Reflection 13

Throughout the semester, Professor Jackson has asked us to view the places our class visits as texts. We've analyzed the architecture and ceremony of Nationals Park, Arlington Cemetery, and the Spy Museum. In all these places, presentation has made an implicit argument about how the substantive elements of a place should be understood. The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), which we visited this Wednesday, struck mew as a place with a particularly odd dialog between substance and presentation. First, the NMAI didn't serve the typical substantive function of a cultural museum, housing historical relics. Many aspects of the museum that at first seemed like presentation in fact, upon reflection, constituted artifacts central to purpose. Second, although the museum made arguments about Native Americans, it didn't really link those arguments to artifacts. The result was a museum reimagined as a theme park; although I enjoyed the trip, as I have most of our University College expeditions, I didn't feel that I gained much intellectually from this particular trip.

The substantive function of any museum, in my opinion, is to display artifacts, whether impressionist painting, T-Rex skeletons, or German submarines. The presentation of a good museum, meanwhile, presents an argument that contextualizes these artifacts and gives them meaning. The artifacts in the NMAI were distinctly atypical. Only two of the building's four levels contained conventional exhibits at all, and, with the exception of an excellent art exhibit by Fritz Scholder, conventional artifacts did not figure prominently into these exhibits. Instead, the exhibits were based around large, prominently placed text and video installations that rarely referenced the more marginally positioned historical relics beside them. The first and second floors of the museum were dedicated, not to exhibits, but to an admittedly delicious cafeteria and a sprawling gift shop. The museum only makes sense when the artifacts the museum is designed to display are redefined: the video displays, the foods, and the overpriced crafts are the museum's artifacts, while the historical relics are merely wall decorations.

            Without an effective presentation, artifacts are meaningless. Unfortunately, the elements that are typically used to frame artifacts, are artifacts in the NMAI, and there is nothing with which to make a unifying argument about the significance of the museum's artifacts. Although the cafeteria was one of my favorite parts of the trip, and could even be considered a significant cultural experience, the food wasn't placed in a context where it had meaning beyond the aesthetics of taste. Likewise, the museum's text and video installations usually adopted the immersive and uncritical perspective of a native, rather than the objective and critical perspective of an anthropologist. There was no voice present that could make an argument as to what the various cultural perspectives meant, and why they were important. Even the architecture of the museum referenced naturalistic, rock-hewn forms that failed to engage in a dialog with the surrounding spaces.