottawa, Ontario.

1992  “Commemoration” June 11 – June 28, 1992. Galerie Intersection, Ottawa, Ontario.

1982  “Papiergraph-Photopapier”.* April, 1982. La corporation des métiers d’art, Chicoutimi, Québec.

SOFTWARE AND TECHNOLOGY SKILLS

Web 2.0 (delicious, digg, Flickr, wordpress, gather, blogspot, Picasa, HTML, ToolBook 5.0, an authoring software package for creating interactive multimedia applications, FoxPro, database (RQBE: Relational Query by Example) includes image management capacity, EndNote, (package for creating bibliographies), Deskscan, Adobe PhotoShop, Corel Draw, WordPerfect 8, MS Word, PowerPoint, ATLAS-TI.

LANGUAGES

Bilingual English-French. Lecture at University level in French. Beginner level courses in Inuktitut (1999). Beginner level self-study courses in Kicongo. (1983)



This portion is in the process of being integrated with the above: 

1997-8 Consultant for Canadian Teachers Federation. Prepared extensive bibliographic resource list on African-Canadian history for 1996-7 Mathieu da Costa award project.

1997 Winter and Fall sessions. Lecturer Carleton University’s Art History, teaching Inuit Art 11.314.

1990-5 As volunteer provided material for and facilitated informal art classes for pre-youth of Golden Lake First Nations at held at Golden Lake Makwa Centre c. 6 – 10 classes a year. Worked with community members to raise funds and organize bus trips to Ottawa to visit museums. Maintained contact and interest in Golden Lake activities particularly those organized through addiction counselor Irvin Sarasin. Rhonda Amikons, a student from this group of pre-youth went on to complete her studies in North Bay in the visual arts.

1994 (Summer) Practicum: Teaching and Learning Centre. Developed a model of how graduate students might assist instructors in the use of interactive multimedia applications. Focus: Preparation of material for an interactive multimedia application (CD-ROM) that could be used as support material for Professor Jackson’s Inuit Art Course (Art History 11.314).

1993 (Summer) Practicum: National Gallery Inuit Art Curatorial Section. Assisted Inuit Art Curator, Marie Routledge in preparation for exhibition From the Centre: The Drawings of Luke Anguhadluq.

1986 (Fall) Learning Problems. McGill University, Montreal. Focus: The learning process: reaching learners with various learning problems. (Selected field work and course work).

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

2005 Status of Women Canada: Contracted to research and submit report on Structural Changes that Impacted on Women’s Lives since 1995.

2005 Prepared illustrated timeline of Mi’kmaq social history.

2004-5 Research Assistant to Professor Donna Patrick, Carleton University. Urban Inuit Research Project

1994-5 Research Assistant to Professor Marion Jackson, Carleton University.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

2001 “Reviews: Saqiyuq.” Inuit Art Quarterly. 16:3.

1999 “Shape-shifting and other points of convergence: Inuit art and digital technologies.” Art Libraries Journal. London: Fall.

1999 “Jessie Oonark: Woman in the Centre.” Inuit Art Quarterly. 14. no. 2. (Summer).

1998 “Dance to the Drum: In Celebration.” Inuit Art Quarterly. 13. no. 3 (Fall).

1998 “CD Rom: The Process behind the Creation of “Woman in the Centre” womenspace. 34. (Fall). e-version: www.womenspace.ca/vol34k.html

1996 “Shamanism in Inuit Art”. Inuit Art Quarterly. 11. no.1. (Spring).

SELECTED CO-AUTHORED PUBLICATIONS

2005 Ejesiak, Kirt & Flynn-Burhoe, Maureen (2005) Animal Rights vs Inuit Rights. Boston Globe/World News Network. Boston.

 

INTERNATIONAL ACADEMIC CONFERENCES

2001 “Reflections from the field of cyberspace: practical, ethical and relational issues in Internet based research.” (co-presented with Andrea Doucet.) 18th Qualitatives Conference. McMaster University. May 17-9, 2001.

2000 “Risks and Rights: Imaging the Seal Hunt, a Web-based Project”. 17th Qualitatives Conference. University of New Brunswick. May 18-21, 2000.

1998 “IMM: Oonark.” Women’s Studies, Women’s Equality and the New Communications Technology. Canadian Women’s Studies Association. Université d’Ottawa, May 30.

1996 “A study of the symbols of womanhood in the work of Jessie Oonark using interactive multimedia as a method of exploration,” 10th Inuit Studies Conference, Memorial University of Newfoundland, August 16, 1996.

OTHER PRESENTATIONS

2000 “Le rôle de l’art dans la société canadienne”. Mini-cours. Institut d’études canadiennes. Université d’Ottawa. 5 mai.

1996 “New Media and Inuit Art,” QAGGIT 1996, Inuit Art Foundation, Carleton University.

SELECTED WWWS DEVELOPED

2006 speechless http://oceanflynn.wordpress.com

1999 “Inuitartwebliography.” www.carleton.ca/inuitartwebliography Launched Fall Qaggit 1999. Inuit Art Foundation. Ottawa. Currently being moved to http://inuitartwebliography.blogspot.com
http://inuitartwebliography.blogspot.com/

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

One-Woman Exhibitions:

1999 “Reflexivité: Double Vision”* July, 1999, Pilar Shepherd Gallery, Charlottetown, PEI.

1992 “Commemoration” June 11 – June 28, 1992. Galerie Intersection, Ottawa, Ontario.

1982 “Papiergraph-Photopapier”.* April, 1982. La corporation des métiers d’art, Chicoutimi, Québec.

COLLECTIONS

1997 Canada Council Art Bank

SOFTWARE AND TECHNOLOGY SKILLS

Currently learning Web 2.0 technologies. HTML, Adobe PhotoShop, ToolBook 5.0, an authoring software package for creating interactive multimedia applications, FoxPro, database (RQBE: Relational Query by Example) includes image management capacity, EndNote, (package for creating bibliographies), Deskscan, Corel Draw, WordPerfect 8, MS Word, PowerPoint, ATLAS-TI.

LANGUAGES
Bilingual English-French. Lecture at University level in French.

Museology: a Timeline

October 5, 2009

1677 G. Mitelli’s “A Baroque “Cabinet of Curiosities.” Lorenzo Legati, Museo Cospiano annesso a quello del famoso Ulisse Aldrovandi e donato alla sua patria dall’illustrissimo Signor Ferdinando Cospi. “One of the first full-fledged demonstrations of this interpretative strategy was Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, several times reprinted since its appearance in 1992. “[I]nstead of attempting to find generalisations and unities,” Hooper-Greenhill proposed “to look for differences, for change, and for rupture.”15 This “effective history” as distinct from the “normal history” of progressive development would clear the way to a full appreciation for the array of alternative practices that the old teleological accounts had glossed over or suppressed. On the model of Foucault’s templates of successive formations of power and knowledge (the famous discursive formations-discourse-epistemes), Hooper-Greenhill discussed a succession of sites of collection and display—the Medici Palace in Florence; the Renaissance Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities (see Fig. 1) the natural history collections of the seventeenth century, particularly the Repository of the Royal Society in England; and the modern “Disciplinary Museum” for which the postrevolutionary Louvre was the prototype. The result is not a connected museum history, let alone a history of “the” museum. It is rather a kind of genealogical chart of the shifting constellations of epistemology and authority governing the collection of material objects” (Starn 2005).

