Smarthistory: Art History Podcasts & Videos

One of our favorites…

Édouard Manet’s The Railway, oil on canvas, 1872-73 (National Gallery of Art)

 

 Manet Railway [4:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Newspapers and wire services have been running stories about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s initiative to offer schools free, open-source digital textbooks for high school students and even younger kids. The articles tend to cite California’s serious budget woes and the price and weight of the traditional textbook. Unfortunately, they are quite vague about what the digital texts will look like. At Smarthistory.org, we hope that California and others look beyond the familiar organizational structure of the textbook and its analogue finding aids. Open textbooks ought to take advantage of the web’s inherent strengths and allow users to organize material in numerous ways while pointing outward to high quality resources elsewhere on the web. Hopefully, these new resources will seamlessly incorporate multimedia allowing users to listen, read, watch and most importantly respond. Here is an opportunity to directly engage students, allowing them initiate or join conversations both in and outside the confines of the text. Hey, that sounds a bit like Smarthistory.org!

Gov. Schwarzenegger Launches First-in-Nation Initiative to Develop Free Digital Textbooks for High School Students

Schools may copy Arnold Schwarzenegger and junk their textbooks

Courtesy Steffenz

A couple of years ago, Peter Samis (museum interpretor par excellence at SFMoMA) coined the term “visual velcro” to describe the goal of museum interpretation:

The work of interpretation…is to give cognitive hooks to the hookless, and assure that these hooks are sufficiently varied so that they can successfully land in the mental fabric of a broad array of visitors. Once visitors have a framework, all kinds of sensory impressions, emotions and reflections can weave themselves into the fabric of perception. In fact, the more you know about a subject, the more you can learn about it (presuming the mental model you are working with accommodates the new information).

But in the last week or two I started wondering, just what is visual velcro? How do you identify it while you’re creating interpretive materials?

I found myself thinking about this question in the last week. I volunteered to do an “alternative” audio-guide for Barbara London’s upcoming exhibition, Looking at Music Side 2. Barbara organized three conversations — each with two artists in the exhibition. I recorded the audio and Barbara and I both prompted our guests with questions. But since this was my first time doing this, I had no structure to offer as “best practices” — so it was pretty free-form. Each conversation lasted about an hour. I thought they would be shorter, but when you get people talking and reminiscing (especially people who haven’t seen each other in a while), it’s hard to cut them off sooner than that, and anyway, their conversations were fun and enlightening.

I started editing last week. Needless to say, editing one hour down to 3 minutes is a lot of work, but what I found myself most aware of was the choices I was making about what to select and what to omit. In the first conversation we did, James Nares talked about his short film (made with Seth Tillett), Game, which shows a grid on the floor (tiles), and two sets of hands on either side — like players on opposite sides of a chess board — taking turns moving rocks back and forth repetitively across the grid. When Barbara told me about the film it seemed strange to me, what could this be about? and I immediately imagined my students saying “this is not about anything” and “this is boring” and “why is the artist being difficult?” Indeed, I found myself wondering what that kind of repetitive motion had to do with art in NYC in the 1970s.

During the conversation, James talked about Game, and explained that a significant aspect of the film for him was the rhythm that emerged from the placing of the rocks, and he talked about how a kind of raw music scene seemed to express the desperate feeling of living in a bankrupt New York City in the 1970s better than anything else. Ok, that helped a lot. That felt like velcro - historical context almost always does. But what felt MOST like visual velcro was when Colleen Fitzgibbon talked about how repetition was important in her work as well, and for other artists from the period too. And she explained that during that time there was a feeling of being bombarded with messages from broadcast media — much of which was delivering messages that seemed, well, just wrong in terms of politics.

And there was the velcro!

For me, the loop that attached was to something that was already on my mind - I had been thinking about the one way delivery of content that was the broadcast TV of my childhood compared with the two-way conversations that are possible with new media, with the read-write web (or even the choices that are possible in terms of media now, with rss, TiVo and fast forwarding and time shifting). When Colleen said what she did, I remembered how repetitive and monolithic broadcast media felt then. Suddenly I could put that repetition into the context of my own childhood - in the hours I spent watching reruns of I Love Lucy and other sitcoms, remembering how powerless I felt before the 7 or so channels there were to watch.

Courtesy Andy Connelly

So these are the sections that I kept in the audio. And I hope that they work as velcro for others, but what are the chances of that? Maybe other people’s velcro will be very different from what worked for me (though I feel like decades of teaching has made me attuned to what works for students). But I also wonder if this connection, the story that I tell in the audio, needs to be spelled out more explicitly? The audio now feels somewhat incomplete… we need a website, a place for hyperlinks and tags, a place where people can talk about what repetition meant to them in the 1970s, about what it was like to live in New York city at one of its lowest moments, about what it meant to be an artist then, about the special power music had at that moment in time, a place where we can expand the possibilities for velcro, so that there is something that attaches for everyone who comes to the exhibition. Peter Samis has written about these possibilities here.

Thanks to Barbara London for giving me this opportunity, and for her openness and collegiality, and thanks too, to Sara Bodinson and Nancy Proctor for their help and support in creating my first MoMA audioguide.

Another Portland Art Museum video from our workshop, this one by two dedicated docents, Gerri Hayes and Floyd Sklaver.

 

 Erastus Salisbury Field, Portrait of a Young Woman, 1830 (Portland Art Museum) [3:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

As part of the two-day workshop at the Portland Art Museum, Steven and I did a recording in the galleries in front of everyone — and Bruce Guenther, Chief Curator chose this great work (a recent acquisition) by Robert Colescott.

