ACM LONDON & FLORENCE: ARTS IN CONTEXT Collecting the World in London and Oxford Winter 2017

Note: This course will be offered in January 2017 for students on the London 18‐week Museum Studies option and students on the London winter quarter/trimester.

INSTRUCTOR: Dr. Andrew Kennedy

CREDITS: 4

COURSE DESCRIPTION London has dozens of museums, displaying a range of objects from mummies to fans, toys to tropical plants. This intensive three‐week course looks at museums not simply as institutions of enlightenment, but as enactments of power – power over the past; over colonised or subjugated peoples; over life, death and disease; over nature. How have museums attempted to classify the world? In doing so, what is the price paid for taking things or living entities out of their original context? We examine questions of repatriation: should museums return objects and human remains in their collections? What is the need to display material artefacts in a digital age? Are there other ways of creating ‘authentic’ experiences?

COURSE OBJECTIVES - To enable students to develop analytical skills which will allow them to explore the meanings of museum displays and architecture. - To enable students to develop a broad knowledge of the historical development of museums and exhibition spaces, and how this has been shaped by social and political forces. - To enable student to begin to form an overview of the development of different categories of museum, and their associated frameworks of interpretation - To enable students to begin to distinguish and evaluate curatorial strategies. - To enable students to develop their research, oral and written skills in order to organise and give expression to museological analysis and reflection.

REQUIRED TEXTS Tony Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, In Representing the Nation: A Reader (David Boswell and Jessica Evans, eds.) (London: Routledge, 1999), 332‐ 361. Kenneth Hudson, ‘Attempts to Define “Museum’, In Representing the Nation: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1999), 371‐379 David Lowenthal, ‘Fabricating Heritage’, History & Memory 10, no. 1 (1998): 5‐24.

COURSE CONTENT Week 1 – Empires of Knowledge

Museums as Power‐Knowledge: collecting and classifying; Museums and Empire: how did Britain’s imperial role shape its museum collections?

1

Reading: Mark O’Neill, ‘Enlightenment Museums: Universal or merely Global?’, Museum and Society, Nov 2004. 2 (3) 190‐202; James Cuno, ‘The Crux of the Matter’ in Who Owns Antiquity?: Museums and the Battle over our Ancient Heritage, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 1‐20.

Monday (whole day): Classroom ‐ discuss week’s themes; Visit British Museum;

Tuesday (afternoon): Visit Sir John Soane Museum [curator talk]

Wednesday (whole day): Group Task, plus Classroom Discussion, feedback on group task.

Friday (whole day): Visit Petrie Museum of Egyptian Antiquities; the Horniman Museum, South London [curator talk]

Week 2 – The Body and Nature in London and Oxford Museums

Collecting the Natural and the Human in Oxford Museums; London Medical Museums and Kew Gardens

Readings: (extracts from) Samuel Alberti, Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth‐ Century Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Elizabeth Stephens. Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011. (Extract from) L.H. Brockway, Science and colonial expansion: the role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. New York: Academic Press, 1979. (Extract from) R.H. Drayton, Nature’s government: science, imperial Britain and the ‘improvement’ of the world. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2000.

Monday all day: Classroom; Visit to the Hunterian Museum

[hand in first written assignment]

Tuesday afternoon: Visit to Kew Gardens

Wednesday half day: Group Tasks: variously the Wellcome Collection/Royal London Museum, Grant Museum of Zoology

Friday all day: Bus to Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum [curator talk] and Museum of Natural History [poss also Christchurch College Art Gallery or Oxford MoMA]

Saturday: Ashmolean Museum, Museum of the History of Science; curator talk at one of these; return to London

Week 3 – High and Low: Temples of Art and Popular Shrines

The Art Museum; Museums of Popular Culture and Advertising

Reading: Carol Duncan, ‘From the Princely Gallery to the Public Art Museum’, In Representing the Nation: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1999), 304‐331. James Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, In Representing the Nation: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1999), 435‐457. James Elkins, ‘Authentic Experiences.’ In Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and Sustainable Values, edited by Selma Holo and Mari‐Tere Alvarez, (Lanham: Alta Mira, 2009), 142‐144.

Monday whole day: Classroom intro to week’s themes: Visit the National Gallery;

2

Tuesday afternoon: The Wallace Collection [curator talk]

Wednesday whole day: Group Task: the Vault at Hard Rock Café; Classroom Report Back

Friday whole day or half day: Visits Sherlock Holmes Museum [Museum of Brands].

[Hand in second written assignment]

ASSESSMENT Participation and class activities (25% of marks): Credit is awarded for active participation and class work; that is to say, answering and asking questions, doing group work and in‐class writing, etc. Students are expected to attend all scheduled classes and visits. Missing a class or visit in such an abbreviated schedule will result in losing points.

Classroom presentation – individual or group, depending partly on numbers (10% of marks): examine a building or display for what it may tell us about museum narratives.

Week 1 assignment (1000 word essay – 25% of marks).

Final written assignment (1500‐1700 word essay – 40% of marks).

ACM POLICY ON ACADEMICS A complete listing of ACM policies can be found in your student handbook.

Class attendance and participation: You are expected to attend and participate fully in all classroom sessions, site visits, and field trips.

Academic honesty: Actions of dishonesty are destructive to the well‐being of the academic community, and ACM staff respond to them vigorously. Cheating, plagiarism, and other forms of academic theft will result in a failing grade for that assignment and may result in failure for the course.

ACM POLICY ON NON‐DISCRIMINATION The Associated Colleges of the Midwest does not discriminate in the operation of its educational programs, activities, or employment on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, color, religion, national origin, age, veteran status, marital status, or disability.

3