1783 An image depicting the monument to Friedrich II in Kassel’s Friedrichsplatz. The Museum Fridericianum proudly claimed that it was the first museum in Europe. Cassel had galleries, parks, gardens and palaces that imitated the magnificence of Versailles. The Langraves of Hesse-Cassel were dealers in men for centuries. Hessian mercenaries had defeated the agrarian peasants in the area and took their lands. Napoleon III was imprisoned in Cassel, Northern Germany. See Crimp ‘The Art of Exhibition’ (OMR:236). 1845 William Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia closed because of competition from P. T. Barnum’s Grand Colossal Museum and Greatest Show on Earth (Boon 1991:259).

1828 In his plans for the Berlin Museum, Schinkel preserved the world of classical perfection in his rotunda which was also the visitor’s first encounter with the museum.”The sight of this beautiful and exalted place must create the mood for and make one susceptible to the pleasure of judgement that the building holds in store throughout.” [. . . ] “First delight, then instruct.” This sanctuary as Schinkel called it, would contain the prize works of monumental classical sculpture mounted on high pedestals. This was to have the effect of preparing the visitor for a “march through the history of man’s striving for Absolute Spirit. Schinkel planned a gestalt in which all relationships among objects were fixed. He paid close attention to Hegel’s notion of aesthetics as they were elaborated in his lectures from 1823-29. Hegel declared that, “The spirit of our world todat appears beyond the stage at which art is the supreme mode of our knowledge of the Absolute. The peculiar nature of artistic production and of works of art no longer fulfills our highest need. We have got beyond venerating works of art as divine and worshipping them. The impression they make on us needs a higher touchstone and a different test. Thought and reflection have spread their wings over fine art.” (Hegel, Introduction to Aesthetics). Hegel was speaking of the Owl of Minerva which was to be exhibited in the museum’s rotunda. The Owl of Minerva prepares the viewer for a contemplation of art which “has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality . . . Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is.” Crimp continues, “It is upon this wresting of art from its necessity in reality that idealist aesthetics and the ideal museum are founded; and it is against the power of their legacy that we must still struggle for a materialist aesthetics and a materialist art (Crimp 1993:302).

1845 P. T. Barnum’s Grand Colossal Museum and Greatest Show on Earth (Boon 1991:259).


1851
Crystal Palace Exhibition was one of the first great world fair’s which were a great nationalistic invention in the 19th century based on the theme of European’s progress (Errington 1998:18). Colonized peoples were represented as sources of raw materials. The disciplines of folklore and archaeology were used for nationalistic purposes. The Crystal Palace unintentionally represented Britain’s colonial transgressions (Boon 1991:259). The world’s fair, the museum of science and technology, the fine arts museum, the natural history museum are examples of public sites for mass education in the idea of progress (Errington 1998:19).
1861 Edward Belcher wrote an paper entitled ‘On the manufacture of works of art by the Esquimaux’ which is archived in the Department of Ethnography in the British Museum in London. See J. King Franks and Ethnography. This may be the first paper written on Inuit art (Belcher 1861).

1892 Henry James (1892) described Venice as a beautiful tomb, a museum city with its gondoliers, beggars and models as custodians and ushers and objects of the great museum. (James, Henry. 1988. Henry James on Italy [Selections from Italian Hours] New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988:10 cited in Boon 1991:255). Crimp (IMR 1993:109) referred to a ghost tale by Henry James which played on the double, antithetical meaning of the word presence. “The presence before him was a presence.” In his ghost stories James uses a notion of presence as a ghost that is really an absence. It refers to a presence which is not there. Crimp added the idea of a presence as a kind of increment of being there. It is a ghostly presence that is its excess of presence even when the person conjured is absent. Crimp compared this to Laurie Anderson’s presence at Documenta 7 (1982) in Cassel as an uninvited but powerfully present contemporary artist.

1893 Boas has collected data for this book while gathering ethnographic material in preparation for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition which he hoped would be a potential for public education about other cultures through the use of culturally sensitive and intelligent ethnographic displays. Boas, a Jew devoted his life to dismantling racist notions that had impregnated the social sciences in the 19th century. He was so disgusted by the final displays of human culture in the world fairs that he refused any further collaboration. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair Inuit wore their fur clothing in the heat of Chicago summers. They demonstrated the art of snapping whips and exhibited their kayaks. Franz Boas’ (1858-1942) book entitled The Central Eskimo was reprinted. Boas has been called the father of American Anthropology. Boas promoted the concept of cultural determinism. His students including Margaret Mead founded university departments and/or directed museums of ethnography. See also The World as Marketplace: Commodification of the Exotic at the World’s Colombian Exposition, Chicago (Hinsley 1991) Columbia Exposition was the origin of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (Errington 1998:20).

1904 Exposition in St. Louis displayed Philippine natives. The US had recently annexed the Philippines.

1905 Franz Boas resigned after ten years with the American Museum of Natural History because he was convinced that it was impossible to adequately represent cultural meaning on so slim a basis as physical objects. (8) He turned his attention to analysis of oral traditions, hoping to find in texts recorded directly from native speakers a more objective method of addressing the issues preoccupying the anthropology of his day — race, language, and culture. (9) Some of his followers, though, continued to argue for the superior objectivity of material culture; Alfred Kroeber, for instance, saw archaeological data as ‘the purest [data] there are.’ (10) This penchant for trying to abstract evidence about ‘traditional’ culture from embodied words and things, while ignoring the turmoil engulfing Native peoples at the time collections were made, has retrospectively been interpreted as a serious shortcoming of early anthropology, but it established patterns. “In the short history of anthropology, analyses of spoken words and of material objects have usually been compartmentalized. In North America this dichotomy reflects the way the discipline was originally constituted.

1907 Picasso’s acquaintance Pieret began to make raids on the Louvre removing Phoenician antiquities and selling them to Picasso. Richardson suggested that these Iberian sculptures inspired Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) (Richardson 1996:22-3). Picasso claimed that his epiphany came in when he paid a visit to the seldom frequented Ethnographical Museum at the Trocadero, now the Musee de l’Homme. He described this visit to Malraux later. “When I went to the old Trocadero, it was disgusting. The Flea Market. The smell. I was all alone. I wanted to get away. But I didn’t leave. I stayed. I understood that it was important: something was happening to me right? The masks weren’t like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were like magic things. But they weren’t the Egyptian pieces or the Chaldean? We hadn’t realized it. Those were primitives, not magic things. The Negro pieces were intercesseurs, mediators: ever since then I’ve known the word in French. They were against everything. I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! Everything! I understood what the Negroes used their sculpture for… The fetishes were… weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent. Spirits, the unconscious (people still weren’t talking about that much), emotion — they’re all the same thing. I understand why I was a painter. All alone in that awful museum, with masks, dolls made by the redskins, dusty manikins. Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism painting— yes absolutely! (Malraux 1974:11)” Picasso discovered African art section of Tropedaro? in Louvre (Errington 1998:10). Primitive objects, history

1910 National Gallery of Canada Collection moved to east wing of theVictoria Memorial Museum building.

1914 “In her recent book, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (1998) anthropologist Shelly Errington traces the rise of the modernist paradigm of Authentic Primitive Art in the United States through a series of temporary exhibits, ranging from the 1914 exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s 219 Gallery in New York to the exhibits of African, Oceanic and American Indian Art at the Museum of Modern Art during the 1930s and 1940s to the permanent Museum of Primitive Art established in New York in 1957 (Phillips 2002:46-7).”