 

 Robert Colescott, Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, 1979 (Portland Art Museum) [4:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In the next few days, we’ll be posting the videos that were created during our workshop at the Portland Art Museum. We spent the last week or two organizing the files and editing video. The videos were made by collaborations among and between curators, educators and docents and produced by an educator (Kate Burns) and by us.

In this video, Tina Olsen, Director of Education and Public Programs, and Bruce Guenther, Chief Curator, talk about Useful Art #5: The Western Hotel, 1992 by Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz.

 

 Kienholz, Useful Art #5 [5:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

WOW! Discovered at nearly midnight last night:

http://www.discoverpentimento.com/

I am so impressed - the interface is beautiful, and presents so many possibilities for interpretation. It’s offline. It’s free. Objects are available via themes, or an image gallery or item list. Audio, zooming… gorgeous!

WOW!

More later…

This post was co-written by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker

Mt. Rainier is currently on our right as we fly back to NYC from Portland by way of Seattle. We were privileged to spend the last few days at the Portland Art Museum with a group of dedicated educators, docents and curators. Our visit was the brainchild of Tina Olsen, the Director of Education and Programs, who thought there might be value in creating Smarthistory-style conversations for the museum—and wanted to test out her theory. We in turn, saw this as an opportunity to bridge the gap that exists between art historians in higher education and those in the museum world. Thanks to a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, we worked closely with Tina to design and execute an intensive two-day workshop to help educators, curators and docents develop the skills needed to create and produce interpretive content in the form of conversation that focused on their rich permanent collection.

Our goals included working across museum departments (with expert and non-expert voices) and opening up interpretation to emotion and opinion—in essence modeling thoughtful and exploratory conversations to invite museum visitors to discover collection objects on their own. While we have a clear sense that Smarthistory videos are engaging and helpful for art history students and informal learners, we had no real sense of how and if they would be successful in a museum context or how they might be transformed by other museum professionals. We were also excited to have two non-Western curators amongst the participants; we have been very curious to understand how our conversations would play out with art that was not part of the Western tradition.

So, this was an experiment—for both Smarthistory and for the Portland Art Museum—and no one was quite sure where it would leave us. We have already begun evaluating how successfully we achieved our goals and will continue in follow-up surveys and interviews. We’ll make sure to post all results here, and plan to develop a related “How-To” section on the Smarthistory site this summer for museums that might want to replicate what we did, though it became very clear to us that having experienced facilitators from the outside was extremely valuable.

Since this was new territory for all of us; we prepared carefully and even assigned preparatory “homework”—articles by Rika Burnham (Frick Collection) and Peter Samis (SFMoMA). The homework focused on museum interpretation and included audios and videos from the Eastman House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Smarthistory and covered a wide range of styles. Some were long, some short, some were conversations while others were lectures and interviews. For our icebreaker we asked each workshop participant to bring in a reproduction of an object that had personal meaning to them—these also formed the basis of the first audio recording.

Over the course of the two days, each participant had four opportunities to create recordings in the galleries followed by time to listen, reflect and discuss. We experimented with different pairings—curator/curator, curator/educator, educator/educator, educator/docent, and docent/docent. In some pairings an object would be intimately familiar to one of the speakers, while in others, the object was less familiar to both. We also took turns in the mix.

What we didn’t anticipate was how much fun everyone would have. Taking time from busy schedules, going out into the galleries, talking to colleagues about beautiful and interesting objects that they feel a strong sense of attachment to, and creating and editing video that would live on the website—proved a surprisingly pleasurable experience. Several participants described the workshop as therapeutic and restorative.

In our discussions, we explored the following questions –

• Where should the media we created reside—on the website and/or in the galleries? How would it be accessed it the galleries?
• What formats (audio or video, long or short) would be best for those different settings?
• What style was best—an exploratory conversation or a relaxed interview? Is style tied to the purpose of the recording (a gallery overview, to model discovery, or an in-depth explication)?
• Does the conversation’s style depend on the speakers’ roles (docents, curators, educators—or a combination of those) and/or their familiarity and expertise with the object that was discussed?
• What visual material is most useful in the gallery versus on the website? Should visual material be offered in the gallery? If so, what kind of material would be best? Should we use a combination of photos of the image and video of the speakers?

We recognize that museum professionals in both education and curatorial departments don’t have the time and perhaps the confidence to learn new technologies unless they see first hand a substantial benefit. We were able to demonstrate strategies for creating engaging interpretive content as well as how to publish high quality video for in-gallery and web distribution. Video and audio production is still veiled in jargon and is viewed as an extremely expensive undertaking that is best left to IT departments and outside consultants.

We took a different approach. Our workshop sought to empower the curatorial and education departments with conversational strategies and inexpensive easy-to-use equipment and software. Very quickly, curators were planning future recordings while after the first brief lesson, two educators were confidently editing audio while zooming and panning across still images.

Please let us know if you have questions about the workshop, or if you are interested in running one at your institution.

Warm thanks to Christina Olsen, Bruce Guenther, Gerri Hayes, Kate Burns, Stephanie Parrish, Floyd Sklaver, Jillian Punska, Amy Gray, Maribeth Graybill, & Anna Strankman.

Brian and Monica reveal some fascinating facts about this sculpture of the New Kingdom Pharaoh from The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.

Ramesses II, Egypt, Herakleopolis
(Temple of Harsaphes), ca. 1250 BCE

 

 Ramses [9:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download