1923-42 Frederick Keppel was the president of powerful Carnegie Corporation. At that the Corporation were interested in creating elitist consensus building and in cultural development in places like Australia. The Corporation’s ideals, values, prejudices, interests and assumptions tended to support business-orientated, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant men (Lagemann 1989:6-8,104). Keppel’s aim was to the transmission of “traditionally elite culture…[through]… enlightening public taste directly”. In regard to the arts it was clear that “the goal was to elevate the “best taste” rather than “improve the average”. Under Keppel, classical styles in the fine arts, great literature and the sensibilities and habits associated with them, were seen as “essential to character and taste especially as culture became more susceptible to commercial standards and interests”. Keppel’s goal was to be achieved, not just through schools, but also via the diverting of popular interest in education to agencies like the library, adult education center and the art museum. E. Root (president of the Carnegie Corporation until 1932) echoed 1920 sentiment, when he directed that Corporation policy would follow the trend “for art education and art appreciation… to unite all of the arts in the common endeavor to educate the publics tastes and to train men and women who may interpret the arts to the body of the people” (Lagemann 1989:95,102,115,117).

1923 Le Corbusier held up an image of a pipe as an image of pure functionalism. See Foucault (OT 1982:60) See Magritte (1926).

1926 Réné Magritte (1898-1967) entitled a painting “Ceci n’est pas une pipe. See Foucault (1973).

1927 Marius Barbeau was an ethnologist who proposed the 1927 exhibition showing native and non-native artists side by side, Emily Carr and totem poles. “The interrelation of totem poles and modern paintings displayed in close proximity made it clear that the inspiration for both kinds of art expression sprang from the same fundamental background. One enhanced the beauty of the other and made it more significant. The Indian craftsmen were great artists in their way, and original; the moderns responded to the same exotic themes, but in terms consonant with their own traditions (Barbeau 1932:337-8 cited in Nemiroff 1992:23).”

1930 Canadian Handicrafts Guild organized an exhibition of Eskimo Arts and Crafts at the McCord Museum in Montreal. The exhibition attracted the attention of the New York Times (Canadian Guild of Crafts Quebec 1980:11).

1936 Walter Benjamin wrote his influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (1936) the aura is the source of all value in a deteriorating world. Aura as used by Walter Benjamin refers to “the associations which, at home in the mémoire involuntaire, tend to cluster around the object of a perception”(186). Its place in memory reveals that the aura is what has made the objects of the collector, the translator and the storyteller seem so meaningful “Once you have approached the mountains of cases in order to mine the books from them…what memories crowd in on you!”(66), he writes of his collection. He connects storytelling explicitly to memory. “Memory is the epic faculty par excellence”(97) and even employs the term “aura”The storyteller is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis of the incomparable aura about the storyteller….The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself (108_9). The aura is elsewhere defined in these telling terms. Experience of the aura thus rests on the transportation of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man….To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return. This experience corresponds to the data of the mémoire involontaire (188). As one can see, before the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (1936) the aura is the source of all value in a deteriorating world. It grounds the practice of the collector, the storyteller and indirectly the translator for it lends to their activities a purposefulness they would otherwise not have, becoming only allegories of market strategies. It makes sense that he would have to declare war on this concept given the way those activities resemble market strategies even with their aura__ given, in fact, the resemblance of aura to ideology. Experience of the aura thus rests on the transportation of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man….To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return. This experience corresponds to the data of the mémoire involontaire (188). Crimp (OMR 1993:112) argued that art history adopts an approach modeled on kunstwissenschaft wherein art historians attempt to prove or disprove the aura or presence of the authentic, unique original aspects of works of art. Using chemical analysis or connoisseurship art historians can prove or disprove the authenticity of a work of art which assures its place in a museum. Museums reject copies and reproductions. The presence of the artist must be detected through the work of art or the claim of authenticity cannot be made. See Crimp (OMR 1993:112).

1941 The US was almost ready to join the war. American nationalism intensified. Marc Chagall invited by the Museum of Modern Art, arrived in New York the day the Germans invaded Russia. New York columnist Henry McBride claimed that Americans “had become the sole custodians of the arts” since the collapse of Europe. He vaunted the Museum of Modern Art, “Is not the museum asking us to take the hint and to return to these original sources and start our aesthetic life anew?” (McBride 1941 cited in Nemiroff 1992:29)

1930s-40s “In her recent book, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (1998) anthropologist Shelly Errington traces the rise of the modernist paradigm of Authentic Primitive Art in the United States through a series of temporary exhibits, ranging from the 1914 exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s 219 Gallery in New York to the exhibits of African, Oceanic and American Indian Art at the Museum of Modern Art during the 1930s and 1940s to the permanent Museum of Primitive Art established in New York in 1957 (Phillips 2002:46-7).”

1941 The Museum of Modern Art in New York “staged a major exhibition called “Indian Art in the United States”, a seminal show which demonstrated that scholars and curators had recognised the unstoppable force of a key area of aesthetics and felt obliged to say: “Yes, we recognise this art, these artifacts, for the divinely inspired wonders which they often are.” One man who summed up what the American public was seeing, in many cases for the first time, was the ethnographer and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. “Before long,” he noted, “these works will appear in museums and galleries of fine art.” (Hensall 1999) See 1999 “The Back Half – Visions of another America” The New Statesman.

1941 The exhibition entitled the “Art of Australia” traveled to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York and the National Gallery of Art Washington and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The exhibition in Canada displayed different works of art than those shown in the US. The MoMA and the US National Gallery of Art were considered to be the most significant. Canada is a commonwealth country whose civic structure and population size is roughly similar to Australia’s. “These three venues set the parameters and context of the exhibition as a public event, configuring the show in a sequence of events in a bigger cultural picture that reveals the relationship of alliances that exists between governments and the deployment of culture as a tool of propaganda (Ryan, Louise 2002)”.

1947 André Malraux introduced his notion of the musée imaginaire or Museum Without Walls. “In his well known Museum Without Walls of 1947, André Malraux commented on the “fictitious” aspect of art books and observed that reproductions not only change the scale of original works, they also make them lose any sense of relative proportion when gathered together in such a way. Enlarged details, lighting, angle of shots, colour, everything metamorphoses the works. Furthermore, reproduction can bring side by side works of art that could never be seen together simply because they are housed in various institutions or scattered in different locations, indoors and outdoors, all over the world. The end result for Malraux was nothing less than an “imaginary museum”, an ideal art museum, as opposed to a real one, one that transformed the way art was experienced, appreciated and understood” (Malraux, 1956).

1949 In his 1949[1969] publication La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Fernard Braudel irreversibly transformed the way history was written. The social science turn in historiography was propelled forward by Braudel’s methodology based on “la longue durée”. Braudel examined white writings on the surface of the profound oceans to explore societies in relation to their geographic environments, social structures, their trade routes and their intellectual histories. Braudel examined the geography, political economies and sociology of the cities, Venice, Milan, Genoa and Florence in the age of Phillip II. Images of the immobility of time in Borges map contrast with the rapid acceleration of time in traditional history where centuries and millenia were encapsulated into the lives of singular heroic figures from Alexander the Great, Caesar, Gengis Khan, Louis XIV to Napoleon (Braudel 1949[1969]).

1950s Whitney committed to MoMA orthodoxy-the preference for European modernism. Prior to 1950s the Whitney was committed to realist art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MOMA) was considered to be an elitist, right of center museum dedicated to exhibiting the aesthetic tastes of the New York establishment.

1953 Charles and Peter Gimpel opened an exhibition of Inuit art entitled “Eskimo Carvings” in May in London, England at the gallery they had opened in 1946 (Vorano 2004:9-18). An illustrated catalogue was produced for the exhibition. Vorano argues that this was a pivotal exhibition introducing Inuit art internationally. Charles Gimpel was a photographer who traveled to Canada’s far north in the 1950s and 1960s long before this became a popular tourist attraction. See Tippett and Gimpel (1994). Charles Gimpel and Terry Ryan visited Kingait in 1958 when James Houston was there. “Charles Gimpel had arranged an exhibition of Inuit art at his Gallery during the Coronation celebrations in 2 June of 1953, and the international press covered it Time International, Mayfair, The Observer, The Times. Every prominent newspaper in the western world was writing about this art, and Canadian critics decided that maybe there was something here they should take a look at.” It was terrific: the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought the first set of Cape Dorset prints. Governor General Vincent Massey gave an Inuit print to Princess Margaret as a wedding present.”

1953 James Houston met with his friend Eugene Power to discuss ways of marketing Inuit Art in the United States. Power, who owned and operated University Microfilms in Ann Arbor, established a non-profit gallery in Ann Arbor called Eskimo Art Incorporated to import the work. He encouraged the Cranbrook Institute of Science to host an exhibition of the work in 1953, the first exhibition of Inuit Art in the United States. In 2004 The Dennos Museum Center holds a collection of nearly 1,000 works of Inuit art from the Canadian Arctic. It is believed to be one of the largest and most historically complete collection of Inuit sculpture and prints in the United States. James Houston visited New York and Chicago to sell Inuit carvings and talk about their experience in the Canadian Arctic. Houston’s friend Eugene B. Power at the university at Ann Arbour, Michigan invited some colleagues including museum director Dr. Robert Hatt and anthropologist Bruce Inverarity, who began collecting Inuit art. Power began Eskimo Art, Inc Power’s foundation Eskimo Art Inc offered to purchase the entire Guild inventory of Inuit art although the Guild declined the offer. Guild president Jack Molson had informed James Houston that even though the quality of the works was improving the Guild did not have a large enough clientele to sell the work. Eskimo Art Inc later helped organize exhibitions of Inuit art including a travelling exhibition organized by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. Houston described other early exhibitions at the Field Museum in Chicago and at the Museum of Natural History in New York. There were exhibitions in the States before Canadian galleries noticed (Houston 1995:146-8).

1957 “In her recent book, The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (1998) anthropologist Shelly Errington traces the rise of the modernist paradigm of Authentic Primitive Art in the United States through a series of temporary exhibits, ranging from the 1914 exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s 219 Gallery in New York to the exhibits of African, Oceanic and American Indian Art at the Museum of Modern Art during the 1930s and 1940s to the permanent Museum of Primitive Art established in New York in 1957 (Phillips 2002:46-7).”

1959 The Vancouver Museum and the Art Gallery of the University of British Columbia welcomed young innovative artists of their region. Roy Kiyooka added his New York influence to Jack Shadbolt’s charisma at the Vancouver School of Fine Arts. Vancouver because of its closer ties to the American west coast, Seattle and San Francisco, was not evolving in an artistic vacuum. See Withrow (1972:12.)

1960 Michael Spock director of the Boston Children’s Museum adopted a missionary zeal in development and implementation of hands-on visitor-centred learning experiences in museum display. Based on his own learning experience as a dyslexic in a well-known and politically liberal family, Spock focused on a concept of aesthetics which was linked to comfort in learning. He used interactive materials in the museum space prior to developing the exhibition to ask viewers what they wanted to know about the exhibition content. He and Oppenheimer were among the pioneers in hands-on museum display (Gurian 1991:180 in Karp and Levine).

1960s and 1970s Canada experienced a major expansion of museums through the late 60’s and 70’s, an expansion often inspired and led by volunteers.

1960s Photography was ‘discovered’ as an art form. Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol began to silkscreen photographic images onto the canvases. Through this process photography contaminated the purity of modernism’s separate categories of painting and sculpture. See Crimp, (On the Museums Ruins 1993:77).

1964 The artist Marcel Broodthaers held an exhibition at the Galerie Saint-Laurent in Brussels. He explained that until that time he had been good for nothing so he decided to try to create. His admission of bad faith, of the commodization of art, made of him a creator of ‘museum fictions’. “Fiction enables us to grasp reality and at the same time that which is veiled by reality.” See Crimp (1993:201).

1965 Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) signed the Declaration of Independence. Museums in Rhodesia reflected the anti-black stance of the government. Africans were discouraged from patronizing museums. The cultural heritage of Africans of Zimbabwe was very rich. Material culture included numerous objects that were aesthetic, sophisticated, innovatice, original and ingenious. Artifacts were collected by third parties, such as farmers, missionaries. These collections were then acquired by museums so that there was no relationship between the ethnographer and the object. The original environment and social context of the object were of no interest to the museum since their was no value assigned to the entire culture of Africans of Zimbabwe. A policy of centralization of research collections was adopted and implemented between 1979 and 1981. No African traditions of Zimbabwe were collected in the archives until 1977. They had clearly set up museums as white culture houses. When Robert Mugabe, first black prime minister of Zimbabwe first came to power in 1981? he called for a reconciliation of the political, economic, cultural identities of Zimbabwe. Cultural institutions through collections and galleries are the central artery of communication as providers of education and information. Some argued that cultural institutions in Rhodesia, like museums, were a European concept that could not be adapted to the needs of a pluralistic society like Zimbabwe. See Munjeri in Karp and Lavine.

1967 Federal and provincial governments built historical parks. Students wore period costumes and took on roles of their forefathers as a summer job. Canadians were learning to be proud of being Canadian. Tourism was on the rise.

1968 But in Krauss’ narrative, by the late 1960s video and television were rendering film obsolete; Broodthaers’ Musee d’Art Moderne signaled a loss of confidence in medium in retooling the readymade to embrace the entirety of commercial dross. In so doing Broodthaers further registered the classifying and collecting functions of the museum as a practice heading toward obsolescence See EndNote entry under Krauss (1999).
1970 Museum workers including Leah Inutiq, at the newly founded institution Nunatta Sunaqutangit organised an exhibition of Inuit Art during the Royal Visit to Frobisher Bay, NWT.

1970s According to d’Anglure (2002:227) new generation of educated Inuit, including the founders of Igloolik Isuma like Paul Apak and political leader Paul Quassa, began to visit archives, museums and libraries to learn more about the past and about shamanism. Research into the past intensified along with negotiations for Nunavut and self-government. (D’Anglure 2002:227).

1970 Minimalist artist Richard Serra moved his work outside museum walls by building Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

1971 Doris Shadbolt was one of the curators of the exhibition “Sculpture of the Inuit: Masterworks of the Canadian Arctic” which opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

1971 The Multiculturalism Policy and its attendant Canadian Multicultural Act were adopted. “The federal multicultural program formalised support for the idea of Canadian identity as constituted in its diversity of cultures, an idea that was only implicit in Massey-Lévesque. Multicultural diversity was designed to be the basis of the cultural pillar of Canada’s foreign and domestic policy. In many ways, its logic is the inverse of Massey-Lévesque. The aim of Massey-Lévesque was about building institutions that would unify a compartmentalised nation and about underlining Canada’s historical roots in Europe, primarily Britain and France, as a means to deflect Canadians from the pernicious influences of American culture.” See Ken Lum (1999).

1971 Duncan Cameron published his article distinguishing between the museum that plays a timeless, universal functions as a structured sample of reality, an objective model of reality (Cameron 1971:201. The museum as forum is a place for confrontation, experimentation and debate (Cameron 1971:197 cited in Karp 1991:3).” “In 1971 the Canadian museologist Duncan F. Cameron pointed out the museum’s need to develop both the functions as a temple and as a forum. Twenty years later he once more offers a critical analysis of the museum and the museum profession. Cameron still thinks the museum profession can form part of the vanguard for positive social change. One of the biggest problems, he finds in the conflicting values within the individual, who is constituted as an unholy trinity of private, professional and institutional persons. Each professional person will have to re-examine himself, the academic disciplines and the museum institution. To meet the challenges of tomorrow it is necessary with a change of heart, not only intellectualism.” (Gjestrum 1994).

1973 Daniel Buren published his influential article in Artforum entitled ‘Function of the Museum’.

1973 Marcel Broodthaers, produced a film entitled A Voyage on the North Sea.

1974 The Museum of Modern Art held a controversial exhibition entitled ‘Eight Contemporary Artists’ including the highly politicized Conceptual and Minimalist work. Minimalist artist and museum critic Daniel Buren cynically argued that works of art might as well be locked up in vaults to protect them since they are already so isolated from the world framed, encased in glass in museums. Burin’s contribution to the exhibition was striped panels and fragments representing these frames affixed to nearby corridor and garden walls. Vogue magazine’s Barbara Rose vented her anger against this complicity between the dominant bourgeois cultural institutions and politically-motivated critics of these institutions. She argued that artists like Buren were disenchanted and demoralized artists who sabotaged museums of prestigious museums like the MoMA. focused their aggression against art greater than their own. See Crimp (Museum Ruins:85).

1974 William Rubin responded to Rose in “The Museum Concept is not Infinitely Expandable” published in Artforum explaining that ‘museums are essentially compromise institutions invented by bourgeois democracies to reconcile the larger public with art conceived within the compass of elite private patronage’. Rubin predicted that museums are perhaps becoming irrelevant to the practices of contemporary art. He predicted the end of the period of modern art (c.1850-1970) which for over a century focused on the ‘easel painting concept with its connection to bourgeois democratic life and concurrently the development of private collections as well as the museum concept. See Crimp (Museum Ruins:87). Crimp (1993:281) described how Rubin attempted “to defend the museum against the charge that it had become unresponsive to contemporary art. He insisted that this art simply had no place in a museum, which he sees essentially as a temple for high art. This, of course, puts him in perfect accord with New York critic Hilton Kramer’s position. Crimp (1993) argued that ‘What is never acknowledged is that ignoring those forms of art which exceed the museum – whether the work of historical avant-garde or that of the present – will necessarily give a distorted view of history.”

1970s Museology became more professional as money increased. Their staff’s professional credentials trumped experienced volunteers.

1970s Feminist projects consisted of retrieval-of the re-presentation of work by women that had been “hidden from history,” as a result of the by now well-known joint effects of selective art criticism, art history, and museum practices. “ (Nochlin 1971, Kristeva 1980, Parker and Pollock 1981), Duncan, Broude and Garrard 1982, Pollock 1988, Tickner 1988, Lipton 1988, Rose in Holly 1997) Borrowing from Marxist ideology critiques, Pollock’s Vision and Difference (1988) contends that the only viable conceptual framework for the study of women’s artistic history is one that emphasizes the ways in which gender differences are socially constructed. While indebted to poststructuralist French feminist thinkers such as Julia Kristeva (who also wrote several important essays in art theory, such as “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, 1980), contemporary English-speaking feminists such as Pollock, Lisa Tickner (The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-1914, 1988), Eunice Lipton (Looking Into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life, 1988), Carol Duncan (“Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth Century Vanguard Painting,” Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany, ed. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, 1982), and Jacqueline Rose tend to focus on the articulation of sexual difference rather than on a definition of a specific female artistic sensibility. They simultaneously restore a certain power to images, for they emphasize that art is as capable of constituting ideology as it is of reflecting it–a political commitment that goes way beyond the mission of art history proposed by either the formalist tradition or the iconological method (See Feminist Theory and Criticism (Holly 1997).”

1977 Michel Foucault’s 1977 essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” provides his most programmatic and most influential statement on the genealogical method is the essay. See Starn (2005).

1976 Brian O’Doherty’s well-known series of articles entitled “White Cube” published in Artforum provide a useful analysis of the modernist art gallery and museum, like the Museum of Modern Art in the 1970s which provide a “a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of twentieth-century art.” Referring to the architectural rhetoric of modern museums, he described how these spaces in their whiteness seem “possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values,… [the] sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, [and] … the laboratory…”White Cube

1978 President Carter established a commission, chaired by professional “survivor” Elie Wiesel, to create a national museum in Washington memorializing Jewish suffering in Europe (Finkelstein 2000).

1979 U’mista Cultural Centre is located in Alert Bay on Cormorant Island near the northern tip of Vancouver Island. It adjoins the former residential school, St. Michael’s Residential School. The objects now on display U’mista Cultural Centre and the Kwagiulth Museum and Cultural Centre (opened 1979) were part of major 1921 potlatch hosted by Dan Cranmer from Alert Bay. Potlatch ceremony was criminalized against harsh criticism by Franz Boas. These objects were all confiscated by the Indian agent at Alert Bay, William Halliday who was a ‘former Indian residential school administrator imbued with civilizing zeal’. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a general cultural resurgence. The movement for repatriation emerged. The Museum of Man in Hull (now the Canadian Museum of Civilization) and the Royal Ontario Museum agreed to their repatriation. At this time the two museums were built with private and government funding. Objects in these museums have an evocative power that includes a sense of ‘here’ as well as formal, aesthetic power. See James Clifford in (Karp and Lavine).

1979 Vogue’s Barbara Rose published ‘American Painting: The Eighties’

1979 Two “large collections of potlatch regalia were returned to the communities of Alert Bay and Cape Mudge in British Columbia. They were housed in museums built specifically to receive them and financed by the federal government. Repatriation can be a deeply spiritual and powerful experience, as indicated in the Peigan Nation response to repatriation of their cultural materials.” RCAP

1980s Marcel Broodthaers’ controversial work led to a series of publications including a special edition of the journal October (1987) devoted to his role in the unsettling the role of museums. Broodthaers registered the classifying and collecting functions of the museum as a practice heading toward obsolescence See EndNote entry under Krauss (1999).

1982 The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened the Rockefeller Wing of Primitive Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is considered to be a politically right of center museum, an establishment or elitist organization (Gurian 1991:178-9). The opening of the Rockefeller Wing was the culmination of “institutional validity” of the Primitive Art (Errington 1998 cited in Phillips 2002:46). Phillips summarized Errington’s argument that by the time Metropolitan Museum of Art opened this wing the distinction between purely authentic primitive art forms and cultural productions transformed by contact with the Other, that is, contaminating cultural (technological) influences leading to acculturation was already waning.

1982 Hans Haake participated in the Documenta 7 exhibition which was held at the Museum Fridericianum in Germany. Haake Oelgemaelde, Homage a Marcel Broodthaers in the Neue Gallery not in the Museum Fridericianum. His work was confrontational. On one wall was a detailed oil painting of Ronald Reagan which was in a gold frame and surrounded by classical museological framing devices. On the other was a gigantic photomural of a peaceful anti-Reagan demonstration protesting the deployment of cruise missiles to German soil held in Bonn a week prior . Artistic Director Rudi Fuchs presented a contradictory image. See Crimp (MR:238-9).

1983 Benedict Anderson wrote his influential “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism” Census, map and museum are the three major institutions of power which shaped the way in which allowed the colonial state to imagine its dominion. These three institutions of knowledge management established systems of classification which nurtured a sense of identity in the emerging, imagined, national community. The museum served to classify, create hierarchies of value, store and served in a role of archontes of cultural traditions. (Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.) [MFB: Museums, along with census and maps, were one of the three major colonializing agents producing infinitely reproducible symbols of tradition that constructed imagined communities. Museums as symbols of a hierarchy of power and order responds to the individual and community's need-to-remember. The museum served to classify, create hierarchies of value, store and served in a role of archontes of cultural traditions. It is our limitation as humans constrained in serial time yet equipped with selective memories, that leaves us dependent on archives. Our long term memory is accessed through mechanisms that we do not yet fully comprehend, so we recall certain things but not others. Everyday life experiences provide individuals with an accumulation of events that evoke (sympathy) emotions. Remembering these sympathies repeated in small habits day after day, helps individuals to evaluate justice with greater lucidity and reason. Museums provide ] These three institutions of power profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion. The census created ”identities” imagined by the classifying mind of the colonial state. The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one, and only one, extremely clear place. The map also worked on the basis of a totalizing classification. It was designed to demonstrate the antiquity of specific, tightly bounded territorial units. It also served as a logo, instantly recognizable and visible everywhere, that formed a powerful emblem for the anticolonial nationalism being born. The museum allowed the state to appear as the guardian of tradition, and this power was enhanced by the infinite reproducibility of the symbols of tradition. Chapter 11: Memory and Forgetting Awareness of being embedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of ”forgetting” the experience of this continuity, engenders the need for a narrative of ”identity.”

1984 The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York hosted an exhibition entitled Primitivism in 20th Century Art which juxtaposed modern artworks with masks from Zaire, Nigeria and Inuit masks. McEvilley (1984) criticized the premise of the exhibition and inaugurated debates on representation of culture. Danto (1987) argued that the juxtapositioning was false and inane. The Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition entitled “Primitivism in 20th Century Art” which was attacked by critic Thomas McEvilley, who called for a rejection of Eurocentricism in cultural history. This opened debates on representation of cultures with a more sophisticated approach to discussions of Self and the Other that continued throughout the 1980s.

1984 The Maori exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum created tensions over ethnohistorical exhibitions. The ethnological and historical background material was rejected as nonsensical by the Maori elders revealing how deeply marginalized groups want to ‘define their own heritage’ and launching debates about institutional procedures (Lavine and Karp 1991:2)


1984
The MOMA held an exhibition in 1984 entitled “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, in which curator McShine excluded many important artists. AT&T Corporation sponsored the exhibition. Their interests were in accord with the exhibition’s. Innovation and experimentation were valued in business, industry and the arts. One of the new acquisitions of the Architecture and Design Galleries at the MOMA was a Bell 47D helicopter which was considered to be a coup de théatre. These helicopters are manufactured by the same corporation Textron, that builds the Huey model used against civilians in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. “Contemporary art of exhibition has taught us distinguish between the political and the aesthetic. A New York Times editorial described how, “A helicopter suspended from the ceiling, hovers over an escalator in the Museum of Modern Art . . . . The chopper is bright green, bug-eyed and beautiful. We know that it is beautiful because MOMA showed us the way to look at the 20th century.” See Crimp (1993:272-5).

1987 The exhibition catalogue (1987) was published for The Spirit Sings, an ethnographic exhibition of 106 artifacts sponsored by Shell Canada. The exhibition included cultural productions of the Tlinglit, Salish, Haida, Tsimshian (including the mate of the famous Musee de l’Homme prehistoric mask), Gitksan, Iglulik, Netsilik, Mackenzie Inuit, Copper Inuit, Qairnirmiut, Caribou Inuit, Sadliermiut, Southern Baffin, Labrador Inuit, Slavey, Kutchin, Athapaskan, Tahltan, Cree, Chipewyan, Tanaina, Ojibwa, Assiniboin, Sioux, Plains Cree, Blood, Blackfoot, Sarsi, Red River Metis, Late Missippian, Ottawa, Cayuga, Iroquois, Huron, Woodlands, Mohawk, Montagnais (Innu?), Naskapi, Micmac, Maliseet and Boethuk spanning centuries. The goal of this exhibition was to enhance understanding and appreciation of ‘the spirit of Canada’s Native peoples. It was dedicated to the ‘people who produced the objects included in the exhibition. Eighty-five institutions loaned works for the exhibition which was shown at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and the Lorne Building in Ottawa. The voluminous preparatory research undertaken by a team of anthropologists and ethnographers produced a vast archives of slides and text that remains as an invaluable lasting resource for all researchers. In her Introduction Harrison (Harrison 1987:7) grouped together all the native populations in Canada at the time of contact suggesting a unified and unifying pan-Aboriginal world-view informed by myths and legends.

1987 In his publication Museums of Influence, Kenneth Hudson described how he had visited 37 museums that made significant changes in the 200 years of museology. He dismissed ethnographic museums as those that exhibited objects from exotic cultures without attempting to communicate essentials features of the societies more easily conveyed through film, video or even lectures. He laments the absence of ambitions, fears, poverty, disease, climate, cruelty, brutality, blood, sense, smell and therefore cohesion to the exhibits. “Ethnographical museums collect widely but do not dig deeply” (Hudson 1987:vii) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1988 The “Lubicon Lake Cree organized a boycott of The Spirit Sings, the cultural showcase of the Winter Olympics in Calgary. Museums were asked not to lend objects for the display, and many people, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, refused to attend. The boycott did a great deal to raise awareness of the issues, and as a result of the conflict, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and the Canadian Museums Association (CMA) formed a task force with a mandate to “develop an ethical framework and strategies for Aboriginal Nations to represent their history and culture in concert with cultural institutions”.6 The task force report sets out guiding principles, policies and recommendations on repatriation and calls for the creation of new relationships to serve the needs of Aboriginal people and the interests of Canadian cultural and heritage institutions. (See Appendix 6A to this chapter for excerpts from the report.)” RCAP

1988 Marybelle Mitchell wrote an article entitled “Current Issues Facing Museums” published in the Inuit Art Quarterly. In 1988 200 delegates met.

1988 Clifford went on to give a powerful example from a museum. The Portland Museum of Art houses the Rasmussen Collection, a series of masks, [end of page 98] headdresses, and other objects collected from southeastern Alaska during the 1920s. When the museum made plans to reinstall and reinterpret the collection in the late 1980s, it decided to involve Tlingit elders as consultants from early stages. A dozen prominent elders, representing clans that originally owned the objects, were invited to travel to Portland, Oregon. During a planning session at the museum, objects were brought out, and elders were asked to speak about them. Clifford describes how he and the curatorial staff, focusing on the objects, waited expectantly for some sort of detailed explication about how each object functioned, who made it, what powers it had within Tlingit society. Instead, he reports, the object acted as memory aids for the telling of elaborate stories and the singing of many songs. As these stories and songs were performed, they took on additional meanings. An octopus headdress, for example, evoked narratives reaching about a giant octopus that once blocked a bay, preventing salmon from state and federal agencies regulating the right of Tlingits to take salmon, so what was started as a traditional story took on precise political meanings in terms of contemporary struggles. “And in some sense the physical objects, at least as I saw it, were left at the margin. What really took center stage were the stories and songs.” (1) From Julie’s Cruikshank “The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory”

1989 In 1989, “the editors of the first book on history museums in the United States complained about a “blanket of critical silence” surrounding the subject. In 1992, the British museum specialist Eilean Hooper-Greenhill observed that the museum as a historical institution had not received “any rigorous form of critical analysis.” Other scholars and critics chimed in around the same time.1 As it happened, a tidal wave of museum studies was just beginning to crest, many proclaiming critical agendas while complaining about their absence. The problem these days is how to navigate a flood of literature on the theory, practice, politics, and history of museums” (Starns 2005).

1989-90 Dr. Jeanne Cannizzo curated an exhibition mounted by the Royal Ontario Museum entitled “Into the Heart of Africa.” It was the most controversial show in the history of the ROM. A vocal opposition arose against cultural racism and appropriation. Cannizzo stated that the goal of the exhibition was to represent the impact of colonialism on Africa. However the 375 artifacts from central and west Africa used were donated around 1889 and onwards to the ROM by Canadian missionaries and military personnel who spent some time in Africa and fully supported Britain’s colonial campaign which imposed “Christianity, civilization and commerce” on Africans. Cannizzo misread her audiences and attempted to use the postmodern trope of irony to draw attention to racist terms such as ‘barbarous customs.’ In fact there were at least two divergent audiences. A misinformed general public read the exhibition as a uncritical cultural exhibition of primitive Africa and the good work of Canadian missionaries and soldiers. The large African-Canadian population of Toronto interpreted the exhibition as a racist assault. A slide show lecture containing highly derogatory, culturally racist, and paternalistic language played framed with a critical introduction and conclusion to situate viewers within the racist colonial context. But most people read it as ‘real’ without the critical postmodern lens of irony. Tour guides had no training in colonial histories or cultural sensitivities and presented the exhibition literally without understanding the critical ironic trope. The guide explained to Grade five children how missionaries taught Africans to carve wood and described African barbaric acts. “This case study crystallizes many of the issues related to cultural racism and cultural appropriation. Nourbese Philip (1993) suggests that at the heart of the ROM controversy are changing beliefs about the role and function of museums and other cultural institutions, especially the issue of who should have the power to represent and control images created by “others.” The traditional values and practices of institutions such as museums are difficult to change. One analyst poses an important question about the ROM controversy: Would the institution have supported a more critical approach to the subject? Would it have risked offending its important patrons, some of whom donated artifacts to the collection? (Butler, 1993:57).”(See the Colour of Democracy).

1990 ? Crossroads of Continents exhibition at the Museum of Natural History disseminated new research and scholarly understandings (in Karp and Levine 1991:315)

1990s There has been an exponential growth of the number of local museums and the expansion of large museums in the 1990s has been referred to as the big bang by former ICOM director Hugues de Varine.

1991 This is a performance art piece by poststructuralist artist. Her work is situated under institutional criticism. In it Andrea Fraser toured an exhibition of the work of contemporary artist Allan McCollum shown at the American Fine Arts Gallery in New York City. She presented the tour in two voices, her own and that of Ms. Jane Castleton), a fictional character, Fraser’s alter ego who was a museum volunteer docent with little understanding of modern art.

1991 Rabbi Michael Berenbaum was project director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Public awareness of the holocaust had heightened since 1978. Jewish suffering was once considered to be a footnote of WWII. This was changed and the horrendous crime was acknowledged.

1991 Ayanna Black (1991:27 in Creane cited in Barrett 2004) critiqued the Royal Ontario Museum’s infamous exhibition “Into the Heart of Africa.” She described the situation as follows, “They used the propaganda of the period without proper explanation or preamble. [The curator] did not want to manipulate the material, but she ended up implanting racist images because the critique of ‘intellectual arrogance’ did not come through. People missed it.” Cannizzo, a contract curator who had trained as a social and cultural anthropologist had done fieldwork experience in Sierra Leone misread her audience.

1991 Mieke Bal (1991) critiqued the Royal Ontario Museum’s infamous exhibition “Into the Heart of Africa” in a diachronics article entitled “The Politics of Citation.” He argued that the reproduction of racist, colonial imagery leads to reinscribing the very attitudes and assumptions that the critic is attempting to expose and analyse. Great care must be made to frame this imagery in such a way that the critique – and not the racist content – predominate. It is fair to ask whether ‘Into the Heart of Africa” did this. Many of the images were troubling for viewers who felt assaulted by the racist perspective embodied (Bal 1991:31 PC in D); museology, politics of representation;

1991 Lee-Ann Martin submitted her commissioned report to the Canada Council entitled “The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Contemporary Native Art and Public Art Museums in Canada.” It was the catalyst for the Visual Arts Section’s Acquisition Assistance Program (1996-9) offering monetary incentives to encourage Canada’s fifty-six public galleries to purchase contemporary art by Canada’s First Peoples (Jessup 2002:xxv).

1991 Kenneth Hudson in “Misleading Ethnographical Museums” argued that experts in ethnography are “very knowledgeable about what is usually described as the “traditional culture” [..] but are much less informed about what is going on in the same country today” (Hudson 1991:459). He continued his argument that this lack of knowledge of the contemporary everyday life is acceptable in an exhibition of ancient Roman art since most museum goers are familiar with Italian culture today. It is less neither responsible nor constructive to exhibit traditional artefacts from Ghana without contextualizing them, since the average person may have the impression that Ghana today has remained as it was hundreds of years ago. He recognised that objects alone cannot convey the ambiguities and contradictions of contemporary everyday life of Bombay or Accra or even small town England. He praised an exhibition called Hunters of the North at the Museum of Mankind in London, UK for an installation showing families in the ‘traditional’ igloo and the portable hut. Did this exhibition manage to show anything of

1991 ROM under fire again over 1990 African exhibit: advisory panel members demanding unequivocal apology. ROM hoping to mend fences: Museum plans exhibition of Caribbean festival costumes. A rich sampling of Caribbean traditions: you may want to dismiss this ROM festival [ Caribbean Celebrations] as another crowd- pleasing gesture, but the centrepiece exhibit is worth catching

1992 “In 1992, the British museum specialist Eilean Hooper-Greenhill observed that the museum as a historical institution had not received “any rigorous form of critical analysis.” Other scholars and critics chimed in around the same time.1 As it happened, a tidal wave of museum studies was just beginning to crest, many proclaiming critical agendas while complaining about their absence. The problem these days is how to navigate a flood of literature on the theory, practice, politics, and history of museums” (Starns 2005).

1992 Assembly of First Nations [AFN] and Canadian Museums Association [CMA], Task Force Report on Museums and First Peoples, Turning the Page: Forging New Partnerships Between Museums and First Peoples (Ottawa: 1992).

1994 The Heard Museum hosted a conference entitled “Navajo Weaving since the Sixties” attended by forty weavers and who presented detailed statements about their work. M’Closkey (2002:230-3) noted a sharp contrast between the presentations by the weavers and those made by dealers, museologists and textile experts who spoke of gallery aesthetics, the history of Navajo weaving and the quality of market-friendly rugs. Gloria Emerson of the Centre for Cultural Exchange at a New Mexico art institution commented on the chasm between the weavers and the scholars. She argued that the weavers should be generating the questions discussed at these conferences (M’Closkey 2002:233).

1994 Today “there are several reasons to stress the importance of local museums. At the same time we find big museums growing even bigger and observe an explosion in the number of small museums all over the world . The former ICOM director Hugues de Varine calls this a big-bang in the museum world, which makes it necessary to separate museums in two very different types: the process-museum and the institution-museum, the latter being the traditional museum” (Gjestrum 1994).

1996 A conference organized by the Department of Ethnography of the British Museum entitled “Imagining the Arctic: The Native Photograph in Alaska, Canada and Greenland” was held in London, UK. Guest speakers included George Quviq Qulaut (Commissioner for Nunavut), Hugh Brody, Nelson Graburn, Elizabeth Edwards of Oxford’s Pit River Museum, Kesler Woodward, Alan R. Marcus who “explored the relationships between government policy and images of the Ahiarmut, as backdrop to the disastrous arctic relocations of the 1950s, Peter Geller presented hia paper on “Archibald Lang Fleming, first Anglican Bishop of the Arctic, as he disseminated a fascinating view of the “Eskimo” through his publications and lantern slide lectures; this was followed by a contemporary example of northern image-making, as Zebedee Nungak presented a series of slides documenting the recent political history of northern Quebec, as carried out by photographers for the Makivik Corporation of the Inuit of Nunavik.” See Peter Geller’s report.

1997-8 Statistics Canada reports that for the year 1997/98, there were some 46,400 volunteers directly engaged in museums and related heritage institutions. This represents about 65 % of the museum workforce on a national basis, including full-time and part-time paid workers. This does not include the vast network of related organizations, such as local Friends of Museums societies, historical societies and community service organizations, all of which contribute greatly to the work of their museums. Volunteers contribute to virtually all facets of museum operations, from facility maintenance, to administration, collections management, events management and public programming. The distribution of volunteers varies greatly across the country. For example, they represent over 95 % of the work force at museums in one province.” MUSE

1998 The first exhibition entitled “First Peoples, First Contacts” at the Museum of Man’s Gallery of North America at its new location at Bloomsbury opened. It was sponsored by the powerful Chase Manhattan Bank. The exhibition tells the story of the interaction of native Americans with the outsiders. The First Nations peoples represented in the Gallery are for the most part unfamiliar even to North Americans. They are represented as “half-forgotten, disgracefully patronised, different and enduringly fascinating peoples.” The story of curious Columbus is depicted without the usual overly romanticized sentiment. He is portrayed as the first of an onslaught of the “blatantly greedy and bigoted arrivistes, colonialists, sharks and expropriators.” Gallery of North America will feature rotating temporary exhibitions and will stay in situ for at least five years. See Henshall (1999) and J. C. H. King (1998) First Peoples, First Contacts, Museum of Mankind, London, UK: Chase Manhattan Gallery.

1999 Meanwhile, the museum was also being thoroughly absorbed by the markets and industries of culture under late capitalism.” See EndNote entry under Krauss (1999).

1999 Rosalind Krauss (1999) published a book entitled A Voyage on the North Sea criticizing art forms like his that had in her view, become fashionably vacuous, a shibboleth– installation art. “Krauss reflects that the notion of the specificity of medium as a foundation of the modern was shaken by Broodthaers ’s practice and by the introduction of video technology in the 1960s. She anchors her historical narrative in the writing of Greenberg and Fried (in the latter’s reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty) and in paintings by Jackson Pollock and Color Field painters, the sculptures of Richard Serra, and the structuralist films of Michael Snow, all of which registered a ‘new idea of aesthetic medium’ in new artistic conventions of opticality, which Krauss describes as foregrounding a ‘phenomenological vector’ in art that connects an object to a viewing subject. She forwards the notion that the construction of physical structure, even within the making of film, is constitutive of modern art: “For, in order to sustain artistic practice, a medium must be a supporting structure, generative of a set of conventions, some of which, in assuming the medium itself as their subject, will be wholly specific to it, thus producing an experience of their own necessity” (26). See EndNote entry under Krauss (1999).

2000 Izzie Asper became Canada’s new media lord as head of Canwest Global Communications. “After acquiring most of Hollinger’s newspapers and magazines, including half of the National Post, Asper now stands to be the most powerful figure in the history of Canadian media. A relentlessly tough businessman, he made a rather unexpected power play to dethrone Conrad Black and, although he might not be as grandiose about it, he now has more clout within Canada than Black ever did.” (Pundit Magazine). “Today, CanWest is one of Canada’s most profitable communication companies. In fiscal 2000 its net earnings were $162 million, with revenues totalling $1.08 billion and operating profits of $263 million. In July 2000, CanWest acquired most of Canada’s leading newspapers, as well as a 50 per cent stake in one of the country’s national dailies, The National Post. Earlier that month, federal regulators approved CanWest’s purchase of eight television stations, an acquisition that created Canada’s second-largest private television network under the banner of Global TV. Long before that, the corporation had forged an international broadcasting presence in New Zealand, Australia and Ireland” (Manitoba Government).

2004 Inuit artist Isaaci Etidloie and x Ashoona, daughter of renowned carver Kiaksuk Ashoona were among the Canadian Aboriginal artists present for the opening of the exhibition entitled Dezhan ejan – “medicine song” at the art gallery of the Canadian Embassy in Washington. The opening of the exhibition jointly sponsored by the Canada Council Art Bank and the Canadian Embassy took place in conjunction with the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian () at the Smithsonian. Ruth Phillips wrote the exhibition promotional brochure. Michael Kergin, Ambassador of Canada to the United States, stated, “Dezhan ejan is an expression of the unique and vibrant culture of Canadian Aboriginal artists. The ties between Aboriginal peoples in North America are long and rich in history, and continue to grow. It is our hope that the exhibition will serve to inform and expand this relationship, not only among Aboriginal communities, but for all Canadians and Americans.” Victoria Henry, Director of the Art Bank curated the exhibition of 18 works selected from the Canada Council’s collection of aboriginal art (Canada Council Press Release 2004). MFB

1904. Exposition in St. Louis displayed Phillipino natives. The US had recently annexed the Phillipines